Hi, I'm Peter Adams, and then you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at HistoryofLosody.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Shakespeare and Philosophy, with Patrick Gray, who is Professor of Literature at the University of Austin. Hello, Patrick.

Hello, hello. Good to see you.

Yes, great to have you on the show. I'm very excited about this topic, and I bet you are too, because you're a big, manufactured Shakespeare.

You were just telling me before we started that you used to be a Shakespeare actor, before you were a Shakespeare academic.

Yes, yes, that's right. When I was a student, I guess, like Polonius, it's something that I really enjoyed, and I think led my interest in Shakespeare and Ethics, because as an actor, you're always up on stage.

You feel like you're making a choice between options, and that's part of the pleasure of Shakespeare, and that's what you're trying to convey to the audience.

And so to make sense of those choices is a big part of what drove my interest and continues to drive my interest in Shakespeare and Ethics.

Okay, nice. Well, we are going to get on to Ethics, but I wanted to start with a more kind of practical question, I guess, which is just what did Shakespeare know about Philosophy?

And I guess what I mean by that is which philosophical sources was he able to draw on? And I guess we have to infer this from things he says in his plays, because we have access to the list of the books he owned or anything like that.

The short answer is more than people tend to think. I think one of the more persistent and charming, but also misleading assumptions about Shakespeare is that he was relatively uneducated or uninterested in abstract thought.

And I think this goes back to a tenacious, memorable jab by his contemporary Ben Johnson who said that Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek.

And then you get a repeat of that about 50 years later from Milton Milton depicts Shakespeare in contrast to Johnson, whom he rightly calls Learned.

It says Shakespeare's fancies child warbling his native wooden notes wild. And I think this picture of Shakespeare as a naive folk artist gets misunderstood.

It's a bit like the Janssonists accusing Montana of being a liberty. It's like, well, I mean compared to them, okay.

But compared to them, everybody, it's like, so it's like, when it comes to me.

But it comes to knowledge of the classics compared to Milton or Johnson, like we're all ignorant misses.

I mean Milton was writing epic good poetry in Latin as a teenager.

So I think his assessment of Shakespeare's supposed lack of learning needs to be taken with a significant grain of salt.

By virtue of his education, Shakespeare could read Latin easily, and he could access all manner of philosophy in that form.

Now, he's living in a time when works like Plutarch's morals and Cicero's tussled disputations are being translated into English.

I think he could also read French in terms of the plays.

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