Plutarch's Influence on Shakespeare and Other Writers of the Sixteenth Century
From Shakespeare's Plutarch. Ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke. London: Chatto and Windus.
The influence of the writings of Plutarch of Chaeronea on English literature might well be made the subject of one of the most interesting chapters in the long story of the debt of moderns to ancients. One of the most kindly and young spirited, he is also one of the most versatile of Greek writers, and his influence has worked by devious ways to the most varied results. His treatise on the Education of Children had the honour to be early translated into the gravely charming prose of Sir Thomas Elyot, and to be published in a black-letter quarto 'imprinted,' as the colophon tells us, 'in Fletestrete in the house of Thomas Berthelet.' The same work was drawn upon unreservedly by Lyly in the second part of Euphues, and its teachings reappear a little surprisingly in some of the later chapters of Pamela. The essay on the Preservation of Good Health was twice translated into Tudor prose, and that on Curiosity suffered transformation at the hands of the virgin queen herself into some of the most inharmonious of English verse.
The sixteenth century was indeed steeped in Plutarch. His writings formed an almost inexhaustible storehouse for historian and philosopher alike, and the age was characterized by no diffidence or moderation in borrowing. Plutarch's aphorisms and his anecdotes meet us at every turn, openly or in disguise, and the translations I have alluded to did but prepare the way for Philemon Holland's great rendering of the complete non-biographical works in the last year of the Tudor era.
But it is as author of the Parallel Lives of the famous Greeks and Romans that Plutarch has most strongly and most healthily affected the literature of modern Europe. Few other books of the ancient world have had since the middle ages so interesting a career; in the history of no other, perhaps not even the Iliad, can we see so plainly that rare electric flash of sympathy where the spirit
The influence of the writings of Plutarch of Chaeronea on English literature might well be made the subject of one of the most interesting chapters in the long story of the debt of moderns to ancients. One of the most kindly and young spirited, he is also one of the most versatile of Greek writers, and his influence has worked by devious ways to the most varied results. His treatise on the Education of Children had the honour to be early translated into the gravely charming prose of Sir Thomas Elyot, and to be published in a black-letter quarto 'imprinted,' as the colophon tells us, 'in Fletestrete in the house of Thomas Berthelet.' The same work was drawn upon unreservedly by Lyly in the second part of Euphues, and its teachings reappear a little surprisingly in some of the later chapters of Pamela. The essay on the Preservation of Good Health was twice translated into Tudor prose, and that on Curiosity suffered transformation at the hands of the virgin queen herself into some of the most inharmonious of English verse.
The sixteenth century was indeed steeped in Plutarch. His writings formed an almost inexhaustible storehouse for historian and philosopher alike, and the age was characterized by no diffidence or moderation in borrowing. Plutarch's aphorisms and his anecdotes meet us at every turn, openly or in disguise, and the translations I have alluded to did but prepare the way for Philemon Holland's great rendering of the complete non-biographical works in the last year of the Tudor era.
But it is as author of the Parallel Lives of the famous Greeks and Romans that Plutarch has most strongly and most healthily affected the literature of modern Europe. Few other books of the ancient world have had since the middle ages so interesting a career; in the history of no other, perhaps not even the Iliad, can we see so plainly that rare electric flash of sympathy where the spirit