"And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek"
About this Quote
A compliment that lands like a dagger: Ben Jonson praises Shakespeare by pretending not to. The line comes from Jonson's 1623 elegy in the First Folio, a landmark act of cultural canon-making disguised as a personal tribute. "Small Latin, and less Greek" sounds like a gentle correction from a schoolmaster, but it is really Jonson staging a debate about what counts as literary authority.
Jonson was famously learned, proud of his classical training, and often suspicious of theatrical popularity unbacked by scholarship. By invoking Latin and Greek, he signals the era's prestige hierarchy: real writers read the ancients in the original. Shakespeare, in this view, is an upstart genius from outside the academy. The genius of the line is its calibration. Jonson grants the rumor of Shakespeare's limited schooling, then uses that limitation as evidence of something larger: talent so abundant it made credentials look optional.
There's also professional politics in the phrasing. Jonson isn't merely grieving; he's positioning himself as the arbiter who can crown Shakespeare without surrendering his own status. The archaic "thou hadst" keeps the intimacy of address, while the comparative "less" adds a faintly comic sting, the kind that lets Jonson remain Jonson: admiring, competitive, incapable of pure reverence.
So the subtext isn't "Shakespeare was uneducated". It's "Even by our strictest standards, he surpassed them". Jonson turns a potential liability into a myth-making engine: the learned poet anoints the natural one, and literature gets a new kind of hero.
Jonson was famously learned, proud of his classical training, and often suspicious of theatrical popularity unbacked by scholarship. By invoking Latin and Greek, he signals the era's prestige hierarchy: real writers read the ancients in the original. Shakespeare, in this view, is an upstart genius from outside the academy. The genius of the line is its calibration. Jonson grants the rumor of Shakespeare's limited schooling, then uses that limitation as evidence of something larger: talent so abundant it made credentials look optional.
There's also professional politics in the phrasing. Jonson isn't merely grieving; he's positioning himself as the arbiter who can crown Shakespeare without surrendering his own status. The archaic "thou hadst" keeps the intimacy of address, while the comparative "less" adds a faintly comic sting, the kind that lets Jonson remain Jonson: admiring, competitive, incapable of pure reverence.
So the subtext isn't "Shakespeare was uneducated". It's "Even by our strictest standards, he surpassed them". Jonson turns a potential liability into a myth-making engine: the learned poet anoints the natural one, and literature gets a new kind of hero.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|---|
| Source | Ben Jonson — "To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us" (prefatory poem to Shakespeare's First Folio, 1623); contains the line "And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek". |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Jonson, Ben. (2026, January 17). And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-though-thou-hadst-small-latin-and-less-greek-64048/
Chicago Style
Jonson, Ben. "And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-though-thou-hadst-small-latin-and-less-greek-64048/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"And though thou hadst small Latin, and less Greek." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/and-though-thou-hadst-small-latin-and-less-greek-64048/. Accessed 7 Feb. 2026.
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