Earl Showerman book review published

The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship is pleased to announce the publication of a review of Earl Showerman’s book Shakespeare’s Greater Greek: An Exploration of Greek Drama, Epic & History in the Works of Shakespeare in a mainstream academic journal.

The review, by Lyle Jennings Colombo (Tulane University), appears in The European Legacy, published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. The European Legacy is a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of the philosophical, historical, ideological and cultural underpinnings of modern Europe and its relations with the rest of the world. The journal is broadly indexed and abstracted in the major databases scholars use to locate current work in the humanities, so the review will reach academics outside the usual circle of authorship studies.

Colombo argues that Showerman’s effort to establish Shakespeare’s direct engagement with Attic drama repositions his dramatic corpus as a major conduit through which core concepts of Greek tragic thought passed into and reshaped early modern European literature. The implications of this reach well beyond Shakespeare studies to recast England as an active participant in the Renaissance recovery of Greek antiquity, rather than a latecomer. Colombo frames Showerman’s book as a contribution to the larger history of ideas: of how classical concepts migrate, transform, and persist across centuries.

Read the review:

For those with institutional access: https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2026.2708394
For all others: https://lcolombo.tulane.edu/2026/09/10/shakespeares-greater-greek/

Publication Details:

Colombo, Lyle Jennings. 2026. “Shakespeare’s Greater Greek: An Exploration of Greek Drama, Epic & History in the Works of Shakespeare: By Earl Showerman. Ashland, OR: Greater Greek Group, 2025. 348 Pp. $24.00 (Paper).” The European Legacy 31 (5): 660–65. doi:10.1080/10848770.2026.2708394.