Shakespeare's Ruins and Myth of Rome

Maria Del Sapio Garbero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000531596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Rome was tantamount to its ruins, a dismembered body, to the eyes of those – Italians and foreigners – who visited the city in the years prior to or encompassing the lengthy span of the Renaissance. Drawing on the double movement of archaeological exploration and creative reconstruction entailed in the humanist endeavour to 'resurrect' the past, 'ruins' are seen as taking precedence over 'myth', in Shakespeare's Rome. They are assigned the role of a heuristic model, and discovered in all their epistemic relevance in Shakespeare's dramatic vision of history and his negotiation of modernity. This is the first book of its kind to address Shakespeare's relationship with Rome's authoritative myth, archaeologically, by taking as a point of departure a chronological reversal, namely the vision of the 'eternal' city as a ruinous scenario and hence the ways in which such a layered, 'silent', and aporetic scenario allows for an archaeo-anatomical approach to Shakespeare's Roman works.

1 Starting With the Debris of Finis Imperii Titus Andronicus

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259671-3

“Hail Rome, Victorious in Thy Mourning Weeds”: Rome Entombed and Unearthed

While I was writing this chapter, Italian newspapers published the unexpected results of one of the many ongoing Roman archaeological digs, faced every day with layered centuries of history and the task of making sense of what emerges as untimely and as urgent in its demand to be understood. This particular piece of news was the reappearance of the remains of Emperor Titus’s triumphal arch dating back to 81 CE, the second of the two devoted to him, in the course of an archaeological campaign that aimed to restore the Circo Massimo hemicycle: an unimaginable tangle of pedestals, beheaded columns, stones, and elliptic inscriptions that archaeologists promised to rearrange—but not immediately; you need money to do that!—into the vestiges of a stately architecture and the imaginative force of an imperial icon of the past. Meanwhile, as the ruins of Titus’s arch remained momentarily visible to be hopefully composed into the graphically imagined ancient monument—a triumphal arch, the monument under which the processions of victorious generals paraded before heading towards the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol—visitors would be content with enjoying the sight of the unearthed stones, from the “extraordinary” vantage point of the adjacent medieval tower of Torre Moletta (La Repubblica, 17 May 2015).

Well, this seems to me an inspiring allegory of heritage and memory in the making. As beholders of such a landscape we are paradoxically promised a “perfect” view of what is fragmentary and only half seen: paradoxically, in so far as the perfection of the view rests on a position which is grounded on, and yet temporally distant from, those remains—precisely like the case of the medieval tower presumably erected with some of the materials taken from the same settlement.

The remains of Titus’s triumphal arch at Circo Massimo, in conjunction with the sight provided by the medieval Torre Moletta, may well serve as a suggestive, petrified representation of the way Shakespeare, the playwright, began his trafficking with ancient Rome: a traffic which, as if starting from the end, he launched with Titus Andronicus—a visionary play with no direct classical source and which could be set in the span of time encompassing the fourth and fifth centuries CE, on the eve of the deflagration of the Roman Empire, culminating in the repetitive sacks inflicted by the Goths in 410–450.

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, more than any of his ensuing Roman plays, urges us to observe a similar archaeological or geological articulation of the playwright’s relationship with Rome and its memory: one which (as I have anticipated in my Introduction) absorbs the distance or difference of a belated point of observation; but also, and more importantly, one which entails inheriting the past at the point of its ruin and inchoate transformation, or metamorphosis, into something else.¹ As a matter of fact, Shakespeare seemed to refer his audience to an even broader span of time—one subsuming the whole parable of imperial Rome (27 BCE–476 CE)—if we consider Titus’s mention, at the outset of the play, of the five hundred years of Andronici’s tomb (“this tomb / This monument five hundred years hath stood”, 1.1.350;² see earlier, Introduction, pp. 4–6) and the way it is symbolically invested with the ineluctable role of entombing Rome’s past and present in layers of self-devouring glory and bodies: “Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive / That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers? / Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine. How happy art thou then / from these devourers to be banished” (3.1.53–57). As for the barbaric sacks launched from the outside, these were not a thing of the past in sixteenth-century Rome. For those in Shakespeare’s audience who had a memory of the traumatic reprise of 1527 carried out, ironically, by the Landsnecht, the mutinous troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, this was enough to justify as well as reinforce the hallucinatory scenario of a city repetitively oscillating between glory and barbarity, aggression and self-aggression. As in the visual perception and memory of the play which Henry Peacham in the 1590s in his famous drawing notably sketched as a syncretic mixture of costumes and ages, Shakespeare works at making events, ages, and bodies precipitate into one mixed heap of limbs, temporalities, and perspectives. The playwright also makes every effort to encapsulate the belated, layered perspective of a scrutinizing posterity.

Needless to say, the historical Titus of my incipit (the general who was emperor of Rome in the brief span of time going from 79 to 81 CE), has nothing to do with the fictional character imagined by Shakespeare, even though similarities might be drawn between Titus, the famous destroyer of the temple of Jerusalem, and the widely reprehended religious impiety of the Shakespearean Titus Andronicus on the part of the Goths. But this is just an instance of the prismatic quality—often compared to that of cubist painting³—which characterizes this play. Indeed, it emblematically stages a perception of Rome as a “floating signifier”, as linguists, anthropologists, and psychoanalysts might help us to say, namely “a void of meaning”, or better “an undetermined quantity of signification”, in the words of Lévi-Strauss, which is “apt to receive any meaning”. As such it signals “a relation of inadequation … between signifiant and signifié”, a loss of reality—as deeply felt as the effort at bridging the gap one finds in the thought of Lévi-Strauss himself,⁴ who developed these notions as an anthropologist experiencing his own encounter with the otherness of the Amazonian natives and his personal frustration in coming to terms with the elusiveness of their signifying system.

In his first Roman play, Shakespeare deals with Rome as if he were invested in an endeavour similar to that of Lévi-Strauss—coping with an ungraspable referent. Rome is a catastrophic, unsituated and yet overcon-noted body, to whose memory the playwright as well as his audience or readers—like Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur—are called to contribute by playing inventively at what has been viewed as a “Rome effect”, a “‘Rome’ as an anthology of stories”.⁵ “Rome”: which Rome, whose Rome? This is what one is bound to ask, if we take as a point of departure the unsituated ruinous scenario of Titus Andronicus, namely Shakespeare’s point of departure. It is no coincidence that Titus’s opening triumph is one with a protracted funeral rite, a visual enactment of the self-neutralizing terms which make up the oxymoron pronounced by Titus upon entering the stage: “Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds” (1.1.73). Equally meaningful is the fact that the first place to be mentioned is the Capitol, where the triumph takes place—the overinscripted heart of empyreal power as well as an erased and lost place, the nostalgic epitome of “de varietate fortunae” in the European humanist imagination: “the temple is overthrown, the gold has been pillaged … and the sacred ground is again disfigured with thorns and brambles”, writes the already quoted Poggio.

The hill of the Capitol on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings; illustrated by the footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the spoils and tributes of so many nations. This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced!

(see Introduction, p. 18)

Shakespeare begins his dealings with Rome by locating himself in the same empty space. As is the case for the European humanists, his first theatrical picture of Rome is born out of absence and desire. Indeed, Titus’s Rome holds up as a signifier in so far as we share with the playwright such an emptiness, a loss of reality, and yet its excess. An excess staged by the playwright, together with the violence of the plot, as an extraordinary if floating and nightmarish “quantity of signification”: arguably a condition that cinema, more than theatre, will be able to handle and enact at its best, as Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999), a film not incidentally produced at the end of a millennium, stands to prove. Ancient Rome stood as such as the petrified representation of an ontological crisis in Shakespeare’s time. As best catalyzed in sonnet 3 by Du Bellay (Englished by Spenser), Rome was the lost referent per antonomasia. It stood as the allegory of the “World’s Inconstancy”, impermanence being its only ontology.

Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest,

And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all,

These same old walls, old arches, which thou seest,

Old palaces, is that which Rome men call.

Behold what wreake, what ruine, and what Waste,

And how that she, which with her mightie powre

Tam’d all the world, hath tam’d her self at last,

The pray of time, which all things doth devoure.

Rome now of Rome is th’ only funerall,

And only Rome, of Rome hath victorie;

Ne ought save Tyber, hastening to his fall,

Remaines of all: O worlds inconstancie.

That which is firm, doth flit and fall away;

And that is flitting, doth abide and stay.

Rome’s “fleetingness” is its only “firmness”, a self-neutralizing coincidence of opposites which in the closing couplet is worked out and strengthened by rhyme (away/stay) as well as chiastic inversion (fleetingness/firmness). In Du Bellay/Spenser’s Ruines, Rome has prevailed upon itself and now, with the display of its entombed landscape, it endlessly celebrates its own spectrality before the eyes of posterity. Shakespeare’s Titus allows us to experience the same loss, the same anxiety, at the very moment in which the city was being discovered in Renaissance Europe. Also, the playwright deliberately showcases his own expertise in gathering and reshuffling the sources he needs in order to envision that spectrality.

Indeed, looking for Rome in Renaissance Europe involved a search for a city which lay disseminated in a palimpsest of stones, vegetal life, and only gradually re-emerging ancient texts: an almost geological conglomerate of ruined architectures and elliptic memories—a remembrance, more than a reality. And this is all the more important to keep in mind if we consider that the reconstruction of an assumed integral space of the imperial ruins—as we have come to know it first of all in contemporary Via dei Fori Imperiali—was yet to come. In fact, this was mostly the result of the large-scale excavating project launched by Mussolini in the 1920s with the aim to make it stand as an instance of Romanitas, well suited to reappropriating the imperial pride of the nation.⁶

Had Shakespeare read Du Bellay/Spenser’s Ruines of Rome (published in Complaints, 1591) by the time (late 1592 according to some critics, late 1593 according to others) he contrived his visionary, unsituated Rome in Titus Andronicus? He might have, as I anticipate in my Introduction (pp. 32–38) and as has become clear to critics of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Even though, in the face of the long time-honoured and transnational cherished poetics of ruins in the Renaissance, I would avoid searching for evidence in lexical similarities when we come to Titus (for all its sometimes startling resemblances), to emphasize rather the influence the French poet may have had in fostering a deeper but more abstract notion of the eternal city as a “flitting” entity: one that was culturally and widely shared and according to which, as Du Bellay put it, “That which is firm, doth flit and fall away; / And that is flitting, doth abide and stay” (3.13–14). Certainly, an authoritative and long-standing reflection on Rome as inextricably linked to its ruins had made the playwright alert—skilful “shake-scene” that he already was—to their dramatic potentialities. Such a dramatic force was mightily epitomized by the opening verses of Du Bellay’s sonnet 7:

Ye sacred ruines, and ye tragick sights,

Which onely do the Name of Rome retaine,

Old moniments, which of so famous sprights

The honour yet in ashes do m...