Rome and Home: The Cultural Uses of Rome in Early Modern English Literature: Introduction

The grounding in the classics, including this multiplicity of Roman sources, provided by such a curriculum has been viewed as one of the major catalysts for that which Richard A. Lanham labelled the 'stylistic explosion' that characterises Renaissance literature.8 Considerable effort has gone into recovering the contents of the curriculum Shakespeare would have studied at King Edward VI School in Stratford-Upon-Avon, most notably in T.W. Baldwin's monumental study, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944).9 Colin Burrow has recently raised a number of caveats in relation to Baldwin's study, including the caution that Baldwin tended to 'overstate the rigour and the range of study at Elizabethan grammar schools' and that he offered a potentially reductive view of Shakespeare's classical learning that did not take into account the possibilities that Shakespeare would not necessarily have retained everything he learned at grammar school or that this continued beyond his school years.10 Nevertheless, the grammar school curriculum undoubtedly placed an emphasis upon classical sources, many originating from ancient Rome, as a means of highlighting good practices in style and rhetoric.\n 3).