To begin with, Shakespeare had a complete grammar school education, and Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes were assigned reading!!
This book presents voluminous, striking, unmediated textual correspondences between the Greek and Shakespearean plays, and illuminating historical background. Not only should this prove the Shakespeare-Greek Drama connection, but that William Shakespeare became “Shakespeare” because of his mastery of the ancient Greek treasury of Drama.
3. “Pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums”
Many of us associate Lady Macbeth’s special temper with some of the most blood-curdling lines in literature:
I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.
Shakespeare’s precise action image appears in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, from verses spoken by Clytemnestra. She says to Agamemnon:
It was not of my own free will but by force that
Thou didst take and wed me, after slaying Tantalus,
My former husband, and dashing my babe on the ground
alive, When thou hadst torn him from my breast with brutal
violence.
The derivation of Lady Macbeth’s dashing image cannot be in doubt.
