ABSTRACT
Ben Jonson’s characteristically grudging comment on Shakespeare’s ‘small Latine, and lesse Greeke’ obscures an important truth, that whatever Shakespeare’s classical learning and Jonson’s scholarship the intuitive Shakespeare of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, delicately steering a parallel course to North’s Plutarch, leaves in the shade Jonson’s pedantic Catiline. In the style of his epic, the Faerie Queene, Spenser certainly owes something to Golding and Chapman. This moves along with the rapidity which one expects from good Elizabethan writing, but at the same time the beat is there, accentuated by the alliteration in almost every line; Spenser would have made a magnificent translation of Beowulf. Paradise Lost is not only a Biblical epic, however. It is also a great psychological narrative, probing into the deepest of moral and spiritual questions.
