ABSTRACT
If William Shakespeare’s casual, irreverent copiousness met with disapproval from certain contemporary readers, there were also those who praised him effusively. Like the signals that point to quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare’s overt classical quotations invariably characterize the figure who is quoting. Capital punishment for a Latin quotation is an extreme example of the vivid characterization which Shakespeare’s overt quotations invariably achieve. Shakespeare may have had little Latin but he had a secure grip of ‘the sociology of Latinity’. Shakespeare exempts just one single Roman author from fatuous name-dropping: ‘sweet witty’ Ovid, whose soul was said to live on in ‘mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare’. Classical elements that ‘seem to jut out as though they are designed to be noticed’ are an exception in the world of Shakespeare’s plays. In addition to marked and unmarked quotations, there is a third kind of classical Shakespearean intertextuality, which definitely confirms Petrarch’s notion that deeply studied material escapes a writer’s consciousness.
