Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy

The Twilight of the Ancient World

Paul A. Cantor

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780226462516
  9780226462486
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226462653
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare's Roman plays—Coriolanus, Julius Caeser, and Antony and Cleopatra—in his landmark Shakespeare's Rome (1976). With Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an integrated trilogy that portrays the tragedy not simply of their protagonists but of an entire political community.

Cantor analyzes the way Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. The transformation of the ancient city into a cosmopolitan empire marks the end of the era of civic virtue in antiquity, but it also opens up new spiritual possibilities that Shakespeare correlates with the rise of Christianity and thus the first stirrings of the medieval and the modern worlds.
More broadly, Cantor places Shakespeare's plays in a long tradition of philosophical speculation about Rome, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two thinkers who provide important clues on how to read Shakespeare's works. In a pathbreaking chapter, he undertakes the first systematic comparison of Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome, exploring their central point of contention: Did Christianity corrupt the Roman Empire or was the corruption of the Empire the precondition of the rise of Christianity? Bringing Shakespeare into dialogue with other major thinkers about Rome, Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy reveals the true profundity of the Roman Plays.
 

PART ONE

Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and the Revaluation of Roman Values

1

Shakespeare’s Tragic City: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic

How many wars do we see undertaken in the history of Rome, how much blood shed, how many peoples destroyed, how many great actions, how many triumphs, how much statecraft, how much sobriety, prudence, constancy, and courage! But how did this project for invading all nations end—a project so well planned, carried out and completed—except by satiating the happiness of five or six monsters? What! This senate had brought about the extinction of so many kings only to fall into the meanest enslavement to some of its most contemptible citizens, and to exterminate itself by its own decrees!

MONTESQUIEU, Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline

Rome in Shakespeare’s Imagination

The subject of Rome looms large in Shakespeare’s career. Of his ten tragedies, four are set in the ancient city. What may well be his first comedy, The Comedy of Errors, is based on a Roman model, Plautus’s Manaechmi. Of his two narrative poems, The Rape of Lucrece deals with a famous incident in early Roman history, and Venus and Adonis is derived from the Roman poet Ovid. Shakespeare’s history plays contain reminders that Britain was once a Roman colony, and one of his last plays, Cymbeline, seems to be an attempt to relate British history to Roman. The history plays often use ancient Rome as a reference point, as if Shakespeare were trying to apply lessons from Roman politics to his own country’s past—and perhaps its present. For example, in the prologue to act 5 of Henry V, the chorus compares the king’s return to London after his great victory over the French at Agincourt to a Roman triumph:

The Mayor and all his brethren in best sort,

Like to the senators of th’ antique Rome,

With the plebeians swarming at their heels,

Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in. (5.Chor.25–28)1

Then, in what is clearly a contemporary political reference, the chorus goes on to draw a further parallel to the wished-for triumphal return of an English general from an expedition to Ireland in Shakespeare’s own day.2

In perhaps the most haunting reference to ancient Rome in Shakespeare’s history plays, the young prince Edward in Richard III, glimpsing the Tower of London, asks, “Did Julius Caesar build that place?” (3.1.69). The fact that a Roman edifice lasted for centuries in England becomes a lesson for the prince in the possibility of eternal glory: “Methinks the truth should live from age to age / As ’twere retail’d to all posterity” (3.1.76–77). The memory of Caesar’s achievement provokes in the English prince hopes of rivaling his great Roman predecessor:3

That Julius Caesar was a famous man;

With what his valor did enrich his wit,

His wit set down to make his valor live.

Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,

For now he lives in fame though not in life.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And if I live until I be a man,

I’ll win our ancient right in France again,

Or die a soldier as I liv’d a king. (3.1.84–88, 91–93)

This is what Rome came to represent in the Renaissance imagination—the pinnacle of earthly glory, specifically the grandeur of military conquest. Many Europeans in Shakespeare’s day could share the experience of young Prince Edward—from the Colosseum in Rome itself to Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, monuments of Roman greatness stood all over Europe.4 Any one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who contemplated an imperial future for Britain might well look back to ancient Rome for models of military and political excellence. Edmund Spenser’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene, first published in 1590, had already presented Britain as the historical successor to Troy and Rome as the third of the world’s great imperial powers.

Shakespeare may have hoped that Britain could recapture something of Roman grandeur, but he was also aware of the huge gulf that separated Britain from Rome. The Britain of Shakespeare’s day was a monarchy. Ancient Rome, for much of its history, was a republic, and it was the Republic that conquered all its rivals in the Mediterranean world and laid claim to much of the territory that comprised what we know as Rome’s empire. To be sure, after Julius Caesar’s death, Rome was ruled by emperors for hundreds of years, and some of them added more territory to Rome’s dominions. But except for Shakespeare’s early—and some would say immature—play, Titus Andronicus, he seems to have been interested primarily in the republican era of Rome. Among his three mature Roman plays, he first wrote Julius Caesar, which focuses on the change from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire—the emergence of one-man rule in the city. Several years later, Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, which continues the story of Julius Caesar and portrays the death throes of the Republic, along with the beginnings of the imperial system under Octavius (who became the first “official” emperor, Augustus Caesar). At roughly the same time, Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus, which deals with the early days of the Roman Republic, indeed with its founding, if one regards the institution of the tribunate, which gave the plebeians an active role in the Roman regime, as the distinctive feature of the Roman republican constitution. Shakespeare’s mature Roman plays appear to form a trilogy, telling the story of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and highlighting the differences between republican and imperial principles.5 Taken together, they form one larger tragedy, what might be called the tragedy of the Republic.

The historical disposition of Shakespeare’s three mature Roman plays suggests a sustained effort to understand the nature of the republican regime—what made it work to begin with, what made it so successful politically and militarily, and what eventually undermined and destroyed it.6 Coriolanus displays remarkable insight into what differentiates a republic from a monarchy, and what allows it to function effectively in the absence of a single ruler in control. Moreover, Coriolanus seems to reflect Shakespeare’s admiration for the political energy and military strength a republican constitution generates. The Rome of Coriolanus has many faults and comes near to disaster, but in the city’s eventual triumph, one can see why a community with this remarkable ability to hold its citizens together and channel their energies into political life was to go on to conquer the Mediterranean world.

By contrast, insofar as Antony and Cleopatra portrays the beginnings of the Roman imperial system, it seems to reflect a negative judgment on it in political terms, ultimately validating Cleopatra’s pronouncement: “’Tis paltry to be Caesar” (5.2.2). The martial virtues, devotion to the common good, and heroic spirit that characterize the Roman Republic seem to be fast disappearing in the world of Antony and Cleopatra. In the figures of Octavius and Antony, Shakespeare correctly identifies the two prototypes of Roman emperors that were to emerge in the next century. Octavius, who in fact became the first Roman emperor, is the cold-blooded and shrewd administrator, the expert manipulator of human beings, the leader who succeeds by managing his subordinates, not by exhibiting heroic virtue himself. Antony, for all his remaining heroism, is the prototype of the decadent emperor, indulging his appetites, ruling tyrannically, and modeling himself on a Hellenistic god-king who expects his subjects to worship him (thus foreshadowing the coming reigns of Caligula and Nero).7 As rulers, neither Octavius nor Antony seems admirable, and neither displays the concern for the common good that animates the republican Romans in Coriolanus and Julius Caesar (even though some of them obviously pursue their private good under the guise of public concerns).

In sum, Shakespeare appears to identify Rome as a distinctive form of community with the Republic and to pass a negative judgment on the Empire in specifically political terms. Speech after speech at the end of Julius Caesar suggests that, with the deaths of the last defenders of the Republic, the breed of noble Romans is becoming extinct. The play concludes with an almost apocalyptic sense of an era coming to an end. Cassius’s death calls forth imagery of the twilight of Roman greatness:

But Cassius is no more. O setting sun,

As in the red rays thou dost sink to-night,

So in his red blood Cassius’ day is set!

The sun of Rome is set. Our day is gone,

Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done! (5.3.60–64)

When Brutus observes the dead bodies of Cassius and Titinius, he laments:

Are yet two Romans living such as these?

The last of all the Romans, fare thee well!

It is impossible that ever Rome

Shall breed thy fellow. (5.3.98–101)

One might dismiss such speeches as mere rhetoric, but their cumulative effect is to convey a sense that the death of the Republic means the death of Rome itself, the end of everything Rome traditionally stood for, the destruction of the spirit that animated the community for centuries and made it great politically and militarily.8

Antony and Cleopatra does little to dispel this negative impression of the Empire. To be sure, in some sense “Rome” survives in the play, and the characters occasionally refer to old Roman ideals.9 But in light of the corruption of imperial Rome, these speeches sound hollow, and the old Roman ideals no longer guide the actual conduct of the Romans in the play.10 Shakespeare does everything he can to stress the discontinuity between the Republic and the Empire. He neglects the ways in which many republican institutions actually survived into the imperial era (or were recreated by Octavius). From reading Antony and Cleopatra, one would never know, for example, that the Senate still existed in the days of Octavius, or that he preserved such titles as “consul.”11 The plebeians, who play such an active role in Roman politics in both Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, are barely mentioned in Antony and Cleopatra, and not a single one is represented in the cast of characters.12 Cleopatra correctly sees that in imperial Roman politics, the plebeians have been reduced to pure spectators (5.2.55–57, 209–11). Far from drawing the energies of its people into public life as the Republic did, the imperial regime restricts participation in politics to the contenders for the position of Caesar and eventually produces one-man rule. As is evident throughout Antony and Cleopatra, an empire replaces active citizens with passive subjects.

This is the key issue that distinguishes the republican world of Coriolanus from the imperial world of Antony and Cleopatra. What defines a republican regime is the fact that its citizens participate in the political life of the community.13 It need not be full participation. The Rome of Coriolanus is not a democracy in either the ancient or the modern sense, but the plebeians do have a distinct role to play in the politics of the city. Their share in power is ratified when the patricians grant them the right to the tribunate as a result of their rebellion (itself a sign of their active participation in Roman political life). What evidently interested Shakespeare in the subject of ancient Rome is this distinctively republican way of life, something very different from the kind of politics he knew in Britain.14

Shakespeare evidently admired the Roman Republic and its ability to generate a remarkable series of great military and political leaders. At the same time, however, he reveals his republican Romans to be limited in their range of humanity precisely because of their intense focus on political life. For all its political defects, the Roman Empire may bring to light and foster other forms of human excellence, unknown in the republican era. Thus to say that Shakespeare admired the republican Roman way of life is not to say that he endorsed it as the best way of life simply for all humanity, and especially not to say that he was eager to convert Britain into a republic. But perhaps he believed that modern Britain could learn something about military and political excellence by studying the very different principles that governed ancient Rome. His history plays can be interpreted as a warning to British monarchs against trying to govern absolutely, without reference to the common good, and advice to them to try to recreate in monarchical form some elements of the mixed regime of the Roman Republic, to find ways to accommodate the interests of both the nobles and the commons in the British regime.15

In his interest in the Roman republican way of life and what it might teach the modern world, Shakespeare was not alone among Renaissance thinkers.16 As its name suggests, the Renaissance was at its core a revival of classical antiquity. We normally picture the Renaissance in cultural terms, and think of its architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature—areas in which it broke with medieval traditions by returning to classical models and precedents. But as the great historian of the period, Jacob Burckhardt, insisted, the spirit of the Renaissance as a rebirth of classical antiquity was also evident in its political life.17 At the very center of the Renaissance—in Italy—a number of cities, such as Florence and Venice, revived classical republican life and specifically hark...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Shakespeare’s Rome Revisited
• PART 1   Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and the Revaluation of Roman Values
• PART 2   Further Explorations of Shakespeare’s Rome
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index