ABSTRACT

If Meres is to be people's starting point for thinking about Shakespeare and the classic, they had better acknowledge that the word "classic" appears to have no more meaning for Meres than it does for Shakespeare himself. The obscurity of Meres' basic terms and concepts may be evidence of an effort to describe both ancient Greco-Roman and modern English writing in terms of a more general category, at a time when comparing English writing to Greek and Latin literature would have seemed preposterous, and when the arrival of new words and the application of old words to new contexts was transforming the range and flexibility of the English language. Meres never comes closer to expressing this idea clearly than he does in his well-known description of Shakespeare's affinity for Ovid. From the claim that Shakespeare and the classics are equal but dissimilar to each other, it is a small step to the idea that they are antithetical.