“The bees that sat upon the Grecian’s lips”: Classical Contaminations in Early Modern English Drama

This volume explores the shifting presence of Greek antiquity on the early modern English stage, tracing how Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights grappled with Greek texts, myths, and models. Far from being a simple inheritance, ‘Greekness’ emerges here as a site of creative friction – at once revered and resisted, adapted and unsettled. Through the lens of imitatio and contaminatio, the contributors examine how early modern dramatists reworked Greek sources through Roman mediation, scholastic traditions, and vernacular experimentation, fashioning new dramaturgies that challenged notions of purity, authority, and originality. From the bee as emblem of intertextual transformation to the cosmopolitan hybridity of English comedies set in Greece, the essays illuminate the complex negotiations that made Greek culture both a source of prestige and a point of contention. By foregrounding the ambivalence of reception, the volume rethinks what it meant for early modern dramatists to write with, against, and through the Greeks – and invites us to consider how pressing questions of cultural transmission and contamination remain today.

Alessandro Grilli is Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of Pisa. His research interests range from ancient drama to the classical tradition, and extend to literary theory, applied rhetoric, film, gender and queer studies.

Emanuel Stelzer is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Verona, whose main research areas are early modern drama and literature, textual studies, and theatre history.