The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

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T H E M Y T H OF ROM E I N SH A K E SPE A R E A N D H IS CON T E M POR A R I E S

When Cleopatra expresses a desire to die ‘after the high Roman fashion’, acting in accordance with ‘what’s brave, what’s noble’, Shakespeare is suggesting that there are certain values that are Â�characteristically Roman. The use of the terms ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, or Jonson’s Sejanus often Â�carries the implication that most people fail to live up to this ideal of conduct, that very few Romans are worthy of the name. Chernaik demonstrates how, in these plays, Roman values are held up to critical scrutiny. The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, and Chapman often present a much darker image of Rome, as exemplifying barbarism rather than civility. Through a comparative analysis of the Roman plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and including detailed discussion of the classical historians Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch, this study examines the uses of Roman historyÂ€– ‘the myth of Rome’Â€– in Shakespeare’s age. wa r r e n c h e r n a i k is Emeritus Professor of English, University of London, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies. He is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2007), Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995), and The Poet’s Time:Â€Literature and Politics in the Work of Andrew Marvell (1983). He has co-edited a number of books on topics as diverse as detective fiction, changes in copyright law, and Andrew Marvell, and has published essays on seventeenthÂ�century authors such as Milton, Herbert, Rochester, and Behn, as well as on Shakespeare and on Restoration drama. He was the founding director of the University of London’s Institute of English Studies.

T H E M Y T H OF ROM E I N SH A K E SPE A R E A N D H IS CON T E M POR A R I E S WA R R E N C H E R N A I K University of London

c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, uk Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title:Â€www.cambridge.org/9780521196567 © Warren Chernaik 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Chernaik, Warren L. The myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his contemporaries / Warren Chernaik. p.â•… cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. i s b n 978-0-521-19656-7 (hardback) 1.â•‡ Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Criticism and interpretation.â•… 2.â•‡ Rome – In literature.â•… 3.â•‡ Historical drama, English – History and criticism.â•… 4.â•‡ Jonson, Ben, 1573?–1637 – Criticism and interpretation.â•… 5.â•‡ Massinger, Philip, 1583–1640 – Criticism and interpretation.â•… 6.â•‡ Chapman, George, 1559?–1634 – Criticism and interpretation.â•… I.â•‡ Title. pr3069.r6c47 2011 822.33–dc22 2010051875 i s b n 978-0-521-19656-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of Gertrude Sheffield and Ruth Parker Chernaik

Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction:Â€a Roman thought

1

1 Roman historians and the myth of Rome

7

2 The wronged Lucretia and the early republic

35

3 Self-inflicted wounds

56

4 ‘Like a Colossus’:Â€Julius Caesar

79

5 Ben Jonson’s Rome

108

6 O’erflowing the measure:Â€Antony and Cleopatra

135

7 The city and the battlefield:Â€Coriolanus

165

8 Tyranny and empire

196

9 Ancient Britons and Romans

219

Postscript:Â€Shakespeare and the republican tradition

244

Notes Bibliography Index

249 275 291

vii

Acknowledgements

Any book of this kind is a collaborative enterprise. I am grateful to the library staff at the British Library Rare Book Room and Humanities Reading Room, Senate House Library, and the Theatre Museum. Sarah Stanton, who commissioned the book, has been supportive throughout the time I have been working on it, and helped immeasurably in the procÂ� ess of drafting and revision. Alexander Leggatt has read and commented incisively on successive versions, helping me to focus my thoughts and give the book a clearer overall argument. Judith Chernaik has been an invaluable help not only in her comments on draft chapters but in the many conversations about Shakespeare that we have had over the years. Friends and colleagues have discussed aspects of the ‘myth of Rome’, Shakespeare, and Jonson with me, and several of them have read earlier versions of chapters. I owe special thanks to Tom Cain, Stella Revard, James Shapiro, Patricia Osmond, Paulina Kewes, John London, Lucy Munro, Rebecca Lemon, A. R. Braunmuller, Fritz Levy, Howard Norland, John Peacock, Martin Dzelzainis, and René Weis. I am grateful to Sonia Massai and Gordon McMullan, fellow Shakespeareans at King’s College London and stalwarts of the London Shakespeare Seminar; to Jennifer Richards and Michael Rossington, who invited me to give a paper on Julius Caesar atÂ€ aÂ€ conference on republicanism at the University of Newcastle; to Ayanna Thompson and Isabelle Schwartz-Gastine for inviting me to give a semiÂ�nar paper, ‘Political Shakespeare’, at the 2010 ISC Stratford conference; and to Andrew Humphries, Angela Day, and John London for inviting me to give other papers on various Shakespearean topics. Among the authors whose books and essays on related subjects have proved especially helpful, I would like particularly to thank Martin Butler, Heather James, and Janet Adelman, and, as an indispensable guide to the republican tradition and its Roman antecedents, Quentin Skinner.

viii


When Cleopatra says of Antony, ‘a Roman thought hath struck him’ (AC, 1.2.87) or when Horatio says to Hamlet, ‘I am more an antique Roman than a Dane’ (Ham, 5.2.325), Shakespeare suggests that there are certain values that are characteristically Roman, but not geographically or Â�temporally limited to a particular place. As G. K. Hunter has said, Cleopatra’s ‘Roman’, by a shorthand readily recognizable by Shakespeare’s audience, means ‘soldierly, severe, self-controlled, disciplined’, virtues toward which Cleopatra, as hedonist, feels distinctly ambivalent.1 Horatio’s ‘antique Roman’, by a similar shorthand, implies an advocacy of suicide as preferable to dishonour or a life of ‘bestial oblivion’ (Ham, 4.4.39), a view sharply at variance with Christian doctrine. Cleopatra alludes to similar notions when she expresses a desire to die by suicide ‘after the high Roman fashion’, acting in accordance with ‘what’s brave, what’s noble’ (AC, 4.15.90–1), transforming herself into a Roman by her death. Antony, one of many Roman heroes in Shakespeare to die by his own hand, proclaims his constancy to such values in his dying words: â•…â•…â•… … and do not basely die, Nor cowardly put off my helmet to My countryman:Â€a Roman by a Roman Valiantly vanquished. (4.15.57–60)

In many of these passages, there is an assumption that most people fail to live up to this ideal of conduct, that relatively few Romans are worthy of the name. Coriolanus scornfully says of the hostile plebeians, ‘I would they were barbariansÂ€– as they are, /Though in Rome litter’d; not Romans, as they are not, /Though calv’d i’th’ porch of the Capitol’ (Cor, 3.1.236–8). Titus Andronicus is full of the contrast between Roman and barbarian (‘Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous’, 1.1.383), in a play in which Romans and Goths compete in behaving barbarously, with a nightmarish descent into murder, rape, mutilation, and cannibalism. In Julius Caesar, 1

2


Cassius employs two comparisons in disdainfully Â�dismissing those who fail to live up to a ‘Roman’ ideal of conduct:Â€‘Romans now’ are women, not men, in a paltry modernity, a pale reflection of ancient glories. ‘Our fathers’ minds are dead, /And we are governed with our mothers’ spirits’ (JC, 1.3.80–4). Cleopatra, as she prepares for suicide, sees Roman ‘resolution’ and perseverance as characteristically male:Â€women are changeable, men are better able to achieve an ideal of constancy in governing their Â�behaviour, to ‘do a noble deed’: My resolution is placed, and I have nothing Of woman in me. Now from head to foot I am marble-constant. Now the fleeting moon No planet is of mine. (AC, 5.2.236–40)

The Roman ideal of conduct, as these passages show, is basically Â� masculine, suitable for a military society, where virtus needs to be tested on the battlefield. The history of Rome, as Shakespeare, Livy, and Plutarch present it, is a history of war and conquest. Myles McDonnell has argued that the term virtus in Roman usage initially means manly courage and only gradually comes to have the broader meaning of Â�virtue or moral worth.2 As we shall see, Livy and Plutarch are central sources for the Elizabethans in defining Roman values. Their accounts of Roman history presuppose a commonwealth of male citizens ready to serve their homeland on the battlefield. Fides, keeping one’s word, is closely related to pietas, fear of the gods and respect for one’s household Â� gods, in a family unit where the father expects unquestioning obedience. Clemency and discipline, masculine virtues, are exercised at the discretion of those with power over life and death, who, accountable to no one, can show the importance of self-control. Discipline at its most fearsome and uncompromising is illustrated in Livy’s Titus Manlius, who executes his son for disobeying an order, and both discipline and clemency are shown in the dictator Lucius Papirius, who demands the death of his Master of Horse for defying his authority in leading Roman troops to a victory without asking his permission, and then relents under pressure.3 Prudence, wisdom, gravitas are all seen as male virtues. The only one of the dominant Roman values more appropriate to women than men is pudicitia, chastity. Yet in Livy and Shakespeare, Lucretia, committing suicide to save her honour, explicitly does so to provide an example to the men in her family, spurring them on to revenge. Shakespeare’s Volumnia, tutor to her son in ‘precepts that would make invincible /The heart that conn’d them’ (Cor, 4.1.10–11), more prudent and wise than


3

the son she has made a soldier, acts as conveyer and repository of masculine Roman values. In all three of Shakespeare’s plays based on Plutarch, Roman values are held up to scrutiny. When Caesar says ‘I am constant as the northern star’, or when Brutus says ‘not that I loved Caesar less, but that I love Rome more’, their proclamation of their own virtues entails considerable self-delusion, and the irony is apparent in both cases (JC, 3.1.60; 3.2.21–2). Throughout Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra keeps up a running commentary on conventional Roman notions of heroism and masculinity, and the virtues of the cold, efficient Octavius Caesar are less attractive and dramatically interesting than the vices of his rival Antony. The scene on Pompey’s barge, with Lepidus, the ‘third part of the world’, carried off dead drunk, is no less critical of Sextus Pompeius’s professions of virtue than of Menas’s cynicism in offering to cut the throats of the triumvirs and make Pompey ‘lord of the whole world’. Pompey’s claim that his ‘honour’ would allow him to reward the act, finding it ‘afterwards well done’, but only if Menas had not told him in advance, is hardly an instance of idealized virtue, and Menas’s comment deflates his Â�pretensions of highmindedness. â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… For this, I’ll never follow thy palled fortunes more. Who seeks and will not take, when once ’tis offered, Shall never find it more.

(AC, 2.7.74–85)

In a scene often omitted from productions, Ventidius’s cautious refusal to seek acclaim for a Roman victory, on the grounds that ‘Who does i’th’wars more than his captain can, /Becomes his captain’s captain’, is another sceptical commentary on ‘ambition, the soldier’s virtue’ in a society of competing males (AC, 2.7.74–85). The manly virtues of the warrior Titus Andronicus, who begins by killing his son for disobedience and later chops off his own hand, slays his raped and mutilated daughter to allow her ‘shame’ to perish, and serves up his enemies in a cannibal feast, are a reductio ad absurdum of Roman values, an implicit critique of ‘the standard motifs of austere republican virtue’.4 In a more subtle critique of Roman virtus, Coriolanus’s exemplary heroismÂ€ – ‘If any think brave death outweighs bad life, /And that his country’s dearer than himself …/ Follow Martius’Â€– leads him to invade Rome at the head of a foreign army and then to lose his own life in what is virtually a parody of his earlier triumph over the Volscians:Â€‘Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads, / Stain all your edges on me’ (Cor, 1.7.72–6; 5.6.112–13).

4


To Shakespeare, Jonson, and their contemporaries, Rome could never be wholly Other, but was seen as parent or precursor:Â€ ‘the Roman past was to them not simply a past but the past … since it led to the present’, providing a model for emulation.5 In a foundation myth similar to that of Rome, Brute, a descendant of Aeneas, is imagined as establishing a colony on the island of Britain, bestowing his name on it. Cymbeline, one of several plays set at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain, ends with a harmonious reconciliation between ancient Britain and Rome, ‘a Roman, and a British ensign’ side by side, waving ‘friendly together’ (Cym, 5.4.481–2). In the court of James I, the Roman analogy is standard currency for praise of the monarch as ‘England’s Caesar’. In James’s elaborately staged entrance into London in 1604, the streets were lined with arches and statues in ‘a triumph in the high Roman style’, recreating ancient Rome in the eyes of the beholders. Jonson’s masques, with their designs by Inigo Jones, full of Roman motifs, present James I as a new Augustus, and in coins and medals the King is frequently represented in Roman dress, crowned with laurel.6 Similar flattering comparisons, with a particular emphasis on peace and ‘moral conquests’, continue in the reign of Charles I, in masques with titles like Britannia Triumphans and The Triumph of Peace, presenting the King as ‘a Roman emperor reincarnate’.7 The plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and their contemporaries often present a much darker image of Rome as exemplifying barbarism rather than civility. Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, and Sejanus in different ways show the twin evils of tyranny and anarchy, the unbridled rule of appetite breaking down ordinary ties of kinship and loyalty in an angry mob or unscrupulous seeker after power. In Julius Caesar, the horrendous spectacle of a plebeian mob tearing Cinna the poet to pieces is immediately followed by a scene of cynical politicians bargaining with death sentences: a n t on y. These many, then, shall die; their names are pricked. o c t av i u s. Your brother too must die; consent you, Lepidus? l e pi du s. I do consent. o c t av i u s. Prick him down, Antony. l e pi du s. Upon condition Publius shall not live, Who is your sister’s son, Mark Antony. a n t on y. He shall not live. Look, with a spot I damn him.

( JC, 4.1.1–6)

In Jonson’s Sejanus, as the virtuous, ineffectual republicans, unhappy with Tiberius’s abuses of power, are picked off one by one by Sejanus and Tiberius, one of them complains, ‘There’s nothing Roman in us; nothing good, /Gallant, or great’.8 When in the opening scene of Titus Andronicus,


5

full of empty ceremony, Titus crowns Saturninus as ‘king and commander of our commonweal, /The wide world’s emperor’, Saturninus’s words in response are patently hypocritical. s at u r n i n u s. Thanks, noble Titus, father of my life. How proud I am of thee and of thy gifts, Rome shall record, and when I do forget The least of these unspeakable deserts, Romans forget your fealty to me. (Tit, 1.1.250–61)

A moment later, ensconced in power, Saturninus indeed forgets any sense of reciprocal obligation or constraints on his power, as he hurls defiance at the Andronici, calling them ‘traitorous’ and imagining a conspiracy to ‘dishonour’ him: No, Titus, no, the emperor needs her not, Nor her, nor thee, nor any of thy stock. (Tit, 1.1.304–8)

The feebleness of beleaguered virtue before triumphant, shameless vice is illustrated in the figure of the raped, mutilated Lavinia, with her hands and tongue cut off. Rome in Titus Andronicus is mutilated, the ideals of patriotism and honour, ‘hands to do Rome service’, shown to be ‘in vain’, and any prayers are ‘bootless’. Rome, Titus concludes, ‘is but a wilderness of tigers’ (Tit, 3.1.54, 74–81). In the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, there are many plays on Roman themes. According to one recent list, forty-nine such plays are extant, and the titles of forty-five additional ‘Roman’ plays survive.9 The extant plays range from Lodge’s The Wounds of Civil War (first performed in 1588) to Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), and include three plays on Cleopatra other than Shakespeare’s, two entitled Caesar and Pompey, three on Nero, and at least three which, like Cymbeline, juxtapose ancient Britons and Romans. Studies of Shakespeare’s Roman plays are rarely comparative in approach:Â€ indeed, the standard pattern for critics is to limit themselves to Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus (or any two of these three), considered in isolation, ignoring Shakespeare’s early Lucrece and Titus Andronicus, his late Cymbeline, and the plays on Roman themes by his contemporaries.10 In this study, I shall examine Shakespeare’s dramatic use of the myth of Rome, the received tradition of Roman history and Roman values. When we compare Shakespeare’s Roman plays and his poem Lucrece with works by other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists writing on similar topics, we find striking differences

6


as well as similarities. Plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, Massinger, and others draw in detail on the writings of Roman historians, interpreting them in various ways, and here again the approach in this study will be comparative, quoting from the Elizabethan translations to which Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have had access.

Ch apter 1

Roman historians and the myth of Rome

S m a l l L at i n a n d l e ss G r e e k Ben Jonson, in rather sour remarks about his rival playwright, described Shakespeare as having ‘small Latin and less Greek’. A tradition, especially prominent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterizes Shakespeare as a disciple of nature rather than art, untutored, breathing the pure air of inspirationÂ€– in Milton’s words, ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child, /Warbl[ing] his native wood-notes wild’.1 In the 1605 Quarto of Sejanus, Jonson provides detailed marginal annotations, mostly in Latin, indicating the passages in Tacitus, Suetonius, and other sources he consulted and adapted in writing the play. Shakespeare differed from Jonson and from such writers as Milton, Marvell, Herbert, Crashaw, and Herrick in not being able to read and compose Latin texts as easily as English. But though Shakespeare left school at the age of fifteen, his Â�education at Stratford grammar school gave him a knowledge of Latin at least equal to that of an A-level student or first-year undergraduate reading Classics today. In the standard curriculum of Shakespeare’s day, students were drilled in Latin from the age of seven. Starting with Lily’s Latin Â�grammar, memorized by rote in the lower forms, a sixteenth-century grammarschool student would have been exposed to texts of increasing difficulty:Â€Cato’s Distiches, Aesop’s Fables in a Latin translation, the plays of Terence, and ‘Tullies epistles … Tullies Offices, de Amiticia, Senectute … Ovid’s Tristia and Metamorphoses, Virgil’. According to one Â�contemporary schoolmaster: And therefore I would have the cheifest labor to make these purest Authors our owne, as Tully [i.e. Cicero] for prose, so Ovid and Virgil for verse, as to speake and write in Latin for the phrase, as they did.2

The method normally used in Tudor grammar schools was ‘double translation’:Â€ the schoolmaster would choose ‘some notable common place out of his Orations, or some other part of Tullie’, translated into plain 7

8


English, and ask each pupil to translate back into Latin, and then to compare his own version with the original in Cicero. Among Latin prose authors, Cicero was generally considered the model of eloquence and correctness, and, among historians, for ‘proprietie in wordes, simplicitie in sentences, plainnesse and light … Caesar and Livie … are perfect examples of Imitation’. Sallust, read in the upper forms, was another standard text, though as a difficult writer, he was considered ‘not verie fitt for yong men, to learne out of him’.3 The principal source for Shakespeare’s Roman plays was an English translation from the Greek:Â€Sir Tï»¿ï»¿homas North’s Plutarch (1579). But for the poem Lucrece (1594), he drew his materials from Livy and from Ovid’s Fasti, neither of which had at that time been translated into English. Ovid was Shakespeare’s favourite poet, a constant presence not only in his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, but in many of his early plays, including Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. According to Francis Meres in 1598, ‘the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets’.4 The Latin authors most important to Shakespeare were those he first encountered in school:Â€Ovid, Virgil (not Horace, a pervasive influence on Jonson), and, among prose writers, Cicero and Seneca, both valued as providing well-phrased sententiae, material suitable for memorization or inclusion in a commonplace book. With Ovid, Shakespeare was able to consult Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses (1567), but the many Ovidian echoes in his plays and poems show that he read Metamorphoses, Heroides, Amores, and Fasti in the original Latin. As Martindale says, Shakespeare’s ‘small Latin’ gave him the ability ‘to read Latin books, if they were not too difficult, without a translation’, though for Greek texts, he was forced to rely on English translations.5 When Shakespeare began writing at around 1590, there was no Â�general history of the Roman republic and empire available in English.6 His first Roman play, Titus Andronicus (1590–3), does not have an identifiable source among Roman historians. Its principal character, the Roman general Titus Andronicus, is an invented figure, as are the rival claimants for emperor, Saturninus and Bassianus, and the play does not depict a particular moment in Roman history. As Terence Spencer comments: It is not so much that any particular set of political institutions is assumed in Titus, but that it includes all the political institutions that Rome ever had. The author seems anxious, not to get it all right, but to get it all in.7

Republic and empire

9

Julius Caesar, written approximately a decade later, has a definite source in Sir Thomas North’s translation of The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans … by Plutarch (1579), from which Shakespeare carefully combines and adapts material from the lives of Brutus, Caesar, and Antony. North’s Plutarch also serves as Shakespeare’s principal source for Antony and Cleopatra and for Coriolanus, though the story of Coriolanus is also found in Livy. In the 1590s, a dramatist with ‘small Latin and less Greek’ writing a play based on Roman history would have been able to consult North’s Plutarch and also another translation from the Greek, Appian’s An Ancient History and Exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes Warres, tr. W. Barker (1578). Appian, the principal source of Thomas Lodge’s The Wounds of Civil War (first performed, 1588) and a partial source of Mark Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar, provides a detailed historical account of the late republic, from the civil wars of Marius and Sulla to the accession of Augustus. A translation of Polybius by Christopher Watson was published in 1568, but it only includes Book I, about the wars of Rome and Carthage (along with an extended comparison of Henry V and the Roman general Scipio as models of heroism, added by the translator). It does not include Polybius’s account of the Roman constitution in Book VI, immensely influential in the history of republicanism later on. Philemon Holland’s enormous folio translation of Livy (over 1,400 pages long) was published in 1600, and could have been used, along with North, in Coriolanus. Sallust’s Two Most Worthie and Notable Histories … The Conspiracie of Cateline … and the Warre … of Jugurth was translated by the dramatist Thomas Heywood in 1608. Two important translations of Tacitus were published in the 1590s, Sir Henry Savile’s Fower Bookes of the Histories of Cornelius Tacitus (1591) and Richard Grenewey’s Annales of Cornelius Tacitus (1598). Aside from one passage in 3 Henry VI, possibly indebted to Savile’s translation, there are virtually no references to Tacitus in Shakespeare, either in translation or in the original Latin.8 R e pu bl ic a n d e m pi r e In the version of Roman history familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, there are two key, defining events. The first is the banishment of the kings and establishment of the Roman republic, as narrated in Books 1 and 2 of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita (the subject of Shakespeare’s poem Lucrece). The second is the end of the Roman republic and its replacement

10


by a form of government concentrating power in the hands of a single man. For dramatists, the principal figure identified with this moment is not Augustus, founder of the empire, but Julius Caesar, assassinated because it was feared he aimed at tyranny: Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

( JC, 1.2.134–7)

The form of government established after the overthrow of Tarquin replaced the all-powerful monarch with two consuls, elected for a term of one year and not eligible for re-election. The consuls were as much military as political leaders and, during the early republic, one or both were likely to be away from Rome, leading an army in the field. As Livy points out, the main constraint on the powers of the consuls was the strict limitation on their period of office. This often created problems in military operations, when a general had to be replaced in the midst of a war, or had to return to Rome to supervise an election for his successor, but it also meant that consuls could be called to account when they left office. Livy in Book 2 praises the republic as ‘a free state now from this time forward’, governed by ‘yearly Magistrates’ and subject not to the caprices of individual men, but to ‘the authoritie and rule of laws’.9 In theory at least, the consuls were responsible to the Senate, which in the early republic was a body of patricians who held office for life. At the time of the expulsion of Tarquin, Rome was a tiny walled city, with control over a territory of 800 square kilometres and the ability to raise an army of 8,000 citizen-soldiers. After three centuries of endless wars against other Italian tribes (Volscians, Samites, Etruscans) and wars of conquest beyond Italy, by the year 218 BC, when the Carthaginian general Hannibal invaded Italy, Rome had a population of 400,000 adult male citizens, with another 600,000 in Roman colonies and among Italian allies.10 At Augustus’s accession two centuries later, the population of Rome exceeded four million. The Romans devised a wonderfully effective strategy in extending their control over all Italy and beyond:Â€ first, they planted colonies of Roman citizens, often former soldiers, in remote outposts, and secondly, they granted Roman citizenship (first with partial and then with complete citizens’ rights) to those they conquered in battle. During the lifetime of Julius Caesar, no more than 15 per cent of Roman citizens lived in Rome. Caesar spent ten years commanding a victorious

Republic and empire

11

army in Gaul, and his decision to cross the Rubicon at the head of that army, violating Roman territory, was the single act that precipitated the demise of the Roman republic. The constitution of republican Rome is described by the historian Polybius as combining ‘elements of all three species’ of government, traditionally identified as monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, with political power ‘divided between these three elements of the state’. According to Polybius, neither the consuls nor the Senate nor the ‘whole mass of the people’ could exercise excessive or arbitrary power, even if they wished to do so, but competing forces coexist in a precarious balance: Whenever one of the three elements swells in importance, becomes overambitious and tends to encroach upon the others … the designs of any one can be blocked or impeded by the rest, with the result that none will unduly dominate the others or treat them with contempt. Thus the whole situation remains in equilibrium since any aggressive impulse is checked, and each estate is apprehensive from the outset of censure from the others.11

The account of the early republic in the first five books of Livy gives a much less idealized picture of a Rome torn apart by factional disputes. In one of many similar passages, Livy describes a Rome in which the Roman generals feared their own mutinous troops more than they feared the enemy. Devided they are, and of one citie become twaine:Â€each part have their Â�severall Magistrats and lawes by themselves. At the first, how ever they were wont to be at ods, and to fall out at the mustering of souldiours, yet in warre they would hold together, and obey their captaines … But now, the former use & custome of disobeying Magistrates within the cittie, is taken up by the Romane Â�souldiours in the verie campe.

During one battle, the soldiers of their own accord abandoned the field, ‘left their Generall alone in the skirmish’, and handed victory to the enemy. In other passages, Livy comments on how each of the contending factions seeks to dominate, bitterly resenting its rivals in the struggle for power: So ticklish and dangerous a thing it is to keepe a meane in maintenance of libertie:Â€whiles under a colour of wishing and desiring equalitie, every man advanceth and lifteth up himselfe so, as that he thrusteth and beareth down another … and so the wrong that we put off and shove from our selves, we impose upon others. As if there were no remedy, but that we must either doe, or suffer injurie.12

Discontent among the plebeians at being excluded from public office led to the establishment of the office of Tribune, elected by and representing

12


the interests of plebeians. The mutual animosity of patricians and plebeians is shown clearly throughout Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, in the scorn of Coriolanus for ‘the rabble’ (echoing a number of complaints by patricians in Livy, he predicts that any concession to the plebeians ‘will in time/Win upon power, and throw forth greater themes /For insurrection’s arguing’) and the hatred of the mutinous citizens and the Tribunes Brutus and Sicinius for the victorious general Coriolanus. Modern scholars often characterize this ‘conflict of the orders’ in the early republic as a struggle for political office between wealthy plebeians and patricians, but both Livy and Shakespeare clearly present it as a clash between rich and poor, brought on by food shortages, ‘hunger for bread’. f i r s t c i t i z e n. We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us … The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance.13

The tumultuous careers of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, who met violent deaths in the years 133 and 121 BC, were the result of attempts at social reform bitterly resented by the wealthy and privileged. The two brothers, from a distinguished patrician family, held the office of Tribune and championed the cause of the poor against the rich. Tiberius Gracchus proposed an ‘agrarian law’, limiting the amount of land that any one Roman could hold and in effect redistributing public land from the rich to the rural poor, breaking up large estates manned largely by slaves. His proposal was strongly opposed by wealthy, conservative senators, who also objected to the means by which he tried to force through his reforms (when another tribune, acting in the interest of Tiberius’s enemies, attempted to veto the proposed agrarian law, Tiberius deposed him and replaced him with one of his supporters). Tiberius was murdered by a mob led by senators, who burst into a public assembly in pursuit of their prey, an act of violence described by historians as unprecedented in violating a public space and settling a political dispute by ‘the rule of force’.14 Gaius Gracchus, elected Tribune nine years after his brother’s death, proposed widespread social reforms, including the extension of Roman citizenship to Italians, monthly rations of grain at a fixed low price for the urban poor, and changes to the legal system, against the interest of the senatorial class. One Roman historian says of him, disapprovingly, ‘he left nothing undisturbed, nothing untouched, nothing unmolested’. With his opponents and supporters both resorting to arms, he was hunted down by troops led by the consul Opimius, who then put to death several thousands of Gaius Gracchus’s followers.15

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Historians are generally agreed that the fate of the Gracchi marked a significant turning point in the history of the Roman republic, but differ in apportioning blame. Sallust, a republican, is sympathetic to the Gracchi as ‘the first, that endeavoured to restore the people to liberty, and to call the offences of some few into question’, though he adds that ‘they were too violent in their desires of prevailing’. Appian is critical of the excesses of both sides, but blames the Gracchi for having ‘set in train’ destructive ‘civil unrest’.16 The Elizabethan William Fulbecke, on the other hand, condemns the Gracchi unreservedly as possessed by a ‘fury and rage of mind’ that led them ‘to raise tumults, to license swords, and to revive discord’. Fulbecke’s title clearly indicates his ideological agenda:Â€An Historicall Collection of the Continuall Factions, Tumults, and Massacres of the Romans and Italians during the space of one hundred and twentie yeares next before the peaceable empire of Augustus Caesar. This is the ‘Tudor myth’ school of history, written to demonstrate ‘the mischiefes of discord and civill discention’ and to praise, by contrast, the ‘sweete quiet and serenitie of this flourishing estate, in which England now standeth’. To Fulbecke, the overthrow of Tarquin was a disaster, by which ‘the Romaunes changed gold for brasse, and loathing one king suffered manie tyrants … curing a festred sore with a poisoned plaister’. The two Bruti, according to Fulbecke, were ‘both fatall to the estate of the Roman Common-weale:Â€ for the former of them did expell the last king of the Romanes, and the later did murder their first Emperour’.17 Where most historical accounts of the Roman republic, following Livy, saw the conflicts between patricians and plebeians as destructive, signs of a fundamental instability in the state, Machiavelli argued that these conflicts were beneficial. Indeed, such discord is what made the Roman republic ‘both free and powerful’: To me those that condemn the quarrels between the nobles and the plebs, seem to be caviling at the very things that were the primary cause of Rome’s retaining her freedom … Nor do they realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the populace and that of the upper class and that all legislation favourable to liberty is brought about by the clash between them.

In the Tribunes, the Roman constitution provided a way in which ‘the ambitions of the populace may find an outlet’, and, even more Â�significantly, these officials ‘served as the guardians of Roman liberties’, particularly in protecting ordinary citizens from arbitrary imprisonment.18 Like Sallust, Machiavelli felt that the Gracchi, whose ‘intention’ was ‘more praiseworthy than their prudence’, went too far by attacking

14


property in the proposed agrarian law. As Machiavelli comments in The Prince as well as the Discourses, ‘men set greater store on property than on honours’ and will defend their possessions as fiercely as they would their lives under threat.19 According to Machiavelli, one cause of the dissolution of the Roman republic and its replacement by ‘a servile state’ was ‘the prolongation of military commands’, allowing victorious generals to have large numbers of troops at their disposal for an extended period. In the early republic, the practice was for commanders of armies in a particular area, like consuls, to be appointed for one-year terms. As Roman power increased beyond the confines of Italy, proconsuls began to be appointed over extended periods in places like Spain and Asia Minor. When a citizen had been for long in command of an army, he won the army over and made it his partisan; so that it came in time to forget the senate and to recognize its commander alone as its head.

In the destructive civil war between Marius and Sulla, one backed by the plebeians and one by the nobility, both men ‘were able to find troops to support them in actions contrary to the public good’.20 Caesar and Pompey, successful generals and ambitious men, each commanded an army loyal to them over long periods:Â€Pompey in a series of triumphant campaigns for five years in Asia and before that in Spain, Caesar for ten years in Gaul. In 60 BC, the two men patched up an uneasy alliance with Crassus, the richest man in Rome, to share power. In 49 BC, after Caesar, against all precedent, led his troops onto Roman territory, the Roman republic was to all intents and purposes dead. Pompey, without troops at his disposal, had to flee Italy and raise an army among Rome’s allies and dependent principalities, and his defeat at Pharsalus and his squalid death afterwards were inevitable. In erecting a new government after the defeat and death of his former ally Mark Antony, Octavius Caesar maintained many of the forms of the republic, while stripping them of any substance. He abolished the office of tribune and awarded himself tribunician powers. Consuls continued to be elected annually, but the office became honorific:Â€ he himself was elected consul for nine successive years early in his forty-year reign. The power inherent in the office of censor (supervision of morals and responsibility for carrying out a census) was invested in the emperor. The position of proconsul or propraetor, in charge of distant Roman colonies, continued as in the late republic to provide opportunities to amass great wealth, but the emperor ‘took direct charge of the greater military provinces and

Republic and empire

15

exercised indirect control over the rest’.21 Octavius rejected the titles of king or perpetual dictator (awarded to Julius Caesar), but at first was called princeps and later emperor (imperator), taking the name Augustus. His own account claims that he rejected arbitrary power: In my sixth and seventh consulships, after I had extinguished civil wars, and at a time when with universal consent I was in complete control of events, I transferred the republic from my power to the dominion of the senate and people of Rome. For this service of mine I was named Augustus by decree of the Senate … After this time I excelled all in influence, although I possessed no more official power than others who were my colleagues in the several magistracies.22

Constitutional pretences meant much less than the fact, widely recognized in his own day and later, that the rule of Augustus brought peace and stability to Rome. As Tacitus puts it, succinctly (in Richard Grenewey’s Elizabethan translation), ‘Augustus … entitling himselfe by the name of Prince, brought under his obedience the whole Romane state, wearied and weakened with civill disorders’. Tacitus is coolly sceptical about Augustus’s constitutional reforms, and emphasizes the political skills of the young aspirant to power, in appealing to the self-interest of different groups in order to gain and retain control over the state ‘without contradiction of any’: After he had wound into the favour of the soldier by giftes; of the people by provision of sustenance; and of all in generall with the sweetenes of ease and repose; by little and little taking upon him, he drew to himselfe the affaires of Senate; the duties of magistrates and lawes, without contradiction of any:Â€the stowtest by war or proscriptions alreadie spent, and the rest of the nobilitie, by how much the more serviceable, by so much the more bettered in wealth, and advanced in honors:Â€seeing their preferment to growe by newe government, did rather choose the present estate with securitie, than strive to recover their olde with danger.23

Augustus remained in power for over forty years, long enough, as Tacitus points out, that few people were left alive who ‘had seene the ancient formes of government of the free Common-wealth’ (p. 2). During Augustus’s long reign, more territory was brought under Roman control than at any other period, fulfilling the prophecy in the Aeneid: Remember thou, O Roman, to rule the nations with thy swayÂ€– these shall be thy artsÂ€– to crown peace with law, to spare the humble and to tame in war the proud. [Tu regere imperios populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.]

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Augustus’s own account of his achievements states that he has brought the world under the empire of the Roman people.24 The emperor was responsible for transforming the city of Rome physically with a massive programme of public building. In Suetonius’s often quoted phrase, he found Rome brick and left it marble. Over a period of forty years, he built a succession of magnificent temples, theatres, and other edifices in which ‘the majesty of the empire was expressed through the dignity of its public buildings’, and also oversaw such practical tasks as building roads and providing an adequate water supply and sewers. The buildings of Augustan Rome were meant to last, as a ‘memorial to future ages’:Â€‘no public space was without some impressive monument to Augustus’s power, wealth, and munificence’.25 Augustus’s long reign created problems of succession. His nephew and son-in-law Marcellus, groomed to become emperor, died young, and so did two of Augustus’s grandsons. Tiberius, the emperor’s stepson and a successful general, was for a while the favoured candidate for the succession, but, after a quarrel with Augustus (possibly as a result of being compelled by the emperor to divorce his wife and marry Augustus’s daughter Julia, whom he loathed), he went into voluntary exile for several years, withdrawing from all political responsibilities. After the death of Augustus’s grandson Gaius Caesar, Tiberius was recognized as heir, and, according to Tacitus, ‘unto him all men crowched and fawned; being received the adopted sonne of Augustus’. When Augustus died, Tiberius’s first action was to give orders for the murder of his cousin Agrippa Postumus, as a possible rival.26 Under Tiberius and his successors, the empire was ruled despotically by emperors whose hold on power grew increasingly insecure. In the later part of Tiberius’s reign he abandoned Rome for the island of Capri, where, according to Suetonius: Being retired againe into the said Isle, he cast aside all care verily of Common weale … He chaunged no militarie Tribunes nor Captaines:Â€no nor any presidents of Provinces … He neglected Armenia and suffered it to bee overrunne and possessed by the Parthians; Maesia to be wasted and spoyled by the Dakes and Sarmatians, as also Gaule by the Germans, to the great shame and no lesse danger of the whole Empire. To proceed, having gotten the libertie of this secret place, and being as one would say remooved from the eyes of people:Â€at length hee poured forth and shewed at once all those vices which with much a doo for a long time he had looked and dissimuled.27

Tiberius and his three successors, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, were all assassinated, either by rebellious soldiers or by members of their own family. It soon became evident that ‘a Prince might bee made elsewhere

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17

than in Rome’.28 In little over a year, four emperors were proclaimed by army units stationed in Spain, Germany, the Danube, and Egypt, and rival armies fought in the name of rival Roman emperors. Vespasian, who was succeeded by his son Titus in AD 79, was the first emperor since Augustus to die of natural causes. Tac i t us a n d S a l lus t After the accession of James I in 1603, Tacitus became the most fashionable of the Roman historians and the principal source of English plays on Roman history. Jonson, who consulted his authors in the original Latin, disdaining translations, makes Tacitus’s Annales his main source for Sejanus (1605), and Sallust’s The Conspiracy of Catiline, along with several orations by Cicero, his source for Catiline (1611). Following the example of Jonson in Sejanus, several Jacobean and Caroline plays with a Roman setting treat the empire rather than the republic, and the view of the empire in each of these plays is hostile. Plays such as Fletcher’s Tragedy of Valentinian (1614), Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), Thomas May’s The Tragedy of Julia Agrippina, Empress of Rome (first performance, 1628), and the anonymous Tragedie of Claudius Tiberius Nero, Romes greatest Tyrant (1607) and Tragedy of Nero (c.1623), all taking their materials from Tacitus, supplemented by Suetonius, present the successors of Augustus as tyrants, ruled by the basest motives.29 The view of the early Roman empire in these plays is akin to that expressed by Gibbon a century later: The dark unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid inhuman Domitian, are condemned to everlasting infamy. During fourscore years … Rome groaned beneath an unremitting tyranny, which exterminated the ancient families of the republic, and was fatal to almost every virtue, and every talent, that arose in that unhappy period.30

Throughout Europe, editions and translations of Tacitus proliferated during the seventeenth century, as well as commentaries on his writings. According to Peter Burke, no fewer than eighty-seven commentaries on Tacitus, with titles such as Axiomatia Politica and La Morale de Tacite, were published in the seventeenth century. As the popularity of Livy, ‘the master of eloquence’, declined, the popularity of Tacitus, ‘the master of prudence’, increased.31 Montaigne was one of many writers who saw the lessons of Tacitus as particularly appropriate for times like their own, an age of absolute monarchies:Â€‘He is most useful for a troubled, sick age like our own; you would often say that it is us he is describing and us he is criticizing.’32

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To some extent, Tacitus was seen as a guide to survival in dark times, with his pragmatic emphasis on the ‘hidden causes’ of the actions of princes and intriguers; as a moralist, he praises constancy, stoic endurance. There is little heroism in Tacitus’s Annals and Histories, especially as compared to the ‘plenteous examples of devout zeale … of wisdom … justice, valour, and all vertues’ to be found in Livy.33 Rather than Cincinnatus summoned from his plough, the indomitable Camillus recalled from exile to save Rome, Mutius Scaevola thrusting his right hand into a fire, or Horatius at the bridge holding off the Etruscan army single-handed, Tacitus presents the virtuous Germanicus, a successful and popular general and grandson of Augustus, murdered by his enemy Piso at the instigation of Tiberius or the philosopher Seneca, tutor and adviser to Nero, accepting unperturbed the emperor’s command that he commit suicide. The key figure in the rise of Renaissance Tacitism was the great Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, whose edition of Tacitus was published in 1574 and his Stoic dialogue De Constantia in 1584. Like Montaigne, Lipsius saw the ‘unpleasant and sorrowfull Accidents’ of Tacitean history as providing close parallels to the uncertainties of life in the ‘Courts of Princes’ in his own day: Let every one in him consider the Courts of Princes, their Private Lives, Counsels, Commands, Actions, and from the apparent Similitude that is betwixt those times and ours, let them expect the like Events. [You] shall find under Tyranny, Flattery and Informers, Evils too well known in our times, nothing simple and sincere, and no true Fidelity even amongst Friends.34

Lipsius’s advice in De Constantia was that in times of distress, the only remedy is contemplative withdrawal, seeking a constancy of mind which will enable us to ‘bee at rest in troubles, and to have peace even in the midst of warre’Â€– the moral Lovelace draws in ‘The Grasse-hopper’ (1649), in suggesting how to survive a ‘cold Time and frozen Fate’: Thus richer then untempted Kings are we, â•… That asking nothing, nothing need: Though Lord of all what Seas embrace; yet he â•… That wants himselfe, is poore indeed.35

In England, the interest in Tacitus was particularly associated with the circle of the Earl of Essex. Sir Henry Savile, the translator of Tacitus’s Histories in 1591, was a close friend and client of Essex for at least twenty years, praised by Essex as ‘most learned, & truelie honest’, and imprisoned in 1601 at the time of Essex’s attempted coup d’ état. Jonson claimed in the Conversations with Drummond that Essex, under a pseudonym, wrote the

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19

preface to Savile’s translation.36 That preface not only praises the utility of history (‘there is no learning so proper for the direction of the life of man as Historie’) but draws explicit political morals from Tacitus as showing ‘all the miseries of a torne and declining state’: The Empire usurped; the Princes murthered; the people wavering; the souldiers tumultuous; nothing unlawfull to him that hath power, and nothing so unsafe as to bee securely innocent. In Galba thou maiest learne, that a good Prince governed by evill ministers is as dangerous as if hee were evill himself. By Otho, that the fortune of a rash man … rises at an instant, and falles in a moment. By Vitellius, that he that hath no vertue can never be happy:Â€for by his owne basenesse hee will loose all, which eyther fortune, or other mens labours have cast upon him.37

The lessons Essex and his circle found in Tacitus differed Â�considerably from the advocacy of a prudent withdrawal from worldly conflict in Lipsius’s De Constantia (Two Bookes of Constancie). Essex favoured an active, aggressive foreign policy in support of the Protestant cause and, though he inveighed against ‘evill ministers’, sought power within the highly competitive world of the court.38 Savile’s translation begins with The Ende of Nero and the Beginning of Galba, a historical narrative in a Tacitean style by Savile covering a period of Roman history not treated in Tacitus’s Histories or Annals. This narrative of seventeen pages is an attempt by an English author in the 1590s to write Tacitean ‘politic history’, emphasizing ‘the reasons and causes of things, not onely the bare events, which are most commonly governed by fortune’.39 Savile’s account of the unsuccessful rebellion of Vindex against NeroÂ€– an emperor under whom ‘to doe ill was not alwaies safe, alwaies unsafe to do well’Â€– is striking in its wholly sympathetic treatment of the rebel as actuated by the noblest of motives: This ende had Julius Vindex, a man in the course of this action more vertuous then fortunate, who having no armie provided, no legion, no souldier in charge, whiles others more able lookt on, first entred the lists, chalenging a Prince upholden with thirty legions, rooted in the Empire by fower descents of ancestours, and fourteene yeares continuance of raigne, not upon private dispaire to set in combustion the state, not to revenge disgrace or dishonour, not to establish his owne soveraignty, things which have mooved most men to attempt; but to redeeme his cuntry from tyranny and bondage.40

Savile’s vocabulary here is essentially republican. Vindex’s motives, as presented here, are not, as with most men, personal aggrandisement or revenge, but a disinterested, patriotic desire to save his country from the evils of ‘tyranny and bondage’.

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There are two traditions in the interpretation of Tacitus, ‘red’ and ‘black’ Tacitism. Black Tacitism is ‘disguised Machiavellianism’:Â€ a pervasive cynicism about the way people behave, an emphasis on disguise, dissimulation, and self-interest, and on arcana imperii, secrets of state. Conspicuous virtue, Tacitus remarks on several occasions, is a sure path to destruction.41 Sir John Holles in 1610 explicitly applies a mordant comment he attributes to Tacitus (though it is actually by Savile in The Ende of Nero) in describing the jockeying for power in the court of James I:Â€‘Too late I find … Tacitus his opinion confirmed, that safetie dwelleth not in doing well or ill, but in doing nothing.’ Tacitus’s vivid account of the behaviour of ‘the common people’ at the time of the sacking of Rome is characteristic of ‘black Tacitism’, though in Savile’s translation the tone wavers between cynicism and moral disapproval: The people stoode by and looked on as they fought, and as in a pastime or game clapped their handes, and encouraged sometime the one, and sometime the other; and when either side turned their backes, and hidde themselves in houses or shoppes, they cried to have them pluckt out and killed; and so attained themselves the greatest part of the pray; for whiles the souldiers minded nothing but slaughter and bloudshed, the spoils fell to the common peoples share.42

‘Red Tacitism’, implicit or explicit republicanism, can be found at the very outset of the Histories in the assertion that Rome’s decline began with the moment when the republic was subjected to the rule of one man, and ‘servility’, the ‘lust to flatter the Prince’, replaced ‘libertie of speech’. For the ancient story of the people of Rome … manie excellent men have delivered, with no lesse eloquence then libertie of speech:Â€but when after the battle of Actium, the whole soverainetie, as it was meete for the peace of the state, was conferred upon one, those worthy wits were no more to be found, as withall the truth of the story was diversely weakened:Â€partly because having no more part in the state they were ignorant of publike affaires, and partly beeing led away with a lust to flatter the Princes.43

Many passages in Tacitus attack the ‘servility’ of those who flatter each claimant to power, abasing themselves in pursuit of self-interest, ‘upon private respectes, without care of the common’. After Otho seizes power: The commons after their flattering fashion receyved the speech with cryes and acclamations without either measure or trueth, contending to passe one another in applause and wishes, as it had been Caesar the Dictator, or the Emperor Augustus; neither for feare nor for love, but onely upon a delight in servility … every man provoked by some private cause, no man regarding the publike dishonour.

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In Agricola, Tacitus comments on events during his own lifetime, in the reign of Domitian: As our ancestours attained and sawe the highest pitch and perfection of liberty, so we of servility:Â€being deprived by intelligencers and spies of the commerce of hearing and speaking togither:Â€yea memory also, as well as toung we had lost, had it lyen in our power aswell to forget as it did to keepe silence.44

In Book II, digressing from ‘the order of the story’, Tacitus presents a capsule history of the Roman republic and empire that is clearly republican in its assumptions. In the infant republic, virtue was possible in a condition of ‘equality’ among Romans, but the growth of Rome’s ‘dominions’ unleashed a ravenous desire to dominate others, turn citizens into slaves. The ‘greatenesse of the Empire’ brought about its corruption with the growth of luxury: That ancient desire of dominion and rule engraffed now long agoe in mens hartes, grewe up and shotte out with the greatenesse of the Empire. For whilest our dominions were strayt, an equality was easily maintained:Â€but after we had subdued the world, destroied all cities, or kings which stoode in our light, or might worke our annoiance; whenas we had leisure to seeke after wealth voide of perill, there arose first hoat contentions between the nobility and commons:Â€sometimes factious Tribunes carried it away; sometimes the Consuls held a hard hand & prevailed.

Ever the realist, Tacitus does not claim that self-aggrandisement and the lust for power over others were absent from the republic, but that these appetites, intrinsic to ‘mens hartes’, were held in check by the Â�relatively straitened conditions of Rome’s early history. Like Sallust a generation earlier, he saw the civil wars between Marius and Sulla as a major turning point, after which the rise of ‘an absolute governement’ became inevitable: Anone after Caius Marius one of the meanest of the comminalty, and Lucius Sulla the cruellest of all the nobility, by force of armes overthrowing the free estate, induced an absolute governement. After when Cneius Pompeius Â�succeeded, somewhat secreter, but nothing better:Â€and after that time never was any other question debated, but who should bee soveraigne Prince of the state. (Fower Bookes, II.15, pp. 75–6)

Sallust’s two surviving narratives, The Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jugurthine War, were written during the last days of the Roman republic, between the death of Julius Caesar and the accession of Augustus. In Catiline, he writes about events of his own day and in The Jugurthine War, events a generation earlier. Sallust’s Latin style, like that of Tacitus,

22


is abrupt, pointed, sometimes obscure in its conciseness, and, in both works, like Tacitus, he draws a sharp distinction between the early republic, as yet uncorrupted, and a degenerate modernity. Such a decline from a primal virtue, according to Sallust in Heywood’s translation, began ‘not many yeares sithence, from the disease of warre, and enjoyment of those vanities (wealth and idlenesse) which all mortall men do most seeke after’. For before the razing of Carthage, the Senate and Roman people ruled the state with indifferencie, in quiet and mutuall modesty:Â€contentions of Superiority and greatnesse were not heard of amongst fellow-Cittizens:Â€ forrayne fears retained the citty within bounds of mediocrity.45

Even more than Tacitus, Sallust idealizes the early republic. In the period of the growth of Rome’s power and influence, the Romans were ‘provident in peace, and valorous in Warre’, encouraging in their citizens virtues which were particularly appropriate to an expanding, warlike state with a citizen army. As Rome ‘increased and prospered’, according to introductory sections of Catiline, ‘so infinite a desire of glory, had possessed the minds of al sorts’: To such courages, no labor was unwelcome, no place inaccessable … Valor was resolute, and at all times victorious. Their emulation was glorious:Â€ Every mans strife was, who should first attack the enemy; give the Scalado:Â€ every one thrust forward, to effect such and such a peece of service, in the eye of his Generall:Â€These exploits they accounted Riches, Reputation, and true Nobility. (Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 3, pp. 61–2)

These are recognizably the values of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, confident that ‘valour is the chiefest virtue’, encouraging his fellow soldiers by ‘his rare example’ before the walls of Corioli and bringing about a victory against great odds. His mother Volumnia, sharing these values, can say joyfully, ‘O, he is wounded, I thank the gods for it’. Emulation in such a society is not, as in the closed, febrile world of a court, in pursuit of posiÂ� tion or material gain, but in displays of masculine prowess, striving for honour and glory.46 In constructing his myth of primitive virtue and subsequent decline, Sallust makes an assertion later taken up by republican theorists in the Renaissance:Â€that the growth of Roman power and greatness was a direct consequence of Roman liberty. Under a free state, ‘concord and unity’ were possible, as among the citizens ‘their mutual contentions were with one another, in quest of Vertue’. In a form of government where a single person holds unlimited power, accountable to no one, injustice rules.

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For absolute Princes are alwaies more jealous of the good, then of the badde, because another mans Vertue (as they take it) is a diminution of their respectivenesse, and therefore dangerous.47

Sallust’s claim, that in an extraordinarily short time ‘the Citty, having obtained this form of Liberty in Government, increased and prospered’ after the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud and the establishment of the republic, is echoed by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy: But most marvellous of all is it to observe the greatness which Rome attained after freeing itself from its kings. The reason is easy to understand; for it is not the well-being of individuals that makes cities great, but the well-being of the community; and it is beyond question that it is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly … The opposite happens where there is a prince; for what he does in his own interests usually harms the city, and what is done in the interests of the city harms him.48

English republicans in the seventeenth century, like Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, and Milton (who said ‘I prefer Sallust to any other Latin historians whatsoever’) generally shared this view:Â€according to Milton, ‘the Romans had a most flourishing and glorious commonwealth after they had banished their kings’.49 The diseases which, Sallust argues, infected a once healthy Roman republic were greed and ambition, ‘the immoderate scraping of money’ and ‘the ambitious desire of superiority’. In Heywood’s translation, which imitates Sallust’s pointed, antithetical Latin style, the moral standards of judgement are overt: After that the Rich man was reputed for honorable, and that Worship, Superiority, and Attendance, depended upon wealth, then began vertue to play bankrupt; Poverty to be disgracefull, and free Language to be accounted malicious frowardnesse. Whereby it came to passe, that youth by superfluity, grew Luxurious, proud, and yet penurious; given to Extortion, yet prodigall:Â€Of their owne estates unthrifty, of another mans extreame covetous; of modesty and civill behaviour, exceedingly neglective:Â€ in divine and humane offices, indifferent:Â€in discretion and moderation, carelesse. (Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 3, pp. 64–6)

Like Tacitus, Sallust sees the civil wars of Marius and Sulla as precipitating this decline, but where Tacitus treats the two as equally culpable, Sallust lays most of the blame on Sulla: For hee … suffered his followers to spoile, to rob … the victors sword knew no meane, no modesty:Â€ abhominable and cruell, were the executions which they inflicted upon their fellow Citizens. (p. 65)

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In The Jugurthine War, the treatment of Marius is generally Â�sympathetic, where with Sulla’s actions in the civil wars Sallust professes to be ‘Â�uncertaine whether it wil more shame or grieve me to repeat them’. Marius is presented as ambitious, ‘greedy of glory’, possessed by ‘an immeasurable desire of attaining the Consulship’, but also as ‘Industrious, honest, a great souldier, high minded’, and confident in his own abilities. Like Shakespeare’s Othello and Coriolanus, Marius is characterized as a man whose experience has been almost entirely military, ‘in the tented field’:Â€‘Rude am I in my speech /And little blest with the soft phrase of peace’.50 In his oration after his election as consul (invented by Sallust), Marius’s stance is that of a man of action, whose fitness for office is demonstrated by ‘a body mangled with scarres and woundes’. My speeches are not well featured, I want Eloquence, but I reguard it not:Â€my vertue is sufficient to shew it selfe … To assaile the Enemy, to chase their Garisons, to bee affrighted onely with infamy … and finally with equall patience to endure Heate, Cold, Hunger, thirst and travayle; herein am I expert. (Warre of Jugurth, ch. 28, p. 212)

As a ‘new man’, of relatively humble origins, Marius in this oration before an assembly of the people presents himself to his plebeian audience as a man like them, strongly attacking the ‘presumptuous and proud arrogancie’ of those who boast of ‘the glorie of their forefathers’, ‘their titles of Ancient Nobility’. Modern scholars disagree as to what extent two clearly defined political factions in the later Republic, nobilitas and plebs, optimates and populares, can be distinguished.51 However, there is no doubt that Sallust saw these two groups as fundamentally opposed, or that he tended to favour the plebeians and ‘new men’ over the entrenched nobility. Not only Marius’s speech but an extended oration by the tribune Memmius in The Jugurthine War severely criticizes ‘the Pride of a few’, an oligarchy behaving like tyrants:Â€ ‘Slaves bought with money, can hardly brook the imperious commands of proud maysters, and can you (Roman citizens) borne in freedome, tollerate so vile a servitude with patience?’52 For all his occasional partisanship, Sallust tends to treat his characters with a historian’s detachment, balancing positive and negative qualities, strengths and weaknesses. Toward the end of Catiline, Sallust includes two extended speeches by Julius Caesar and Marcus Cato before the Senate, arguing opposed positions, followed by a carefully balanced comparative assessment of the two as men of outstanding abilities: Caesar affected the Sir-name of Great, by Largesse and Bountie; Cato by Integritie of life. Caesar became famous for his curtesie and gentlenesse; Cato for

Livy:Â€history and myth

25

his sterne carriage and severity … The one profest refuge to the oppressed:Â€the other, inexorable to offenders. The one was praised for affability:Â€the other for gravity.

Though both in the oration and in the summarizing comparison, Cato’s stern principles, attacking luxury, praising ‘the daies of our Ancestors’Â€– ‘We admire Riches, and embrace Sloth:Â€ betweene Virtue and Vice we put no difference’Â€– are closely akin to Sallust’s own views as expressed in these two works, he nevertheless is careful to give Caesar equally strong arguments in favour of the rule of law.53 Catiline, on the other hand, is presented as wholly vicious and unprincipled, promising his fellow conspirators the ‘inestimable spoiles’ of ‘Magistracies, Priesthoods, Pillage’, and all those material benefits which ‘the Liberty of war is accustomed to share unto the pleasure of the victor’ (Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 7, p. 75). In Marius’s oration in The Jugurthine War, as with Cato in Catiline, Sallust attributes to his speaker views that resemble his own:Â€true nobility is the product of character, not birth. It is true, we are all sprung from one and the same Universall Nature, yet the most valiant ought to be reputed the most generous and noble … But (proud men) they are farre deceived:Â€for albeit their fathers gave them wealth, left them Crestes, and their undying memories, yet vertue, which may neither be given or taken, they were unable to bequeath unto them.54

This is not mere factionalism, but the statement of a principle, Â�essentially republican, which is central to The Jugurthine War and Catiline. Virtue cannot be inherited, but must be demonstrated in action. Cicero, another ‘new man’ raised to the consulship and Catiline’s most persistent adversary, expressed similar views, seeing virtus in terms of ingenium, inborn talent, the uses one makes of native abilities. Such a view of virtue as an ‘immortall garland … to be run for, not without dust or heat’, uncoupling virtus from its initial association with military prowess, finds Â�frequent expression among the civic humanists of the Renaissance, and in the writings of Milton and other seventeenth-century republicans: The other part of our freedom consists in the civil rights and advancements of every person according to his merit:Â€the enjoyment of those never more certain, and the access to these never more open, than in a free Commonwealth.55

L i v y:Â€h i s t or y a n d m y t h During the Renaissance, the principal authority for the history of the Roman republic was Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. Over a period of forty years

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in the reign of Augustus, Livy (who, unlike Sallust and Tacitus, held no public offices) devoted himself to a detailed narrative of the history of Rome from the archaic period to his own day, in 147 books of which 35 are extant. Of the books that have survived, Books 1–5 treat the foundation of Rome and its early history, for which very few records exist. Books 6–10 concern the expansion of Roman power in Italy. Books 21–30 give a detailed account of the Second Punic War against Rome’s powerful rival Carthage. The extant books go no further than 167 BC, so we have no way of knowing how Livy might have treated the last days of the republic, except for brief summaries of the missing books by Florus (included in Philemon Holland’s 1600 translation). In the preface to Book 6, Livy comments on the relative scarcity of sources for the early books. Because of the ‘exceeding antiquitie’ of the material presented in Books 1–5, ‘there were very few writings and monuments’ that might provide reliable, ‘true remembrancers of deeds past’.56 Modern classical scholars have often been sternly disapproving of these early books as fiction rather than hard fact; but Livy openly asserts that any treatment of ‘the first foundation of the citie’ must be considered myth, stories that have been told about the early RomansÂ€– not what can be proved, but what is ‘generally held’. His narrative is full of phrases such as ‘as they say’; ‘as men say’.57 The widely held view of Livy and other historians of antiquity that ‘the limitations of their historical thinking made them gullible, vulnerable to the plausible invention’Â€– Macaulay said of Livy, ‘no historian with whom we are acquainted has shown so complete an indifference to truth’Â€ – is based on false premises. As Tim Cornell has said, ‘the Roman historical tradition’ as represented in Livy ‘can be defined as what successive generations of Roman citizens believed about their own past’Â€– not ‘an authenticated official record or an objective critical reconstruction’, but ‘an ideological construct’.58 Livy’s great popularity in the Renaissance was partly due to his reputation as a moralist: For then is it that is so good and profitable in an historie, when a man may see and behold as in a conspicuous monument and lightsome memoriall, the lively examples of all sorts, set up in open view for his instruction, whereout he may chuse for himselfe and his countrey what to follow, as also learne, how to eschew a foule enterprise, and avoid a shamefull end. (Book 1, p. 2)

In much of Ab Urbe Condita, especially in the first ten books, Livy presents patterns of conduct, good and bad, for his readers to follow. The view of history as essentially didactic was widely held during the


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Renaissance. Sir Thomas North’s preface to his translation of Plutarch, to cite one of many instances, sees reflection on ‘examples past’ as a way of understanding the present: For it is a certaine rule and instruction, which by examples past, teacheth us to judge of things present, and to foresee things to come:Â€so as we may know what to like of, and what to follow, what to mislike, and what to eschue.59

Examples of heroic conduct and its opposite abound in Livy’s first ten books. The courageous individual deeds of Horatius Cocles and of Mutius Scaevola in Book II, the first of which is explicitly characterized as ‘a brave adventure for all posteritie another day to talke of, rather than to beleeve’, are contrasted with the instinct of self-preservation, the ‘feare’ ruling most men in times of crisis. Horatius confronts his fellow soldiers as they are running away, and ‘for verie shame’ two of them stand by him as he defies the superior forces of the Etruscan enemy. Holding the entrance to the bridge single-handed, he defies his enemies as a champion of Roman freedomÂ€– not simply a patriot, but a republican. Then casting all about in menacing manner his fierie and terrible eies, towards the captains and principals of the Tuskanes, one while he challenged them one by one to single fight:Â€ otherwhiles he rated them all in generall, calling them the hirelings and slaves of proud kings and tyrants; who forgetting and making no reckoning of their owne freedome, were come to oppugne and impeach the libertie of others. (Book 2, p. 50)

Mutius, in defending the new Roman republic, under siege by an Etruscan army under King Porsena, is even more overtly presented as an embodiment of the highest Roman values. He identifies himself to the King he has tried unsuccessfully to kill as a Roman, and an exemplification of Roman virtus, in his selfless courage and his stoical willingness to suffer pain and even death: I am (quoth he) a cittizen of Rome, and Caius Mutius is my name, a professed enemie, I confesse, and an enemie would I have slaine; as readie and willing am I to die my selfe, as I was to kill another. For, both to doe, and to suffer valiantly, is the part of a noble Romane.

The young hero demonstrates his undaunted courage by voluntarily thrusting his hand into the fire (thus earning the name of ‘Scaevola’, Â�left-handed). Again, the language he uses associates stoical endurance and the pursuit of honour, presented as quintessential Roman values:Â€‘Lo (quoth hee againe) how little they set by this carkasse, that aspire to great glorie and honour:Â€and with that, thrust his right hand into the hearth on fire.’60 King Porsena is so impressed by this display of valour that he

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magnanimously pardons Mutius and, for good measure, agrees to a peace treaty with Rome. Camillus, the principal figure in Books 5 and 6, is a more Â�complex Â�exemplum of Roman heroism. Marcus Furius Camillus may well be as much a legendary figure as Mutius or Horatius, though there is Â�independent historical evidence for the major events with which Livy associates this indomitable warrior, such as the victorious war with Veii and the sacking of Rome by the Gauls.61 The career of Camillus, as Livy portrays him, is similar in many respects to that of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. A divisive figure, who in factional disputes allies himself with the patricians against the plebeian Tribunes, Camillus, after winning a great victory against Veii, is exiled by his enemies. Beyond that, the two figures take very different courses.62 At the end of Book 5, Camillus is presented as the embodiment of the Roman virtue of pietas. Called back from exile after the Gauls had occupied Rome, he rallies his troops by calling upon them to ‘redeeme their countrie’, reminding them of the sacred ties of native home and family: Having in sight before their eies, the churches of their gods, their wives and children, and the soile whereon the citie stood (deformed now with miseries of warre) and all the things els which they ought by good reason to defend, recover, and be revenged for. (Book 5, pp. 205, 211)

After recapturing the half-burnt city of Rome from the Gauls, Camillus then, in an eloquent speech, argues against a proposal to abandon Rome and resettle in the prosperous, attractive city of Veii. Part of his appeal is patriotic, shaming his fellow Romans by reminding them of former victories and of the traditions handed down to them by their ancestors, ‘the ancient honour of war’. However, his primary appeal is religious:Â€Rome is a city sacred to the gods, ‘full of divine majestie’, hallowed by tradition, and to desert it, blinded by greed and self-interest, is to defy the gods (Book 5, p. 213). In Book 6, Camillus, called back again and again from retirement in times of crisis, is contrasted with the deeply flawed figure of Manlius. In some respects, Marcus Manlius Capitolinus has the traditional qualifications of heroism. His physical courage is unquestionable:Â€ he is introduced as ‘a right hardie & noble warriour’, a former consul widely admired ‘for his valour’ and ‘descended of great name and reputation’. Manlius first comes into prominence when, single-handed, he repels an attack by the Gauls on the Capitol and by his example encourages others, initially fearful, to drive the invaders back. This exploit earns him the


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name ‘Capitolinus’.63 However, flaws of character lead him to be deeply resentful of Camillus, feeling that any honours bestowed on others are a Â�derogation from his own unrivalled greatness. Who being a man of too loftie and hautie a minde, despised all other of the Nobilitie, and envied one above the rest, M. Furius, as singular, as well in regard of his honourable dignities, as his worthie parts and commendable virtues. He could not brooke and endure, that hee onely should ever be Lord Generall in the field:Â€ who now was exalted as high above others, that even those who were created with him in egall authoritie, he accounted not as his peeres and fellowes, but emploied as his ministers and serviteurs. Whereas (quoth he) if men could weigh aright, and duly consider every thing, M. Furius could never have delivered his countrie from the siege of the enemies, had not the Capitoll and castle cliffe been saved by mee afore … In the service performed by me, no earthly creature was fellow and partener with me. (Book 6, p. 223)

Like Coriolanus, similarly ‘hote and hastie, arrogant and insolent’, in his hurt pride at feeling ‘his gifts and qualities were not esteeemed sufficiently’, he seeks revenge on Rome, though not by armed invasion, but by assuming leadership of a rebellious political faction. ‘Solliciting and inveagling the Commons’ to gain their support, Manlius is ‘carried away with the vaine gale of the peoples opinion:Â€not guided by sage counsell and discretion:Â€and in one word, chusing rather to be of great name, than of good and honest report’ (Book 6, pp. 223–4). The story of the rise and fall of Manlius is a mixture of romantic myth, ascertainable fact, and the politics of Livy’s own day. The legend of Manlius’s great feat of physical strength and courage is pure fiction, but we know from other sources that there was a Marcus Manlius, a former consul, who was executed after an attempt to seize power. It is known that no later member of his family bore the name Marcus Manlius because of his unsavoury end.64 Livy describes his actions as ‘popular and plausible’ in ‘outward shew’ but arising from a ‘troublesome and tumultuous spirit’. At a time when ordinary Romans were struggling with debt, Manlius stages a public spectacle in which, surrounded by an admiring crowd, he pays off the debt of a former soldier, freeing him from imprisonment. In a number of speeches, he accuses the Senators of having in their possession ‘hidden treasures of the Gaules gold’. Modern scholars have suggested that Livy’s version of the story of Manlius is consciously or unconsciously modelled on later political conflicts, the rebellion of Catiline or the violent deaths of the Gracchi, radical reformers of the late republic.65 The early books of Ab Urbe Condita have as a recurrent theme the damaging effects of political and economic divisions in Rome, pitting the rich

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against the poor, a privileged class against those resentful of privilege. The story of Coriolanus in Book 2 is typical:Â€in Livy as in Shakespeare, the arrogance and truculence of the patrician Coriolanus, ‘an utter and capitall enemie to the Tribunes power and authoritie’, is set against the vindictiveness of the Tribunes and the crowd, ‘set upon mischeef … in their angrie mood against him’ (Book 2, pp. 66–7). Toward the conclusion of this episode, Livy presents the fate of Manlius in terms of tragedy:Â€the principal figure is not a villain, but a flawed hero. In his account of Manlius’s trial, he gives the accused man ‘a most glorious and eloquent Oration’ listing ‘his noble feats of armes’ and services to the state. In summarizing the rise and fall of Manlius, his ‘singular glorie’ and ‘ignominious death’, Livy characterizes him as one ‘who, but that he was borne in a free cittie, had been a right worthie and renowmed man’. In other circumstances, his story might have had a Â�different ending.66 The early stages of the war against Hannibal, as narrated in Books 21–3, present a series of disasters for Rome. No Roman general at this time is a match for Hannibal, whose ‘noble qualities and manly virtues’, as Livy lists them, closely resemble Roman ideals of conduct: Most forward he was and hardie to all hazards and dangerous adventures:Â€right provident and warie againe, at the verre point of perill and jeopardie. No travaile was able to wearie and tire his bodie:Â€no paines taking could daunt and breake his heart. He could away with heat and cold alike. (Book 21, p. 395)

The defeats at Lake Trasimene and Cannae are both shown to be directly attributable to moral failings on the part of the Roman commanders. Flaminius, the Roman general at Lake Trasimene, displays physical courage, but foolish rashness, as ‘in a great chafe and choler’ he rejects prudent advice to wait for reinforcements to arrive, but does ‘all in hast, hand over head, without discretion’ and falls into a trap set by Hannibal (Book 21, pp. 433–4). At Cannae, the consul Varro, inexperienced in war, boasts that he will ‘vanquish the enemie, the first day that I set eie upon him, yea and finish the war at once for ever’, and squabbles endlessly with his more ‘circumspect and warie’ colleague Paulus. Hannibal, aware of ‘the disagreement and jarring of the Consuls’, is able to win a decisive victory, in which virtually the entire Roman army is destroyed. Where Varro flees from the battlefield, Paulus dies a heroic death ‘among the heapes of mine owne slaine souldiers’, appropriate for a Roman (Book 22, pp. 455, 458).


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After the war has dragged on for nine years, the Romans finally find a leader who is Hannibal’s equal in the young Scipio, who is elected general of the army in Spain at the age of twenty-four, after the death of his father and uncle in battle. In Books 27–30, there are many suggestions that the tide has turned in Rome’s favour. In these books, Hannibal, who at one point foresees, with ‘a deepe sigh’, the destruction of Carthage, is given tragic dimensions, as a man ‘more to be wondred at in adversitie than in prosperitie’, resolute in facing difficulties: Warring as he did in his enemies land for the space of thirteene yeeres, as farre from home, in much varietie of fortune, with an armie not consisting of Â�naturall citizens and subjects, but mingled of a confused riff raff and medley of all nations, having neither the same lawes nor manners and customes, nor language … nor serving as it were the same gods:Â€he had so knit and united them in one linke & straight band, that they mutinied neither among themselves, nor against their Generall, notwithstanding oftentimes there wanted money for pay, and victuals in their enemies countrey. (Book 27, p. 666; Book 28, p. 676)

The climactic battle is preceded by a face-to-face meeting of the two commanders, presented by Livy as an epic encounter, with impressive, dignified speeches by the young and the old hero. Each pays tribute to the other, in mutual recognition. Livy brings out the enormous stakes for which the two contestants are playing in this ‘finall triall’:Â€sovereignty over the entire known world or utter destruction, the tragic demise of a once-great civilization. Where Scipio’s speech is defiant, Hannibal’s speech is full of the weary, battered wisdom of age, an awareness of the vicissitudes of fortune, the transiency of earthly glories: For mine owne part, one while age has taught me, who am returned an old man into my countrey, from whence I came a child:Â€ another while prosperitie and adversitie both, hath so schooled me, that I would now rather be ruled by reason, than swayed by fortune … For commonly he fore-casteth no variable chaunces, who never tasted of adverse fortune. And the same are you this day, that sometimes I was at Thrasymenus and at Cannae. (Book 30, pp. 760, 762)67

What, then, does Livy give to Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists? First of all, he provides a detailed coherent narrative of Roman history over a period of five hundred years, an account of the rise of the Roman republic. His aim, as stated at the outset, is ‘to eternise the worthie deeds of that people which is the soveraigne of the whole world’ (Book 1, p. 2). Polybius, whose Histories, written in Greek, were not available in

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Â� translation to the Elizabethans, similarly states as his objective ‘to discover by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in less than fifty-three years in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement which is without parallel in human history’.68 Livy’s emphasis on ‘worthie deeds’ and on ‘the renowmed martiall prowes of the Romans’ (Book 1, p. 2), in a narrative dominated by military campaigns, suggests an interest not only in the fact of Rome’s growing power but in what Gabriel Harvey, in his annotations of Livy in the 1570s, calls ‘the forms of state, the conditions of persons, and the qualities of actions’. Harvey says of Livy, ‘no historian either observes more seriously or depicts more graphically’. Harvey and his friends, ‘the courtier Philip Sidney’ and the statesman Sir Thomas Smith, applied ‘a political analysis’ to Livy, reading ‘Roman history in a way directly applicable to contemporary affairs of state’.69 In Elizabethan England, then, Livy was read for his ‘examples’ and as a practical guide to conduct, in public and in private life. Though Livy’s focus is on the past rather than the present, there is a suggestion in his introductory remarks that the seeds of eventual decline can be discerned at the height of Rome’s power:Â€as Carthage has fallen, so may Rome. This would I have everie man rather to thinke upon in good earnest, and consider with me, what their life, and what their carriage was:Â€by what men and meanes both in war and peace, their dominion was atcheived and enlarged:Â€afterward, as their discipline began by little and little to shrinke, let him marke how at the very first their behaviour and manners sunke withall:Â€ and how still they fell more and more to decay and ruine, yea and began soone after to tumble downe right even untill these our daies, wherein wee can neither endure our owne sores, nor salves for the cure. (Book 1, p. 2)

Another thing that Livy provides for Renaissance authors is a fund of stories, often exemplary in nature, suitable for dramatic representation:Â€the story of the chaste Lucretia, of Coriolanus, of Appius and Virginia, of Sophonisba. A further legacy of Livy to the age of Shakespeare is a belief that past and present are linked, that the study of history will reveal certain recurrent patterns. When Camillus rejects a proposal to seize Falerian children as hostages, he identifies traditional Roman values or practices with moral principles applicable under different circumstances: There are lawes due for warre as well as for peace:Â€and those have we learned to observe no lesse justlie, than valiantly … So will I conquere I doubt not, by feats


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that the Romanes professe; by vertue, by travaile, by hardie fight:Â€like as I have done [at] Veii already. (Book 5, p. 198).

To Livy, the historian, as moralist, provides ‘lively examples of all sorts, set up in open view’ (Book 1, p. 2), set out in a way that will both entertain and instruct an audience. The moral in a number of the episodes is implicitly republican. Quentin Skinner has argued that Livy’s history of Rome provided ‘the most important conduit for the transmission to early-modern Europe’ of the idea of the free state, the civitas libera, in its account of the early republic and its institutions.70 After the expulsion of the tyrant Tarquin, Livy says in the opening words of Book 2, ‘the acts both in war and peace of the people of Rome’ are those of a ‘free state’, ‘the good and wholsome fruits of libertie’. In such a state, rather than being ruled by the arbitrary will of anyone exercising power, Roman citizens live under ‘the authoritie and rule of laws, more powerfull and mightie than that of men’ (Book 2, p. 44). Harvey, in his annotations, comments that Livy’s republicanism made him in some respects a dangerous author for those living in a monarchy: There are many things that I think in passing as I read, which I hardly dare write down … Many things were said and done with the greatest prudence in the Roman republic, which it would be absurd to do in a kingdom and nowadays … Whatever is praiseworthy should also be appropriate.71

Machiavelli’s Discourses, a key text in the history of Renaissance republicanism, takes the form of a detailed commentary on Livy’s first ten books, drawing general principles of conduct from such episodes as the overthrow of Tarquin the Proud and the downfall of Manlius. Of ‘the example of Manlius Capitolinus’, Machiavelli remarks, ‘from his case it may be seen how the inordinate desire to rule afterwards cancels out virtues of mind and body and services rendered to one’s country, however great they may be’.72 The conclusion Machiavelli draws from the fate of Tarquin is made applicable to all princes and all subjects, as one of the ‘political lessons’ to be learned ‘from the study of history’: The reason for his expulsion, then, was not that his son, Sextus, had ravished Lucretia, but that he had violated the laws of the kingdom and ruled tyrannically … Rome had lost all the liberties she had enjoyed under previous kings … From this princes should learn, therefore, that they begin to lose their state the moment they begin to break the laws and to disregard the ancient traditions and customs under which men have long lived.73

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As with Tacitus and Sallust, Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists Â�drawing their materials from Livy saw parallels between their own time and the history of Rome. The relationship between such plays as Julius Caesar and Sejanus to the republican tradition, with its indictment of tyranny, will be a central concern in the chapters that follow.

Ch apter 2

The wronged Lucretia and the early republic

S h a k e spe a r e a n d L i v y A striking anomaly in Shakespeare’s narrative poem Lucrece (1594) is that the prose Argument attached to the poem does not accurately represent the poem itself. The Argument closely follows Shakespeare’s two main sources, Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Book I, and Ovid’s Fasti.1 Lucius Tarquinius (for his excessive pride surnamed Superbus) after he had caused his own father-in-law Servius Tullius to be cruelly murdered, and, contrary to the Roman laws and customs not requiring or staying for the people’s suffrages, had possessed himself of the kingdom, went accompanied with his sons and other noblemen of Rome to besiege Ardea; during which siege the principal men of the army meeting one evening at the tent of Sextus Tarquinius, the king’s son, in their discourses after supper everyone commended the virtues of his own wife. Among whom Collatinus extolled the incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia. In that pleasant humour they all posted to Rome, and intending by their secret and sudden arrival to make trial of that which everyone had before avouched, only Collatinus finds his wife (though it were late in the night) spinning amongst her maids. The other ladies were all found dancing and revelling, or in several disports. Whereupon the noblemen yielded Collatinus the victory, and his wife the fame. At that time Sextus Tarquinius, being inflamed with Lucrece’ beauty, yet smothering his passions for the present, departed with the rest back to the camp. From whence he shortly after privily withdrew himself, and was (according to his estate) royally entertained and lodged by Lucrece at Collatium. The same night he treacherously stealeth into her chamber, violently ravished her, and early in the morning speedeth away. Lucrece in this lamentable plight hastily dispatcheth messengers, one to Rome for her father, another to the camp for Collatine. They came, the one accompanied with Junius Brutus, the other with Publius Valerius; and finding Lucrece attired in mourning habit, demanded the cause of her sorrow. She first taking an oath of them for her revenge, revealed the actor, and the whole manner of his dealing, and withal suddenly stabbed herself. Which done, with one consent they all vowed to root out the whole hated family of the Tarquins; and, bearing the dead body to Rome, Brutus acquainted the people with the doer and manner of the vile deed, with a 35

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bitter invective against the tyranny of the king. Wherewith the people were so moved that, with one consent and a general acclamation, the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls.2

There are at least three major discrepancies between Argument and poem. Shakespeare’s opening stanzas, starting in medias res, radically compress the first part of the narrative in the Argument (twenty-three lines of forty-three in the Oxford edition), Livy, and Ovid, and give the ravisher Tarquin a motivation different from that in the sources. Shakespeare omits an episode in which the Roman men, bored with inaction, decide to test the virtue of their wives by paying an unexpected visit, a competition which Lucretia wins easily. They had all taken their drinke well, and were prettily heat with wine:Â€Marry, content say they all, and to horse they go, and away they gallop … Where they find dame Lucretia, not as the kings sons wives, whom they had surprised & seen afore, passing the time away in feasting and rioting with their minions and companions:Â€but sitting up farre within night in the middest of her house amongst her maidens, hard at wool-work by candle light. Whereupon, in their debate about their wives, the entire praise and commendation rested in Lucretia.3

In Shakespeare’s poem, Tarquin is tempted not by the sight of Lucretia, but by hearing her husband Collatine praise her, in a competition of boasting very similar to that in Cymbeline, where Posthumus’s praise of Imogen leads to Iachimo’s challenge and the virtual rape of the blameless Imogen. The violation of Lucretia and of Imogen is motivated by homosocial rivalry, an assertion of power and ownership more than lust, and Shakespeare suggests by repeated financial imagery that Collatine is morally obtuse in having ‘unlocked the treasure of his happy state’. The next three lines include ‘priceless wealth’, ‘reck’ning his fortune’, and ‘possession’. Or why is Collatine the publisher Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown From thievish ears, because it is his own?4

Shakespeare’s poem also differs from its sources and from the Argument in making very little in its opening stanzas and later of the fact that Tarquin is a king’s son and the rape an instance or consequence of tyranny, the abuse of power. The Argument begins not with Sextus Tarquinius, the rapist, but with his father’s ‘excessive pride’, cruelty, and unjust rule, and in this respect accurately reflects Livy’s account. In stanza 6, Shakespeare mentions in passing that Tarquin is the ‘proud issue of a king’, and later on, Lucretia is aware of the ‘high estate’ of her ‘princely

Shakespeare and Livy

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guest’ (37, 90, 92); but there is no significant emphasis on kings and kingship, on Tarquin’s position as son of a king and potential monarch, until line 601, very late in the poem, in a speech by Lucretia. Before that, there is much more emphasis on ‘knighthood’ (197, 569) and on honour and dishonour. Thou seem’st not what thou art, a god, a king; For kings like gods should govern everything. How wilt thy shame be seeded in thine age When thus thy vices bud before thy spring? If in thy hope thou dar’st do such outrage, What dar’st thou not when once thou art a king? O, be rememb’red, no outrageous thing From vassal actors can be wiped away; Then kings’ misdeeds cannot be hid in clay. This deed will make thee only loved for fear, But happy monarchs still are feared for love. With foul offenders thou perforce must bear, When they in thee the like offences prove. If but for fear of this, thy will remove. For princes are the glass, the school, the book, Where subjects’ eyes do learn, do read, do look. (601–16)

The political aspects of the story of Lucrece, absolutely central in Livy and in such other dramatic versions as Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece (1608) and Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), are much less prominent in Shakespeare. Colin Burrow, who sees this passage as a collection of commonplaces in the humanist genre of Advice to Princes, points out that Shakespeare departs from Livy and Ovid in having Lucrece use a vocabulary that is ‘distinctly political’ in addressing Tarquin.5 Yet even in these lines, rather than attacking the institution of monarchy, Lucretia praises it in urging Tarquin to behave in a manner fitting his position in society. The most extraordinary discrepancy between poem and Argument comes in the final stanza, which simply omits the main point of the story of Lucrece in Livy, the banishment of the kings and establishment of the Roman republic. The Argument is quite explicit in its final words, following both Livy and Ovid:Â€ after Brutus’s ‘bitter invective against the tyranny of the king’, ‘the people were so moved that with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls’.6 In Shakespeare’s poem, Brutus

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(using the words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ five times in three stanzas) calls on Collatine and Lucretia’s kinsmen to avenge her death, not once mentioning kings or Tarquin’s royal father. Then, in a perfunctory final stanza, Tarquin the rapist is banished from Rome, with not a word about the forcible expulsion of ‘the whole hated family of the Tarquins’ or the change in the form of government. When they had sworn to this advisèd doom, They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence, To show her bleeding body thorough Rome, And so to punish Tarquin’s foul offence; Which being done with speedy diligence, The Romans plausibly did give consent To Tarquin’s everlasting banishment. (1849–55)

Shakespeare thus deliberately plays down the republican implications of the rape, strongly emphasized in later dramatic versions and in Machiavelli’s commentary on Livy:Â€ ‘The reason for his explusion … was not that his son, Sextus, had ravished Lucretia, but that he had violated the laws of the kingdom and ruled tyrannically.’7 R a pe a n d t y r a n n y As Ian Donaldson has shown in The Rapes of Lucretia, later versions of the story of Lucretia fall into two distinct categories:Â€those emphasizing the political aspects of Livy’s narrative, the birth of the Roman republic, and those focusing on the confrontation between the lustful Tarquin and the chaste Lucretia. In works in which the emphasis is on sexual conduct, the principal character tends to be Lucretia, where in the works that are overtly political, the main character is usually Brutus.8 Of the references to Tarquin in Shakespeare’s later works, two, in Macbeth and Cymbeline, emphasize the psychological rather than the political, in bringing out the drama of ‘Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design’. A third, in Julius Caesar, shows Marcus Brutus remembering how ‘My ancestors did from the streets of Rome /The Tarquin drive when he was called a king’Â€– the tyrant father rather than the rapist son.9 Titus Andronicus, close in its date of composition to Lucrece, is full of allusions to the rape of Lucretia and its consequences. Of the four passages drawing explicit parallels between the action of the play and the story of Lucretia, two bring out Lucretia’s chastity and Sextus Tarquinius’s villainy, while two emphasize the expulsion of the Tarquins that follows the death of Lucretia. Marcus

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Andronicus leads his surviving relatives in a vow of revenge patterned on that in Lucrece: And swear with meÂ€– as, with the woeful fere And father of that chaste dishonoured dame, Lord Junius Brutus swore for Lucrece’ rapeÂ€– That we will prosecute by good advice Mortal revenge upon these traiterous Goths.

Another passage carries the narrative beyond the time frame of Shakespeare’s poem in presenting the attempt of ‘proud Tarquin and his queen’ to regain power.10 In the many Renaissance paintings of Lucretia, there is little or no political element. Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia (c.1570), pulsating with energy, brings out the physicality of the assault, with a fully clothed Tarquin forcing his knee between the legs of the naked Lucretia:Â€no debate here, but brute masculine force, vainly resisted. Donaldson points out that nearly all depictions of Lucretia by Renaissance painters, whether they present the rape or her suicide, show her as unclothed (even though Livy, Ovid, and Shakespeare make the suicide a public performance before her kinsmen, eliciting a promise to avenge her death). The nudity of Lucretia carries an erotic appeal and brings out her vulnerability, but also suggests her purityÂ€– and in the omnipresent knife, her ultimate triumph over the rapist who sought to sully her innocence.11 In the greatest of the literary transformations of the myth of Lucretia, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, both the libertine rapist Lovelace and the virtuous Clarissa are complex figures. The struggle between Lovelace and Clarissa, who are explicitly compared several times with Tarquin and Lucretia, though it involves a rape, is psychological rather than physical, and both characters recognize it as a contest for dominance. As in a number of other versions of the myth of Lucrece, the victim triumphs over the victimizer, who, far more than Shakespeare’s Lucrece, becomes a ‘convertite’, bearing ‘the burden of a guilty mind’ in the later part of the novel.12 In Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus, Father of his Country (1680), banned after three performances for alleged ‘Scandalous Expressions & Reflections upon the Government’, Lucretia dies in Act I, and has only the third most important female role. The action of Lee’s play is largely based on Book II of Livy, in which an attempt is made to restore the deposed monarch Tarquin. Its climactic scene, milked by Lee for its tragic effect, is the execution of Brutus’s two sons for complicity in the plot.13 Brutus in Lee and in Livy is both a republican hero and a tragic victim of a conflict

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between civic duty and paternal affection. Machiavelli finds a more practical moral in the execution of Brutus’s sons, in realpolitik:Â€the founders of a state, to strengthen their hold on power, need to stage spectacles that will set examples, warning potential rivals. The severity used by Brutus was no less necessary than it was useful in maintaining the liberty which Rome had just acquired by his aid … When the form of government has been changed … it is in all cases essential that exemplary action be taken against those who are hostile to the new state of affairs. He who establishes a tyranny and does not kill ‘Brutus’ and he who establishes a free state and does not kill ‘the sons of Brutus’ does not last long.14

Thomas Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece (1608), closely based on Livy, tells more of the story than Shakespeare’s version, emphasizing the political dimension. Heywood’s play begins with the inordinate lust for power of Lucius Tarquinius and his wife Tullia, leading to the murder of the rightful king Servius Tullius (father of Tullia) and Tarquin’s usurpation of the throne. In the scenes between the elder Tarquin and his wife, there are echoes of Macbeth and of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, though Heywood is following Livy: For now the woman minded nothing but one mischeefe upon another:Â€ and would not suffer her husband to be at rest night nor day, least peradventure the former murders done and past, should serve to no purpose … But sir (quoth she) if you be the man for whom I take my selfe wedded, then I cal you both husband and king:Â€if not, then is our case changed for the worse, in that cowardliness is accompanied now with wickednesse. Why resolve you not? Why arme you not your selfe, and go about this businesse? (Romane Historie, Book I, p. 33)

Heywood similarly presents Tullia as possessed with ‘hot appetite’, longing ‘to be a Queene’ and urging her husband to depose her father: t u l . I am no wife of Tarquin if not King: Oh had God made me man, I would have mounted Above the base tribunals of the earth, Up to the clowdes, for pompeous soveraintie. Thou art a man, oh beare my royall minde, Mount heaven and see if Tullia lag behinde.15

Sextus Tarquinius (called ‘Sextus’ throughout) plays a subsidiary role in the first half of the play, in which the emphasis is on usurpation and tyranny. Throughout the play, Tarquin is presented as the archetypal tyrant, ruling by fear:Â€‘We will admit no counsell, we obtaind /Our state by cunning, ’tmust be kept by strength’.16 In Heywood’s play, tyranny is given

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a Jacobean rather than Roman colouring, in the references to the King’s prerogative, the arbitrary seizure of the goods of subjects, and the belief that kings, ruling by divine right, are accountable to no one. t a r q. All capital causes are by us discust, Traverst and executed without counsell. We challenge too by our prerogative, The goods of such as strive against our state, The freest citizens without attaint, Arraigne or judgment we to exile doome, The poorer are our drudges, rich our pray, And such as dare not strive our rule obey. t u l . Kings are as Gods, and divine scepters beare, The Gods command for mortall tribute feare. But royall Lord, we that despise thir love, Must seke some meanes how to maintaine this awe. (Rape of Lucrece, Sig. D1)

There is nothing equivalent in Shakespeare’s Lucrece:Â€here, Livy’s republicanism is adapted to the circumstances of the Jacobean court. The lines do not go so far as to accuse James I of being an actual or potential tyrant, but they show an awareness of how monarchs abuse power, and the play ends by justifying tyrannicide.17 Brutus plays a much more prominent role in Heywood’s play than in Shakespeare’s poem. In this popular play, acted at the Red Bull in 1606–7, revived several times, and remaining in the repertory as late as 1637, with five editions published between 1608 and 1638, Brutus is likely to have been the star part. Like Hamlet, Brutus dissimulates, hiding his true nature and intent as scourge and revenger under a cloak of folly, shifting from comic prose to verse in soliloquy. Much of Heywood’s text consists of clowning, with Brutus the principal clown, abetted by Valerius, ‘the merrie Lord’, who sings a number of songs, some of them satiric in intent. The most indecorous of the play’s comic songs is a catch, sung by Valerius and two others after the rape: va l . Did he take faire Lucrece by the toe man? cl ow n. Toe man. va l . I man, cl ow n. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha man. hor . And further did he strive to goe man? cl ow n. Goe man. hor . I man, cl ow n. Ha, ha, ha man, ha fa derry derry derry downe. (Sig. G4v, H1)

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In much of the clowning, the Roman colour is virtually non-existent, though the remarks of the clowns often touch on political issues, treating the commonwealth as diseased. The comic scenes were evidently popular in Heywood’s day, since later editions add further songs. Lucretia enters the play approximately halfway through, and Heywood includes several incidents from Livy not in Shakespeare’s poem:Â€the competition among the young Roman lords boasting of their wives, the discovery of Lucretia among her maids engaged in ‘domestick Business’, the award of the victory to Lucretia over the other, more worldly wives. Sextus Tarquinius is given an extended soliloquy, with echoes of Macbeth and possibly Othello, as he approaches the sleeping Lucrece ‘with his sword drawne and a Taper light’. s e x t. Night be as secret as thou art close, as close as thou art black and darke, thou ominous Queene Of Tenebrouse silence, make this fatall hower, as true to Rape as thou hast made it kinde To murder and harsh mischiefe:Â€Cinthia maske thy cheeke, And all you sparkling Elementall fires, Choke up your beauties in prodigious fogges … Least you heholde my practice:Â€I am bound Upon a blacke adventure, on a deede That must wound vertue, and make beautie bleede. (Sig. G1)

As in Shakespeare’s Lucrece, the rapist has qualms of conscience, recognizing the blackness of the deed he is about to commit. In the scene of the rape, rather than an extended debate in which Lucrece tries to dissuade Tarquin to ‘stoop to honor, not to foul desire’ (Lucrece, 574), Heywood includes a rapid-fire rhymed exchange. s e x t. Where faire meanes cannot, force shall make my way. By Jove I must injoy thee. l uc . Sweet Lord stay. s e x t. I’me all impatience, violence and rage, And save thy bed, naught can this fire asswage; wilt love me? l uc . No I cannot. s e x t. Tell me why? l uc . Hate me, and in that hate first let me dye. s e x t. By Jove ile force thee. (Sig. G2)

The play does not end with the death of Lucrece and the vow of revenge, but includes several further scenes, in which the republican forces, with

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Brutus as their general, confront Tarquin and his courtiers in battle. Tarquin and Tullia are slain in battle, and in the play’s final scene, Sextus and Brutus confront one another in a single fight, with Sextus behaving gallantly in his last moments. bru. Hadst thou not done a deed so execrable, That Gods and men abhorre, ide love thee Sextus, And hugge thee for this chalenge breath’d so freely: Behold, I stand for Rome as Generall, Thou of the Tarquins dost alone survive. (Sig. I4v)

Rewriting the received narrative, Heywood has Brutus and Sextus Tarquinius both die in this climactic combat, and Collatine succeed Brutus as consul. There is no clear indication what form of government is to replace the monarchy, though Brutus and his allies fight ‘to save Rome’ (Sig. I1). In John Fletcher’s The Tragedy of Valentinian (1614), rape is equated with tyranny. The rape of the chaste Lucina by the emperor Valentinian is presented as an abuse of power by an absolute monarch and as a crime that must eventually be punished. Tyranny expresses itself here in sexual terms, with the tyrant’s unbounded will invading the rights of subjects, and, in particular, violating the marriage bed. When threatened with rape, the innocent, virtuous Lucina protests ‘As long as there is motion in my body /And life to give me words, I’ll cry for justice’. Valentinian responds, chillingly, ‘Justice shall never hear ye; I am justice.’ At one point, Lucina compares herself explicitly with Lucretia and Valentinian with Tarquin, as examples to be imitated or shunned. l uc i n a . The sins of Tarquin be remembered in thee, And where there has a chaste wife been abused, Let it be thine:Â€the shame thine, thine the slaughter, And, last, forever thine the feared example.18

In an adaptation of Valentinian by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, written in the 1670s, Lucina’s wronged husband Maximus, contemplating tyrannicide, praises Brutus as a model to be imitated by others suffering under tyranny, identifying his own revenge with the traditions of Roman republicanism: m a x i m u s. Why was the lustful Tarquin with his house Expelled, but for the rape of bleeding Lucrece? … What servile rascal, what most abject slave, That licks the dust from where his master trod, Bounded not from the earth upon his feet And shook the chain, that heard of Brutus’s vengeance?

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The wronged Lucretia and the early republic Who that ere heard the cause applauded not That Roman spirit, for his great revenge?19

In Fletcher’s play, the revenger Maximus is a far more equivocal figure, Â�motivated partly by ambition, and contemptuous of ‘dull obedience and tame duty’. Even after Lucina’s rape, he is primarily concerned with his own reputation:Â€‘She is a woman and her loss the less.’ Cynically, he says in soliloquy, ‘If I rise, /My wife was ravished well’ (Valentinian, 3.3.36, 44; 5.3.39–40). The tyrant Valentinian dies in torment, recognizing ‘I am a ravisher, a Â�murderer, a hated Caesar’, and Maximus, when crowned emperor, shows himself as no better and is assassinated in turn (Valentinian, 5.2, 116–17). Another Jacobean play portraying sexual misconduct as the mark of a tyrant is John Webster’s Appius and Virginia (1624–6). Here, the arrogant figure using his power illegitimately is not a monarch, but a Decemvir, an elected officer of the state who, once secure in office, is consumed with pride and ambition. Livy’s account of Appius Claudius’s rise to power presents it as a conspiracy to hold ‘the soveraigne rule … for ever’ and make ‘havock and spoile of the Commons and their goods’ (Romane Historie, Book III, p. 112). In Webster’s play, as in Livy, the ‘wanton lust’ of Appius ultimately leads to his overthrow, and his attempt to assert his power over the innocent Virginia by ‘cruell and proud violence’ is likened to the rape of Lucretia: Now followeth the other heinous deede committed within the cittie:Â€ which began of wanton lust, and had as foule and shamefull an end, as that, which upon the carnall abusing and bloudie death of Lucretia, cast the Tarquines out of the cittie, and deprived them of the regall dignitie:Â€ that both KK. and Decemvirs, might have not only the like successe and issue, but also one and the selfsame cause, of loosing their rule & dominion.

At the end of Appius and Virginia, the death of Appius is presented as a restoration of order, as Rome recovers its traditional liberties: ic i l i u s. Rome thou at length art free, Restored unto thine ancient liberty. m i n u t i u s. Of Consuls:Â€which bold Junius Brutus first Begun in Tarquins fall … v i r g i n i u s. Two Ladies fair, but most infortunate, Have in their ruins rais’d declining Rome, Lucretia and Virginia, both renown’d For chastity.20

Webster follows the general outlines of Livy’s narrative in having Appius, an unjust judge, concoct a wholly fictitious claim that Virginia,

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rather than being the daughter of a free-born Roman, was the child of a slave and thus, the lawful property of his henchman Clodius. In the scene in the marketplace, in which Clodius seizes Virginia, as throughout the play, much is made of the contrast of freedom and slavery. As Quentin Skinner has argued, the contrasting legal positions of citizens of a free state and slaves, without rights and at the disposal of their owners, is Â�central to the republican tradition. In Appius and Virginia, father and daughter both assert their status as free-born Romans. v i rg i n i a . Unhand me villaine. cl odi u s. â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•‡ What, Mistris, to your Lord? He that can set a rasor to your throate, And punish you as freely as the gods, No man to ask the cause? Thou art my slave, And here I sease what’s mine. v i rg i n i a . â•…â•… Ignoble villaine, I am as free as the best King or Consull Since Romulus.21

Near the end of the play, Virginius makes a similar claim, though with a significant difference:Â€rather than Virginia herself being able to claim the status of free-born Roman, the father asserts that as a free Roman, he is able to exercise a father’s rights over his daughter, keeping her reputation and his free from stain and bestowing her on the husband of his choice. v i rg i n i u s. Alas, might I have kept her chaste and free, This life so oft ingag’d for ingrateful Rome Lay in her bosom. But when I saw her pull’d By Appius Lictors to be claim’d a slave, And drag’d into a publick Sessions house, Divorc’d from her fore Spousals to Icilius, A noble youth, and made a bond-woman, Inforc’d by violence from her fathers armes To be a Prostitute and Paramour To the rude twinings of a leacherous Judge … (4.2.122–31)

To save her from this fate, Virginius kills his daughter, after bidding farewell to her with expressions of love and memories of her ‘pretty infancy’. Such an act, shocking when presented on stage, is even more ambivalent morally than the act of Lucius Junius Brutus in ordering the execution of his sons. Roman honour here is at its most inflexible, as a father expresses his loving care for his daughter by stabbing her to death.

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The wronged Lucretia and the early republic v i rg i n i u s. Farewel my sweet Virginia, never, never Shall I taste fruit of the most blessed hope I had in thee … O my Virginia, When we begin to be, begun our woes, Increasing still, as dying life still growes … Thus I surrender her into the Court Of all the Gods. [Kills her with a knife.] And see, proud Appius see, Although not justly, I have made her free. (4.1.279–81, 293–5, 302–4)

In an even more shocking moment in the bloodbath that ends Titus Andronicus, the crazed Titus cites the example of Virginius in killing his own daughter because of her ‘shame’ at having been ‘enforced, stained and deflowered’. Here again the ‘father’s sorrow’ and family honour are seen as all-important and the child’s life as at the father’s disposal.22 There is no reason to distrust Virginius’s words when he claims to be motivated by principle, acting in the public interest even to his own detriment: You that have wives lodg’d in yon prison Rome Have lands unrifled, houses yet unseis’d, Your freeborn daughters yet unstrumpeted, Prevent these mischiefs yet while you have time. (4.3.176–9)

Yet though he speaks of his daughter as ‘freeborn’ and ‘made free’ in death, both wives and daughters are seen here as the property of the husband and father, equivalent in their status to houses and lands, chattels of the patriarchal household. Though the Roman soldiers pronounce Virginius as ‘guiltless of his daughter’s death’ (4.3.142) and then, under his leadership, march on Rome to exact revenge on Appius ‘for Romes lasting good’ (4.3.185), there is nevertheless a difference between Lucrece and Virginia as moral agents:Â€one chooses to die by suicide, and the other is the passive recipient of a series of acts of violence by contending males. It is arguable that Virginius in this action is no less a tyrant than Appius.23 The character of Virginius, soldier, father, and revenger, is more fully developed in Webster than in Livy. In Livy, Virginius is ‘a man of honest example and conversation of life, both at home and also abroad in warfare’, known for his ‘hardie exploits and valiant pieces of service in warre’ (Romane Historie, Book III, pp. 117, 119). Webster makes him a figure somewhat like Kent in King Lear:Â€honest, plain-speaking, choleric, at times ‘too

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bold’ in confronting those in power. In an incident early in the play, not in Livy, Virginius acts as spokesman for the grievances of the army, starved of pay and supplies:Â€ ‘Will you send us /To fight for Rome like beggars?’ Appius, saying that his power ‘knows no curb’, answers Virginius coldly:Â€a man in his position will not ‘be prescrib’d and taught’ by a mere soldier. When we please Out of our Princely grace and clemency To look upon your wants, it may be then We shall redress them:Â€But till then, it fits not That any petty fellow wag’d by us Should have a tongue sound here before a Bench Of such grave Auditours.

(1.3.73–4, 96–8, 101–7)

There are many Shakespearean parallels for a confrontation between an arrogant ruler or magistrate and a subject made bold by the conviction that ‘duty’ should never ‘have dread to speak, /When power to flattery bows’. This passage may include a topical dimension in allusions to events of 1624–6, the sufferings of English troops sent to the aid of Frederick, Elector of Palatine, and ‘scandalously neglected’ by being ‘left without pay or provisions’. As we will see, there are comparable passages in the plays of Massinger in the 1620s; but Virginius’s appeal to shared Roman valuesÂ€ – ‘fair Rome’, ‘long flourishing Rome’, ‘if you be Romans’, ‘fair Rome’s sons’, ‘the streets of Rome’Â€– situate this episode, and the play as a whole, in the general context of Roman republicanism.24 Luc r e c e’s Voic e What Shakespeare adds to the accounts of Livy and Ovid is a series of extended rhetorical set pieces, taking up nearly 1,400 lines (approximately three quarters of the poem). There is nothing equivalent in Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece or in Webster’s Appius and Virginia. Tarquin is given Â�twenty-six stanzas of soul-searching, an internal debate between ‘frozen conscience and hot burning will’, in which, anticipating Macbeth, he shows his awareness of the many reasons why he should not commit ‘so black a deed’: But as he is my kinsman, my dear friend, The shame and fault finds no excuse nor end.

(226, 237–8, 247)

Shakespeare, building on a hint in Ovid, next lingers over the rape itself and its preliminaries, with an extended, voyeuristic blazon displaying

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Lucrece’s naked beauties to the ‘lewd unhallowed eyes’ of Tarquin and the reader: Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, A pair of maiden worlds unconquerèd.

(392, 407–8)

Ovid sets the scene (’twas night, and not a taper shone in the whole house’) and mentions ‘her breast, that till now had never known the touch of stranger hand’, but includes no description of the sleeping Lucrece.25 In the dialogue between the awakened Lucrece and Tarquin, Shakespeare follows Livy and Ovid (though not the Argument) in having Lucrece resist the ravisher, but finally succumb to the threat that Tarquin will rape her, kill her, and then kill her honour by placing a dead slave in her bed, accusing her falsely of adultery. Both Livy and Ovid present this threatened stain on her honour and that of her husband as overcoming her resistance. Shakespeare, though he devotes several stanzas to the threat, gives Lucrece thirteen stanzas of argument, appealing to Tarquin’s better nature, and then shows him overcoming her by force, stifling her outcries: The wolf has seized his prey; the poor lamb cries, Till with her own white fleece her voice controlled Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet fold. (677–9)

In this description of Tarquin’s stopping Lucrece’s mouth with her bed linen, the mouth and the genitals are equated:Â€the rape literally silences her protests, in asserting control over her.26 In Shakespeare’s poem, far more than in Livy, Ovid, the Argument, or Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece, the rape gives Lucrece a voice, in sixty-seven stanzas of lament.27 Tarquin slinks away, ‘like a thievish dog’, and virtually disappears from the poem, leaving Lucrece to lament her pollution and desperately search for a way of throwing off the burden of shame. She bears the load of lust he left behind, And he the burden of a guilty mind … He thence departs, a heavy convertite; She there remains a hopeless castaway.

(734–6, 743–4)

As a number of critics have pointed out, Lucrece’s lament, with its Â�apostrophes to Night, Opportunity, Time, and ‘lamenting Philomel’, follows the conventions of women’s complaint, a flourishing Elizabethan sub-genre, and is directly indebted to Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of

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Rosamond (1592).28 In these stanzas, ‘frantic with grief’, Lucrece castigates herself, presenting herself less as innocent victim than as somehow complicit in a ‘cureless crime’, failing in her responsibility as a Roman matron, besmirching her husband’s ‘honour’: Make me not object to the tell-tale day: The light will show charactered in my brow The story of sweet chastity’s decay, The impious breach of holy wedlock vow. Yea, the illiterate that know not how To cipher what is writ in learnèd books, Will quote my loathsome trespass in my looks.

(762, 772, 806–12, 841)

No remedy is possible to wipe out this indelible stain, and Lucrece, who sees herself rather than Tarquin as violating ‘holy wedlock vows’, concludes that she must die by her own hand. The remedy indeed to do me good Is to let forth my foul defilèd blood … For me, I am the mistress of my fate, And with my trespass never will dispense, Till life to death acquit my forced offence. (1028–9, 1069–71)

The poem’s advocacy of suicide, in accordance with Roman values but contrary to Christian doctrine, has occasioned a good deal of critiÂ� cal comment, some of it hostile. St Augustine, writing from an explicitÂ�ly Christian perspective, denigrates Lucretia as excessively ‘covetous of glory’, ruled by worldly standards of conduct:Â€‘if she be an adulteress, why is she commended? If she be chaste, why did she kill herself?’29 Neither the Argument, nor the sources, Livy and Ovid, find anything problematiÂ� cal in Lucrece’s suicide. In Livy, Lucrece’s husband and father assure her that she is blameless. All of them one after other give their assured word, comforted the wofull hearted woman, excused her selfe that was but forced, and laid all the blame upon him that committed the shamefull act:Â€saying, It is the mind that sinneth, and not the bodie; and where there is no will and consent, there could be no fault at all. Well (quoth she) what is his due to have, see you to that:Â€as for me, however I quit and assoile my selfe of sinne, yet I will not be freed from punishment. And never shall there by example of Lucretia, any Â�unhonest woman or wanton callot live a day:Â€and thus having said, with a knife which she had close hidden under her clothes, shee stabbed her selfe to the heart, and sinking downe forward, fell upon the floore readie to yeeld up the ghost.Â€(Romane Historie, Book I, p. 41)

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Shakespeare follows his source in contrasting the unspotted mind and the body and in Lucrece’s refusal to provide an excuse for unchaste women. He also, like Livy, presents Lucrece as more resolute than her male relations, less willing to compromise. With this they all at once began to say Her body’s stain her mind untainted clears, While, with a joyless smile, she turns away The face, that map which deep impression bears Of hard misfortune, carved in it with tears. ‘No, no!’ quoth she, ‘no dame hereafter living By my excuse shall claim excuses giving.’ (1709–16)

To Lucrece, though her shame and feelings of unworthiness are internalized, honour is a matter of reputation, ‘that suspicion which the world might bear her’ (1321), demonstrated by her fear that the servant she has employed to deliver a letter to her husband knows her secret: But they whose guilt within their bosoms lie Imagine every eye beholds their blame: For Lucrece thought he blushed to see her shame. (1342–4)

Lucrece, like her adversary Tarquin, sees herself as appendage to, or property of, her husband Collatine:Â€a stain on her honour is a stain on his honour, which she has an obligation to safeguard (‘thine honour lay in me’): Let my good name, that senseless reputation, For Collatine’s dear love be kept unspotted. If that be made a theme for disputation The branches of another root are rotted, And undeserved reproach to him allotted. (820–4, 834)

‘Senseless’ here evidently means ‘free of sensuality’:Â€the lines refer to the threat of bastardy, the contamination of the family line created by adultery. In the last part of the poem, Lucretia resolves her dilemma by getting her male relatives to swear a solemn oath to revenge the wrong done to her:Â€no tears, but resolute action appropriate to Roman men, who ‘shall plight your honourable faiths to me /With swift pursuit to venge this wrong of mine’ and ‘chase injustice with revengeful arms’. Once she has secured this promise, she re-enacts and cancels out the rape with a knife, confident that her words have unleashed the swords of her husband and family to wipe out ‘this forcèd stain’ (1690–3, 1701).30

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Before Lucrece resolves to kill herself and exact revenge on her betrayer, she hears the singing of a nightingale, and recalls the Ovidian tale of ‘Philomel, that sing’st of ravishment’ (1128). Shakespeare chooses to emphasize different aspects of the myth of Tereus and Philomel here and in Titus Andronicus, where the raped and mutilated Lavinia is able by signs to reveal the name of the rapist, overcoming an attempt to silence her. Here, it is a fellowship of suffering, the shared pain that enables Lucrece to find a kindred spirit in the nightingale. ‘Her own grief’ allows Lucrece to find ‘surmise’ of the sorrows of others, and some relief from her suffering (1577–8).31 At the end of the poem, agency passes from the wronged Lucrece to the male members of her family, who initially react with ineffective floods of tears, until ‘manly shame’ reminds them of their responsibilities. In a comic touch, Lucrece’s husband and father compete in claiming ownership: ‘Oh,’ quoth Lucretius, ‘I did give that life Which she too early and too late hath spilled.’ ‘Woe, woe,’ quoth Collatine, ‘She was my wife: I owed her, and ’tis mine that she hath killed.’ ‘My daughter’ and ‘My wife’ with clamours filled The dispersed air, who, holding Lucrece’s life, Answered their cries, ‘my daughter and my wife’. (1777, 1800–6)

Lucius Junius Brutus, Lucretia’s kinsman, who before then had not appeared in the poem, then reminds Collatine of his responsibilities as Roman and as husband, addressing him as ‘thou wrongèd lord of Rome’. As in the sources, Shakespeare mentions Brutus’s antic disposition, as he throws off the cloak of folly or madness, which ‘deep policy’ had led him to assume for his own protection. Flourishing the knife with which Lucrece had killed herself, he contrasts vain tears with resolute action: Do wounds help wounds, or grief help grievous deeds? Is it revenge to give yourself a blow For his foul act by whom thy fair wife bleeds? (1815, 1818, 1822–4)32

In Shakespeare’s poem, though not in other versions of the story, Brutus sees Lucrece’s suicide as a sign of ‘childish’ female weakness, in inciting Collatine to revenge: Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so, To slay herself that should have slain her foe. (1825–7)

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In Livy, the solemn oath that Brutus swears over the body of Lucrece, holding the knife dripping with blood, is directed not simply at Tarquin the rapist, but at his father the king, and at the institution of monarchy. Young Tarquin’s rape is thus seen as concrete embodiment of his father’s tyranny. Out alas, cried her husband and father hereat:Â€and whilest they two were in their plaints and mones, Brutus drew forth the knife out of the wound of Lucretia, and holding it out afore him, all embrewed and dropping with bloud, Now I swear (quoth he) by this bloud, by this most chaste and pure bloud, before the vilanie wrought by the kings sonne, and here before the gods I protest, whom I cal to witnesse, that I wil by fire and sword, and with all my might and maine persecute and drive the country of L. Tarquinius the prowd, and his ingracious wife, and the whole brood of his children, and suffer neither him nor any els for his sake to raigne as king at Rome. (Romane Historie, Book I, p. 41)

Shakespeare’s version is very different from this call for insurrection. Invoking Roman values of piety, courage, and honour, Brutus urges Lucretia’s kinsmen to behave like Romans; but what he urges is straightforward revenge:Â€death must answer death and wipe out the disgrace. Courageous Roman, do not steep thy heart In such relenting dew of lamentations; But kneel with me and help to bear thy part, To rouse our Roman gods with invocations, That they will suffer these abominations, Since Rome herself in them does stand disgracèd, By our strong arms from forth her fair streets chasèd. (1828–34)

After Lucrece’s kinsmen vow, following Brutus’s example, to ‘revenge the death of this true wife’, they display the body as witness to ‘Tarquin’s foul offence’ and, in the poem’s final line, TarquinÂ€– not his father, and not ‘the kings regiment at Rome’, is summarily banished.33 T h e p ol i t ics of r a pe Several critics have found an implicit political dimension in Shakespeare’s Lucrece. One recent study, Andrew Hadfield’s Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, argues that Lucrece’s resistance to Tarquin’s rape is ‘politically charged’ and represents ‘a position that resembles a republican one’:Â€ ‘Shakespeare’s poem casts Lucrece as a more important principal actor than Brutus, suggesting that she is the truly virtuous republican figure who liberates Rome.’34 This attempt to appropriate Shakespeare’s

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Lucrece as republican role-model is unconvincing, partly because it uses the word ‘republican’ too loosely and partly because it gets the details of the plot wrong, confusing the rapist Sextus Tarquinius with his father Lucius Tarquinius. A more closely argued essay along the same lines is Barry Nass’s ‘The Law and Politics of Treason in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, which sees Shakespeare’s poem as putting ‘into question the legitimacy of official Tudor doctrine’. The terms ‘traitor’, ‘treason’, ‘foul usurper’, ‘guilty rebel’, and ‘mutiny’ are again and again applied to Tarquin, prince and presumptive heir to the throne. According to Nass, ‘in equating the rape with treason … Shakespeare makes rebellion seem the logical and fitting response to the outrage Lucrece has suffered’, in accordance with resistance theory rather than the conventional doctrines of divine right used ‘to legitimate and retain power’.35 Political readings of Shakespeare’s Lucrece tend to read the poem in terms of the Argument, conflating the two, or even assume that if ‘the connection of Shakepeare’s narrative with republican politics is never directly stated in the poem’, this is ‘for reasons of political expediency’, in coded references to get round possible censorship.36 One account, while recognizing discrepancies between Argument and poem, claims that the two are linked as part of an ‘imagined whole’, so that an understanding of the poem is dependent on a reader’s awareness of events Â�narrated in the Argument, filling in the poem’s silences.37 A more promising approach emphasizes ‘the imagery of siege and predation’ prevalent in Shakespeare’s poem, with Tarquin shown to be someone ‘in whom the contradictions of the dominant ideology are internalized and set at war’. Violent rape in the poem is equated with aggressive war, the drive toward domination. Tarquin is represented as a barbarian invading Rome and Lucretia as the embodiment of Roman pietas, embodying all the domestic virtues.38 Here with a cockatrice’ dead-killing eye, He rouseth up himself, and makes a pause, While she the picture of pure piety, Like a white hind under the gripe’s sharp claws, Pleads in a wilderness where are no laws, To the rough beast that knows no gentle right, Nor aught obeys but his foul appetite. (540–6)

In this reading, the politics of the poem are sexual politics:Â€ the ‘neverconquered fort’ of Lucrece’s body is a walled city, Rome itself, and when Tarquin claims to have been motivated by love and the attraction of

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her ‘bright beauty’, his self-serving lies are transparent (482, 490). The extended meditation on the destructiveness of war in the fall of ‘burning Troy’ makes the link between warrior and rapist explicit. Lo, here weeps Hecuba, here Priam dies, Here manly Hector faints, here Troilus sounds, Here friend by friend in bloody channel lies, And friend to friend gives unadvisèd wounds, And one man’s lust these many lives confounds.

(1473–4, 1485–9)

Feminist critics have in a number of essays questioned some of the assumptions underlying the ideology of republicanism, as reflected in the story of Lucretia. According to this argument, the rape of Lucrece, as avenged by Brutus, is ‘one of the founding myths of patriarchy’. Coppélia Kahn argues that even Lucrece’s resistance in Shakespeare’s poem is ‘inscribed within the same structure of power as the rape is’:Â€ Lucrece ‘laments the consequences of men’s power, but remains helpless to challenge it’. In the view of some critics, the only effective action Lucrece could have taken would have been to kill the rapist, rather than turning the knife on herself, enacting ‘a script which blames the victim’Â€ – a version of Brutus’s assertion that suicide and feelings of guilt and sorrow are signs of ‘weak minds’ (1825–7).39 In Stephanie Jed’s statement of a similar position, the reader is made complicit in a ‘Â�displacement of the focus from the violated Lucretia to Brutus the liberator’, in effect condoning the rape as ‘a necessary prologue to Brutus’s act of liberation’. The change in government from kings to consuls, monarchy to republic, is no more than a transfer from one group of men to another, ‘within an essentially closed phallocentric political economy’, over the violated body of an abused woman.40 Yet Lucrece in Shakespeare’s poem is not a passive victim, a meek servant of patriarchy like Webster’s Virginia, but an active agent, who can speak of herself after the rape as ‘the mistress of my fate’ (1069). Before revealing the name of her assailant, she secures an oath of revenge from her kinsmen, and then kills herself, an act in accordance with Roman notions of stoic courage and virtue.41 Though Tarquin and Lucrece share some values, Tarquin violates them and is consciencestricken as a result of doing so, where Lucrece upholds these values, as a tragic heroine and model to succeeding generations. To Shakespeare and his contemporaries as to Livy, the difference between the rule of one man, governed only by his unbounded will, and government by

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elected, responsible officials, was far from trivial. Though Shakespeare does not dwell on the political consequences of the rape as do more overtly republican retellings of the story of Lucrece, the poem ends with the ‘consent’ given by ‘the Romans’ to the ‘everlasting banishment’ of Tarquin as a source of pollution (1854–5). ‘Consent’ or its lack is precisely what defines the crime of rape, as it defines the difference between a tyrant and someone who holds power in trust, ruling with the consent of the governed.42

Ch apter 3

Self-inflicted wounds

Mor ta l l m a l ic e Thomas Lodge’s The Wounds of Civil War, the first ‘Roman’ play of the Elizabethan theatre, was ‘publicly plaide in London, by the Right Honourable the Lord Admiral his Servants’, probably in 1588, by the same company that performed the two parts of Tamburlaine in 1587–8.1 Lodge’s primary source was the Civil Wars of the Greek historian Appian, translated in 1578 as An Auncient Historie and exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes Warres, both Civile and Foren. The translator, W. Barker, summarizes the contents of Appian’s history of Rome in highly tendentious terms on the title page: Their greedy desire to conquere others. Their mortall malice to destroy themselves. Their seeking of matters to make warre abroade. Their picking of quarels to fall out at home. All the degrees of Sedition, and all the effects of Ambition. A firme determination of Fate, thorow all the chaunges of Fortune. And finally, an evident demonstration, That peoples rule must give place, and Princes power prevayle.

A prefatory epistle finds a similar moral in Appian’s narrative:Â€‘How God plagueth them that conspire against theyr Prince, this Historie declareth at the full.’â•›2 Yet this ‘Tudor myth’ view, demonstrating the evils of sedition and the superiority of monarchical rule, is not borne out either by Appian’s account of the wars of Marius and Sulla or by Lodge’s play. Though the ‘greedy desire to conquer others’ and the ‘mortall malice to destroy themselves’ are much in evidence, there is little suggestion of a possible remedy in The Wounds of Civil War. If we compare Lodge’s play with the accounts of Marius and Sulla in Sallust and Tacitus, we find that Lodge has stripped the conflict between the two men of any political dimension, 56

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the role of Marius as representative of the common people, and Sulla of ‘the nobility’. The vivid characterization of Marius as a grizzled, plainspeaking soldier, with a ‘rough severity of nature and maner’, conscious of his humble origins, in Sallust and in Plutarch, is absent from The Wounds of Civil War.3 In Lodge, both Marius and Sulla speak with an undifferentiated Marlovian rhetoric, imitating Tamburlaine: s c i l l a . Tut, Scilla’s sparkling eyes should dim with clear The burning brands of their consuming light, And master fancy with a forward mind, And mask repining fear with awful power. For men of baser metal and conceit Cannot conceive the beauty of my thought. I, crowned with wreath of warlike state, Imagine thoughts more greater than a crown, And yet befitting well a Roman mind. (2.1.10–18) m a r i u s. Thou wretched stepdame of my fickle state Are these the guerdons of the greatest minds, To make them hope and then betray their hap, To make them climb to overthrow them straight? … Untrodden paths my feet shall rather trace Than wrest my succors from inconstant hands. (2.2.46–9, 52–53)4

The primary difference between the aspiring Sulla and the aspiring Marius, as Lodge presents them, is that, at the time of speaking these lines, one is at the top of Fortune’s wheel and one at the bottom. Marius, confident that ‘magnanimity can never fear’, looks forward to another reversal of fortune, where ‘nature, that has lift my throne so high’, will once more ‘witness Marius’ triumphs’ and Sulla may ‘on sudden’ lose his head (2.2.30, 56–7). Lodge follows the general outlines of Appian’s narrative (Book I, paras. 55–104, pp. 34–63 in the 1578 translation). In Acts 1–3, Sulla invades Rome and Marius, defeated, goes into exile; Marius’s ally Cinna becomes consul and recalls Marius, whereupon Sulla flees Rome. In 4.1, Lodge paraphrases Appian closely, as Marius and Cinna ‘entred the Citie with the feare of all that receyved them’ and then ‘made spoyle of the contrary parte, without stoppe’, ordering ‘this decree’: a revocation of all things that Sylla had done, whose friends and kinsfolke were killed, his house pulled downe, his goods confiscate, and he proclaymed enemie

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to his countrie, his wife and his daughter with great daunger escaped:Â€ finally, there was all sortes of miseries and mischiefe that could be invented.5

For Appian and for Lodge, there is no moral distinction between Marius and Sulla, who behave in exactly the same way when they are in power. Appian says of Marius and his allies that they were willing to invade their country by violence, just as Sulla had done, but ‘lacking [an] army, they tarried till occasion might serve’; and of Sulla, at his moment of triumph, as Marius flees the city: Thys was the first army of Citizens that invaded the Countrey as enemies. Yet sedition ceased not by this trial of armes, for continuall invasions were made against Rome, the walls were beaten downe, and all other extremities of warre done, no reverence eyther of lawe, common wealthe, or Countrey, being able to restrayne the violent mindes.6

Lodge, like Appian, emphasizes the savagery with which both Marius and Sulla, intent on revenge, turn Rome into a charnel house. s c i l l a . I now am enter’d Rome in spite of force, And will so hamper all my cursed foes, As be he tribune, consul, lord or knight That hateth Scilla, let him look to die. (Wounds, 5.1.23–6) m a r i u s. Go, soldiers, seek out Bebius and his friends, Atilius, Numitorius, with the rest: Cut off their heads, for they did cross me once … I tell thee, Cinna, nature armeth beasts With just revenge, and lendeth in their kinds Sufficient warlike weapons of defense. If then by nature beasts revenge their wrong, Both heavens and nature grant me vengeance now. (4.1.55–7, 81–5)

Appian presents the ‘murthers of them that were counted enemies’ in vivid detail, where Lodge tends to be content with speeches promising bloodshed. Searchers ranne straighte aboute for to fynde their foes, and there was no regarde of Senator or Gentleman, nor no difference made … there was neyther reverence of the Gods, nor respect of men, or any matter made of murther, but all bent to cruell actes, and from actes to horrible sightes, killing, crueltie, and cuttyng off the heads of them that were kylled, to the feare & astonishment of the beholders, making thereof most miserable shewe. (Auncient Historie, p. 44)

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There is nothing in The Wounds of Civil War as powerful as the tableau of the father who has killed his son and the son who has killed his father in Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI, or the horrifying scene in that play where Queen Margaret taunts the helpless Duke of York. The principal spokesman for traditional Roman values in The Wounds of Civil War is Mark Anthony (grandfather of Shakespeare’s Antony), an honest counsellor who is allied to neither faction and retains his integrity throughout, warning both Sulla and Cinna of the possible consequences of their rash actions. O Rome, poor Rome, unmeet for these misdeeds, I see contempt of heavens will breed a cross … O fellow citizens, be more advis’d.

(3.1.73–4, 77)

The words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ recur again and again throughout the play:Â€225 times altogether, 46 times in 1.1 alone and 11 times in speeches by Anthony in that scene, where he sets forth the plight of ‘sad declining Rome’ in addressing Sulla. a n t hon y. What wars are these thou stirrest up in Rome? What fire is this is kindled by thy wrath? A fire that must be quench’d by Roman’s blood, A war that will confound our empery … But thou dost wound and raze thy city Rome. (1.1.247, 255–8, 278)

Sulla’s response, curtly rejecting Anthony’s plea, associates Rome with an entirely different set of values:Â€honour, glory, conquest, the sword of war. s c i l l a . So farewell, Anthony, honor calls me hence; Scilla will fight for glory and for Rome. (1.1.286–7)

Marius’s first speech in the play, earlier in this scene, cites Rome seven times, always in terms of ‘warlike Rome’, ‘empire’, a life spent ‘bringing honors into Rome’ on the battlefield. Sulla similarly boasts of ‘all the honors I have done to Rome’, the conquests he has brought ‘as tributaries unto famous Rome’ (1.1.121, 127, 135, 161, 172). At the end of the scene, Anthony explicitly contrasts former triumphs and the present state of ‘civil discords’Â€– rather like John of Gaunt in Richard II lamenting ‘that England that was wont to conquer others /Hath made a shameful conquest of itself’ (R2, 2.1.65–6). a n t hon y. Unhappy Rome and Romans thrice accurst That oft with triumphs fill’d your city walls

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Self-inflicted wounds With kings and conquering rulers of the world, Now to eclipse in top of all thy pride Through civil discords and domestic broils. O Romans, weep the tears of sad lament. (1.1.298–303)

Later in the play, Anthony protests ineffectually against ‘the ruin of this city Rome’, as Roman swords are drawn ‘to conquer … Roman citizens’ (2.1.168–70; 4.1.35). Anthony, appealing to Sulla in 2.1, invokes the ‘care of Rome’ as a political ideal, as well as the tears ‘that Roman matrons weep’ at the outbreak of civil war (2.1.162, 172). Both Marius and Sulla are presented as potential tyrants, deaf to counsel and indifferent to the rule of law and the common good. When Marius enters in triumph, accompanied by soldiers who ‘waste and murder all they meet’, Anthony flees in despair. ‘Where states oppress’d by cruel tyrants be, /Old Anthony, there is no place for thee’ (4.1.31, 44–5). In portraying ‘old Anthony’ as helpless observer of Rome’s self-inflicted wounds, Lodge presents a Rome in apparently irreversible decline. Other dramatists, following Tacitus and Sallust, will present the ‘desire of domination and rule’ as in itself corrupting.7 Many of the references to Rome in the play are associated with exile from or return to the native city. Those who are victorious are generally presented as defying or violating traditional Roman values, while the defeated uphold these values, with stoic acceptance of their allotted fate. Young Marius, after his father’s offstage death and the defeat of his allies, refuses to surrender to Sulla and beg for mercy, but commits suicide, ‘to let thee see a constant Roman die’, choosing ‘to die /With fame, in spite of Scilla’s tyranny’ (5.3.82, 88–9). Sulla’s wife and daughter, when captured by Marius, are willing, like Cleopatra, to die ‘after the high Roman fashion’: c or n e l i a . Dry up those tears, and like a Roman maid Be bold and silent till our foe have said … f u lv i a . We wait our ends with Roman constancy.

(4.1.287–8, 335; AC, 4.15.91)

T i t us’s Rom e The words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ recur nearly as often in Titus Andronicus as in The Wounds of Civil WarÂ€– ‘Rome’ a hundred times altogether, fiftythree times in the opening scene, ‘Roman’ twenty-six times. The play is packed with classical allusions, especially to Ovid and Virgil, and to

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an unusual extent in Shakespeare, its characters frequently spout Latin phrases:Â€ ad manes fratrum (1.1.101), suum cuique (1.1.284), sit fas aut nefas (2.1.134), per Stygia, par manes vehor (2.2.136), Magni dominator poli, /Tam lentus audis scelera, tam lentus vides? (4.1.81–2), Terras Astraea reliquitÂ€(4.3.4). Even the non-Roman characters in the play have received an education in the Roman classical texts, equivalent to that available at Stratford grammar school. Intent on rape, the Goth Demetrius quotes Seneca and Horace to justify his actions, right or wrong, and the brothers Demetrius and Chiron later in the play show both a familiarity with the standard Latin texts learned at school and an inability to understand them. Titus, threatening revenge, sends verses from Horace to his enemies. de m e t r i u s. What’s here? A scroll, and written round about? Let’s see: [reads] Integer vitae, scelerisque purus, Non eget Mauri iaculis, nec arcu. c h i r on. O, ’tis a verse in Horace, I know it well: I read it in the grammar long ago. a a r on. Ay, justÂ€– a verse in Horace, right, you have it. [aside] Now what a thing it is to be an ass. Here’s no sound jest! The old man has found their guilt, And sends them weapons wrapped about with lines That wound beyond their feeling to the quick.8

The clever, amoral Machiavel Aaron immediately recognizes the relevance of the Horatian text (‘the man of upright life and free from crime does not need the javelins or bows of the Moor’), but the foolish young Goths fail to appreciate the jest or to realize that they are being insulted. Like Hieronymo in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, Titus speaks in Latin in moments of high emotion, quoting Seneca’s Hippolytus on how the heavens fail to see or hear when dreadful crimes are committed on earth. Both Lavinia and Titus’s grandson are well schooled in the classics. The young Boy has been taught by his aunt Lavinia (‘Cornelia’ is a reference to the mother of the Gracchi, exemplary in educating her sons in the tradition of Roman republicanism). Ah, boy, Cornelia never with more care Read to her sons than she hath read to thee Sweet poetry and Tully’s Orator.

(4.1.12–14)9

Unable to communicate other than through gestures, the maimed, ravished Lavinia, with her tongue and hands cut off, shows her father and

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uncle a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and turns the pages until she finds the right extract in ‘the tragic tale of Philomel’ (4.1.47–53). The story of Philomela, Tereus, and Procne is one of several Roman narratives quoted or re-enacted by characters in Titus Andronicus, in which the action is ‘patterned by’ (4.1.57) that described by a Roman author:Â€others are the seduction of Dido and her desertion by Aeneas, the rape of Lucretia, and the death of Virginia, killed by her father Virginius. The characters in Shakespeare’s play not only are conscious of their classical precedents, but cite them to make sense of their own predicament. t i t u s. Was it well done of rash Virginius To slay his daughter with his own right hand, Because she was enforced, stained, and deflowered? (5.3.36–8)

In the play’s ‘overloading with classical allusion’, the ‘sheer amount of learning displayed’ in Titus Andronicus, it is, as several critics have noted, self-evidently ‘the work of a young man’ relatively inexperienced in writing Â� for the stage. Yet, as we shall see, Shakespeare’s rewriting of Roman myth in Titus Andronicus is complex, embodying a critique of traditional Roman values.10 The Roman state in Titus Andronicus is a Rome in termiÂ�nal decline, torn apart by contradictions within its governing ideology. Titus Andronicus differs from Shakespeare’s later plays in its vague and sometimes inconsistent treatment of Roman history. As Terence Spencer says, the events of the play ‘cannot be placed at any known period of Roman history’, though it appears to be set some time in the later empire, when Rome has been threatened by ‘wars against the barbarous Goths’ and, after the death of the unnamed reigning Emperor, three candidates present their rival claims to be crowned with ‘the imperial diadem of Rome’ (1.1.6, 28).11 In a prose ‘History of Titus Andronicus, The Renowned Roman General’, a chap-book dating from the eighteenth century, the Emperor is named as Theodosius (fourth century AD):Â€ ‘When the Roman Empire was grown to its Height … in the Time of Theodosius, a barbarous Northern People out of Swedeland, Denmark, and Gothland, came into Italy … [and] overrun it with Fire and Sword.’ However, in all probability, the narrative in the chap-book (which claims to be ‘translated from the Italian’) is not Shakespeare’s source, but written afterwards. In the chap-book, Theodosius marries the Queen of the Goths, who ‘being an imperious Woman, and of a haughty Spirit, would govern him as she pleased, and enslave the noble Empire to Strangers’, and then the Queen and her Moorish lover murder ‘the Emperor’s only Son’, betrothed

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to Lavinia.12 The first two chapters of the chap-book and Act I of Titus Andronicus present entirely different narratives, with virtually nothing in common; after that, Chapters 3–6 of the chap-book and Acts 2–5 of the play tell basically the same story, with some minor discrepancies. The victorious general Titus Andronicus is a fictional figure, as are the two sons of the deceased emperor, Saturninus and Bassianus, each, with an army of followers, striving ‘ambitiously for rule and empery’ (1.1.9). There was an Emperor Bassianus, who murdered his brother Geta, with whom he ruled jointly after the death of their father Severus, and it is possible that Shakespeare took the name Bassianus from A Chronicle, conteyning the lives of tenne Emperours of Rome (1577), giving the name Bassianus to the murdered brother rather than to his rival.13 In Act 1 of Titus Andronicus, the two rival claimants confront one another. Saturninus bases his claim on primogeniture, threatening civil war if the ‘successive title’ is denied him, where Bassianus, the younger son, argues from ‘desert’ and ‘justice’ that the empire should be awarded in ‘pure election’, as manifestation of the ‘freedom’ of the Roman people (1.1.1–17).14 Marcus Andronicus, speaking as Tribune representing ‘the people of Rome’, tells the two claimants that a popular assembly has chosen Titus as emperor, in recognition of his victory over the Goths. m a rc u s. Know that the people of Rome, for whom we stand A special party, have by common voice In election for the Roman empery Chosen Andronicus, surnamed Pius For many good and great deserts to Rome. (1.1.20–4)

In terms of Roman history, Marcus’s speech is very questionable. The institution of tribunes is associated with the republic rather than the empire, in which the emperor assumed all the powers formerly exercised by tribunes. The office of tribune continued to exist in the empire, but tribunes then were virtually powerless, and could neither elect emperors nor act as judges decreeing life or death, as they do in 3.1, ‘more hard than stones’ (3.1.45) and treating Titus with contempt. Titus Andronicus, like 1 Henry VI, is a collaborative play. It is generally agreed that Act I, with its emphasis on ceremony and frequent repetitions of the words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’, is by George Peele. In its stylistic characteristics, Act I of Titus Andronicus is much closer to other plays by Peele than to the rest of the play or to early Shakespeare generally. As well as ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’, terms such as ‘honour’, ‘fortune’, ‘virtue’, ‘right’,

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‘grace’, and ‘favour’ are repeated in formulaic utterance again and again. In one speech, ‘honour’ occurs three times in seven lines (‘with honour’s spoils’, ‘by honour of his name’, ‘honour and adore’).15 If we examine the references to ‘Rome’ in Act I, certain patterns emerge. The speech of a Captain before Titus’s first entrance is characteristic: c a p t a i n. Romans, make way:Â€the good Andronicus Patron of virtue, Rome’s best champion, Successful in the battles that he fights, With honour and with fortune is returned From whom he circumscribed with his sword And brought to yoke the enemies of Rome. (1.1.67–72)

This formal, ceremonial utterance, associating Titus with ‘virtue’, ‘honour’, and ‘fortune’, presents Titus as victorious warrior, proving his worth in battle, as does Marcus’s speech earlier in the scene. Titus’s ‘good and great deserts to Rome’ are attested by his many battles, defending ‘the cause of Rome’ and returning ‘bleeding … from the field’ (1.1.24, 32–5). Titus’s claims to ‘the Roman empery’ (1.1.22), like those of Marius and Sulla in The Wounds of Civil War, are wholly based on military prowess. From the outset of the play, victory is twinned with death, as is evident in the prominence in Act I of the tomb of the Andronici, the stage direction ‘two men bearing a coffin covered with black’, and Titus’s first line ‘Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds’ (1.1.73). Of Titus’s ‘five-andtwenty valiant sons’ (1.1.82), we learn, twenty-one have died in battle, and in the course of Act I, there are two further violent deaths, of Titus’s son Mutius and Tamora’s son Alarbus. The other references to Rome in ActÂ€I, aside from direct addresses to ‘Romans’ six times in speeches, mostly celeÂ�brate Titus’s ‘return to Rome’ (variants of this phrase recur six times within two hundred lines) or concern the main point at issue in the opening scene, the settlement of the state. Marcus urges his brother Titus to ‘help to set a head on headless Rome’ (1.1.189), and, as we shall see, this is precisely what Titus fails to do. In Act V, the references to Rome, much less frequent (nineteen altogether, thirteen in 5.3), largely concern divisions afflicting the state and the hope of resolving them. In the play’s final scene, Marcus and a Roman Lord express their collective grief for the wounded state: m a rc u s. You sad-faced men, people and sons of Rome, By uproars severed …

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a r om a n l or d. Let Rome herself be bane unto herself. And she whom mighty kingdoms curtsy to, Like a forlorn and desperate castaway, Do shameful execution on herself! (5.3.66–7, 72–5)16

The speech by the Roman Lord, a choric figure, resembles the lament for ‘unhappy Rome’ by Mark Anthony in The Wounds of Civil War, as well as passages by Tacitus and Sallust discussed in Chapter 1:Â€ Rome, with its proud history of conquest, has now turned its weapons on itself. This speech goes on to compare the calamities descending on Rome to the fall of Troy, as narrated by ‘our ancestor’ Aeneas in Book II of the Aeneid:Â€‘Or who hath brought the fatal engine in /That gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound’ (5.3.79, 85–6). At this point in the play, the stage is littered with six bodies, including the reigning Emperor and Empress. Marcus’s speech, addressed to the Roman people, like the later long expository speech by ‘Rome’s young captain’ Lucius, is an attempt to restore order, healing the wounded state. m a rc u s. O let me teach you how to knit again This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body. (5.3.69–71)

Critics have disagreed as to the extent to which such speeches and the acclamation of Lucius as emperor provide a note of reconciliation and closure, the hope, after these dread events, ‘to Order well the State’.17 Hammer blows of violence, mutilation, and desecration, in a play where a mother is fed a pie containing ‘the flesh that she herself had fed’ (5.3.61), tend to overwhelm any suggestions of hope for the future. In the Quarto and in most modern editions, the play, which begins with the solemn burial rites of the Andronici, ends with the savage punishment of the Goth Tamora and the Moor Aaron, denied burial and cast out from human bonds of kinship or pity: l uc i u s. As for that ravenous tiger, Tamora, No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed, No mournful bell shall ring her burial, But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey. Her life was beastly and devoid of pity, And being dead, let birds on her take pity. (5.3.194–9)18

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Self-inflicted wounds Rom a ns a n d B a r b a r i a ns

There are two moments in Act I where the word ‘Roman’ takes on ethical dimensions, and in both, Romans are contrasted with barbarians. ‘Barbarous’ and ‘barbarian’ are terms of exclusion, identifying a particular group as outsiders, a potential source of pollution. Those within the city, assumed to be the home of civilization, of the virtues associated with civility, are contrasted sharply with those outside the walls, a constant source of danger. Group solidarity is affirmed by casting out the outsider, stigmatized as bestial or less than human. The ‘barbarous Moor’ Aaron, whose ‘body’s hue, /Spotted, detested and abominable’, is the visible sign of his otherness, is, in the eyes of his Roman enemies, ‘this ravenous tiger, this accursed devil … inhuman dog, unhallowed slave’ (2.3.73–4, 78; 5.3.4–5, 14). ‘Barbarous Tamora’, Queen of the Goths, another ‘ravenous tiger’, when she rejects Lavinia’s plea to ‘show a woman’s pity’, is a ‘beastly creature’ worse than lions and ravens, who, unlike her, can show instincts of sympathy (2.3.118, 147–54, 182). Yet, again and again in Titus Andronicus, the comforting myth by which ‘culturally dominant nations fashion a self-image which casts them as guardians of civilization and arbiters of its attendant values’ is undermined.19 In Act I, Titus, while giving his sons slain in battle ‘burial amongst their ancestors’ (1.1.87), an act of piety uniting family and Roman state in a communal ritual, orders that Alarbus, Tamora’s eldest son, be made a human sacrifice. Tamora, turned later in the play into an implacable revenger, urges the claims of common humanity and parental affection in pleading to Titus to be merciful: And, if thy sons were ever dear to thee, O, think my sons to be as dear to me … O, if to fight for king and commonweal Were piety in thine, it is in these. Andronicus, stain not thy tomb with blood. (1.1.110–11, 117–19)

Tamora’s response to Titus’s stern rejection of her plea interrogates the claims of ‘Andronicus, surnamed Pius’ and the Romans generally to piety in their behaviour. t a mor a . [r i s i ng] O cruel, irreligious piety! c h i r on. Was never Scythia so barbarous? de m e t r i u s. Oppose not Scythia to ambitious Rome. (1.1.23, 133–5)

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The bankruptcy of traditional Roman values, in which the patriarchal family is replicated in the state, is shown even more plainly later in Act I, when Titus kills his own son. After Bassianus claims Lavinia as lawfully betrothed to him, Titus’s sons Mutius and Lucius defend Bassianus’s claim, contested by Titus. The Andronici thus split into factions, and Titus disowns kinship with any members of his family who disobey his commands. m u t i u s. My lord, you pass not here. t i t u s. What, villain boy, barr’st me my way in Rome? [He kills him.] m u t i u s. Help, Lucius, help! l uc i u s. My lord, you are unjust, and more than so: In wrongful quarrel you have slain your son. t i t u s. Nor thou, nor he, are any sons of mine: My sons would never so dishonour me. Traitor, restore Lavinia to the emperor. l uc i u s. Dead if you will, but not to be his wife That is another’s lawful promised love. (1.1.294–303)

In some ways, Titus’s killing of his son resembles the act of Titus Manlius in Livy, who ordered his son’s execution for disobeying an order, except that Manlius did so as a calculated symbolic act, enforcing discipline, where Titus Andronicus’s action was impulsive and patently ‘unjust’. Titus Andronicus, acting like an archetypal patriarchal tyrant, sets his own honour, his fealty to Saturninus, whom he has just crowned as emperor, and the presumption that sons owe their father the same kind of unquestioning obedience that subjects owe their ruler, over any paternal affection or family loyalty. Titus’s brutal killing of his son in the name of pietas and honour, as Heather James points out, is an ‘act unthinkable in the Aeneid ’, a poem which is a constant presence in Acts I and II.20 In their confrontation with their father, the actions of Mutius and Lucius are no less disruptive and morally questionable than those of Titus. Lucius shows so little regard for Lavinia’s feelings that he says he would prefer her ‘dead’ to being married to anyone but Bassianus. But later in this scene, where Marcus upholds traditional Roman values and family solidarity, characterizing Titus’s behaviour as ‘impiety’ (1.1.360), it is clear that Titus, deaf to reason, is in the wrong. All who dare to disagree with him are his ‘foes’, ‘traitors’ (1.1.354, 371), no longer Romans or members of his family, as, flatly contradicting his behaviour earlier in the scene, he refuses to allow Mutius burial in the family tomb.

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Self-inflicted wounds m a rc u s. O Titus, see! See what thou hast done! In a bad quarrel slain a virtuous son. t i t u s. No, foolish tribune, no. No son of mine, Nor thou, nor these, confederates in the deed That hath dishonoured all our familyÂ€– Unworthy brother and unworthy sons. (1.1.346–51)

Marcus ultimately convinces Titus grudgingly to relent and allow the burial, though Titus continues to feel himself ‘dishonoured’. m a rc u s. Suffer thy brother Marcus to inter His noble nephew here in virtue’s nest, That died in honour and in Lavinia’s cause. Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous. (1.1.380–3, 390)

Marcus’s assumption is that the Roman virtues symbolized by the family tomb and the rituals of burialÂ€– honour, virtue, nobility of character and of birth, and the sanctity of family relationships are all evoked in four linesÂ€– are incompatible with barbarity. However, the deaths of Mutius and Alarbus, like the horrors to follow in Acts 2–5, show that Romans are no less capable of appalling acts of violence and cruelty than those they consider barbarous. In many respects, Titus Andronicus reads like a trial run for King Lear. Like Lear, Titus is an old man, lacking in self-knowledge and accustomed to being obeyed, who makes a series of mistakes in judgement early in the play for which he is punished disproportionately. Where Lear seeks to shed his powers while retaining the name of king, Titus refuses the empire when it is offered him, on the grounds that his ‘age and feebleness’ make him unfit for the ‘trouble’ and responsibility of rule (1.1.190–2). Then he makes matters worse by awarding the throne to the manifestly unworthy Saturninus, whose response is to treat Titus and his family with contempt and ingratitude, disavowing the proposed alliance with Lavinia to marry Tamora:Â€‘No, Titus, no, the emperor needs her not /Nor thou, nor thee, nor any of thy stock’ (1.1.304–5). Titus disregards the sound counsel of Marcus, as Lear does with Kent, showing throughout Act I ‘a soldierly obliviousness to what anyone says to him’, the unthinking rigidity of a man who ‘ever hath but slenderly known himself’. Where Lear rejects his daughter, disclaiming all ‘paternal care’Â€– ‘We /Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see /That face of hers again’Â€– Titus kills his son as though Mutius were ‘an impediment that must be removed, like an impediment

Scenes of blood and horror

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in war’, and stubbornly denies any kinship with his remaining sons and his brother.21 In Deborah Warner’s 1987 production, Brian Cox played Titus in Act I as a gruff, battle-scarred soldier ‘trained to kill for Rome’, and ‘out of touch with politics and people (including Mutius and Lavinia, who were mere objects to him)’. By initially presenting Titus as ‘a spiritual bankrupt’, Warner’s production made his subsequent journey into tragic awareness more convincing.22 Sc e n e s of Bl o od a n d Hor ror The most problematical aspect of Titus Andronicus is its incongruous combination of extreme, sickening violence and ornate, elaborate language, both seemingly immoderate. Coleridge condemned the play as catering to the baser instincts of the groundlings, ‘obviously intended to excite vulgar audiences by its scenes of blood and horrorÂ€– to our ears shocking and disgusting’.23 The element of visual spectacle, horrific in nature, is apparent in such stage directions in the Folio as ‘Enter the Empresse Sonnes, with Lavinia, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, and ravisht’, ‘He cuts off Titus hand’, and ‘Enter Titus Andronicus with a knife, and Lavinia with a Bason’ (to collect blood from Chiron and Demetrius, butchered on stage). Lavinia’s entry, maimed and mute, is followed by a long, poetic speech from Marcus, which critics have found puzzling in its ‘bizarre conflict of rhetoric and referent’: m a rc u s. Alas, a crimson river of warm blood, Like to a bubbling fountain stirred with wind, Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips, Coming and going with thy honey breath … Ah, now thou turn’st away thy face for shame, And notwithstanding all this loss of blood, As from a conduit with three issuing spouts, Yet do thy cheeks look red as Titan’s face, Blushing to be encountered with a cloud. (2.4.22–5, 28–32)24

Recent productions have emphasized the gore, seeing the element of violence in the play as potentially attractive to an audience used to seeing slasher films. The 2006 Globe production put out a press release claiming that members of the audience have fainted at the on-stage slaughter of Tamora’s two sons, and reviews included publicity photos of the two bodies trussed up, with Titus grinning maniacally, or Lavinia covered in blood.

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The rape of Lavinia by Tamora’s brutal sons Chiron and Demetrius is not shown on stage. After Tamora scornfully rejects her pleas for mercy, Lavinia is dragged offstage, to reappear, horribly mutilated, later in Act II. In the interim, two more of Titus’s children, Quintus and Martius, are undone by falling into a pit prepared for them by Aaron. When Saturninus, led to the spot by Aaron, finds the two young Andronici in the pit, along with the bloody corpse of Bassianus, the Emperor, egged on by Tamora, immediately jumps to the conclusion that the two young men have killed Bassianus, though there is no reliable evidence to back up this conclusion. The condemnation of Quintus and Martius, allowed no opportunity to speak in their defence, is plainly an abuse of power by the Emperor, even if Saturninus has not colluded in Tamora’s plot to destroy the Andronici. When Titus protests, the Emperor cuts him short: t a mor a . What, are they in this pit? O wondrous thing! How easily murder is discovered … t i t u s. [k n e e l i ng] High emperor, upon my feeble knee I beg this boon with tears not lightly shed: That this fell fault of my accursed sons, Accursed if the fault be proved in themÂ€– s at u r n i n u s. If it be proved? You see it is apparent … Let them not speak a word:Â€the guilt is plain. (2.3.286–92, 301)25

After 2.3, Lavinia does not have another line to speak in the play, but in Acts 3 and 4, her maimed, silent figure is the centre of the action. Her entry, with ‘her hands cut off and her tongue cut out’, is accompanied by callous joking by the two giggling rapists, a moment of black comedy which intensifies the horror. c h i r on. Go home, call for sweet water, wash thy hands. de m e t r i u s. She hath no tongue to call, nor hands to wash, And so let’s leave her to her silent walks. c h i r on. And ’twere my cause, I should go hang myself. de m e t r i u s. If thou hadst hands to help thee knit the cord. (2.4.6–10)

In performance, the spectacle of Lavinia’s mutilated body remains before our eyes, a painful visual image which Marcus and, in a later scene, Titus and Lucius are unable to interpret:Â€‘Speak, Lavinia … Speak, gentle sister, who hath martyred thee?’ (3.1.67, 82). The forcible severing of the means of communication and the consequent failure of understanding are central concerns in Marcus’s speech and in the play generally.

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m a rc u s. Shall I speak for thee? Shall I say ’tis so? O that I knew thy heart, and knew the beast, That I might rail at him to ease my mind! Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped, Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is. (2.4.33–7)

The mutilation of Lavinia is not only an attempt by the rapists to ‘make her sure’ (2.3.187) and escape detection, but to deprive her of her identity, deny her humanity, as expressed through the agency of voice and hands.26 Shakespeare’s rewriting of the Ovidian myth of Philomela allows Lavinia to regain the agency denied her, and also allows Titus to find a way out of the utter bleakness of despair, exemplified in his initial reaction when he sees his mutilated daughter. t i t u s. What shall I do, Now I behold thy lively body so? Thou hast no hands to wipe away thy tears, Nor tongue to tell me who hath martyred thee … What shall we do? (3.1.105–8, 134)

Aaron is the first of the characters to mention the myth of Philomela, in outlining the plan of ‘blood and revenge’ in lines addressed to Tamora: a a r on. This is the day of doom for Bassianus, His Philomel must lose her tongue today, Thy sons make pillage of her chastity And wash their hands in Bassianus’ blood. (2.3.42–5)

In the Ovidian story, Tereus, described several times as ‘barbarous’, violating all natural relations, rapes his wife’s sister, overcome with lust. When Philomela threatens to proclaim his guilt, moving the very woods and rocks to pity, he cuts off her tongue, but she is eventually able to reveal the identity of the rapists by weaving it into a tapestry.27 In the second explicit reference to the Ovidian narrative, Marcus guesses at what might have happened, but he sees no way of identifying the perpetrators. m a rc u s. But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue … A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met, And he hath cut those pretty fingers off, That could have better sewed than Philomel. (2.4.26–7, 41–3)

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The Ovidian narrative, like Titus Andronicus, ends with an act of violent revenge in which the avenger becomes no less barbarous, no less a violator of pietas and the ordinary ties of kinship than the original criminal. Procne, Philomela’s sister, comes to realize that her husband has raped and mutilated her sister and then the two women exact a horrible revenge by killing Itys, the child of Tereus and Procne, and feeding him to his father. In 4.1, when Lavinia produces a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, pointing to ‘the tragic tale of Philomel’, Titus finally recognizes that Lavinia had been ‘ravished and wronged as Philomela was’. Then, guiding a stick with her stumps, Lavinia writes the names of Chiron and Demetrius in the sand (4.1.47–52). The nature of Titus’s revenge, patterned on that of Procne and Philomela, is withheld until Act 5:Â€‘For worse than Philomel you used my daughter, /And worse than Procne I will be revenged’ (5.2.194–5). In the earlier scene, Shakespeare draws on another Roman narrative, this time taken from Livy rather than Ovid, as Marcus invokes the parallel of Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman republic, in leading the surviving Andronici in a solemn oath. m a rc u s. My lord, kneel down with me; Lavinia, kneel; And kneel, sweet boy, the Roman Hector’s hope, [They kneel.] And swear with meÂ€– as, with the woeful fere And father of that chaste dishonoured dame, Lord Junius Brutus swore for Lucrece’ rapeÂ€– That we will prosecute by good advice Mortal revenge upon these traitorous Goths, And see their blood, or die with this reproach. (4.1.87–94)

Marcus’s oath dignifies their revenge as a response to the abuses of tyranny (in Ovid, Tereus is described several times as a tyrant), not only emphasizing Lucrece’s blameless chastity but appealing to shared notions of honour and Roman patriotism, in a call to arms against ‘these traitorous Goths’; but Titus’s revenge, when it comes, is the most unsettling of the play’s violent acts, far removed from any notions of Roman virtue. ‘i a m no t m a d, i k now t h e e w e l l e noug h’: t i t us’s r e v e ng e In Act 3 of the play, Titus, fallen precipitately from his former state as triumphant Roman warrior, suffers a series of devastating blows. The act begins with Titus abasing himself before the implacable Tribunes and

‘I am not mad, I know thee well enough’: Titus’s revenge

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Senators, who leave him lying prostrate, ignoring his plea to spare his sons, unjustly condemned to death. t i t u s. Hear me, grave fathers; noble tribunes, stay! For pity of my age, whose youth was spent In dangerous wars while you securely slept; For all my blood in Rome’s great quarrel shed … Let my tears staunch the earth’s dry appetite; My sons’ sweet blood will make it shame and blush. (3.1.1–4, 14–15)

Titus sees his suffering as to some extent educative, correcting false perceptions of the society he lives in, and, like Lear at this stage, he considers himself more sinned against than sinning. t i t u s. 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. (3.1.53–6)

In rapid succession, he is confronted by ‘consuming sorrow’ (3.1.61) in the destruction of his remaining family:Â€the condemnation of his two sons, the savage mutilation of his daughter, and the exile of his one remaining son, Lucius. In this scene, with its ‘miseries’ that ‘are more than can be borne’ (3.1.244), Titus’s speeches attain a tragic dignity, brought out in powerful performances by Laurence Olivier in 1955 and Brian Cox in 1987. Marcus, the voice of reason and moderation, urges Titus to try to control his outbursts of emotion and not ‘break into these deep extremes’. t i t u s. Is not my sorrow deep, having no bottom? Then be my passions bottomless with them. m a rc u s. But yet let reason govern thy lament. t i t u s. If there were reason for these miseries, Then into limits could I bind my woes. When heaven does weep, doth not the earth o’erflow? If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad … And would you have a reason for this coil? I am the sea. (3.1.217–3, 225–6)

Like Lear, Titus sees his own state of mind mirrored in the wild eruptions of the ‘fretful elements’ of the natural worldÂ€– ‘Rumble thy bellyful! Spit fire, spout rain!’ (King Lear, 3.1.4; 3.2.14)Â€ – and, like Lear, he descends into madness.

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At the end of 3.1, there is a distinct change in tone, with a movement from passive suffering to active revenge. Titus, turning away from fruitless sorrow, seeks to find a way to right his wrongs, without any clear sense of how he can make his injuries ‘be returned again / Even in their throats that hath committed them’ (3.1.274–5). Titus’s first attempts at revenge are ineffective. He sends the child Lucius with a threatening message to Chiron and Demetrius in Latin verse, and then, muttering incoherently, he hands out arrows to his kinsmen, with messages addressed to various Roman gods, to shoot in the general direction of the court. As in The Spanish Tragedy, the underlying question throughout this part of the play is ‘Shall I have justice?’ (4.3.79). t i t u s. And sith there’s no justice in earth nor hell, We will solicit heaven and move the gods To send down Justice for to wreak our wrongs. (4.3.50–2)

Saturninus, brandishing the arrows shot by the Andronici, recognizes their import, and sees the actions of the mad Titus as a challenge to his authority. s at u r n i n u s. Was ever seen An emperor in Rome thus overborne, Troubled, confronted thus? … What’s this but libelling against the senate And blazoning our injustice everywhere? (4.4.1–3, 17–18)

When Saturninus learns that Lucius is about to invade Rome at the head of an army of Goths, his initial reaction is panic. Insecure in his hold on powerÂ€– Tamora has to remind him, ‘be thy thoughts imperious like thy name’Â€– the Emperor fears that ‘the citizens favour Lucius /And will revolt from me to succour him’. ’Tis he the common people love so much; Myself have often heard them say, When I have walked like a private man, That Lucius’ banishment was wrongfully, And they have wished that Lucius were their emperor. (4.4.72–6, 78–80)

Though the messenger bringing the news compares Lucius to Coriolanus, Lucius’s invasion is not presented as a violation of order and pietas, but as a potential restoration of order, like the attempt of Cordelia, with a French army, to regain the throne for Lear. Any distinction between civilized


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Romans and barbarous Goths is destabilized by the status of Tamora as adoptive Roman, ‘incorporate in Rome, /A Roman now adopted happily’ (1.1.467–8), Empress of Rome, and the dominant figure in the Emperor’s court. In Act 5, the ‘warlike Goths’, united in loyalty to Lucius, demonstrate their respect for ‘high exploits and honourable deeds’, the traditional markers of Roman virtus (4.4.109; 5.1.11). The behaviour of Aaron serves further to destabilize any simple opposition of Roman virtue and barbarian wickedness. Aaron the Moor, whose blackness is mentioned again and again in the play, is the ultimate, unassimilable outsider, who revels in his transgressive villainy and, like the other characters, equates the physical signs of blackness with evil. a a r on. O, how this villainy Does fat me with the very thoughts of it. Let fools do good and fair men call for grace, Aaron will have his soul black like his face. (3.1.203–6)

However, Aaron is by a considerable margin the most clever and resourceful of the characters in the play, and the defiant pleasure he takes in his catalogue of wicked deeds can elicit, at the very least, a grudging admiration from the audience. Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things As willingly as one would kill a fly, And nothing grieves me heartily indeed But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (5.1.141–4)

In a production directed by Antony Sher in post-apartheid South Africa, the audience burst into spontaneous applause after one of Aaron’s speeches, ‘yelling their approval and solidarity’, in much the way that James Baldwin remembers as a boy in Harlem cheering the Indians in cowboy films.28 In Act 4, Aaron, on learning that Tamora, his mistress, has given birth to a black child, protects the child against the attempt by Chiron, Demetrius, and the Nurse to kill it secretly and hide the evidence of ‘our empress’ shame and stately Rome’s disgrace’ (4.2.61). To the Romans and Goths, the child’s black hue is ‘dismal … loathsome as a toad’, but to Aaron, the child is his ‘flesh and blood’, his ‘first-born son and heir’. To the Moor, defying his enemies, ‘coal-black is better than another hue’ (4.2.68–9, 86, 94, 101). Aaron’s nurturing instincts, contrasting sharply with Lucius’s order to ‘hang the child’ in its father’s sight (5.1.51), introduces

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‘a note of ordinary humanity’ into the play’s bleak conclusion.29 Though Lucius agrees to spare the child in return for a full confession from Aaron, the play gives no indication of the ultimate fate of the child. The confrontation of Lucius and Aaron in Act 5 suggests that no one group, Roman or non-Roman, has a monopoly on barbarous behaviour. Certainly, there is nothing more barbarous, cruel, or shocking than the cannibal feast in the play’s climactic scene. The slaughter of Chiron and Demetrius, like the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, is shown on stage. The two are bound and gagged, unable to speak, and in the 2006 Globe production they were mounted upside down on pulleys, like animal carcasses. Lavinia, as Titus’s speech indicates, is involved in the ritual murder as Titus’s assistant: Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you: This one hand yet is left to cut your throats, Whilst that Lavinia ’tween her stumps doth hold The basin that receives your guilty blood.

(5.2.180–3)

Titus’s ‘fearful words’ (5.2.168) as triumphant revenger are full of graphic detail, explicitly recalling the revenge of Procne and Philomel on Tereus. In Ovid’s narrative, a mother’s murder of her son is presented as particularly horrible, the breaking of a taboo. Ovid intensifies the pathos of the scene by having the unsuspecting child throw his arms around his mother and kiss her and then cry ‘mother, mother’ when he sees the knife and the mother’s fierce expression (like a tigress attacking a fawn). The two women then cut up the body, still warm and quivering with life, and throw it into a bubbling pot. Titus’s speech is no less vivid, sparing none of the gruesome details. Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust, And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste, And of the paste a coffin I will rear, And make three pasties of your shameful heads, And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam, Like to the earth swallow her own increase. This is the feast that I have bid her to.

(5.2.186–92)30

It is a convention of revenge tragedy that the revenger, acquiring a taste for blood, often sinks to the level of his adversaries. Imagery of feeding and devouring has been common throughout the play (the ravenous tiger, the blood-drinking pit), and in this scene Titus feeds his revenge, while


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Tamora, in full view of the audience and the courtiers, is made to ‘swallow her own increase’. s at u r n i n u s. Go, fetch them hither to us presently. t i t u s. Why, there they are, both baked in this pie, Whereof their mother daintily hath fed, Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred. (5.3.58–61)

Titus’s lines provide an implicit stage direction, since the audience has just seen Tamora and Saturninus eating the bloody banquet and, after these lines, see Tamora react in horror to the realization of what she has eaten, before Titus kills her. In some ways, the most disturbing aspect of the banquet scene is the casual, seemingly unmotivated murder of Lavinia. The rapid succession of deaths, with Tamora, Saturninus, and Titus dispatched within three lines, is in accordance with the conventions of revenge tragedy, with multiple deaths, one after another, in the final scene, often in a kind of ritual patterning, as in The Spanish Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy. Lavinia’s death is especially shocking because it is gratuitous and unexpected. t i t u s. Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, And with thy shame thy father’s sorrow die. [He kills her.] s at u r n i n u s. What hast thou done, unnatural and unkind? t i t u s. Killed her for whom my tears have made me blind. I am as woeful as Virginius was, And have a thousand times more cause than he To do this outrage, and now it is done. (5.3.45–51)

The parallel with Virginius, who killed his daughter to preserve her chastity, provides Titus with a motive:Â€the death restores her purity, removes the stain on the honour of the Andronici. By killing her in yet another ritual sacrifice, he is reasserting a patriarchal control over her, in accordance with the dominant Roman ideology, just as, earlier in the play, he had slain his son Mutius without hesitation.31 According to Brian Cox, the key to his performance was the moment, mapped out in early rehearsal, in which Titus, with Lavinia sitting on his knee, suddenly broke her neck ‘like a chicken’: As she was sitting there I realized that this image, this classic image of parent and child, was also an image of vulnerability and of potential brutality … It

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suddenly occurred to me that this would be perfect for breaking her neck, this close and this intimate. There was something about the image that was tender but at the same time ultimately brutal, and I started really from that point.32

Though some critics have found a positive element in the speeches of Lucius and Marcus after the bloodbath, a hope that Lucius, newly crowned Emperor, may be able ‘to restore justice to the corrupt city’, in performance the play tends to come across as bleak and despairing. As Cox puts it, commenting on the ‘visceral’ effect of the final scenes on the audience: There is no final forgiveness for Titus, no final forgiveness in the play. Its last image is of the casting out of Tamora’s body for the birds to peck at. All posÂ� sibility of progress is destroyed by man’s capacity for brutalization … It is a cruel play, deliberately cruel.33

If Titus Andronicus is unsparing in its exposure of the contradictions within the ideology of imperial and republican Rome, a state which equates virtus with bloodshed and conquest, it is no less unsparing in confronting the audience with their own flattering self-image and potential for violence.

Ch apter 4

‘Like a Colossus’:Â€Julius Caesar

F r i e n d s, Rom a ns, c ou n t r y m e n The words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ recur throughout Julius Caesar, as they do in Titus Andronicus, but here the terms generally carry an ethical import. ‘Noble/nobly/noblest’ is attached to ‘Roman’ six times, including the celebrated epitaph on Brutus, ‘This was the noblest Roman of them all’ (5.5.69). In one speech in 5.3, Brutus uses ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ in three successive lines, each of them associating Rome with standards of conduct, seen as remaining applicable even in dark times. Brutus here pays tribute to Cassius and Titinius, both of whom, taking ‘a Roman’s part’, have committed suicide on the battlefield. bru t u s. Are yet two Romans living such as these? The last of all the Romans, fare thee well: It is impossible that ever Rome Should breed thy fellow. (5.3.89, 98–101)

Throughout the play, ‘Roman’ is a highly charged term implying possession of moral qualitiesÂ€– constancy, fidelity, perseverance, self-discipline, respect for tradition, a sense of honourÂ€– or a claim that others lack such qualities. In Act I, nearly all mention of ‘Rome’ or ‘Roman’ has persuasive intent, used by enemies of Caesar to evoke a tradition of republican independence and self-reliance, while pouring scorn on those who fail to live up to these ideals. The tribunes Flavius and Murellus, loyal to the defeated Pompey, are contemptuous of the populace who ‘make holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph’. m u r e l l u s. Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home? What tributaries follow him to Rome To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels? You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things, 79

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‘Like a Colossus’:Â€Julius Caesar O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, Knew you not Pompey?

(1.1.31–8)

Like Caska (who identifies himself as ‘a Roman’ to his fellow conspirators), the tribunes have a low opinion of ‘the vulgar’, though, in keeping with republican principles, they inveigh against ‘servile fearfulness’ that turns Romans into bondmen (1.1.71, 76). In the temptation scene, where Cassius attempts to persuade Brutus to join the conspiracy, each mention of ‘Rome’ or ‘Roman’ suggests that to be a true Roman is to be a republican. The rule of ‘one man’, Cassius argues eloquently, is antipathetic to the ‘noble bloods’ of Romans, a shameful violation of nature and tradition: Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed That he is grown so great? Age, thou are shamed! Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods! … When could they say, till now, that talked of Rome, That her wide walks encompassed but one man? … O, you and I have heard our fathers say There was a Brutus once that would have brooked Th’eternal devil to keep his state in Rome As easily as a king. (1.2.148–50, 153–4, 157–60)

Brutus, responding to the appeal to family tradition in ‘our fathers’ and ‘breed’, proclaims to his ‘noble friend’ Cassius that he shares his republican principles, as a descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus, who expelled the kings from Rome. bru t u s. Brutus had rather be a villager Than to repute himself a son of Rome Under these hard conditions as this time Is like to lay upon us. (1.2.170–4)

‘Noble’ to Brutus, Cassius, and their fellow conspirators is double-edged, as a term partly moral and partly class-based:Â€republicanism, with its distrust of the fickle populace, is the political philosophy of the Roman aristocracy. Cassius in 1.3 tells Caska that ‘some certain of the noblest-minded Romans’ have joined with him in ‘an enterprise /Of honourable dangerous consequence’ (1.2.122–4):Â€here, nobility is a characteristic of the mind and of the blood, the property of an elite, conscious of honour. Caska’s account of the offer of the crown to Caesar, one of the few prose passages in Shakespeare’s text, is full of contempt for ‘the common herd’, ‘the

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tag-rag people’. ‘Sweaty nightcaps’, like ‘as they do the players in the theatre’, gives the Roman populace an Elizabethan colouring. c a s k a . And still as he refused it the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chapped hands, and threw up their sweaty nightcaps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar; for he swooned and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air. (1.2.242–9, 257–9, 263)

Cassius, addressing Caska in 1.3, uses a different form of persuasion as, proudly asserting his own superiority to common superstitious fears, he seeks to shame Caska. Rather than praising Caska as a true and honourable Roman, Cassius dispraises him, leaving Caska with an awkward choice:Â€either he shares those qualities that ‘should be in a Roman’ or he confesses his unworthiness and lack of moral courage. c a s s i u s. You are dull, Caska, and those sparks of life That should be in a Roman you do want Or else you use not. (1.3.57–9)

A later speech by Cassius contrasts the present and the past, heroic Roman tradition and a degenerate modernity, in a manner familiar in Tacitus and Sallust. As Coppélia Kahn has noted, Roman republicanism is gendered masculine:Â€again, Caska’s consent to these remarks is virtually compelled, or he will convict himself as ‘womanish’, weak and irresolute.1 c a s k a . ’Tis Caesar that you mean. Is it not, Cassius? c a s s i u s. Let it be who it is:Â€for Romans now Have thews and limbs like to their ancestors: But woe the while, our fathers’ minds are dead, And we are governed with our mothers’ spirits: Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish. (1.3.79–84)

Cassius and Caska then join in proclaiming their republican defiance against tyranny and bondage, asserting the sovereignty of the will, though throughout the scene it has been evident that Cassius has been moulding the will of Caska, in accordance with his belief that ‘honourable mettle may be wrought /From that it is disposed’ (1.2.308–9). c a s s i u s. That part of tyranny that I do bear I can shake off at pleasure. [Thunder still.]

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‘Like a Colossus’:Â€Julius Caesar cask a. So can I. So any bondman in his own hand bears The power to cancel his own captivity. (1.3.99–102)

These lines apply equally well to tyrannicide and suicide, as ways of attaining freedom from dishonourable subservience. Cassius goes on to accuse the Romans of his day of complicity in their imprisonment. Again, the rhetoric virtually compels Caska’s consent, unless he admits to being a ‘willing bondman’. c a s s i u s. And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf But that he sees the Romans are but sheep. He were no lion, were not the Romans hinds. Those that with haste will make a mighty fire Begin it with weak straws. What trash is Rome? What rubbish, and what offal? (1.3.103–9, 113)

The use of the magic words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ by Brutus later in the play is similarly designed to persuade. In his funeral oration in 3.2 (introduced by the words ‘Romans, countrymen and lovers, hear me for my cause’), Brutus’s studied antitheses, in carefully balanced clauses, turn ‘the good of Rome’ into an overriding principle that takes precedence over any merely private feelings of friendship. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:Â€not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more … With this I depart, that as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death.

(3.2.13–14, 20–2, 44–7)

As critics have often noted, there is a certain frigidity in Brutus’s patterned oratory:Â€ this is rhetoric by the book, the words of a practised speaker following the standard rules. In denying his own emotional ties to a dear friend, any sense of loyalty and mutual obligation, Brutus is in effect stripping the term ‘love’ of any meaning. Unlike Antony in the oration that follows, Brutus’s appeal to the audience is based on formal logic:Â€not A but B, if A then B. The syllogistic form is overt in a passage that seeks to control audience response. As Kenneth Burke says, ‘he told them to choose, then stated the issue in such a way that there was no choice. Those that love Rome, he said, must agree that Caesar should have been killed, Those that do not love Rome, should object’.2

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Who is here so base, that would be a bondman? If any, speak, for him I have offended. Who is here so rude, that would not be a Roman? If any, speak, for him I have offended … I pause for a reply … Then none have I offended.

(3.2.29–36)

The logic here is fallacious, and the shallowness of Brutus’s appeal to shared republican sentiments is brought out by the shouts of the plebians. 3 pl e be i a n. Let him be Caesar. 4 pl e be i a n. Caesar’s better parts Shall be crown’d in Brutus. (3.2.51–2)

In the scene where the conspirators meet to make plans, Brutus’s citations of ‘Roman’ qualities can be seen as an attempt to convince himself as well as others. In arguing against the imposition of an oath by which they would ‘swear our resolution’, Brutus claims that true Romans need no bond other than the invisible cords of honour. What need we any spur but our own cause To prick us to redress? What other bond Than secret Romans that have spoke the word And will not palter? (2.1.112, 122–5)

The assumption here is that their cause is just, their motivation entirely high-minded and disinterested, as they seek redress for ‘the time’s abuse’ (2.1.114), righting wrongs. ‘Every Roman’ who is worthy of the name, Brutus claims, is by his ancestry alone committed to an ideal of honourable behaviour, instinctively recoiling from any taint of dishonour or compulsion. Every drop of blood That every Roman bears, and nobly bears, Is guilty of a several bastardy If he do break the smallest particle Of any promise that hath passed from him. (2.1.135–9)

The argument is disingenuous, ignoring the fact that they are conspirators, engaged in a ‘dangerous’ enterprise, and that a great many Romans do not share their views. Perhaps the irony is not as marked here as in ‘Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers’ later in this scene, but the pretence that their cause is one of unstained ‘even virtue’ is one of the many instances of Brutus’s habitual self-delusion, or the rhetorician’s ability to make the worse cause seem better.3 At other times, Brutus shows his

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awareness that ‘conspiracy’ bears a ‘monstrous visage’ under its ‘mask’ and, like Macbeth, reveals in soliloquy that his projected actions fill him with a terror that he tries to hide before others. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council, and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

(2.1.63–9, 77–82)

The divorce of ‘our looks’ from ‘our purposes’, putting on a false countenance ‘as our Roman actors do’, is not simply at variance with Cassius’s advice that the conspirators should ‘show yourselves true Romans’ (2.1.222–6); it can be seen as an attempt, ultimately futile, to escape from self-knowledge and the promptings of conscience. Brutus’s two soliloquies before the entrance of the conspirators not only show his inward doubts but contradict his republican principles in positing a ‘kingdom’ as the natural ‘state of man’, the default mode of the political universe. C a e s a r a s H e ro a n d T y r a n t The reputations of Caesar and of Brutus have undergone extraordinary vicissitudes over the years. Probably the high point in the adulation of Julius Caesar as hero and statesman is the ardent encomium, a love-letter eleven pages long, in Theodor Mommsen’s monumental The History of Rome (1854–6): the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down … His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession … Caesar was thoroughly a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook and achieved was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius … Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman. From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a statesman in the deepest sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed to propose to himselfÂ€– the political, military, intellectual, and moral regeneraÂ� tion of his own deeply decayed nation.

To Mommsen, Julius Caesar was ‘the entire and perfect man’, and Mommsen was confident that anyone encountering ‘this unique man’

Caesar as hero and tyrant

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shared his view of Caesar:Â€ ‘to every not utterly perverted inquirer the grand figure has exhibited the same essential features’.4 As Maria Wyke shows, Mommsen’s extravagant praise of Caesar can be seen in its historical context, exemplifying the longing for a Nietzschean superman, a modern Caesar. A century later, another German historian, Friedrich Gundolf, in The Mantle of Caesar (1929), though recognizing the existence of hostile as well as favourable accounts of Caesar, introduces his study with these words: To-day, when the need of the strong man is felt … we should like to recall to the minds of those of hasty judgment the great man to whom the supreme authority owes its name and for centuries its guiding thought:Â€Caesar.5

According to Benito Mussolini, who modelled himself on Julius Caesar in his political career, advertising the parallel in propaganda again and again, ‘Caesar’s murder was a disaster for mankind.’ In an interview, Mussolini gushed ‘I love Caesar … the greatest of all men who have ever lived.’6 The dark side of Caesar and Caesarism, in the attempt of twentieth-century totalitarian leaders to clothe themselves in Caesarian robes, is brought out in Orson Welles’s celebrated New York production of Shakespeare’s play, radically cut and subtitled ‘Death of a Dictator’, in 1937. Here, Caesar, dressed to resemble Mussolini and surrounded by thuggish black-shirted acolytes, is a menacing figure, a warning against hero-worship and the manipulation of the gullible masses.7 Dante was unequivocal in his praise of Caesar and his hostility toward Brutus and Cassius. In the Inferno, the worst of all sinners, guilty of unforgivable betrayal and thus deserving of the worst possible punishment, are Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot, devoured perpetually in the mouths of a three-headed Satan, where Brutus ‘writhes and utters not a word’. Julius Caesar, embodiment of ‘the will of Rome’ and of ‘heaven’, is depicted in the Paradiso as a great, irresistible conqueror, whose Â�victories, of extraordinary rapidity and geographical range, bring ‘all the world to its own state of peace’.8 Dante’s view of Caesar and of Brutus is similar to that of Petrarch in his Life of Caesar, where Brutus is castigated for ‘inhuman ingratitude’ and ‘ignoble treachery’, and Caesar is praised as exemplary hero and conqueror. Though some of Petrarch’s earlier writings are ambivalent toward Caesar, his influential biography of Caesar is prediÂ� cated on the belief, shared with Dante, that ‘the rule of one just leaderÂ€… is the best condition for the commonwealth without any doubt’.9 The Florentine humanist Salutati, in De Tyranno (1400), argued that Caesar was a great man struck down by envious murderers:Â€‘Who would not say

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that his assassins were wrong rather than right in laying their criminal hands on the father of their country, the man who with every right was ruler of the world?’10 A rival view, seeing Caesar as a potential or actual tyrant, threatening the extinction of Roman liberty, finds its origin in Lucan’s Pharsalia. In this poem Cato, who committed suicide rather than surrender to the victorious Caesar, receives the greatest praise. In his rise to power, Caesar is presented as a wholly destructive force, impatient of any restraint, inordinately ambitious and sweeping aside anything that stands in his path. Caesar’s victory in the civil wars against Pompey is seen as inevitable, but deeply regrettable, in bringing about the extinction of Roman liberty. Even after the defeat and death of Pompey, Cato remains faithful to the republican cause, ready to die in liberty’s defence. As Cato says to his nephew Brutus in Book 2: I will not leave thee, Rome, till I embrace Thy hearse, and libertie, thy dying face, And fleeting Ghost with honour doe attend.11

David Quint has characterized Lucan’s Pharsalia as ‘the epic of the lost Roman republic’, inaugurating a tradition of poems that ‘embrace the cause of the politically defeated’.12 In the Florentine Republicans, as in Lucan, we find an ‘active hostility toward Julius Caesar’, whose rise to power is presented by Leonardo Bruni in the early fifteenth century as ‘the pivot around whose career the liberty of the Roman Republic swings into the tyranny of the Empire’. Machiavelli considered Caesar a tyrant and usurper, who had hoodwinked the Roman populace, making them ‘unaware of the yoke which they themselves had placed on their necks’ in surrendering a liberty never to be regained. Nor should anyone be deceived by Caesar’s renown when he finds writers extolling him before others, for those who praise him have either been corrupted by his fortune or overawed by the long continuance of the empire which … did not permit writers to speak freely of him.

Caesar, according to Machiavelli, is worse than Catiline, since ‘he who has done wrong is more blameworthy than he who has but desired to do wrong’.13 To seventeenth-century English republicans such as Harrington and Milton, ‘the arms of Caesar … extinguishing liberty’ gave birth to ‘those ill features of government which … are become far worse in these western parts’. In the writings of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century republicans, Brutus, Cassius, and Cato were praised and tyrannicide justified.14


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There are several ‘Caesar’ plays roughly contemporaneous with Shakespeare. Henslowe’s Diary lists a two-part Caesar and Pompey, now lost, performed by the Admiral’s Men in 1594–5, and the anonymous Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey was ‘privately acted by the Students of Trinity Colledge, in Oxford’ in 1595. Another Caesar and Pompey, no longer extant, was acted at court in 1581, and Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia (or Pompey the Great His Fair Cornelia’s Tragedy), a translation of Robert Garnier’s Cornélie (1573) was published in 1594. George Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey, not published until 1631, was written c.1605, and the Julius Caesar of William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, was published in 1607. There are also sixteenth-century ‘Caesar’ plays in French, Italian, andÂ€Latin. Where Shakespeare’s play has the assassination of Julius Caesar as its central event, both the anonymous Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey and Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey tell a wider-ranging story, beginning with the war between Caesar and Pompey. In The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, the action is framed by the allegorical figure Discord, joying in ‘hideous sights’ of ‘bloud & death’. In the final scene, accompanied by the Ghost of Caesar, whose ‘revengfull thirst’ has been ‘fulfilled’ by the deaths of Brutus and Cassius, Discord pronounces this verdict: di s. Cesar I pitied not thy Tragick end: Nor tyrants daggers sticking in thy heart, Nor doe I that thy deaths with like repayd, But that thy death so many deaths hath made: Now cloyde with blood, Ile hye me downe below, And laugh to thinke I caused such endlesse woe.15

Pompey, defeated at Pharsalia in Act 1, dies offstage at the end of Act 2, shortly followed by Cato’s suicide, and Caesar is assassinated at the end of Act 3. The enormous cast includes Brutus, Pompey, Caesar, Cassius, Titinius, Antony, Cleopatra, Cornelia, Calphurnia, Octavian, Cicero, Sempronius, Cato senior and junior, and Caesar’s ghost. Though Pompey, Brutus, Cassius, and Cato all claim to be defending ‘the Romains liberty’ (159), the rapidity of the action makes their protests seem hollow, and Caesar’s pride in his great accomplishments seems equally insubstantial. In this undramatic narrative, the characters are little more than stick figures, illustrating a simple homiletic moral: Though Caesar be as great as great can be, Yet Pompey once was even as great as he (619–20).16

Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey, drawing on Plutarch and Lucan, begins and ends with Cato, presented as an exemplary figure. The play’s

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epigraph, printed on the title page and at the beginning of 1.1, is ‘onely a just man is a free man’, and Cato’s dying words are ‘just men are onely free, the rest are slaves’. As in Lucan, the defeated Pompey is presented more sympathetically than the victorious Caesar, excoriated by the virtuous Cato as not only ‘tyranous’ but corrupt: So still, where Caesar goes, there thrust up head, Impostors, Flatterers, Favorites, and Bawds … Close Murtherers, Montibankes, and decaied Theeves, To gaine their banefull lives reliefes from him.17

Pompey, seeking to help his ‘injur’d Country’ and resorting to arms ‘more for feare of Caesars violence to the State, than mov’d with any affectation of his own greatnesse’, is contrasted with a proud, confident Caesar who boasts of his many victories, conducing to the glory of Rome: Put all together, I have past them all That by their acts can boast themselves to be Their Countries lovers … Besides, I tooke in lesse then ten yeares time, By strong assault, above eight hundred Cities, Three hundred severall Nations, in that space, Subduing to my Countrey.

Even in ‘perill’, Caesar sees himself as a man of destiny, trusting in his force of character to overcome any obstacles and limitless in ambition. At times, he resembles Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: I that have ransackt all the world for worth, To forme in man the image of the gods, Must like them have the power to check the worst Of all things under their celestiall Empire, Stoope it, and burst it, or breake through it all, With use and safety, till the Crowne be set On all my actions.18

Pompey, who rejects Caesar’s offer of peace and, like Antony before the battle of Actium, ignores sound advice not to risk all on a single battle, as well as disregarding omens that should ‘move … All sound mindes from tempting the just gods’, is presented as ennobled by defeat. Recognizing the folly of a false ‘confidence’ prompted by ‘love of glory’, after the defeat at Pharsalia he sees himself as justly punished. by my Angell and the gods abhorr’d; Who drew me, like a vapour, up to heaven To dash me like a tempest ’gainst the earth:


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O the deserved terrors that attend On humane confidence! Had ever men Such outrage of presumption to be victors Before they arm’d?19

In his stoical acceptance of whatever fate may bring, Pompey in Acts 4 and 5 of Chapman’s play, ‘unmoved’ by ‘outward change’, gains a greater victory than in ‘all my other Conquests’ (Sig. G2v). Chapman adds a scene, not in Plutarch or Lucan, in which the defeated Pompey meets with his wife Cornelia and they console one another with expressions of stoic courage, renouncing worldly greatness: p om . O gods, was I ever Great till this minute?… No fault in me, in it; no conquest of me. I tread this low earth as I trod on Caesar. Must I not hold my self, though I lose the world?… c or . O Pompey, Pompey:Â€never Great till now. p om . O my Cornelia:Â€let us still be good, And we shall still be great:Â€and greater farre In every solid grace, then when the tumor And bile of rotten observation sweld me. (Sig. H4v)

Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia (1594), a translation of a French Senecan tragÂ� edy by Robert Garnier, is unequivocal in its representation of Caesar as tyrant, whose victory over Pompey is a disaster for Rome, and in its endorsement of tyrannicide. The action in this neoclassical tragedy takes place after the death of Pompey, mourned by most of the other characters. Pompey is not the flawed figure he is in Plutarch and Lucan, but wholly admirable, where Caesar, who appears in only one scene, is an exemplum of the folly of trusting in earthly greatness, as he boasts of his ‘matchles victories’: There lyves no King, (how great so e’re he be,) But trembleth if he once but heare of mee … Rome, speak no more of eyther Scipio, Nor of the Fabii, or Fabritians … Caesar has tam’d more Nations, tane more Townes, And fought more battles then the best of them. Caesar doth tryumph over all the world, And all they scarcely conquered a nooke.20

The play begins with Cicero, lamenting Caesar’s victories as destructive of Rome’s ancient freedom and seeking to console the distraught Cornelia,

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Pompey’s widow. The terms of the complaint are familiar:Â€Rome the conqueror has become Rome the conquered. Carthage and Sicily we have subdude, And almost yoked all the world beside: And soly through desire of publique rule, Rome and the world are waxen all as one: Yet now we live despoil’d and robd by one, Of th’ancient freedom wherein we were borne. And even that yoke that wont to tame all others, Is heavily return’d upon our selves.

(Act 1, Sig. A3)

Far more unusual is a passage later in this speech, where Cicero, arguing from republican principles, attacks the idea of imperial expansion, showing considerable sympathy for the conquered people whose freedom has been infringed by the Roman conquerors. This is very different from later republican theorists like Machiavelli and Harrington, who saw liberty and imperial conquest as compatible, and its hostile treatment of the idea of empire, either in republican Rome or by extension Elizabethan England, is extremely rare in the 1590s: What right had our ambitious auncestors, (Ignobly issued from the Carte and Plough,) To enter Asia? What, were they the heires To Persia or the Medes, first Monarchies? What interest had they to Afferique? To Gaule or Spaine? Or what did Neptune owe us Within the bounds of further Britannie? Are we not thieves and robbers of those Realmes That ought us nothing but revenge for wrongs? What toucheth us the treasure or the hopes, The lyves or lyberties of all those Nations, Whom we by force have held in servitude? (Act 1, Sig. A3v)21

Even more unusual in Elizabethan England is the treatment of tyrannicide. In Acts 1 and 2, at the very moment that Caesar has gained supreme power, both the Chorus and Cicero predict that, like any tyrant, Caesar will be overthrown. The Chorus at the end of Act 2 compares Julius Caesar to Tarquin, prophesying that history will repeat itself, with another brave, resolute Junius Brutus defending victimized, dishonoured Rome against the tyrant. And once more unjust Tarquins frowne, (with arrogance and rage enflam’d)


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Shall keepe the Romaine valure downe; and Rome it selfe a while be tam’d … But heavens as tyrannie shall yoke our basterd harts, with servile thrall; So grant your plagues (which they provoke) may light upon them once for all And let another Brutus rise, bravely to fight in Romes defence, To free our Towne from tyrannie, and tyrannous proud insolence. (Act 3, Sig. D2)

In this choral ode, the republican language (unjust Tarquin, servile thrall, tyrannous proud insolence) is more or less that of sixteenth-Â�century Â�resistance theory:Â€ the passage suggests that it is the abuses of tyrannous monarchs that bring about their deserved downfall. A passage in a speech by Cicero in Act 3 (again following Garnier) even more openly justifies tyrannicide, asserting that Caesar will not be able to ‘hold us in this servitude’ for long. In a vision prefiguring Caesar’s assassination, Cicero can ‘see’ Caesar’s ‘stab’d and torne’ corpse, and views the scene with approval. Think’st thou to signiorize, or be the King Of such a number, nobler then thy selfe? Or think’st thou Romains beare such bastard harts, To let thy tyrannie be unreveng’d? No, for mee thinks I see the shame, the griefe, The rage, the hatred that they have conceiv’d: And many a Romaine sword already drawne, T’enlarge the libertie that thou usurpst. And thy dismembered body (stab’d and torne) Dragd through the streets, disdained to bee borne. (Act 3, Sig. E3)

In Act 4, a colloquy between Cassius and Brutus (called ‘Decimus’ as in Garnier, rather than ‘Marcus’) presents Cassius as far more resolute in his republican principles. Cassius urges immediate action to remedy wrongs, where Brutus hesitates, saying ‘Caesar is not yet a king’. c a s s i u s. But Brutus shall we dissolutelie sitte, And see the tyrant live to tyranize? Or shall theyr ghosts that dide to doe us good, Plaine in their Tombes of our base cowardise? … And rather chuse (unarm’d) to serve with shame, Then (arm’d) to save their freedom and their fame?

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As in Shakespeare and Plutarch, Brutus weighs his friendship for Caesar against his sense of ‘the general good’, and concludes that love of country must constitute the greater obligation. bru t u s. I love, I love him dearly. But the love That men theyr Country and theyr birth-right beare, Exceeds all loves, and dearer is by farre Our Countries love, then friends or chyldren are.

The dialogue between Brutus and Cassius is followed by a choral ode praising the public-spirited citizen who seeks ‘T’enlarge his countries liberty’ by resisting ‘bloody Tyrants rage’.22 C a e s a r, Bru t us, a n d t y r a n n ic i de Shakespeare is highly selective in his use of the Life of Julius Caesar in North’s Plutarch. There is no enumeration of military conquests, no crossing of the Rubicon, no mention of Gaul, of the temporary alliance with Pompey and Crassus in the triumvirate, or of the army which was the basis of Caesar’s power. Shakespeare does not follow the example of other plays on Caesar by giving Caesar a speech boasting of his great deeds, the number of towns he has conquered, the captive kings he has brought under Rome’s yoke. Most other accounts of Caesar, including North’s Plutarch, present Caesar as warrior, with conquests which ‘made him to be knowen for as valiant a souldier and as excellent a Captaine to lead men, as those that afore him had been counted the wisest and most valiantest Generals that ever were, and that by their valiant deedes had atchieved great honor’.23 In characterizing Caesar, Shakespeare draws on North’s Plutarch for many details, but nearly all of them come from the latter part of the Life of CaesarÂ€– in the 1595 folio text, the final five pages, with virtually nothing from the previous twenty-eight. What is extraordinary in Julius Caesar is the number of times the name ‘Caesar’ is invoked by the characters, especially by Caesar himself.24 c a e s a r . Caesar shall forth. The things that threatened me Ne’er looked but on my back; when they shall see The face of Caesar, they are vanished … Caesar should be a beast without a heart If he should stay at home for fear. No, Caesar shall not. Danger knows full well That Caesar is more dangerous than he. (2.2.10–12, 42–5)

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The use of ‘Caesar’ rather than ‘I’ lends a distancing formality and dignity to the utterance, suggesting that a great man like Julius Caesar is not bound by standard grammatical rules and conventions. The name ‘Caesar’, here and elsewhere, is endowed with a magical quality, indicative of an ideal or reputation which one must live up to. Certainly, this linguistic habit of Caesar shows a self-confidence bordering on arrogance. When Calphurnia tries unsuccessfully to persuade him to stay home on the Ides of March, warning him that ‘wisdom’ should moderate undue ‘confidence’, his response is that, as ‘Caesar’, he transcends all paltry considerations:Â€‘Decius, go tell them Caesar will not come … The cause is in my will, I will not come’ (2.2.49, 68, 71). In asserting the primacy of the ruler’s will, refusing to give reasons for his actions and showing his contempt for the Senators, Caesar here is acting like a tyrant. His arrogance reveals itself even more clearly just before the assassination, where, rejecting pleas for clemency, he tells Metellus Cimber that he is impervious to those considerations that ‘might fire the blood of ordinary men’. As Caesar, he is incapable of doing wrong (‘Know, Caesar doth not wrong’), and treats petitioners as inferior beings (3.1.37, 45–8). The irony is especially marked in Caesar’s great speech immediately before the assassination. In some respects, this speech shows Caesar’s admirable qualities:Â€his strength of character, his refusal to be deflected from his course by petty, selfish concerns, his constancyÂ€ – a quintessentially Roman virtue, especially associated with stoicism. When Artemidorus tries to hand Caesar a petition ‘that touches Caesar nearer’ than others, Caesar responds ‘What touches us ourselves shall be last served’ (3.1.7–8). However, the ‘northern star’ lines also show overweening pride, in a mortal who has come to think of himself as a god. c a e s a r . I could well be moved if I were as you: If I could pray to move, prayers would move me. But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fixed and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament. The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks: They are all fire, and every one doth shine; But there’s but one in all doth hold his place. So in the world:Â€’tis furnished well with men, And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive Yet in the number I do know but one That unassailable holds on his rank Unshaked of motion. (3.1.58–70)

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In denying that he is ‘flesh and blood’, seeing himself as ‘but one’ in the entire universe, ‘unassailable’ in his transcendent greatness, Caesar confirms the conspirators’ hostile view of him as a would-be tyrant, who seeks to rule as ‘one only man’ (1.2.156), reducing free Romans to slaves. Cassius, with his republican convictions, finds it intolerable that … this man Is now become a god, and Cassius is A wretched creature, and must bend his body If Caesar carelessly but nod at him. (1.2.115–18)

Caesar’s ‘Hence! Wilt thou lift up Olympus?’ (3.1.74) is naked hubris, the kind of presumption that experienced viewers can expect to be soon punished. Cassius denies that any name, including Caesar’s, has magical qualities. A sceptic and materialist, Cassius finds that all names ‘weigh’ equally, as all free individuals share a common nature. c a s s i u s. ‘Brutus’ and ‘Caesar’:Â€what should be in that ‘Caesar’? Why should that name be sounded more than yours? Write them together:Â€yours is as fair a name: Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well. Weigh them, it is as heavy:Â€conjure with ’em, ‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as ‘Caesar’. (1.2.141–6)

Not only does Cassius deny any intrinsic superiority to Caesar (‘I was born free as Caesar, so were you’), he characterizes Caesar as inferior in bodily strength and susceptibility to outer circumstances, narrating an incident in which he saved Caesar from drowning, bearing Caesar on his shoulders as Aeneas bore his father, the feeble Anchises.25 On another occasion, he tells Brutus, he was eye-witness to Caesar moaning and shaking with a fever ‘when the fit was on him’, crying out in pain like ‘a sick girl’. Ye gods, it doth amaze me A man of such a feeble temper should So get the start of the majestic world And bear the palm alone. (1.2.119–21, 128–31)

Like Edmund in King Lear, Cassius dismisses as foolish superstition any belief that ‘planetary influence’ determines human behaviour. According to Plutarch, Cassius, ‘being in opinion an Epicurean’, considered signs


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and portents the products of an overactive imagination, ‘our senses beeing credulous, and therefore easily abused’ and thus led to ‘imagine and conjecture that, which they in truth doe not’.26 Where Caska trembles in fear at the ‘strange eruptions’ of a storm in which ‘all the sway of earth / Shakes like a thing unfirm’, Cassius, in the classic stance of the atheist, defying heaven to strike him down, confronts the thunder and lightning unafraid. c a s s i u s. For my part, I have walked about the streets, Submitting me unto the perilous night, And thus unbraced, Caska, as you see, Have bared my bosom to the thunder-stone.

(1.3.3–4, 46–9, 78)

Portents and ‘most horrid sights’ (2.2.16) reported in Acts 1 and 2 by the awe-struck Caska and later by Calphurnia are capable of being interpreted in different ways. The entire action of the play, up to the assassination of Caesar in Act 3, is predicated on a central, controlling irony:Â€every member of the audience knows what is going to happen, and none of the characters does. When Caesar brusquely dismisses the warning of the SoothsayerÂ€– ‘He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass’ (1.2.24)Â€– we are aware that Caesar has good reason to beware the Ides of March. In Act 2, where Caesar reports that Calphurnia has cried out in her sleep, ‘Help ho:Â€they murder Caesar’, we know that such fears are justified, the dangers real and not imaginary. As in Macbeth, prophecies in Shakespeare, however ambiguously worded, always come true. Shakespeare presents two rival interpretations of Calphurnia’s dream, seen by Calphurnia herself as ‘warnings and portents’ of ‘evils imminent’. c a e s a r . She dreamt tonight she saw my statue, Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts, Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it. (2.2.76–81)

With our privileged knowledge of what will follow, denied to the characters, we can read these lines as a vision prefiguring the violence of the assassination, contributing to a pattern of imagery which dominates the later part of the play. bru t u s. Stoop, Romans, stoop, And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood Up to the elbows and besmear our swords.

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‘Like a Colossus’:Â€Julius Caesar Then walk we forth even to the market-place, And waving our red weapons o’er our heads Let’s all cry, ‘Peace, Freedom and Liberty’. (3.1.105–10)

What Brutus and his fellow conspirators fail to realize is that the physical manifestation of the blood-stained hands and clothing, shockingly visible in a stage production, negates the cries of peace and liberty, brands them as murderers, and suggests that more blood will be shed before the end of the play. Decius Brutus, countering Calphurnia’s reading of the dream, appeals to Caesar’s vanity, flattering him and suggesting that a refusal to come to the Senate might damage Caesar’s interest, as well as laying him open to the charge of cowardice. de c i u s. This dream is all amiss interpreted. It was a vision, fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes In which so many smiling Romans bathed Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck Reviving blood, and that great men shall press For tinctures, relics, stains and cognizance. This by Calphurnia’s dream is signified. (2.2.83–90)

The audience, aware of the plans of the conspirators, can recognize that Decius’s argument is specious and self-serving, while at the same time calculated to appeal to Caesar by flattering him as a demi-god, an object of veneration. In what may be the most familiar lines in the play (other than ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’), Cassius, even more skilled in the arts of persuasion than Decius, says to Brutus: Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves, that we are underlings. (1.2.138–40)

The subsequent action of the play could be said to prove a contrary thesis:Â€that men are at no times masters of their fates, though they think they are. The frequency of signs and portents, variously interpreted, does not indicate that the ‘stars’ exercise a controlling influence over human lives, though they provide warnings. What encloses and limits characters who think erroneously that they are acting freely is an overarching authorial irony:Â€events have consequences, but not those intended by men and women acting out a script in which they have been assigned parts.


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At no point does the play give clear, unambiguous evidence as to whether Caesar is or is not a tyrant, actual or potential. We do not even know whether, in the ceremony on the Lupercal, he wants to be crowned.27 Shakespeare gives us two conflicting versions of the offer of the crown, one by the hostile, cynical Caska and the other, after the assassination, in Antony’s funeral oration. To Caska, the ceremony is a charade, ‘mere foolery’, a theatrical spectacle: If the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him according as he pleased and displeased them, as they use to do the players in the theatre, I am no true man. (1.2.235, 257–60)

Caska is convinced that Caesar longs for the title of king and, with Antony’s connivance, is testing public opinion. As I told you, he put it by once; but for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again, then he put it by again; but to my thinking, he was very loth to lay his fingers off it. (1.2.239–41)

Plutarch’s account of the incident makes it seem even more calculated, commenting that at each offer of the crown, the ‘cry of rejoycing’ was ‘not very great, done onely by a few, appointed for the purpose’, while ‘when Caesar refused the Diademe, then all the people together made an outcry of joy’:Â€‘Caesar having made this proofe, found that the people did not like of it’.28 To Antony, seeking to sway the crowd in Caesar’s favour, the refusal of the crown is presented as genuine, a proof that Caesar was no potential tyrant, but a virtuous, modest man, dedicated to the public welfare, rather than personal aggrandisement. a n t on y. You all did see, that on the Lupercal I thrice presented him a kingly crown, Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition? Yet Brutus says, he was ambitious, And sure he is an honourable man. I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, But here I am to speak what I doe know. (3.2.96–102)

Of course, what Antony is doing here, with consummate skill, is precisely calculated ‘to disprove what Brutus spoke’, to dismantle Brutus’s case against Caesar as a danger to the liberty of Romans. Aspects of Caesar familiar from historical accounts and from other ‘Caesar’ plays, largely absent from the earlier scenes, are brought into prominence by Antony:Â€ his many victories, his clemency, his loyalty to friends. As

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Madeleine Doran says, ‘until Caesar is dead … we hear nothing positively good about him, and afterwards nothing bad’.29 By giving Caesar so few lines to speak, making him a character spoken about rather than speaking and acting, Shakespeare presents Caesar as enigmatic and opaque, a blank sheet for others to write on. In production, Caesar has been characterized in a wide variety of ways. In Orson Welles’s 1937 Death of a Dictator, consciously echoing ‘the political climate of Europe in the mid-thirties’, Caesar was overtly a tyrant, and terrifying. In Trevor Nunn’s 1972 production, with a programme including quotations and photographs representing Hitler, Mussolini, and two contemporary African dictators, Mark Dignam’s dignified, imperious Caesar dominated the production, in which a huge statue of Caesar presided over the battle scenes. Ron Daniels’s 1983 production, in contrast, had an elderly Caesar who was ‘harmless’, benevolent, avuncular.30 In the 1953 film, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, Louis Calhern, who had the advantages of being a head taller than anyone else in the cast and having a face with a profile like that on a Roman coin, managed to convey both patrician hauteur and vulnerability in his Caesar. In the recent Deborah Warner production, John Shrapnel’s Caesar, rather than being a military dictator, was a smooth political operator ‘in an Armani suit, surrounded by minders, working the crowd’, in a world where ‘everyone’s a spin doctor’, jockeying for power.31 Brutus’s monologue, in which he convinces himself that Caesar must be killed, resembles Macbeth’s ‘If it were done’ soliloquy, in the way that it states all the arguments that should dissuade Brutus from his intended course of action. As with Macbeth, the prominence of these negative arguments (‘First, I am his kinsman and his subject, /Strong both against the deed …’) is indicative of the speaker’s troubled conscience, his divided mind, ‘with himself at war’.32 Though he claims to be considering a ‘question’, Brutus begins by giving an answer, foreclosing all other possible conclusions at the very outset. bru t u s. It must be by his death, and for my part I know no personal cause to spurn at him But for the general. He would be crowned: How that might change his nature, there’s the question. (2.1.10–13)

According to standard Renaissance political theory, there are two kinds of tyrant, usurpers ex defecto tituli, with no right to the throne, and tyrants ex parte exercitii, who, whatever their legal entitlement, governed viciously,


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making their will the law.33 Brutus accepts that Caesar fits neither description. In arguing that Caesar might, at some later point, succumb to the temptations of power, Brutus’s reasoning is particularly tortuous, as the phrase ‘Fashion it thus’ (let us construct the following hypothesis) and the element of dubiety and factitiousness in ‘colour’ both indicate. So Caesar may. And, lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus:Â€that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities.

(2.1.27–31)

In the soliloquy, Brutus proceeds by a series of abstractions, subsuming the individual known to him by experience under the general category. ‘What he is’ is thus wholly swallowed up by what, according to the theoretical premise Brutus is advancing, Caesar may become. He therefore proposes a pre-emptive strike against Caesar, killing him before he has a chance to display any tyrannous tendencies. And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg Which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell. (2.1.32–4)

This is one of several instances of self-delusion in Brutus, in which he advances extremely shaky arguments to support a particular course of action. When Cassius, ever the pragmatist, recommends to the other conspirators that the ‘shrewd contriver’ (2.1.157) Antony, left alive, would represent a serious danger to their cause, Brutus responds characteristically: bru t u s. Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius, To cut the head off and then hack the limbsÂ€– Like wrath in death and envy afterwardsÂ€– For Antony is but a limb of Caesar … And for Mark Antony, think not of him, For he can do no more than Caesar’s arm When Caesar’s head is off. (2.1.161–4, 180–2)

Brutus’s advice here is spectacularly ill-judged, as is his later recommendation that it would be perfectly all right to allow Antony to address the Roman crowd, displaying Caesar’s body in the marketplace. In both cases, Cassius’s assessment of the situation is more accurate than that of Brutus, whose misjudgement, as Plutarch says, ‘indeede marred all’. In Plutarch,

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Brutus’s reasons for sparing Antony are ‘that it was not honest’ to kill him and that ‘there was hope of change in him’ as someone who might ‘willingly helpe his countrey to recover her libertie’.34 In Shakespeare, Brutus once again substitutes ‘the general’ for ‘the personal’, not simply underestimating Antony but refusing to allow him any individual existence. As the passage continues, the irony is even more marked, as Brutus pretends that they will be able to kill Caesar without shedding blood. The strong, violent verbs, with their insistent physicalityÂ€– ‘carve’, ‘hew’, ‘dismember’Â€– negate his premise, bringing to the fore the doubts he is unable to suppress:Â€ that, however he would like to disguise it, they are ‘butchers’ and not priests of a republican religion, performing a sacrifice. Let’s be sacrificers and not butchers, Caius, We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar, And in the spirit of men there is no blood. O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit And not dismember Caesar … And, gentle friends, Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully: Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. (2.1.165–73)

In his speech promising vengeance, an orgy of ‘blood and destruction’ to pay back those who have ‘shed this costly blood’, Antony uses very similar terms, implicitly refuting Brutus’s assumptions:Â€‘O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, /That I am meek and gentle with these butchers’ (3.1.254–5, 258, 265). There is no point in the play where Brutus and his fellow conspirators are more deeply mired in self-delusion than when they bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood, vainly predicting that future ages will honour them as ‘the men who gave their country liberty’ (3.1.118). In production, Brutus has generally been portrayed sympathetically. Traditionally, he was played as a tragic hero akin to Hamlet, troubled, melancholy, often with a ‘calm dignity’ reflecting his ‘exalted ideals’, yet ‘fraught with an underlying tension’.35 To some extent, James Mason, with his furrowed brow and matinée-idol looks, played Brutus as romantic idealist in the Mankiewicz film. In Trevor Nunn’s 1972 production, in which Caesar’s Rome was explicitly ‘a police state’, John Wood played Brutus as ‘cold-blooded’, ‘self-absorbed’, emphasizing the character’s ‘selftorturing neuroticism’.36 Deborah Warner’s 2005 production, explicitly designed as ‘a play for now’, with a programme full of photographs of the war in Iraq, featured a notably unsympathetic Brutus, who ‘felt no real

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warmth for anybody’. To an unusual degree, this production focused on competitiveness and rivalry among the Roman aristocrats.37 T h e D o g s of Wa r The key defining moment in the second half of the play is Mark Antony’s funeral oration, from which the subsequent action inevitably follows. Shakespeare radically condenses the received historical accounts, including Plutarch’s Life of Brutus, where there is a considerable interval between the assassination of Caesar and the defeat of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. In North’s Plutarch, the conspiracy and assassination take up seven pages, the events following the assassination sixteen.38 Antony plays a minor role in the first two acts of Julius Caesar, and his first substantial speech comes in 3.1, after the assassination, when, after sending a servant to negotiate a safe conduct, he confronts the assassins, stating his willingness to make peace with them. After extracting a promise from Brutus that he may speak at Caesar’s funeral, Antony is left on stage to soliloquize, with a complete change of tone, expressing not simply grief for the loss of his friend, but anger, hatred, and passionate desire for revenge.39 a n t on y. O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers. Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times. Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood. (3.1.254–8)

In the terrifying prophecy that follows, the tone modulates from grief to violent, overwhelming rage, the desire to destroy, as Antony imagines himself transformed into the voice of Caesar’s wounds, blood crying out for more blood to be shed. Over thy wounds now I do prophesy (Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue) A curse shall light upon the limbs of men: Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy. (3.1.259–64)

In some ways, the prophecy of ‘fierce civil strife’ resembles the outburst of the Bishop of Carlisle in Richard II, or Henry V before Harfleur, or the scene of the father who has killed his son and the son who has killed his father in 3 Henry VI. But all of these evocative, powerful passages express

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regret for the sufferings that might ensue, as they project a vision of chaos and destruction unleashed. Each of these speeches, in dramatic context, serves as warning, explicit or implicit, evoking something to be feared, something to be avoided. Carlisle, speaking out in protest at the deposition of Richard II, prophesizes that the overthrow of a lawful king will have terrible consequences:Â€‘Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so.’ The blood of English shall manure the ground, And future ages groan for this foul act. Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels, And in this seat of peace tumultuous wars Shall kin with kin and kind with kind confound. Disorder, horror, fear and mutiny Shall here inhabit, and this land be called The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls. (Richard II, 4.1.138–45, 149)

The rhetoric of Antony’s speech is similar, taking the form of a ‘curse’ as well as a prophecy, predicting ‘blood and destruction’ unforeseen by those responsible for altering an established form of government by violence. In Antony’s speech and Carlisle’s, the vision of chaos is particularly horrendous because it is ‘civil strife’, a war fought ‘kin with kin and kind with kind’, violating normal family ties and loyalties. The difference in Antony’s speech is that he welcomes the destruction, revels in it as punishing his enemies and giving his pent-up emotions an outlet. What is absent from Antony’s speech is any element of ‘pity’. Blood and destruction shall be so in use, And dreadful objects so familiar, That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war: All pity choked with custom of fell deeds.

(3.1.265–9)

At the end of the play, both Brutus and Cassius recognize that ‘Caesar’s spirit’ has conquered them, taking its revenge. Brutus, who says ‘Caesar, now be still’ (5.5.51) as his dying words, pays reluctant tribute to a victorious Caesar, thwarting all their plans: bru t u s. O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet. Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords In our own proper bowels. (5.3.44–6)

The spirit of Caesar can be seen as presiding over the action of the play after his death. In The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, a literal Ghost

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of Caesar is brought on stage to ‘tell his wronges’, torment ‘ingratefull Brutus’, and urge Antony and Octavius to join forces and ‘revenge my murther on their cruell head, /whose trayterous hands my guiltles bloud have shed’.40 Antony’s soliloquy, less crudely, associates the spirit of Caesar not only with punishment of Caesar’s murderers, paying the blood debt, but with wide-ranging destruction, without mercy or relief. And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate at his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice, Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial. (3.1.270–5)

Caesar’s body in its coffin is visible on stage for most of the next scene, which follows rapidly after Antony’s soliloquy. Both the memory of Caesar and the physical body, with its cloak torn by the assassins’ wounds, are central to the emotional appeal of Antony’s speech. a n t on y. Kind souls, what weep you when you but behold Our Caesar’s vesture wounded? Look you here, Here is himself, marred as you see with traitors. 1 pl e be i a n. O piteous spectacle! 2 pl e be i a n. O noble Caesar! 3 pl e be i a n. O woeful day! 4 pl e be i a n. O traitors, villains! 1 pl e be i a n. O most bloody sight! 2 pl e be i a n. We will be revenged! a l l . Revenge! About! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay! Let not a traitor live!41

Skillfully working up the emotions of the crowd, directing their response (‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now’), Antony concludes the scene by commenting, approvingly, on the violence he has unleashed: a n t on y. Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot: Take then what course thou wilt. (3.2.167, 251–2)

Successful staging of this scene depends on the response of the onstage crowd to Antony’s words. The director must be able, imitating the dramatist, to shape the emotional responses of the theatrical (or cinematic) audience in the same way that Antony exercises mastery over the plebeians. At the same time, some distance must be preserved, allowing the

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viewers to recognize and appreciate Antony’s skills as a rhetorician, while not entirely succumbing to his appeal, and remaining apart from the overexcited crowd. In staging this scene, the Warner production and the Mankiewicz film both paid detailed attention to the crowd response. As in the Welles production, members of the plebeian crowd were individualized, assigned to particular actors, with close-ups in the film. In intensive rehearsals for the Warner production, each of the members of the crowd was ‘asked to concoct individual characters for themselves … specific faces with specific histories’.42 Other recent productions illustrated How Not to Do It. Terry Hands used recorded sounds, so that Antony had no one to address; Trevor Nunn, in an otherwise effective production, gave his skimpy crowd ‘an impossible job trying to react to Brutus and Antony with their backs to the audience and confined to a thin ribbon of stage’; and Peter Hall treated the crowd, recruited from citizens of Stratford, as ‘mute space fillers’, standing around with ‘inept inexpressiveness’ looking embarrassed.43 By the end of the first section of his speech, Antony has the support of at least part of the crowd, who have moved from ‘This Caesar was a tyrant’ to ‘Caesar hath had great wrong’ (3.2.70, 111). In the second part of his oration, Antony moves to more direct methods of appeal, characterizing ‘dead Caesar’ as ‘sacred’, an object to be worshipped. The irony here takes a new form in telling the audience again and again that he will not do what he is in fact doing, and arousing their expectations:Â€‘this testament, /Which pardon me, I do not mean to read’. By repeated mention of Caesar’s will, delaying the actual reading of the will while broadly hinting that it contains irresistible treasures, Antony inflames the crowd, so that he can be more open in condemning Caesar’s murderers:Â€ ‘I fear I wrong the honourable men /Whose daggers have stabbed Caesar’ (3.2.131–4, 152–3).44 In the rest of the speech, with the crowd in ‘a ring around the corpse of Caesar’, he uses the physical corpse and its torn mantle as props, re-enacting the assassination, making the ‘poor dumb mouths’ of Caesar’s wounds ‘speak’ for him. Once the crowd is whipped up to a frenzy, Antony reveals the contents of the will, with the material advantages it gives ‘to every Roman citizen’, and can watch contented as the crowd rushes out, bent on destruction (3.2.158, 218–19, 234). In the Welles and Warner productions, the central scene of the play was 3.3, the murder of Cinna the poet, which follows immediately after Antony’s funeral oration. Reviewers of both productions commented on the extraordinary, visceral power of this scene, in which the savagery of the crowd in killing an innocent man is a direct consequence of

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Antony’s moulding them into an instrument of revenge. Warner, to stunning effect, brought the curtain down for an interval immediately after ‘Cinna’s unspeakable death’, in which he appeared to be torn into pieces by the crowd, and left his body on stage, bisected by the curtain, during the interval.45 In some ways, the scene that follows is equally horrifying, though it differs greatly in its matter-of-fact tone, killing men with a word or a gesture. Octavius (in his first appearance in the play), Antony, and Lepidus meet and, without any emotion, agree to a series of judicial murders, including the brother of Lepidus and the nephew of Antony:Â€ ‘He shall not live. Look, with a spot I damn him’ (4.1.6). Other accounts, including Plutarch and The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, devote some attention to the mutual distrust of Antony and Octavius, contending for power but agreeing to join together in wars against Brutus and Cassius. Here, Antony shows his contempt for Lepidus as ‘a slight unmeritable man/ Meet to be sent on errands’ (4.1.12–13), but the alliance between Antony and Octavius is shown as firmer than that between Brutus and Cassius, As several critics have pointed out, the overall structure of the play is bipartite, with Caesar’s death ending the first part, showing the conspirators at the height of their fortunes, and Caesar’s revenge providing the conclusion to the play in the extinction of the hopes of Brutus, Cassius, and their fellow conspirators. Lines like Brutus’s ‘We shall be called purgers, not murderers’ and Cassius’s prediction that posterity will applaud them as ‘the men who gave their country liberty’ (2.1.179; 3.1.118) have ironic force in arousing the expectation of the audience that exactly the opposite result will ensueÂ€– an expectation fulfilled in Acts 4 and 5.46 The longest scene in the second half of the play is the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius (4.3), praised throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as ‘famous and wonderful’, and a favourite scene among actors.47 Though they are reconciled at the end of the scene, the bonds of friendship and the conviction that they are engaged in a common cause are stretched to breaking point as the two shout accusations at each other. Brutus angrily accuses Cassius of having ‘an itching palm’, and Cassius responds by saying he is a soldier ‘older’ and ‘better’ than Brutus. Even before Cassius enters, bitterly saying ‘you have wronged me’, Brutus sees their relationship as that of ‘hot friend[s], cooling … / When love begins to sicken and decay’ (4.2.19–20; 4.3.1, 10, 31, 56). In one speech, Brutus comments explicitly on their failure to live up to the high principles of their republican cause, though, characteristically, he lays the blame on Cassius, while praising himself as ‘armed … strong in honesty’:

106

‘Like a Colossus’:Â€Julius Caesar Remember March, the Ides of March remember: Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake? What villain touched his body, that did stab And not for justice? … Shall we now Contaminate our fingers with base bribes, And sell the mighty space of our large honours For so much trash as may be grasped thus? I had rather be a dog and bay the moon Than such a Roman.

The descent into petty wrangling illustrates the decline of the republican cause and the growing disillusionment of Brutus, as he tries to convince himself that the killing of ‘great Julius’ was indeed an act of ‘justice’, uncontaminated by ‘base’ motives and ‘vile means’ (4.3.18–21, 23–8, 67,Â€71).48 The battle of Philippi and the events leading up to it are presented in a succession of brief scenes. Brutus, anticipating possible defeat, tells Cassius that he would never allow himself ‘to be led in triumph / Thorough the streets of Rome’ (5.1.108–9). With the outcome of the battle still Â�uncertain, Cassius sends Titinius to see how Brutus is faring. Then, in the first of several examples where appearances are disastrously ‘misconstrued’, Cassius fails to realize that Brutus has won the day and commits suicide, convinced that both Brutus and Titinius have been slain.49 When Titinius learns of Cassius’s death, he then kills himself as well, announcing that ‘the sun of Rome is set’ (5.3.63, 84). In 5.5, the soldiers Clitus, Dardanus, and Volumnius all refuse Brutus’s request to hold his sword while he runs on it, before StratoÂ€– a fourth character without a line to speak earlier in the playÂ€– accedes to this request, and Brutus dies on the sword with which he killed Caesar. The play ends with several tributes to the dead Brutus, by Strato (‘For Brutus only overcame himself, /And no man else hath honour by his death’) and the victorious Antony and Octavius, who can afford to be generous and forgive their enemies. Octavius, saying that the dead Brutus, ‘like a soldier’, should be treated ‘with all respect’, associates his slain adversary with ‘virtue’ and ‘honour’, and Antony even more explicitly endows Brutus with virtues seen as characteristically Roman. The terms of Antony’s praise of Brutus are close to those in a passage in Plutarch comparing Brutus and Cassius, but given particular prominence here as a funeral epitaph at the end of the play. In North’s Plutarch, in contrast to Cassius, ‘who sought to rule men by feare, rather than lenitie’:

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Brutus … for his virtue and valiantnesse, was welbeloved of the peopleÂ€ … esteemed of noble men, and hated of no man, not so much as of his enemies:Â€ bicause he was a marvellous lowly and gentle person, noble minded, and would never be in any rage, nor carried away with pleasure and covetousnesse, but had ever an upright mind with him, and would never yeeld to any wrong or injustice, the which was the chiefest cause of his fame, of his rising, and of the good will that every man bare him:Â€for they were all perswaded that his intent was good.50

Antony’s tribute similarly emphasizes Brutus’s ‘gentle’ nature and his concern for the ‘common good’, in distinguishing his character and motivations from those of the other conspirators. The qualities of character Antony singles out are seen as enduring, preserving Brutus’s reputation for posterity, and as quintessentially Roman. ‘This was a man’ (virtus as manliness and as virtue) and ‘this was a Roman’ are presented here as equivalent. ‘Great Caesar’ and Brutus are reconfigured, not as opponents but as complementary models of noble and virtuous conduct. a n t on y. This was the noblest Roman of them all: All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar. He only, in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’ (5.5.69–76)

This tribute by an enemy is one of the play’s many instances of ambivalence in its treatment of its principal characters. Shakespeare’s habitual practice is to juxtapose differing perspectives on a character or event without privileging a single voice as clearly preferable. This habit of mind has been associated with the rhetorical tradition of arguing in utraquem partem, speaking with equal eloquence on either side of a given question, or attributed to a Keatsian ‘negative capability’.51 Though Shakespeare’s acting company presented Sejanus four years later, with Burbage and Shakespeare in the cast, Jonson’s approach to Roman history, though complex and in its way problematical, differed greatly from that in Julius Caesar and in Shakespeare’s other Roman plays.

Ch apter 5

Ben Jonson’s Rome

Jons on a n d Hor ac e In Poetaster, or The Arraignment (1602), Jonson satirizes his own society in a setting that is simultaneously Augustan Rome and contemporary London. As he explains in an ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ appended to the play in the 1616 Folio: [I] therefore chose Augustus Caesar’s times, When wit and arts were at their height in Rome, To show that Virgil, Horace, and the rest Of those great master spirits did not want Detractors then, or practicers against them. And by this line (although no parallel) I hoped at last they would sit down and blush.1

The characters include Augustus Caesar, Maecenas, the poets Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, and Propertius, and the emperor’s daughter Julia, all historical figures, together with a number of invented characters, objects of satire, who despite their Roman names, are plainly Londoners:Â€ the malicious informer Lupus, the parasite Captain Tucca, and Chloe, the social-climbing wife of the city merchant Albius. Crispinus and Demetrius, the bad poets or poetasters of the title, are both generic, representative figures and, more specifically, Jonson’s contemporaries and rivals Marston and Dekker. These two writers saw the play as slanderous and responded by attacking Jonson in what has come to be known as ‘the War of the Theatres’.2 Poetaster is full of extended translations from the Latin, identified in Quarto and Folio in the marginal notes. Ovid’s Amores, I.15 and Virgil’s Aeneid, IV.160–88, are read out on stage, interrupting the action, and two entire scenes, 3.1 and 3.5 (the latter added in the Folio), closely imitate two of Horace’s satires, I.ix and II.i. In the first of these, the bore who 108

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imposes himself on the unwilling Horace is Crispinus, who in later scenes is explicitly identified as John Marston, thus straddling the worlds of London and Rome. Jonson, like Shakespeare, left school at the age of 15, and, a bricklayer’s stepson ‘brought up poorly’, came from a background far remote from the Elizabethan and Jacobean aristocracy. Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson took pride in his classical learning, advertising it in the detailed listing of his Latin sources in marginal annotations in Sejanus, as well as Poetaster. In identifying himself, in Poetaster and his satiric poems, with Horace, subjected to envious ‘spy-like suggestions, privy whisperings’ by ‘malicious ignorant and base’ detractors seeking their own advantage, Jonson has chosen as model ‘a poet whose life … resembled his own’, a figure, initially marginal to his society, who rose by his own efforts to a position of prominence within that court society.3 The resounding victory of Horace in Poetaster over his enemies, granted a secure position by the side of a benevolent emperor who respects ‘true arts and learning’, is, as one critic says, a situation which for Jonson in 1601, denied preferment during the reign of Elizabeth I, was ‘only a dream’.4 Indeed, Jonson’s adversaries Dekker and Marston did not concede victory to Jonson, but in Dekker’s play Satiromastix (1602) contested his claim to the mantle of Horace, accusing him of being ‘a counterfeit Jugler, that steales the name of Horace’, full of arrogance and self-love.5 Poetaster is the third in a series of ‘comicall satyres’ written by Jonson between 1599 and 1601, attempting to adapt the form of Roman verse satire to the stage. Though Jonson attacks a number of satiric targets, the central theme in Poetaster is the poet’s role in society, a defence of the poet’s calling against the enemies of ‘sacred poesy’, ‘barbarism’ in its various manifestations. The position of the poet in Roman society as depicted here is precarious. In a subplot, the young Ovid is under siege from a father blind to all but material concerns and other ‘base groveling minds’, who despise poetry as a ‘poison’ and as ‘idle fruitless studies’.6 In the main plot, Horace is accused by the spy Lupus of writing ‘a dangerous, seditious libel’, and defends himself by claiming that ‘a just man cannot fear … the malice of traducing tongues’. Horace’s rivals Crispinus and Demetrius, competing with him for the emperor’s favour, are exposed as pretenders to the laurel wreath, whose bad verses and malicious envy serve only to ‘bring all true arts and learning in contempt’. Ovid, presented as both a true poet and a voluptuary, is banished from Rome at the end of Act 4, with a clear suggestion that in his pursuit of ‘amorous pleasures’ he has abused the sacred calling of poetry. As the Emperor Augustus says to

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Ovid and his fellow poets Tibullus and Gallus, ‘There is no bounty to be shown to such /As have no real goodness’ and do not ‘rule their lives’ by the strenuous pursuit of virtue. The contrasting fates of Ovid and Horace illustrate how, in this highly competitive court society, success or failure depends on the arbitrary will of an all-powerful ruler.7 In Poetaster, Jonson portrays Augustus Caesar as the ideal prince. Jonson’s Augustus willingly accepts advice, delegates his powers freely, and at one point is so respectful of ‘sweet poesy’s sacred garlands’ that he relinquishes the seat of honour to Virgil. When Horace, saying ‘And for my soul, it is as free as Caesar’s’, offers counsel, Augustus responds: Thanks, Horace, for thy free and wholesome sharpness, Which pleaseth Caesar more than servile fawns. A flattered prince soon turns the prince of fools. (Poetaster, 5.1.17, 90, 94–6)

When Horace exposes the malice of the informer Lupus and, later, harshly punishes the pretenders to poetry, Crispinus and Demetrius, it is with the approval of Augustus Caesar. The emperor, as presented here, does not countenance or encourage the abuses of the state; he welcomes their correction. As we shall see, precisely the opposite situation exists in the Rome of Tiberius, as portrayed in Sejanus. In Discoveries, Jonson’s commonplace book, there are several passages in which Jonson sets forth the relationship between prince and wise counsellor in highly idealized terms: Learning needs rest:Â€ sovereignty gives it. Sovereignty needs counsel:Â€ learning affords it. There is such a consocation of offices, between the prince, and whom his favour breeds, that they may help to sustain his power, as he their knowledge … A prince without letters is like a pilot without eyes. All his government is groping. In sovereignty it is a most happy thing not to be compelled; but so it is the most miserable not to be counselled … The good counsellors to princes are the best instruments of a good age.8

Those advising a prince must necessarily be cautious and circumspect, even at times attributing to the prince virtues he may not have. In his poem to the historian John Selden, Jonson comments that if at times he has ‘erred’ and ‘praised some names too much’ in his poems, he did so with persuasive intent:Â€‘’twas with purpose to have made them such’. And to the prince … to behave himself modestly and with respect; yet free from flattery … Not with insolence or precept; but as the prince were already furnished with the parts he should have, especially in affairs of state.9

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Jonson recognizes that princes are likely to resemble his idealized version of Augustus Caesar less than Tiberius, surrounded by flatterers, insecure in the seat of power, and behaving as though ‘all is under the law of their spoil and license’. ‘A merciful prince’, Jonson says, disagreeing with ‘the great doctor of state, Machiavel’, is ‘safe in love, not fear’. He needs no emissaries, spies, intelligencers, to entrap true subjects. He fears no libels, no treasons. His people speak what they think, and talk openly what they do in secret. They have nothing in their breasts that they need a cypher for. He is guarded with his own benefits.

However, in the Rome of Tiberius and, Jonson hints, in the England of his own day, ‘spies, intelligencers’, as well as flatterers, those who ‘know more than honest counsels’, flourish, seeking the favours of the prince and the prince’s favourites. As a disaffected Roman says in the opening scene of Sejanus: These can lie, Flatter, and swear, forswear, deprave, inform, Smile, and betray; make guilty men; then beg The forfeit lives, to get the livings; cut Men’s throats with whisp’rings.10

Jonson’s remarks on the uneasy relationship between Tiberius and Sejanus in Discoveries summarize the action of Sejanus and draw a general moral applicable to contemporary princes, in a society where ‘so many courtarts are studied’: But princes that neglect their proper office thus, their fortune is often-times to draw a Sejanus to be near about them, who will at last affect to get above them, and put them in a worthy fear of rooting both them out and their family. For no men hate an evil prince more than they that helped to make him such; and none more boastingly weep his ruin than they that procured and practised it. The same path leads to ruin which did to rule, when men profess a license in governing. A good king is a public servant. (Discoveries, pp. 554–5)

The detailed listing of sources in the margins of the Sejanus Quarto is a gesture directed at the ‘learned’ reader, asserting Jonson’s credentials as a serious author steeped in the Latin classics, refusing to pander to the debased taste of ‘the ignorant gapers’ in the theatrical audience.11 Jonson’s crowded margins, with citations like ‘cons. Tac. Annal, lib. 4 pag. 94’, are as remote as can be imagined from the pages of the quarto and folio Shakespeare texts. Shakespeare may follow North’s Plutarch as closely as Jonson follows Tacitus or Suetonius, but he does not advertise the fact

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or give page references. A further reason for the inclusion of marginal notes in Sejanus is ‘self-protection’, Jonson guarding himself, in a ‘dangerous age’, against accusations of seditious intent by ‘base detractors’. His implicit answer to such charges is that he is writing about ancient Rome rather than contemporary England and that he is only saying what Tacitus and other classical Roman authors have said before him.12 Jonson’s career as poet, dramatist, and provider of court masques is full of contradictions. Fiercely protesting his independence, maintaining a defiant stance of being ‘at feud /With sin and vice, though with a throne endued’, Jonson was nevertheless deeply enmeshed in the patronage system, the willing servant of monarchical authority. His poems and masques, like Poetaster, can be seen as ‘closely aligned with the ideological co-ordinates of Jacobean monarchy, and serviceable to its political ends’.13 A professional dramatist who, unlike most of his contemporaries, saw his plays primarily as reading rather than acting texts, Jonson bitterly attacked ‘the loathèd stage’ as infected by the ‘loathsome age’, in which authors seeking success were encouraged to ‘prostitute’ themselves. In one of the two poems entitled ‘Ode. To Himself ’, Jonson contrasted virtue and fortune, in terms repeated again and again in his writings: â•… Minds that are great and free â•…â•… Should not on fortune pause; ’Tis crown enough to virtue still, her own applause.

But Jonson never felt able to rest secure in virtue’s applause, ‘alone, / Without companions’ in a world where, as he says in the ‘Epistle to Lady Aubigny’, ‘’Tis grown almost a danger to speak true /Of any good mind now, they are so few.’14 The final two lines of ‘An Ode. To Himself’ echo a passage at the end of the ‘Apologetical Dialogue’ appended to Poetaster in 1616: And since our dainty age â•…â•…â•… Cannot endure reproof, Make not thyself a page To that strumpet, the stage; â•…â•…â•… But sing high and aloof, Safe from the wolf’s black jaw, and the dull ass’s hoof.

At no point was Jonson able to free himself from obsessive awareness of the pressures of the competitive environments of the court and the theatrical world, the ‘dull ass’s hoof’ of public taste and the ‘wolf’s black jaw’ of arbitrary power, intent, as in Tiberius’s Rome, to make ‘knowledge

Jonson as moralist and courtier

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… a capital offence’, as those in authority attempt to silence writers who speak inconvenient truths.15 Jons on a s Mor a l i s t a n d C ou r t i e r Jonson’s favourite Latin authors, the ones he ‘continually quotes and paraphrases, recommends to friends and readers’, are all practical moralists:Â€ Seneca, Cicero, Horace, Martial, Juvenal, Tacitus, and among neo-Latin authors, Lipsius. The ethical position these authors implicitly or explicitly argue in their writings can be described as Stoic, emphasizing the austere Roman virtues of temperance, self-reliance, discipline, fortitude.16 In his poems, Jonson frequently praises the man or woman who can manage to ‘keep an even and unaltered gait’, securely free from ‘the turning world … giddy with change’ of society and its false values. Epigram 102, ‘To William, Earl of Pembroke’, largely made up of sententiae adapted from Seneca, neatly sums up the ethical stance expressed again and again in Jonson’s poems, as well as indicating some of the problematical aspects of Jonsonian ethics. I do but name thee, Pembroke, and I find â•… It is an epigram on all mankind, Against the bad, but of and to the good: â•… Both which are asked, to have thee understood. Nor could the age have missed thee, in this strife â•… Of vice and virtue, wherein all great life, Almost, is exercised, and scarce one knows â•… To which yet of the sides himself he owes. They follow virtue for reward today, â•… Tomorrow vice, if she give better pay; And are so good and bad, at such a price, â•… As nothing else discerns the virtue or vice. But thou, whose noblesse keeps one stature still, â•… And one true posture, though besieged with ill Of what ambition, faction, pride can raise, â•… Whose life even they that envy it must praise, That art so reverenced, as thy coming in â•… But in the view doth interrupt their sin: Thou must draw more, and they that hope to see â•… The commonwealth still safe must study thee.17

Jonson explicitly addresses his poems (often, like Horace, in the form of epistles, with named addressees) to ‘the good’, small in number, but able to recognize one another as members of a community of like-minded

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people. ‘The bad’ occupy positions of power, and deride and seek to punish those who dissent from their corrupt values. In the ‘Epistle to Lady Aubigny’, Jonson speaks of himself as routinely castigated as ‘dangerous /By arts and practice of the vicious’, who are ‘fortified’ by their ‘number’ (‘Epistle to Lady Aubigny’, 3–4, 11–12). In the characteristic mode of satire, as exemplified in the Satires and Epistles of Horace, ‘the bad’ and ‘the good’ reciprocally define one another, with positive standards of conduct, stated or implied, providing norms against which deviations can be measured.18 The opening lines of Epigram 102 claim that ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ can easily be distinguished, but the poem goes on to complicate this straightforward assertion. Line 4, like Milton’s ‘good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up almost inseparably’, suggests the ‘incessant labour’ involved in ‘knowing good by evill’. In a world in which ‘vice and virtue’ are at ‘strife’, without intermission, it becomes harder and harder to tell one from the other, with their ‘many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned’. Lines 5–12 contrast two ways of defining vice and virtue:Â€ an instrumental, nominalistic one, associated later in the seventeenth century with Hobbes, asserting that ‘these words of good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them; there being nothing simply and absolutely so’, and another, more traditional view that ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’ are moral absolutes.19 In a court society, such as that of imperial Rome or the England of James I, where relationships, within a hierarchical patronage system, are largely based on the distribution of ‘reward’, seemingly virtuous actions may disguise base motives in those seeking their own advancement. Appearances are not to be trusted. The traditional stoic position, as set forth in Seneca and the neo-stoic Lipsius, is that ‘the bad’ are likely to predominate in any given society, and that the virtuous individual, ‘besieged with ill’, needs to fortify himself against the vicissitudes of circumstances. Pembroke, rather than being a lonely adherent of beleaguered virtue, was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom, Jonson’s patron, to whom he dedicated both Catiline (1611) and the Epigrams (1616), claiming Pembroke’s ‘protection’ against ‘ignorant and guilty mouths’. In December 1615, Pembroke was appointed Lord Chamberlain, and the last four lines of Jonson’s epigram may refer to his public role as ‘the leading figure in the emergent regime’.20 Lines 17–18 seem to suggest that when the austere Pembroke enters a room, the wicked people, abashed, temporarily cease their activities. ‘In the view’ suggests surveillance, and the last two lines present Pembroke as guardian and steward of the commonwealth, keeping it ‘safe’.

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Unlike Shakespeare, a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s (and later King’s) Men, from whom he received a steady income in return for writing an average of two plays a year, Jonson was dependent on patronage for financial support. Entering the service of the King, from whom he received an annual pension after 1616, Jonson wrote a series of masques for the King and court, and between 1616 and 1626 abandoned the public stage entirely. Jonson complained to Drummond that poetry ‘had beggared him’ and that ‘of his plays he never gained two hundred pounds’ altogether. His twenty-odd court masques, for which the going rate was at least six times greater than that for Volpone or Sejanus, provided greater financial security.21 Recent criticism has tended to treat Jonson’s poems to great men as transactions, intended to promote his own interests in the competitive world of the court. Riggs’s biography emphasizes ‘the motif of social advancement’ in the poems and Jonson’s success by 1616 in having ‘firmly ensconced himself in a patronage network of rising power’. One study, crudely reductive, treats Jonson’s epigram to Pembroke as selfadvertisement, demonstrating skills ‘that would make him attractive to other potential patrons’.22 More subtly, Stanley Fish, in a closely argued essay, presents Jonson as an outsider, someone ‘who must rely on others for favor and recognition’, and, in compensation, creates an imagined society of the virtuous, where he can be ‘gatekeeper’.23 In the compliments addressed to King James in Jonson’s poems and masques, there is a considerable element of flattery and of a courtÂ� ier’s astuteness. An epigram ‘To King James’, on the occasion of the Gunpowder Plot, responds to the immediate historical context, as well as arguing an ethical position consistent with Jonson’s other writings. Who would not be thy subject, James, to obey â•… A prince that rules by example more than sway? Whose manners draw, more than thy powers constrain; â•… And in this short time of thy happiest reign Hast purged thy realms, as we have now no cause â•… Left us of fear, but first our crimes, then laws.

(Epigram 35, ‘To King James’, 1–6)

The King, no autocrat, is presented here as responsible guardian of the public interest, choosing to rule by moral example rather than by fear. Jonson’s lines, here as elsewhere in his poems and masques, offer counsel, projecting an ideal of harmony overcoming disorder. As such critics as Stephen Orgel and Leah Marcus have pointed out, the element of persuasion is prominent in Jonson’s court masques, many of which have a specific political agenda. Neptune’s Triumph for the Return

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of Albion (1624) is an attempt to turn a disaster, Prince Charles’s return from a deeply unpopular attempt to marry a Spanish princess, into a cause for celebration. Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) similarly attempts to deflect criticism of royal policies, portraying the court as ‘Virtue’s seat’: See where he shines:Â€Justice and Wisdom placed About his throne, and those with Honor graced, Beauty and Love. It is not with his brother [Atlas] Bearing the world, but ruling such another Is his renown. Pleasure, for his delight Is reconciled to Virtue.24

Jonson’s masques are instruments of royal power, written to and for the King, and an obligatory element in them is a passage of direct address, praising monarchical rule as benevolent, life-giving. In some of the masques, the terms of praise are closely akin to those in Epigram 35, ruling ‘by example more than sway’. In Oberon (1611), in which scenery, costumes, and dominant metaphors unite Roman and ancient British elements, Silenus, paying ‘homage to the British court’, praises James I as abhorring tyranny and the use of ‘force’: He is a god o’er kings, yet stoops he then Nearest a man when he doth govern men, To teach them by the sweetness of his sway, And not by force. He’s such a king as they Who’re tyrans’ subjects, or ne’er tasted peace, Would, in their wishes, form for their release.25

Here, as in several other masques, Jonson praises King James’s pacific inclinations, his refusal to become embroiled in European conflicts, against the advice of some influential courtiers who favoured a militant Protestantism. In these masques as in the celebrations heralding his accession to the throne, James I is turned into a reincarnation of the Emperor Augustus, inaugurating an era of peace.26 Ideologically, Jonson’s masques are deeply conservative, presenting idealized versions of King and courtiers to an audience highly susceptible to flattery. Their main underlying ideological premise is ‘the centrality of the monarch to the state’ and, despite criticism of abuses associated with the court in a number of masques, the form is by its very nature Â�hierarchical, supportive of the existing social structure.27 For all the expertise demonstrated in such masques as The Golden Age Restored, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, and The Vision of Delight in showing King James a flattering image of himself as demigod ‘whose power is everywhere’,

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creating ‘a heav’n on earth’, in the actual performances of the masques, reality sometimes intruded. The King’s reaction while watching Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, as reported by a Venetian observer, showed neither pleasure nor virtue:Â€‘The King, who is by nature choleric, grew Â�impatient and shouted loudly, “Why don’t they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take all of you, dance!”’28 The action of Milton’s Ludlow Masque, which, like Jonson’s masque, features Comus and his followers, is predicated on the assumption that pleasure and virtue cannot be reconciled. Courts, the home of ‘lewdly-pampered Luxury’ and its ‘vast excess’, can never be ‘Virtue’s seat’. Jonson’s masque, in contrast, assumes that the forces of disorder, like the spectacular effects Inigo Jones provided for the court audience, would vanish in an instant, at the clap of a hand:Â€‘’Tis only asked from thee to look and these will die.’29 S ej a n us a n d R e pu bl ic a n i s m The most puzzling aspect of Sejanus (1605) is the sharp contrast between that play’s republicanism and the conservative royalist politics of Jonson’s masques. After the first performances of the play in 1603–4, Jonson was questioned by the Privy Council, accused of ‘popery and treason’. We have no record of what was actually performed at the Globe and at court. Jonson takes pains in his prefatory remarks ‘To the Readers’ to point out that he has rewritten the play substantially. Lastly, I would inform you that this book, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the public stage, wherein a second pen had good share; in place of which I have rather chosen to put weaker (and no doubt less pleasing) of mine own.30

Two commendatory poems seek to exonerate Jonson from charges, brought by ‘great ones’ in the court, that Sejanus is a disguised attack on King and court, seditious in intent, using the Roman parallel to reflect on ‘later times’. â•… â•… â•… â•…

Ne of such crimes accuse him, which I dare By all his muses swear be none of his. The men are not, some faults may be these times’; He acts these men, and they did act these crimes.31

For all these disclaimers, there are passages in Sejanus that might have made James I and prominent courtiers distinctly uncomfortable. Tiberius, the reigning emperor, is depicted as a tyrant, duplicitous, ruthless, a master of dissimulation, indifferent to the public interest, the fount

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of corruption and injustice. When the cautious Lepidus says, ‘he is our prince’, the republican Arruntius responds: He is our monster:Â€forfeited to vice So far, as no racked virtue can redeem him, His loathèd person fouler than all crimesÂ€– An emp’ror only in his lusts. (Sejanus, 4.372–6)

Sejanus, the overmighty favourite, is even more monstrous. Utterly amoral and unscrupulous, swollen with ambition, Sejanus is a Machiavel who, like Richard III or Iago, recognizes no claims beyond the desiring, ravenous self. Tacitus describes him as ‘in his own actions secret … in shew modest, but inwardly greedie of aspiring’.32 In soliloquy, Sejanus, casting off the mask, exults in his wickedness, defying both conventional morality and the gods, Adultery? It is the lightest ill I will commit. A race of wicked acts Shall flow out of my anger, and o’erspread The world’s wide face, which no posterity Shall e’er approve … Laugh at the idle terrors. Tell proud Jove, Between his power, and thine, there is no odds. ’Twas only fear first in the world made gods.

Jonson follows Tacitus in presenting Sejanus’s downfall as inevitable once he allows his judgement to become affected ‘sottishly’ by his ‘overgreat fortune’ and seeks to supplant his master Tiberius, by whom he is outclassed in ‘cunning’ and political skills.33 What is potentially incendiary in Sejanus is the play’s depiction of the symbiotic relationship between unscrupulous monarch and unscrupulous favourite. In Act I, Sejanus advises Tiberius to have no compunctions about ruling tyrannously: s ej a n u s. The prince, who shames a tyrant’s name to bear, Shall never dare do anything but fear. All the command of sceptres quite doth perish If it begin religious thoughts to cherish: Whole empires fall, swayed by those nice respects. It is the license of dark deeds protects Ev’n states most hated, when no laws resist The sword, but that it acteth what it list. (2.178–85)34


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Tiberius responds, several lines later, by saying that he agrees entirely with Sejanus, and had only pretended to disagree to draw Sejanus out, testing him. t i be r i u s. We can no longer Keep on our mask to thee, our dear Sejanus; Thy thoughts are ours, in all, and we but proved Their voice, in our designs, which by assenting Hath more confirmed us, than if heart’ning Jove Had, from his hundred statues, bid us strike. (2.278–83)

There are several plays and pamphlets depicting overmighty subjects, corrupt and ambitious favourites, written during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. Even before his accession to the English throne, the young James VI of Scotland was criticized for being surrounded with favourites, ‘borne heritours to nothing in this land’, ‘yonge men that lyes in his chamber and is his mynions’.35 Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the King’s lover and favourite, excoriated as an upstart and a malign influence on James I, only became prominent in 1607, and thus can not be portrayed in Sejanus, but in 1604, between the performance and publication of Sejanus, Jonson was imprisoned for having aroused ‘the Kinges indignation’ at satire of the influx of ‘industrious Scots’ at the court of James I in the play Eastward Ho:Â€‘Where ambition of place goes before fitness of birth, contempt and disgrace follow.’ Writing from prison to Pembroke, Salisbury, and five other prominent court figures in 1605, hoping that they would intercede with the King, Jonson urged them ‘rightly to inform his Majestie, yt I never in thought, words, or Act, had purpose to offend or grieve him, but with all my powers have studied to shew my selfe most loyall and zealous’.36 There are aspects of Sejanus that might ‘offend or grieve’ a touchy James I even more. Where in Marlowe’s Edward II, Gaveston is an ambitious favourite, ‘base and obscure’ in his origins, seeking to manipulate a weak king who ‘dotes upon’ him, Mortimer and the other rebellious barons are no less ambitious and unscrupulous than their despised enemy Gaveston. In Richard II, ‘the wasteful King’ is criticized for his irresponsibility in allowing ‘caterpillars’, ‘too-fast-growing’ court favourites, to infest the realm, but the institution of monarchy remains intact as the crown passes from Richard to Henry. In Sejanus, in contrast, the villainous Sejanus is the instrument of Tiberius’s tyranny, carrying out the emperor’s unspoken desires.37 In Tiberius’s Rome, as depicted by Jonson, there is no

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possibility of blaming the evils infecting the realm on the advisers to the monarch, on the grounds that ‘the king can do no wrong’. Sejanus, blinded by ambition, exults in Act 5 that he, not Tiberius, is the ruler of Rome, surrounded by obsequious flatterers who pay tribute to his unbounded power. s ej a n u s. All Rome hath been my slave. The Senate sat an idle looker-on And witness of my power, when I have blushed More to command, than it to suffer. All The fathers have sat ready and prepared To give me empire, temples, or their throats, When I would ask ’em. (5.256–62)

Under the guise of service to the emperor, whom he secretly despises, Sejanus seeks to control the instruments of power in the Roman state, to ‘draw all dispatches through my private hands’ and award ‘dignities and offices’, becoming ‘arbiter of all’ (3.615–21). He thinks he can manipulate Tiberius in ways that will serve his own interests and damage his enemies. â•…â•… This have I made my rule, To thrust Tiberius into tyranny, And make him toil to turn aside those blocks Which I, alone, could not remove with safety.

(2.390–3)

Tiberius, jealous of his own power and distrustful of his ambitious Â� favourite, ruthlessly discards Sejanus when he feels his own position under threat. In a speech in which Tiberius comments on the need to observe ‘caution, and fit care’ (3.628) toward one’s supposed allies and dependants, trusting no one, Jonson paraphrases Machiavelli:Â€the prince should fear ‘those on whom he has conferred excessive favours’ even more than those he has injured: Those are the dreadful enemies we raise With favours, and make dangerous with praise … ’Tis then a part of supreme skill to grace No man too much, but hold a certain space Between th’ascender’s rise and thine own flat, Lest, when all rounds be reached, his aim be that.

(3.637–8, 643–6)38

The Emperor then recruits Macro, whom he knows to be no less vicious and unprincipled than Sejanus, to spy on Sejanus and, eventually, to


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act as his agent in removing Sejanus from power. Tiberius compares his promotion of Macro, ‘the organ we must work by now’ (3.649), as rival to Sejanus, to allowing two poisons to counteract one another. Macro’s response is that of a true Machiavel and servant of arbitrary power:Â€ a prince’s command overrides all considerations of morality, all domestic ties (wife, parent, friends, ‘all my kin’). m ac r o. I will not ask why Caesar bids do this, But joy that he bids me. It is the bliss Of courts to be employed, no matter how: A prince’s power makes all his actions virtue. We, whom he works by, are dumb instruments, To do, but not enquire … The way to rise is to obey and please. He that will thrive in state, he must neglect The trodden paths that truth and right respect. (3.714–19, 730, 735–7)39

What is under attack in Sejanus, then, is not simply the influence of overmighty, ambitious favourites, but tyranny, the reduction of free-born Romans to the condition of slaves. The only virtuous characters in the play, acting as a moral touchstone, are a group of disaffected republicans mourning the decay of the Roman values of the past. Senators and consuls, Sabinus complains in Act 1, vie with one another to see ‘who shall propound most abject things, and base’, abandoning any concern with ‘the public liberty’ to embrace ‘flat servility’ (1.50, 54–5). His friend Silius, an experienced army commander and former consul, agrees, attributing the decline of Rome from its former greatness under the republic to a decline in virtue. s i l i u s. Well, all is worthy of us, were it more, Who, with our riots, pride, and civil hate, Have so provoked the justice of the godsÂ€– We that (within these fourscore years) were born Free, equal lords of the triumphèd world, And knew no masters but affections, To which betraying first our liberties, We since became the slaves to one man’s lusts. (1.56–63)

Tacitus expresses similar republican views, contrasting idealized past and debased present, in several passages:Â€‘As our ancestors attained and sawe the highest pitch and perfection of liberty, so we of servility.’ The contrast between a birthright of liberty and the condition of slavery, subservience

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to the will of a single man, is characteristic of Tacitus and of the republican tradition.40 The attitude of the dissident republicans in Sejanus toward an imagined heroic Roman past is shown clearly in a speech by Arruntius in Act 1: a r ru n t i u s. Times? The men, The men are not the same:Â€’tis we are base, Poor, and degenerate from th’exalted strain Of our great fathers. Where is now the soul Of god-like Cato?Â€– he, that durst be good When Caesar durst be evil; and had power, As not to live his slave, to die his master. (1.86–92)

In Julius Caesar, Cassius makes a similar comparison of ‘our fathers’ in a virtuous republican past and a degenerate present (1.3.80–4), but his appeal to shared republican values, addressed to Brutus and to Caska, is calculated, aimed at enlisting them as fellow conspirators, where Arruntius has no such persuasive end in mind. Arruntius sees Julius Caesar as potential tyrant and, as in Lucan or in Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey, praises Cato’s suicide as resistance to slavery, a courageous act by which he conquers the victorious Caesar. Caesar is a ‘monster’, where Brutus and Cassius, ‘mighty spirits’, are heroes of liberty. a r ru n t i u s. Or where the constant Brutus, that (being proof Against all charm of benefits) did strike So brave a blow into the monster’s heart That sought unkindly to captive his country? O, they are fled the light. Those mighty spirits Lie raked up, with their ashes, in their urns, And not a spark of their eternal fire Glows in a present bosom … There’s nothing Roman in us; nothing good, Gallant, or great. (1.93–100, 102–3)

Later in the play, the historian Cremutius Cordus, another ‘championÂ€/For the old liberty’, is tried for treason on a charge of praising Brutus and Cassius in his historical writings, ‘comparing men /And times’ to the disadvantage of the present, and asserting that Cassius was ‘the last of all the Romans’ (2.311–12, 3.390–2).41 In Acts 1–4, the opponents of Sejanus, politically inept as compared to the shrewd, ruthless Sejanus and Tiberius, are picked off one at a time by the emperor’s network of spies and mercenary, intriguing courtiers. Silius,


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considered by Sejanus the ‘most of danger’, because of his high reputation as victorious general, after reminding his accusers of his services to Rome, commits suicide with stoic dignity, ‘fortified against’ the vicissitudes of Fortune: Romans, if any here be in this Senate, Would know to mock Tiberius’ tyranny, Look upon Silius, and so learn to die. [Stabs himself.] (2.286–7; 3.330, 337–9)

Sabinus, betrayed by his supposed friend Latiaris, acting as an agent provocateur, is sentenced to death, and the young princes Nero and Drusus, potential heirs to Tiberius, are exiled and imprisoned.42 Sejanus, exulting in victory over his enemies, sees no obstacles in his rise to supreme power, and his few remaining opponents despair at the ease with which vice triumphs over innocence and virtue. In some ways, the overall structure of the play resembles Richard III, in which the first part of the play (four acts in Sejanus, three and a half in Richard III) presents the protagonist’s seemingly unstoppable rise to power, toppling one after another adversary, and the second part his sudden fall. In Richard III, most of Richard’s victims are compromised in some way, whereas in Sejanus the dividing line between virtue and vice is more clear-cut, though virtue can hardly be said to triumph in the end, with Macro taking over from Sejanus.43 Sejanus’s hubristic speech at the beginning of Act 5 clearly suggests that retribution waits around the corner. s ej a n u s. Swell, swell, my joys, and faint not to declare Yourself as ample as your causes are. I did not live till now, this my first hour, Wherein I see my thoughts reached by my power … â•…â•…â•… Great, and high, The world knows only two, that’s Rome, and I. My roof receives me not; ’tis air I tread. (5.1–7)

The audience knows, as Sejanus does not, that Tiberius has come to distrust the reigning favourite and that Sejanus’s confidence is unjustified. As Macro says in his soliloquy at the end of Act 3: m ac r o. If then it be the lust of Caesar’s power T’have raised Sejanus up, and in an hour O’erturn him, tumbling down from height of all, We are his ready engine; and his fall May be our rise. (3.744–8)

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Jonson builds up the suspense in Act 5, alternating scenes with Sejanus and Macro and including some comic touches as senators and consuls abase themselves before Sejanus and then, once they realize he has lost Tiberius’s favour, turn against him as a source of infection. Sejanus’s fall is presented as an example of the instability of fortune and the insecurity of a monarch’s favour: Whom, but this morn, they followed as their lord, Guard through the streets, bound like a fugitive … â•…â•…â•… Forbear, you things That stand upon the pinnacles of state, To boast your slippery height. (5.736–7, 903–5)

In Act 5, Tiberius, who dominates the action behind the scenes, does not appear, and, indeed, is absent from the stage after Act 3. Jonson’s plot device, imitated from Cassius Dio, is to have a letter from Tiberius read out, which begins with equivocal praise of Sejanus but then, criticizing the favourite more and more severely, ends with declaring Sejanus ‘suspended from all exercise of power’ (5.637–8). In the recent RSC production, Tiberius is brought on stage in this scene, in a kind of split-screen effect, reading out the letter as, in another part of the stage, the senators are shown reacting to the letter.44 Like Tacitus, Jonson presents Tiberius as a master of ‘dissimulation’Â€– a ‘consummate political actor’, according to one reviewer of the 2005 production, who ‘distances himself from the violence he sanctions’. In his public appearances, Tiberius plays the role of the virtuous prince, pretending reluctance to assume power, calling himself ‘the servant of the Senate’ and feigning piety and concern for ‘the good of all and every citizen’ (1.393, 444).45 Though he chooses to act through Sejanus and then through Macro, these agents of the tyrant’s will, having no independent existence, can be brutally discarded. The play ends with Sejanus replaced by Macro, who may be even worse, and tyranny continuing unchecked, with no help of redress. The portrayal of Rome under tyranny in Sejanus fits uneasily with the received view of Jonson as staunch conservative and apologist for monarchy. According to Norbrook, for example, ‘Jonson’s conception of the well-being of the state was centred on the monarchy … Jonson found faults in particular individuals, but believed that the principle of social hierarchy and monarchy was perfectly sound.’ Worden, in an influential essay on Sejanus, argues that what Jonson is attacking is ‘not monarchical


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power but its ill administration:Â€not absolute government, which is properly strong but can be healthy, but arbitrary rule … The problem of good government to Jonson … is not one of altering the constitution but of protecting it. It is a problem of counsel and of moral corruption.’â•›46 Critics who see Jonson as conservative place particular emphasis on speeches by the virtuous, powerless Sabinus and Lepidus in Act 4 advocating a prudent withdrawal in dark times. Even ‘lasting darkness and despair of day’ would not justify active resistance against a lawful sovereign, however wicked he may be. s a bi n u s. No ill should force the subject undertake Against the sovereign, more than hell should make The gods do wrong. A good man should and must Sit rather down with loss, than rise unjust. (4.162–6)47

Lepidus, after seeing the brutal murder of his friend Sabinus, tells Arruntius that their only recourse is the stoic’s ‘passive fortitude’ in suffering, secure in the consciousness of one’s own virtue, abandoning the political arena as irremediably corrupt. l e pi du s. None, but the plain and passive fortitude To suffer, and be silent; never stretch These arms against the torrent; live at home, With my own thoughts, and innocence about me, Not tempting the wolves’ jaws:Â€these are my arts. (4.294–8)

Yet in context, neither of these speeches is entirely to be trusted, since Sabinus is fencing verbally with the spy Latiaris, who is trying to entrap him into openly attacking the emperor, and Lepidus is reacting to the slaughter of his fellow republicans and the apparent extinction of all vestiges of Roman freedom. As Arruntius says in response to this speech, ‘No place, no day, no hour, we see, is free’ (4.312). The relationship between Poetaster and Sejanus is complicated by the later play’s republicanism, but the ideological contrast is straightforward:Â€ if Augustus in Poetaster is the ideal prince, then Tiberius and Sejanus illustrate what it is like to live under a tyrant, ‘dead to virtue’ (1.416), and a power-hungry favourite. At the time of its initial performances in 1603, Sejanus could serve as coded warning to the new King, suggesting (perhaps injudiciously, as the summons before the Privy Council might indicate) that James should imitate Augustus rather than Tiberius

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in his conduct. Silius carefully distinguishes between a virtuous prince and a tyrant who abuses his power and surrounds himself with flatterers: Men are deceived who think there can be thrall Beneath a virtuous prince. Wished liberty Ne’er lovelier looks than under such a crown.

(1.407–9)

As Tom Cain has pointed out, even committed republicans like Milton can argue in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, ‘how great a good and happiness a just King is, so great a mischeife is a Tyrant’. Sejanus, written at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I and published, with revisions, at the beginning of the reign of James I, can thus, like Tacitus’s Annals, serve both to examine ‘how men should conduct themselves under tyranny’ and to warn princes against becoming tyrants.48 Any parallels between the Roman past and the late Elizabethan or early Jacobean present are general and admonitory, in accordance with standard Renaissance notions of the uses of history, as set forth in the preface to North’s Plutarch: For it is a certain rule and instruction, which by examples past, teacheth us to judge of things present, and to foresee things to come; so as we may know what to like of, and what to follow, what to mislike, and what to eschue.

Such assumptions underlie both the ‘red Tacitism’ of the republican tradition and the ‘black Tacitism’ that offers the bleak counsel that under a tyranny ‘safetie dwelleth not in doing well or ill, but in doing nothing’ and thus ‘not tempting the wolves’ jawes’.49 C at i l i n e :Â€T h e R e pu bl ic u n de r T h r e at Catiline His Conspiracy, Jonson’s second Roman tragedy, was acted by the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, in 1611 and published in Quarto in the same year. At the first performances, the audience response was hostile. In the Quarto, Jonson includes a combative preface ‘To the Reader in Ordinary’ and a dedication to Pembroke complaining of ‘so thick and dark an ignorance as now almost covers the age’. He says of the theatrical audience, scornfully, neither praise nor dispraise of you can affect me’, addressing himself, here as in a number of his poems, to the ‘few’.50 In Catiline as in Sejanus, Jonson relies in great detail on classical sourcesÂ€– in this case, Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae for Acts 1–3 and part of Act 5, Cicero’s speeches against Catiline for Act 4 and part of Act 5. His immediate source, as a number of scholars have pointed out, is the edition of Sallust published in Basel in 1564, which includes not only Sallust’s

Catiline:Â€the Republic under threat

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Latin text but Cicero’s In Catilinam I and IV and, along with other commentaries, an extended Latin narrative by the Italian humanist Felicius Durantinus that, in effect, rewrites Sallust’s account of Catiline’s conspiracy to correct what Felicius considers Sallust’s bias and deficiencies. In this edition, a copy of which Jonson owned and annotated, Felicius modifies Sallust’s account in two principal ways:Â€to bring out the role of Cicero more fully in preserving Rome from a dangerous conspiracy, and to suggest that Julius Caesar was implicated as a secret ally of Catiline.51 Jonson in Catiline followed Felicius in both respects:Â€Cicero is, without question, the hero of the play, the saviour of Rome, and Caesar is a deeply equivocal figure, Cicero’s political opponent, who encourages Catiline from the sidelines. In Sallust, Catiline is a mixture of good and bad characteristicsÂ€– in Thomas Heywood’s 1608 translation, ‘Bold of Spirit’ but ‘voide of wisdome’, ‘of a high minde’ and ‘adorned with Gentleman-like qualities, but of an evil and froward disposition’. In Jonson, Catiline and his followers are thoroughly evil, with no redeeming qualities.52 Sallust, writing in the last days of the Roman republic, between the death of Julius Caesar and the accession of Augustus, begins his narrative with general reflections on the decline of Rome from its original republiÂ� can virtue. The causes of this catastrophic degeneration from a glorious past to a base, ignominious present, Sallust argues, in a passage often cited by later republicans such as Milton, were greed and ambition, ‘an immoderate desire of riches’ and ‘the ambitious desire of superiority’. Romans who, in the early days of the republic, ‘made light of labour, of dangers, and of difficult adventures’, were corrupted by ‘the enjoyment of those vanities (wealth and idleness), which all mortall men do most seeke after’.53 Milton in Paradise Regained echoes Sallust in characterizing the Romans of a somewhat later period as ‘degenerate, by themselves enslaved’: That people victor once, now vile and base, Deservedly made vassal, who once just, Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquered well, But govern ill the nations under yoke … â•…â•…â•… first ambitious grown Of triumph that insulting vanity … Luxurious by their wealth, and greedier still, And from the daily scene effeminate.54

Jonson adapts passages from Sallust’s prefatory remarks on the decline of Rome, ‘by itself now overcome’, in the Chorus that ends Act I of Catiline:

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Ben Jonson’s Rome Rome now is mistress of the whole World, sea and land, to either pole, And even that fortune will destroy The power that made it:Â€she doth joy So much in plenty, wealth, and ease, As now th’excess is her disease. (Catiline, 1.536, 545–50)

The listing of the vices infecting Rome in Jonson’s Chorus differs in some details from Sallust, but the emphasis on luxury (‘They eat on beds of silk and gold’) is similar, and so is the central contrast between ‘simple poverty’ and the vices attending wealth and success, ‘ambition’ and ‘eating avarice’, in a state where ‘decrees are bought and laws are sold’ (Catiline, 1.565, 575–9). Jonson, like Sallust, presents Catiline’s rebellion as a symptom of the disease infecting Rome, just punishment for ‘Rome’s faults’. For guilty states do ever bear The plagues about them which they have deserved … We see ’em not. Thus still we love The evil we do until we suffer it.55

One important element in Sallust prominent in the later republican tradition is largely absent from Jonson’s Catiline:Â€the claim that the great achievements of Rome in its early history were directly attributable to liberty, the advantages of living in a free state.56 Though the Chorus at the end of Act 2 praises magistrates whose sole concern is ‘the public good’, contrasting those who ‘seek to get the start /In state, by power, parts, or bribes’ (2.379–80, 401), with the republic’s unselfish servants, it is Catiline and his followers who claim to be proponents of liberty. In Act 1, in a passage closely based on Sallust, Catiline addresses his fellow conspirators, urging them to ‘redeem ourselves to liberty /And break the iron yoke forg’d for our necks’. â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… And being Consul, I not doubt t’effect â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… All that you wish, if trust not flatter me, â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… And you’d not rather still be slaves than free. c e t h e g u s. Free, free l ong i n u s. ’Tis freedom. c u r t i u s. Freedom we all stand for.

(Catiline, 1.344–5, 418–21)

Jonson, like Sallust, clearly shows that the republican rhetoric of Catiline in this oration is hypocritical. ‘The liberty you oft have wish’d for’ is the liberty to plunder, the licence of the unbounded will, seeking the ‘spoil


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the war brings’:Â€ ‘Behold renown, riches, and glory court you. /Fortune holds out these for you as rewards’ (Catiline, 1.410–12, 415). Sallust, in his version of Catiline’s oration, similarly identifies ‘that Liberty, which so long you have expected, and so often implored’ with ‘the inestimable spoiles of War’, the appeal of ‘Magistracies, Priesthoods’, and other mateÂ� rial benefits made available to ‘the pleasure of the victor’.57 More explicitly than in Sallust, Catiline in Jonson’s play appeals to the hitherto frustrated ‘longings’, sexual and acquisitive, of his supporters: Is there a beauty here in Rome you love, An enemy you would kill? What head’s not yours? Whose wife, which boy, whose daughter, of what race, That th’ husband or glad parents shall not bring you And boasting of the office?

(1.474–8, 480)

The distinction between the liberated, ravenous will and rational liberty is closely akin to Milton’s distinction between liberty and licence:Â€‘License they mean when they cry liberty; /For who loves that, must first be wise and good.’â•›58 Jonson’s Catiline in Act 1 inveighs against the way the offices of ‘the Commonwealth’ are ‘engross’d so by a few’, rich men who ‘swell with treasure’ and, in their luxury and extravagance, ‘buy rare Attic statues, Tyrian hangings’, tearing down ‘ancient habitations’ and building new and newer ones as visible manifestations of their wealth (1.347, 377, 384–5, 392). As in Sallust, Catiline and his followers are not motivated by moral fervour but by a desire to have these things for themselves. With followers ‘so threaten’d with their debts’ and oppressed by ‘wants’ and ‘envy to the state’ that they will ‘run any desperate fortune’ (1.147, 157, 160–1), Catiline is presented throughout Jonson’s play as thoroughly base in his actions and his motivations. Inordinately proud and ambitious, Catiline is bent on destruction, ‘the ruin of [his] country’ (1.45), dedicated to evil. The ceremony of drinking wine mixed with blood from a murdered slave, an infernal ‘sacrament’ (1.487) binding the conspirators together, associates Catiline with the powers of darkness, foreclosing any possibility of viewing his rebellion sympathetically. Jonson places less emphasis than Sallust on the political dimensions of Catiline’s rebellion, the conflict in the late republic between two political factions purporting to represent patricians and plebeians. Though an aristocrat by birth, Catiline directs his appeal to those among the Roman populace who, discontented with their own lot, ‘affect novelties’, hating whatever is old and established.59 In introducing Cicero in Act 3, Jonson

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brings out his vulnerability, as a ‘new man’, without powerful allies or a long line of aristocratic ancestors. c ic e r o. I have no urns, no dusty monuments, No broken images of ancestors Wanting an ear or nose, no forged tables Of long descents to boast false honors from Or be my undertakers to your trust, But a new man, as I am styl’d in Rome, Whom you have dignified, and more, in whom Yo’have cut a way and left it ope for virtue Hereafter to that place which our great men Have shut up with all ramparts for themselves. (3.1.14–23)

In the choral odes ending Act 2 and Act 4, as in speeches by Cicero and Cato in Act 3, much is made of the ‘wisdom, foresight, fortitude’ required by the ‘careful magistrate’, whose ‘industry and vigilance’ must be unremitting. The ideal magistrate, according to the Chorus in Act 2, is oneÂ€who … to justice will adhere, Whatever great one it offend, And from the embraced truth not bend For envy, hatred, gifts or fear.

(2.376, 383–6; 3.1.33; 4.7.54)

Cicero’s ‘watchfulness’ (4.7.62) as guardian of the endangered Roman state is demonstrated by the way he acts resolutely and effectively to defeat Catiline and the conspirators. Jonson differs from Sallust in presenting Cicero as the saviour of Rome, virtually unaided, rather than as one of a group of Roman statesmen opposed to Catiline. In the closing sections of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, Cicero plays a relatively minor role. Where Jonson, following Felicius, includes Cicero’s oration attacking Catiline before the Senate, a single speech, virtually uninterrupted, taking up well over half the lines in Act 4, Scene 2, Sallust says, simply, ‘the Consull, either fearing his presence, or being mooved at his shamelesse impudency, made an excellent and profitable Oration, which afterwards he put forth in writing’.60 In the scene, near the end of the narrative, where the Senate debates the appropriate punishment for Cethegus, Lentulus, and the other conspirators, Sallust gives Cicero only the role of chairing the debate and, afterwards, carrying out the Senate’s order that they be put to death. Most of the episode in Sallust is devoted to two lengthy orations, first by Caesar, urging leniency, and then by Cato, arguing that to ‘stand


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looking one uppon another; doubtfull and irresolute what to do’ is to endanger the survival of Rome, threatened with the massacre of its citizens. Jonson, in contrast, gives Cicero a prominent role both in this scene and in an earlier scene, in which the conspirators are apprehended and confess their treason.61 Twentieth-century critics have frequently expressed doubts about the character and conduct of Jonson’s Cicero. The most common charge is expediency, the use of morally questionable means to bring about desired ends. Anne Barton states the case for the prosecution: A flexible, even a compromised, statesman, adept at bestowing flattery, gifts, and bribes, ready to use informers and spies, Cicero is an exponent of politics, of the art of the possible. He is even a little like Catiline.62

Cicero himself comments on the discrepancy between the ‘worthy’ ends and the employment of ‘so vile a thing’ as the cowardly turncoat Curius and the vain, selfish Fulvia, ‘a base /And common strumpet’ (3.2.216–17, 222). In reflecting on the advisability of winning the support of his fellow consul Antonius, a man not conspicuous for his virtue and thought to be sympathetic to Catiline, Cicero makes a comment similar to lines in Jonson’s epigram to Pembroke:Â€some men ‘follow virtue for reward’ and will follow vice, ‘if she give better pay’. c ic e r o. I must by offices and patience win him, Make him by art that which he is not born, A friend unto the public … ’Tis well if some men will do well for price; So few are virtuous when the reward’s away.63

The other means used by Cicero to defeat the conspiracy is espionage, the employment of a network of spies and informers. As he says to the ambassadors from the Allobroges, a Gaulish tribe that Catiline and his associates have sought to recruit to the conspiracy: Here in this city I have by the Praetors And Tribunes plac’d my guards and my watches so That not a foot can tread, a breath can whisper, But I have knowledge.

(4.4.48–51)

In other passages, he tells Catiline ‘I have those eyes and ears shall still keep guard /And spial on thee as they have ever done /And thou not feel it’ (4.2.173–5) and he instructs Curius, acting as his agent among the conspirators, to ‘find their windings out /And subtle turnings … Be secret

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as the night’ (3.2.182–3, 198). As Worden has suggested, these practices are uncomfortably close to the surveillance and suppression of dissent in Tiberius’s Rome, the use of dubious means to secure equally dubious ends. At the time of the Gunpowder Plot in 1606, Salisbury was criticized for the measures he used to ‘keepe down Faction’ and even accused of exaggerating or inventing a Catholic conspiracy for his own purposes. In An Answere to Certain Scandalous Papers, Salisbury responded: To what ende doe Princes admit of Counsellors care, or Secretaries vigilancie (whose Offices are to stand Sentinell over the life of Kings, and safetie of States) if their endevors to countermine the secret mynes of Treason, be thus exposed to misconstruction?64

Cicero’s actions in defence of the state against its enemies can be interpreted in two very different ways:Â€as the acts of a wise and prudent man, or as evidence of ‘the paradox that virtuous actions may arise from the basest of motives, while ignoble actions (Cicero’s duplicity and bribery) may arise from the most virtuous of intentions’.65 In the choral ode at the end of Act 4, Jonson raises very similar questions about how to interpret the actions of political leaders, in commenting on the fickleness of the Roman populace, in the grip of contradictory rumours, hopes, and fears, swinging wildly from one extreme to another. One while we thought him innocent, â•… And then w’accus’d The Consul for his malice spent â•… And power abus’d. Since that we hear he is in arms â•… We think not so, Yet charge the Consul with our harms â•… That let him go.

(4.7.44–51)

The actions of Cicero, ‘the careful magistrate’, in the eyes of the troubled Roman populace, beset with uncertainties, can appear sinister and underhanded or benevolent. Though the Chorus argues that it is necessary to ‘give to every noble deed /The name it merits’, the clear implication is that the names assigned to the deeds of public figures bear no absolute, unchanging signification, but vary according to circumstances. And call their diligence, deceit, â•… Their virtue, vice, Their watchfulness, but lying in wait, â•… And blood the price.

(4.7.60–3, 66–7)66


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One reason why Cicero needed to be cautious in dealing with the Roman senate and with the conspirators is that Catiline had powerful allies. A second problem Cicero faced, brought out more fully in Felicius than in Jonson, is the limitations on a Consul’s power:Â€holding office for one year only, a Consul could be liable for prosecution for what were later deemed to be offences committed in office, and in fact Cicero was exiled by his enemies a few years later, on the grounds that, contrary to preÂ� cedent, he had the conspirators put to death without trial. In Catiline, Jonson inserts a scene making it clear that Caesar encourages Catiline in his rebellion, telling him ‘Be resolute /And put your enterprise in act … What you do, do quickly’ (3.3.2–3, 36). The advice he gives Catiline shows Caesar to be deeply cynical, an advocate of Machiavellian ‘policy’:Â€might makes right, and moral considerations are irrelevant. c a e s a r . Let ’em call it mischief; When it is past and prosper’d, ’twill be virtue. Th’are petty crimes are punish’d, great rewarded … Less ought the care of men or fame to fright you, For they that win do seldom receive shame Of victory, howe’er it be achiev’d. (3.3.15–17, 21–3)

Caesar and Catiline share the conviction that ‘conscience’ is no more than ‘folly’, appropriate to a ‘religious fool … a superstitious slave’:Â€‘There was never yet any great thing yet /Aspired, but by violence and fraud’ (3.3.26–30). Caesar and his ally Crassus express their scorn of Cicero as a ‘new man’, coming from outside the ranks of the nobility, and claim that the fears and rumours of ‘turbulent practices’ and ‘dangers’ to the Roman state have been invented by Cicero to serve his own ends (3.1.51–2, 93–7). Later, when it becomes clear that Catiline’s rebellion has failed, Caesar and Crassus abandon Catiline and hypocritically praise Cicero along with the other senators. In Sallust, the arguments of Caesar and Cato before the Senate are equally balanced, with strong arguments on both sides. In Jonson, Caesar’s speech is more evidently a piece of special pleading, by a wily politician the audience knows to be implicated in Catiline’s conspiracy. Where in Sallust, charges accusing Caesar and Crassus of involvement in the conspiracy are presented as unsubstantiated rumours circulated by their enemies, in Jonson the audience knows beforehand that the accusations are true, and so does Cicero.67 Whether his refusal to act against Catiline’s powerful allies can be considered an example of Cicero’s political shrewdness, his recognition that (as Sallust puts it, in Heywood’s

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translation) ‘the greatnesse of the man’ may require that the possible complicity of Caesar ‘bee winked at’, or whether it can be considered a failure of nerve, an unwillingness to confront a danger to the state even greater than that represented by Catiline, is left open by Jonson.68 The view of Caesar that emerges from Jonson’s Catiline is very different from that in SallustÂ€– a dangerous man, ambitious, envious and unscrupulous, much closer to the Caesar of Lucan’s Pharsalia and Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey than to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.69 In an epigram on a translation of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Jonson treats Caesar as an ambivalent figure, one whose great deeds brought about the destruction of Roman liberty: Not Caesar’s deeds, nor all his honours won In these west parts; nor when that war was done, The name of Pompey for an enemy, Cato’s to boot, Rome and her liberty All yielding to his fortune … (Epigram 110, 1–5)

The events of Jonson’s Catiline take place early in Caesar’s career, with his military and political triumphs as well as the way he ‘fell by rage’ (14), killed by his enemies, still to come; but Caesar in Jonson’s play, like Catiline, represents a disease eating away at the Roman republic. As Cicero says to the Senate, in a passage adapted from In Catilinam I: Not only the grown evil that now is sprung And sprouted forth would be pluck’d up and weeded … But the main peril would bide still enclos’d Deep in the veins and bowels of the state, As human bodies laboring with fevers. (Catiline, 4.2.355–6, 361–3)

Jonson’s Caesar is, in potential at least, the Caesar of the classical republican tradition, the bold and turbulent man who destroyed Roman liberty, plunging the Roman world into the darkness of tyranny. If Cicero by his ‘labors’ and ‘watchings’ (5.9.90–1) manages to preserve the Roman commonwealth from destruction, the play suggests that this victory is only a temporary one.70

Ch apter 6

O’erflowing the measure:Â€Antony and Cleopatra

C l e opat r a a n d t h e de s t i n y of R om e In Horace’s ‘Cleopatra’ ode (Odes, 1.37), celebrating Octavius’s victory at Actium, Cleopatra is presented as the enemy of Rome, and, initially at least, described in hostile terms, as a kind of monster. She is a ‘frenzied queen’, plotting destruction against Rome as a city and empire, surrounded by ‘a mob of polluted, foul creatures’, mad and drunk with her unrealistic hopes of conquest.1 One oddity of this poem is that Antony is never mentioned. The battle of Actium, rather than being a confrontation of Roman against Roman, in which the two most powerful political leaders in Rome, Antony and Octavius, contend for supremacy, with the issue very much in doubt, is presented as an unequal contest between virtuous Rome and a foreign enemy. In Horace’s Epode 9, also celebrating the victory at Actium, Antony is described as behaving in a shameful manner, unworthy of any Roman. The charge against Antony here resembles the bitter reproach of Scarus in Antony and Cleopatra, after Antony, following Cleopatra, flees from the sea-battle. s c a ru s. I never saw an action of such shame. Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before Did violate so itself. (3.10.22–4)

In Horace’s Epode, the shameful act is not fleeing from the battle, abandoning his men, but going into battle at the head of an Egyptian army on behalf of a woman, in effect emasculating himself. Posterity, Horace says, will never believe that a Roman could allow himself to behave in such a way, becoming the servant of withered eunuchs.2 In the closing stanzas of Horace’s Ode, after describing the destruction by fire of the Egyptian fleet and Cleopatra’s terrified flight from her Italian pursuers, the tone changes. The ‘monster’, doomed to destruction in the face of irresistible Roman power, becomes courageous, resolute, 135

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heroic in choosing to die by her own hand. Bravely, ‘with no woman’s fear’, Horace’s Cleopatra contemplates death ‘with face serene’, as she boldly seeks to die ‘a nobler death’. As in Shakespeare and Plutarch, her motivation is in part an unwillingness to be led in triumph by Octavius, but Horace’s wording (the poem ends ‘non humilis mulier triumpho’) suggests that in her death she wins a victory over her Roman adversary.3 There is no such ambivalence in the treatment of Cleopatra and Egypt in the celebrated description of Aeneas’s shield in Book VIII of the Aeneid. In this extended episode, Aeneas is vouchsafed a vision of the glories of Roman imperium under his descendants, in which the high point is the battle of Actium, with ‘young Caesar … in Armour bright’ leading ‘the Romans and their Gods’ on one side, and Antony, surrounded by barbarous troops speaking in discordant tongues, on the other.4 Virgil does not present Actium as the climactic battle in a civil war among Romans, but as an epic confrontation of Roman civility and Eastern barbarism. As David Quint has pointed out, passages like this, contrasting the forces of order and disorder, pitting the Olympian gods against monstrous Egyptian gods, in every conceivable grotesque form, serve as ‘propaganda for the winning side of Augustus’, which effectively manages to ‘project a foreign “otherness” upon the vanquished enemies of Augustus’.5 Ideologically, the passage is closely akin to the praise of a godlike Augustus Caesar in Anchises’s prophecy in Book VI: Hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis, Augustus Caesar, Divi genus, aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva Saturno quondam.

In Dryden’s translation: Caesar himself, exalted in his line; Augustus, promis’d oft, and long foretold, Sent to the realm that Saturn rul’d of old; Born to restore a better Age of Gold.6

The famous lines that conclude Anchises’s prophecy serve a similar function, though here stated in terms of a generalized Roman destiny, addressed to the receptive Aeneas as representative and custodian of Roman values: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacique imponere morem, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

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Here Dryden’s translation is not accurate, and a literal prose translation conveys the paradox of spreading universal peace through war, in a passage which equates the unchallenged rule of Rome over conquered nations to the reign of virtue, moderation, and law. ‘Remember, O thou Roman, to rule the nations with thy swayÂ€ – these shall be thy artsÂ€– to impose peace by law, to spare the humble and to tame in war the proud.’7 For Dryden, as for many later commentators on the Aeneid, ‘Augustus is … shadow’d in the Person of Aeneas’, as Virgil gives his hero traits of character, ‘sober, steadfast, and tenacious’, meant to recall the victor at Actium. According to Syme, ‘no contemporary could fail to detect in Aeneas a foreshadowing of Augustus’. In this view, the relationship between Virgil and the emperor he served was that of client to patron, and like Jonson addressing poems and masques to James I and prominent courtiers, the poet offered counsel adapted to his immediate circumstances: Oblig’d he was to his Master for his Bounty, and he repays him with good Counsel, how to behave himself in his new Monarchy, so as to gain the Affections of his Subjects, and deserve to be call’d the Father of his Country. From this Consideration it is, that he chose for the ground-work of his Poem, One Empire destroy’d, and another rais’d from the Ruins of it.8

Dryden places particular emphasis on the unsettled condition of the Roman commonwealth at the time Augustus gained supreme power, suggesting that Virgil might well have been ‘still of Republican Principles in his Heart’, but, in the interest of order, hoping to avoid a continuation of civil war, wrote the Aeneid in favour of ‘the present settlement’ under Augustus. I say that Virgil having maturely weigh’d the Condition of the Times in which he liv’d:Â€that an entire Liberty was not to be retriev’d:Â€that the present Settlement had the prospect of a long continuance in the same Family, or those adopted into it … he concluded it to be the Interest of his Country to be so Govern’d:Â€To infuse an awful Respect into the People, towards such a Prince:Â€by that respect to confirm their Obedience to him; and by that Obedience to make them Happy. This was the Moral of his Divine Poem. (Poems, ed. Kinsley, III.1014–15)

Yet if, in the tradition represented by Dryden, the Aeneid is ‘a great work of propaganda’ serving the interests of Augustus, victor at Actium, this political reading ignores major aspects of the Aeneid. As Adam Parry points out in ‘The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid’, throughout Virgil’s poem the ‘sense of triumph’ is balanced against ‘a sense of loss’:Â€‘the proÂ� cesses of history are presented as inevitable … but the value of what they achieve is cast into doubt’.9 The ‘felt presence of the Aeneid’ permeates

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Antony and Cleopatra. Like Virgil’s Dido, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra presents a direct threat to the destined future of Rome, deflecting the hero from his chosen path.10 Antony recalls the story of Dido and Aeneas as he contemplates a liebestod in Act 4, revising Virgil’s account to reunite the lovers in the underworld. a n t on y. Where souls do couch on flowers we’ll hand in hand And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze. Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops, And all the haunt be ours. (AC, 4.14.52–5)

In the Aeneid, where Dido and Aeneas never go ‘hand in hand’, the story has no such happy ending. Aeneas, conscious of his responsibilities as the destined founder of Rome, deserts the distraught Carthaginian Queen, Dido commits suicide, and when Aeneas encounters the shade of Dido in the underworld, she turns away, stony-faced, rejecting him.11 Antony’s choice, in rejecting Rome and its stern values, is precisely the opposite of Aeneas’s, as the hero of the Aeneid, with some reluctance, chooses the path of duty and self-denial, rather than love and its pleasures. Antony’s public statement at the beginning of the play is a deliberate insult to the Roman messengers and to Octavius: Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space! Kingdoms are clay … Now, for the love of love and her soft hours, Let’s not confound the time with conference harsh.

(1.1.34–6, 45–6)

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, like Virgil’s Dido, is a complex, ambivalent figure. Explicit echoes in Antony and Cleopatra include the recurrent motif of parting:Â€‘Sir, you and I must part, but that’s not it; /Sir, you and I have loved, but there’s not it’ (1.3.89–90). Throughout the first half of the play, Cleopatra is aware of the forces drawing Antony away from her, toward Rome and the assumption of his responsibilities. Though the tone in these early scenes tends to be comic rather than tragic, in her death Cleopatra, like Dido, achieves a tragic dignity ‘fitting for a princess /Descended of so many royal kings’. Going gladly into the dark like Dido, Cleopatra in Act 5 resolves uncertainty by a decision ‘To do that thing that ends all other ends, /Which shackles accidents and bolts up change’.12 Book IV of the Aeneid differs from Act 5 of Antony and Cleopatra in being a tragic episode

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within an epic narrative, rather than providing a magnificent, transfiguring climax. From the outset, Aeneas is aware of the burden of his destined role, and Book IV is full of reminders, to Aeneas and the reader, that his stay in Carthage must be only temporary. The Olympian gods pronounce judgement:Â€forgetful of his destined kingdom and its promised fortunes, as founder of a Rome which will bring all the world under its laws, Aeneas shamefully ‘wastes his Days /In slothful Riot, and inglorious Ease’. Both he and Dido, lost in ‘lawless pleasure’, neglect their political responsibilities, with predictable injuries to the commonwealth: Mean time, the rising Tow’rs are at a stand: No Labours exercise the youthful Band: No use of Arts, nor Toils of Arms they know; The Mole is left unfinish’d to the Foe. The Mounds, the Works, the Walls neglected lye.13

In a play in which the values of Rome and Egypt are sharply Â�contrasted, the Roman view of Cleopatra is unforgiving. To the abstemious, selfcontrolled Octavius, Cleopatra is ‘a whore’, ‘a trull’, and Antony’s surrender to her and to ‘present pleasure’ unmans him, as well as being an offence against honour and propriety, suitable to ‘boys’ rather than grown men (1.4.31–2; 3.6.68, 97). ‘Our great competitor’, he tells Lepidus, ‘is not more manlike /Than Cleopatra, nor the Queen of Ptolemy /More womanly than he’ (1.4.5–7). His contempt for Antony’s ‘lascivious wassails’ is evident in his fastidious, unbending remarks on proper and improper conduct: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Let’s grant it is not Amiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolemy, To give a kingdom for a mirth, to sit And keep the turn of tippling with a slave, To reel the streets at noon, and stand the buffet With knaves that smells of sweat.

(1.4.16–21, 57)

To Octavius Caesar, Cleopatra is a walking embodiment of vice, of those pleasures that the virtuous man must resist, and the enemy of Rome. The conventional Roman view of Cleopatra as temptress, distracting man from his proper concerns, war, politics, and service to the Roman state, is summed up in the lines of the choric figure Philo in the play’s opening scene: p h i l o. Look where they come! Take but good note, and you shall see in him

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O’erflowing the measure:Â€Antony and Cleopatra The triple pillar of the world transformed Into a strumpet’s fool. (1.1.10–13)

A number of twentieth-century critics have taken Philo’s words as defining the way in which audiences, in Shakespeare’s day or their own, ought to feel toward Cleopatra. Franklin Dickey in Not Wisely But Too Well (1966), whose account of Cleopatra bristles with contemptuous disapproval, purports to find a consistent ‘traditional Elizabethan view’ of Cleopatra as ‘a moral exemplum to warn others … of the end of those who live for pleasure’. There is little that is appealing in the passion of Antony and Cleopatra … The Elizabethan reader must have seen them as patterns of lust, of cruelty, of prodigality, of drunkenness, of vanity, and, in the end, of despair.14

A similar view of Antony and Cleopatra as a play illustrating ‘the necessity of controlling passion’ is argued by Daniel Stempel and, in a New Historicist variant of this motif, Leonard Tennenhouse. The spread of chaos on the level of political organization, in particular, was feared by men of the Renaissance … Antony’s domination by Cleopatra is an unnatural reversal of the roles of men and woman … Woman was a creature of weak reason and strong passions, carnal in nature and governed by lust.15

Stempel denies any transfiguration in Act 5, seeing the play as legitimizing Augustus’s rule:Â€‘the morbid disease which has destroyed [Antony] must be removed completely as a source of danger to the state’. Tennenhouse, using a different critical vocabulary thirty years later, makes essentially the same point:Â€‘political disorder’, as embodied in Cleopatra, is ‘pollution’: In destroying Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare accomplishes two things. First he relocates the sources of legitimate authority in Rome. Secondly, he establishes the figure of uncompromising male power over that of the autochthonous female … This elaborate scene of punishment purges the world of all that is not Roman.

Characteristically, such views of the play, whether couched in terms of morality or realpolitik, treat Octavius, ‘the man who is shielded against temptation by reason’, as a touchstone, and applaud the Roman values of moderation and self-discipline represented in the play by Octavius.16 T r ag ic C l e opat r a s Earlier Cleopatra plays that might have been known to Shakespeare place relatively little emphasis on the struggle for dominance in Rome.

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Estienne Jodelle’s Cléopatra captive (1552), Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1578), translated in 1592 by the Countess of Pembroke as The Tragedie of Antonie, and Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra (first edn, 1594) all confine themselves to the later stages of the story, ending with Cleopatra’s suicide. Jodelle and Daniel begin their plays after Antony’s death, with Antony’s ghost in Jodelle lamenting his ‘ardeur fatale’ and attacking Cleopatra as ‘quelle poison extreme’.17 In both plays, Cleopatra wants to die, from the outset, and a confrontation between Octavius and Cleopatra provides a certain amount of suspense before Cleopatra joins her beloved Antony in death. Jodelle and Daniel include a scene, based on Plutarch, in which Seleucus, Cleopatra’s treasurer, reveals to Octavius that Cleopatra has ‘kept back’ a large proportion of her ‘money, plate, and jewels’ (AC, 5.2.137–47). Where Shakespeare brings out the comic aspects of the episode, Jodelle and Daniel treat it with high seriousness. Daniel adds a further scene in which Seleucus laments having been false to his ‘bounteous Queene’, hoping to have ‘us’d a means to climbe’ and ‘flowne unto the great’, but then was justly punished for his ‘trechery’.18 Garnier’s Marc Antoine is curiously bifurcated in its treatment of Antony and Cleopatra as Roman soldier and Egyptian queen. In Act 1 of Garnier and in the Countess of Pembroke’s translation, Antony regrets having abandoned a Roman’s pursuit of honour (‘Thy vertue dead; thy glory made alive /So oft by martial deeds is gone in smoke’) for the ‘foule sinke’ of ‘wanton love’.19 In Act 3, in dialogue with his friend Lucilius, Antony recalls his former glories and hopes that he may wash away ‘the shame of time abus’d’ by ‘a noble death’ (The Tragedie of Antonie, 3.1238–40). Here, rather than blaming Cleopatra or ‘fortunes even chaunging face’ as bringing about his downfall, Antony blames himself, moralizing on the destructive effects of surrender to the baits of pleasure: Fallen from a souldier to a chamberer, Careless of vertue, careless of all praise … With glutted heart I wallowed in delights, All thoughts of honor trodden under foote … By steps I drove my former wits astraie. I made my friends, offended, me forsake, I holpe my foes against my selfe to rise. (3.1141, 1153–7, 1161–3)

Cleopatra in Act 2 even more emphatically blames herself for Antony’s defeat by Octavius:Â€ ‘I am sole cause:Â€ I did it, only I’ (2.448). Charmian urges her to make her peace with Octavius, but Cleopatra is resolute, determined to die and to remain loyal to Antony:Â€it would be shameful to

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outlive him. Where Antony is severely criticized by himself and the other characters, Cleopatra, a martyr for love, is presented in ‘eulogistic’ terms in much of the play, invested with tragic dignity.20 The ‘Unhappie Queene’, who bids adieu in Act 5 to her ‘deare children’, weeping like Niobe, has nothing of the complexity of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, but is painted in primary colours as an object of admiration:Â€perfect beauty, perfect sorrow. She is all heav’nly:Â€never any man But seeing hir was ravish’d with her sight … Darkned with woe her only study is To weepe, to sigh, to seek for lonelines.

(2.711–12, 727–8; 5.1801, 1847, 1887)

If there is a political dimension in Garnier’s play, it can be found mainly in the choral odes ending each act. A chorus of Roman soldiers at the end of Act 4 laments the destructiveness of civil war and expresses the hope that ‘since the rule of Rome /To one man’s hand is come’, Octavius’s victory over Antony may bring about an end to ‘deadly discord’ (4.1745–6, 1755). In Act 4, Agrippa expresses conservative sentiments that present monarchical rule as divinely ordained: â•…â•…â•…â•… Mete it was The Romain Empire so should ruled be, As heav’n is rul’d … Now as of heav’n one onely Lord we know: One onely Lord should rule this earth below.

(4.1485–90)

The divine right arguments here, anachronistic in the Roman setting, differ strongly from the republicanism of Garnier’s Cornélie, and may well reflect the historical circumstances of a France ‘traumatized by civil war’ in the 1570s. In Act 2, the philosopher Philostratus laments the ‘evils the fates … have brought’ upon Egypt, and a choral ode mourns the destruction of this ‘sweet fertile land’, now reduced to slavery ‘under foreign yoke’. The chorus ends with a prediction that some day a similar fate may await Rome, now triumphant. One day there will come a day which shall quaile thy fortunes flower and thee ruinde low shall laie in some barbarous Princes power, when the pittie-wanting fire shall, O Rome, thy beauties burne, and to humble ashes turne thy proud wealth and rich attire.21

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Samuel Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra, dedicated to his Â�patroness the Countess of Pembroke, contains similar reflections on the Â�transiency of earthly things in its choral odes. The play’s Argument ends ‘And so, hereby came the race of the Ptolemies to be wholly extinct, and the flourishing rich kingdome of Egypt utterly overthrowne and subdued.’ Several choral odes reflect on how ‘prowd mounting vanitie’ is brought to ‘confusion’ by ‘the powres of heaven’ and ‘with the ruine of their fall, / Extinguish people, state and all’. As in Garnier, the Chorus predicts that some day Rome will undergo a similar punishment, purging its ‘iniquitie’, just as ‘Egypts fat prosperitie’ has reached its destined end: As we, so they that treate us thus, Must one day perish like to us.22

As a philosophical poet, Daniel is preoccupied throughout his Â�writings with the relationship of fate and character, the extent to which individuals are responsible for the consequences of their actions, and with the theme of cyclical recurrence. Though the characters in The Tragedie of Cleopatra often see themselves as victims of ‘th’inevitable destinie’, a dialogue between the philosophers Arius and Philostratus makes it clear that the evils afflicting Egypt are punishment for ‘dissolute impietie’ and ‘sensualitie’, infecting ‘th’unrespective mindes of prince, and people’. As Arius says to his fellow philosopher, other ‘proude states’ can provide ‘examples for our owne’: That no state can in height of happinesse, In th’exaltation of their glory stand: But thither once arriv’d, declining lesse, Ruine themselves, or fall by others hand.

A similar belief in the ‘perpetual circle’ of ‘the ever-changing course of things’ and in a divine justice which must inevitably punish ‘our errors’ pervades such works by Daniel as Musophilis, Philotas, The Complaint of Rosamond, and The Civil Wars. Fate is not prevented though fore-knowne. For that must hap decreed by heavenly powers, Who worke our fall, yet make the fault still ours.23

Daniel’s Cleopatra accepts full responsibility for her actions, blaming herself not only for the downfall of Antony but for the ruin of the Egyptian state. Daniel’s tragic Cleopatra is a loving mother, concerned about what will happen to her children, innocent victims subjected to the remorseless power of the Roman conqueror.24 Far more than Shakespeare’s Cleopatra,

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she is presented as the ruler of a great kingdom, who has been remiss in her responsibilities toward her Egyptian subjects. Whereby my dissolution is become The grave of Egypt, and the wracke of all; My unforeseeing weakenesse must intoome My Countries fame and glory with my fall.

In Daniel’s play, Cleopatra is able to draw an ethical and political moral from her fall, seeing herself and her fate as a mirror to princes. Unswerving in her devotion to the dead Antony, to whom she vows to pay a debt by dying with honour, she promises in Act 1 to ‘make death my praise’, erasing the ‘infamie’ of her life. And let me write in letters of my bloud A fit memoriall for the times to come, To be example to such Princes good As please themselves, and care not what become.

(21–4, 109–14)

Dryden’s All for Love (1678), which does not include Octavius Caesar among its characters, represents traditional Roman values in Ventidius (a scaled-down version of Enobarbus), Octavia, and Dolabella, who as in Daniel’s play is smitten with Cleopatra’s charms. In keeping with classical ideas of decorum, the action takes place in a single location and (presumably) a single day, beginning with Antony in despair after the defeat at Actium and ending with his death and that of Cleopatra. In Act I, VentidiusÂ€ – ‘a braver Roman never drew a sword … The plainness, fierceness, rugged virtue /Of an old true-stamped Roman lives in him’Â€– urges Antony to go into battle once more, ‘for honor’s sake’, and warns him against the bad influence of Cleopatra. Antony, as in Antony and Cleopatra, 3.11, condemns himself for having violated these Roman standards of behaviour:Â€‘But I have lost my reason, have disgrac’d /The name of soldier with ignoble ease.’25 Once in Cleopatra’s presence, both he and she seem unable to talk of anything else but love, presented as a value transcending all others (as the play’s title suggests): a n t on y. Go? Whither? Go, from all that’s excellent? Faith, honor, virtue, all good things forbid That I should go from her who sets my love Above the pride of kingdoms. (2.439–42)

More than in any other version of the story, this is one with the political element virtually absent, presenting an irresolute Antony pulled in

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various directions by Ventidius, Octavia, and Dolabella, but always in the end choosing love. Dryden’s passive, clinging Cleopatra, fearing desertion by the man she loves, is far less formidable than Shakespeare’s, capable of saying, without irony, ‘I could not counterfeit’, and â•…â•…â•… My love’s so true That I can never hide it where it is, Nor show it where it is not. Nature made me A wife, a silly, harmless, household dove, Fond without art, and kind without deceit. (4.89–93, 518)

Indeed, in her suicide, she acts not simply as a Roman but as a Roman wife, the highest title to which she can aspire. Several Cleopatra plays in the seventeenth century have direct topical relevance, with an implicit or explicit political dimension. In the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Fulke Greville wrote a tragedy, ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, which he prudently destroyed, fearing that his play might be ‘construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors and government’. Greville, a friend and kinsman of the Earl of Essex, felt that under the circumstancesÂ€– ‘the Earl of Essex then falling, and until then worthily beloved, both of Queen and people’Â€– a play that set out to ‘trace the high ways of ambitious governors’, showing that such figures, even in their apparent success, ‘hasten to their own desolation and ruin’, might be read as reflecting directly on recent events, ‘beyond the author’s intent or application’.26 Sir Charles Sedley’s Antony and Cleopatra (1677), with an unusually unheroic Antony and multiple subplots of political intrigue, is a critical portrait of Charles II, subject to the influence of corrupt courtiers and a foreign mistress. Cleopatra, presented as loyal to Antony but disliked and distrusted by both Egyptians and Romans, is the cause of ‘general Discontent’. As Maecenas says, crudely: â•…â•…â•… Was it ever seen A Woman rul’d an Emperor till now? What Horse the Mare, what Bull obeys the Cow?

Both Antony and Octavius are presented as potential tyrants, and the pleasure-loving Antony resembles Charles II as depicted in anti-court satire of the 1670s. Play’rs and Minstrels, Singers and Buffoons, Are the great Instruments and Props of Thrones … To marry Whores to Fencers is his Sport,

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O’erflowing the measure:Â€Antony and Cleopatra And with their Issue throng his loathed Court … His Court with Asian Flatt’rers is fill’d, And lying Greeks the only Servants held.

Several passages express nostalgia for the Roman republic, including lines given, surprisingly, to Octavius Caesar’s general and close associate, Agrippa: ag r i ppa . Born under Kings our Father[s] freedom fought, And with their blood the Godlike treasure bought, We their vile issue in our chains delight, And born for freedom for our Tyrants fight.27

Except for Sedley’s roman à clef, none of these Cleopatra plays is in any way critical of traditional Roman values, even where they invest Cleopatra with some degree of tragic dignity. All these plays assume that reason should rule over passion and that men should rule over women. All treat Octavius Caesar’s victory as the triumph of Roman virtue over Eastern licentiousness, though Garnier and Daniel in choral odes warn that Rome may some day undergo Egypt’s fate, weakened by luxury. One play that differs from the rest is Thomas May’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra Queen of Aegypt (1639), by the translator of Lucan, a key figure in the English republican tradition. May, who like Jonson in Sejanus lists his sources (mostly Cassius Dio and Plutarch) in marginal citations, is deeply sceptical in treating Octavius Caesar and his victory over his rival Antony. In the play’s opening scene, Canidius, a figure similar in some ways to Shakespeare’s Enobarbus, provides the perspective of a cynical realist when his fellow Romans complain of the ‘shame and dishonour to the Roman name’ of Antony’s desertion of ‘his lawfull wife the good Octavia’ for Cleopatra:Â€‘He loves the Queen, and will do so in spite /Of our morality.’ He goes on to suggest, in more or less republican terms, that in the contest for power between Octavius and Antony, Romans have been reduced to a mere ‘shew of liberty /When we have lost the substance’. c a n i di u s. Then like a Roman let me answer, Marcus. Is it become a care worthy of us What woman Antony enjoys? have we Time to dispute his matrimoniall faults, That have already seen the breach of all Romes sacred laws, by which the world was bound? Have we endur’d our Consuls state and power To be subjected by the lawlesse arms Of private men, or Senators proscrib’d,

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And can we now consider whether they That did all this, may keep a wench or no?

Canidius then says he will remain loyal to Antony as his friend, a man with ‘a nature … honester than Caesars’, and more likely than Octavius to restore the republic.28 The political aspects are more prominent in May than in these other plays, with much less emphasis on the love of Antony and Cleopatra and much more on the struggle for dominance between ‘the two great Lords / Of all the Roman world’, Antony and Caesar, who have been ‘enemies / These many yeers’ (Act 2, Sig. B10v). Whoever wins, a series of choric figures lament at the end of Act 2, Rome will suffer. ac hor i u s. Alas, my sonne, there need no prodigies To shew the certain losse of Italy. For on both sides do Roman Eagles stand, And Rome must bleed who ere be conquerour, Besides her liberty for ever lost … g l auc u s. What hast thou got By all thy conquest Rome, by all the bloud Which thy ambition through the world has shed, But rais’d a power, which now thou canst not rule? (Sig. C2)

Here again, May’s republican sympathies may be discerned. Cleopatra in May’s play is motivated much of the time by political Â�considerations. Her decision to go to the wars, for example, is presented as self-interested political calculation, and in Acts 4 and 5 she seriously contemplates abandoning Antony for the victorious Octavius. To the republican May, the Egyptian queen is motivated by the same ambition to rule as her Roman enemy. c l e opat r a . What more then Caesars love could I have wish’d On which all power, all state, and Glories wait? … Alas, Antonius is already fall’n So low, that nothing can redeem him now Nor make him able to contest with Caesar. He has not only lost his armies strength But lost the strength of his own soul, and is not That Antony he was when first I knew him. (Act 4, Sig. D2, D5)

It is only after she realizes that Octavius is impervious to her charms that she resolves to die. Even in her death scene, clad in royal robes and crown, where she tells her attendant ‘I go to meet my dear Antonius’, the

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emphasis is more on her ambition and her ‘Royall state’ than on love. She compares herself not to ‘Dido and her Aeneas’ or other loving pairs, but to the ‘ambitious love’ of Semele, burnt to death for aspiring to godhead. Though she pays tribute to the dead Antony in this scene, in the last sixteen lines of her final speech she does not mention him at all.29 virtus

and

i m p e r i u m :Â€rom a n

va l u e s

The critique of Roman values is subtler in Antony and Cleopatra than in May’s Tragedie of Cleopatra. Idealization of the Roman republic, as in the speeches of Cassius in Act 1 of Julius Caesar or in the English republican tradition, is absent from Antony and Cleopatra, except for one speech by Pompey. p om pe y. What was’t That moved pale Cassius to conspire? And what Made the all-honoured, honest Roman, Brutus, With the armed rest, courtiers of beauteous freedom, To drench the Capitol, but that they would Have one man but a man? (2.6.14–19)

Even here, Pompey’s motivation is primarily revenge for his father’s death, rather than any deep-seated republican convictions. The clearest statement of traditional Roman virtus in the play is Octavius Caesar’s speech in 1.4, contrasting what Antony was with what he has become. The speech has none of the disdainful fastidiousness of ‘Let’s grant it is not /Amiss to tumble on the bed of Ptolemy’ earlier in that scene, but shows a certain admiration for his rival, as, in his past behaviour, embodying shared Roman values. The assumption underlying the speech is that Antony’s present behaviour is a temporary aberration, and that the real Antony, the model Roman soldier, may reappear. c a e s a r . Antony, Leave thy lascivious wassails! When thou once Was beaten from Modena, where thou slew’st Hirtius and Pausa, consuls, at thy heel Did famine follow, whom thou fought’st against, Though daintily brought up, with patience more Than savages could suffer. Thou didst drink The stale of horses and the gilded puddle Which beasts would cough at. Thy palate then did deign The roughest berry on the rudest hedge.

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Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets, The barks of trees thou browsed. On the Alps, It is reported, thou didst eat strange flesh Which some did die to look on. (1.4.16–17, 56–69)

The true hero, the manly Roman, demonstrates his virtus in defeat and in difficult, testing circumstances, more than in victory. Antony’s stoicism and self-discipline are presented not as natural, instinctive behaviour, but as willed, unnatural, contrary to instinct.30 Overcoming any natural repugnance, even though he has been ‘daintily brought up’, he outdoes beasts and savages, drinking urine and eating ‘strange flesh’. Antony, as described here, is ruled not by the need for survival but by the overriding imperative of ‘honour’. The highest compliment Octavius can give is to behave ‘like a soldier’. â•…â•…â•… And all thisÂ€– It wounds thine honour that I speak it nowÂ€– Was borne so like a soldier that thy cheek So much as lanked not. (1.4.69–72)

The rivalry, personal and political, between Octavius and Antony, is a central motif in the play. As Enobarbus says, commenting on Lepidus’s fall from power: Then, world, thou hast a pair of chaps, no more, And throw between them all the food thou hast, They’ll grind the one the other.

(3.5.13–15)

The grotesque image of a pair of giant teeth, grinding each other as they devour great quantities of food, suggests a rivalry that is mutually destructive, all-consuming. It is a variant of the lines on ‘appetite’ raging beyond control in Ulysses’s speech on order in Troilus and Cressida: And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey And last eat up himself.

(TC, 1.3.121–4)

In his tribute to the dead Antony, Octavius is able to ‘see himself’ in the man he calls ‘my brother, my competitor /In top of all design, my mate in empire, /Friend and companion in the front of war, /The arm of mine

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own body, and the heart /Where mine his thoughts did kindle’. The term ‘competitor’ is double-edged, suggesting colleague or equal partner as well as deadly rival. Their ‘stars’ are ‘unreconcilable’, so that their ‘equalness’ is sundered, divided. â•…â•…â•… I must perforce Have shown to thee such a declining day Or look on thine. We could not stall together In the whole world.

(5.1.35, 37–40, 42–8)

The ideology of emulation, competitive rivalry, in which one’s brother or equal is a potential enemy to be overcome, is central to the Roman conception of manhood. As in Cassius’s swimming race with Julius Caesar, emulation embodies ‘an unstable combination of identification and rivalry, love and hate’.31 In a scene where an Egyptian soothsayer, who has accompanied Antony to Rome, warns him against Octavius, Antony asks ‘Whose fortunes shall rise higher, Caesar’s or mine?’ s o o t h s a y e r . Caesar’s. Therefore, O Antony, stay not by his side. Thy daemonÂ€– that thy spirit which keeps theeÂ€– is Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable, Where Caesar’s is not. But near him, thy angel Becomes afeard, as being o’erpowered; therefore Make space enough between you. (2.3.15–22)

Antony may have more natural nobility of character, more courage, more experience and skill as a soldier than Caesar, but in direct competition, however trivial, Caesar always wins. Antony agrees with the Soothsayer’s observation that ‘if thou dost play with him at any game, /Thou art sure to lose’:Â€‘the very dice obey him’ (2.3.23–4, 32). The abstemious, cold-blooded Octavius, who stands aloof from the ‘levity’ of the drinking bout on Pompey’s barge (2.7.121), is a model of temperance, for whom the pleasures of the flesh have no appeal. His success in the contest for power, as in smaller enterprises, is due to his single-mindedness, his ruthless efficiency. Critics tend to find Octavius unattractive. Bradley sees him as ‘very formidable’, bloodless, unfeeling, the kind of man the viewer is likely to ‘respect, fear, and dislike’. Danby sees him as a Machiavel, and as an ‘impersonal embodiment’ of Rome, ‘the sphere of the political’:Â€ ‘he is the perfect commissar, invulnerable as no human being should be’.32 In Trevor Nunn’s 1972 production, the young Corin Redgrave, ice-cold, disdainful, and fanatical, was described


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by reviewers as ‘frightening’, a dictator in the making. Octavius has no hesitation in sacrificing ‘a sister … whom no brother /Did ever love so dearly’ (2.2.158–9) to political advantage.33 In his negotiations with Octavius at Rome, as in the later scene where the triumvirs spar with Pompey, dissuading him from challenging them in battle, Antony shows himself to be as adroit a politician as Octavius. In Rome, Antony behaves like a Roman, suppressing for the moment those aspects of himself that find expression in Egypt. Even in Egypt, Antony is able for a moment to summon up a Roman’s decisiveness, though Cleopatra quickly re-establishes her dominance over him. a n t on y. Hear me, queen. The strong necessity of time commands Our services awhile … â•…â•…â•… Our Italy Shines o’er with civil swords; Sextus Pompeius Makes his approaches to the port of Rome; Equality of two domestic powers Breeds scrupulous faction; the hated, grown to strength, Are nearly grown to love; the condemned Pompey, Rich in his father’s honour, creeps apace Into the hearts of such as have not thrived Unto the present state. (1.3.42–53)34

Octavius in the next scene uses similar language to draw a similar political moral, in commenting on the fickleness of the ‘common body’, who in their ‘discontents’ flock to Pompey: c a e s a r . It hath been taught us from the primal state That he which is was wished until he were. And the ebbed man, ne’er loved till ne’er worth love, Comes deared by being lacked. (1.4.39, 41–4)

When the triumvirs negotiate a peace with Pompey, a decisive, Â� confident Antony takes the dominant role, seconded by Octavius and Lepidus. Earlier, in his tense meeting with Octavius, where Lepidus acts as peace-maker, Antony is diplomatic and restrained in his language, deflecting Octavius’s hostile, insulting accusations. Though seeking to make excuses for his past behaviour, Antony is conscious of his dignity, as befitting a Roman to whom, as he claims, ‘honour is sacred’: a n t on y. As nearly as I may I’ll play the penitent to you, but mine honesty

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O’erflowing the measure:Â€Antony and Cleopatra Shall not make poor my greatness, nor my power Work without it. (2.2.91, 97–100)

Enobarbus neatly skewers the hypocrisy of the two contestants for power, temporarily united by ‘the present need’: e nob a r bu s . Or, if you borrow one another’s love for the instant, you may, when you hear no more words of Pompey, return it again. (2.2.107, 109–11)

The scene on Pompey’s barge contrasts sharply with this episode of high politics in negotiations intended to further the ‘great designs’ (2.2.157) of the participants. In the later scene, Roman pretensions to honour, selfdiscipline, and probity are shown to be threadbareÂ€– first in the drunkenness of the feeble Lepidus (‘the third part of the world’ is carried off drunk, patently unworthy of his high place) and, even more strikingly, in Menas’s offer to Pompey, ‘Wilt thou be lord of all the world?’ (2.7.62, 91). Menas’s proposal to Pompey that they brutally murder the Â�unsuspecting triumvirs is open ‘villainy’, violating principles of honourable conduct, hospitality, or trust. If Menas’s suggestion is Machiavellian ‘policy’ at its worst, a temptation to do evil, dismissing any scruples of conscience, Pompey’s response is morally questionable. Pompey’s sense of honour is highly flexible:Â€for a subordinate to perform such an act would be ‘good service’, deserving reward, but for Pompey to know about it in advance would be contrary to his sense of ‘honour’, conduct inappropriate to his status in Roman society. p om pe y. Being done unknown, I should have found it afterwards well done, But must condemn it now. (2.7.74–81)

Menas’s response, predictably, is to see Pompey’s scruples as a sign of weakness, and he resolves to desert his former master, foreshadowing Enobarbus’s later desertion of Antony. As the play’s opening lines suggest, Octavius’s Rome is defined by measurement, precise calculation of advantage, where the contrasting Egyptian world is one in which ‘excess is the normal state of affairs’:Â€as Antony says to Cleopatra, ‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned.’35 Enobarbus, the voice of reason and common sense, puncturing the pretensions of the other characters with his clear-sighted, caustic observations, is the most likeable of the play’s Romans. His role as satiric


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commentator, truth-teller, allows him to stand apart from the action, and he moves freely between Rome and Egypt, gaining the trust of most of the other characters. The advice he gives to Antony and to Cleopatra before Actium is sound, and in both cases it is disregarded. He warns Cleopatra that her presence in battle ‘needs must puzzle Antony’, creating a distraction that would lessen their chances of victory, and he gives Antony detailed, practical reasons why the impetuous, stubborn ‘By sea, by sea’ would be a mistake, throwing away all the advantages he would have by land (3.7.10, 40–8). The tribute to Cleopatra (‘The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne …’) is made more convincing by being spoken by the cynical realist Enobarbus. In these lines that closely follow and improve on a passage in North’s Plutarch, Cleopatra is presented as an irresistible seductress:Â€the winds are ‘love-sick’, the water is ‘amorous’ of the strokes of the oars, she o’erpictures Venus, and even the air seems to court her (2.2.204–11, 226–8). One dramatic function of the passage is to provide evidence to back up Enobarbus’s statement that Antony will never ‘leave her utterly’ (2.2.243–4). The passage also hints at a greater complexity in Enobarbus than in Octavius and his followers. He can appreciate Cleopatra as a force of nature, where they can only condemn her. The censorious Roman view of Cleopatra and the fleshly pleasures of Egypt equates food and sex, gluttony and lust. Pompey, not wanting to encounter Antony in battle, hopes that ‘the ne’er lust-wearied Antony’, neglectful of honour, will remain ‘at dinner’ in Egypt: Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts; Keep his brain fuming. Epicurean cooks Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honour Even till a Lethe’d dullness.

(2.1.12, 23–7, 39)

Enobarbus predicts, concisely, ‘he will to his Egyptian dish again’ (2.6.128). Antony, enraged at what he considers to be Cleopatra’s betrayal, condemns her harshly, using the same Roman standards:Â€ ‘I found you as a morsel, cold upon /Dead Caesar’s trencher’ (3.13.121–2).36 However, the lines that conclude Enobarbus’s description of Cleopatra on her barge treat appetite in an entirely different way, directly contrary to Roman notions of measurement, containment, finitude. Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy

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O’erflowing the measure:Â€Antony and Cleopatra The appetite they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies. (2.2.245–8)

Cleopatra makes her own rules, defying normal rational expectations in the world of common experience, where the effects of age and custom cannot be counteracted, and where the sex act, once completed, leaves satiety, boredom, ‘a waste of shame … Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight’ (Sonnet 129, 1, 5). In Acts 3 and 4, Enobarbus, previously secure in his position as Antony’s loyal servant and confidant, is faced with a conflict of values, torn between fidelity to his friend and master and disapproval of Antony’s self-destructive folly. Unlike the others who rush to desert Antony after ActiumÂ€ – Canidius, Alexas, Herod, the catalogue of kings listed by Octavius before the battleÂ€– Enobarbus is not motivated by self-interest or a desire to curry favour with Octavius. Again and again in this part of the play, Enobarbus states his belief, in accordance with the dominant ideology of the Rome he has served as a soldier, that reason or ‘judgement’ should govern one’s behaviour. When Cleopatra, after she flees from the battle, asks Enobarbus ‘Is Antony or we in fault for this?’, Enobarbus answers ‘Antony only, that would make his will /Lord of his reason’ (3.13.2–4). In an earlier scene, when Canidius announces his intention to desert Antony’s cause, Enobarbus resolves to remain loyal. e nob a r bu s. I’ll yet follow The wounded chance of Antony, though my reason Sits in the wind against me. (3.10.35–7)

In a lengthy aside, Enobarbus, with characteristic clarity, states the alternatives facing him:Â€reason may dictate our course of action, the path of common sense and self-preservation, but the obligations of honour and loyalty, not susceptible to measurement or rational calculation, suggest a contrary course, perhaps more praiseworthy:Â€‘He that can endure /To follow with allegiance a fallen lord /Does conquer him that did his master conquer’ (3.13.44–6). Until the catastrophic battle of Actium, Enobarbus, like Antony, has managed to ‘maintain an equilibrium’ between the two worlds of Rome and Egypt, with their contrasting values, but now he is forced to choose.37 Ironically, he decides to leave Antony at a time when Antony, rebounding from rage and despair, resolves to go once more into battle, reinvigorated.


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e nob a r bu s. Now he’ll outstare the lightning … A diminution in our captain’s brain Restores his heart. When valour preys on reason, It eats the sword it fights with. I will seek Some way to leave him. (3.13.200, 203–6)

Antony’s immediate, instinctive reaction when he learns of Enobarbus’s desertion shows up the poverty of this view of reason as a reliable, exclusive guide to conduct. His ‘bounty’, unselfish and boundless generosity, demonstrates a nobility of character which by implication rejects the polarity between Rome and Egypt, suggesting that the contrast in Antony between ‘what I am’ and ‘what I have become’ is not absolute (3.13.147–8; 4.6.33). As the messenger tells Enobarbus in delivering the treasure to him, ‘your emperor /Continues still a Jove’. a n t on y. Go, Eros, send his treasure after. Do it. Detain no jot, I charge thee. Write to himÂ€– I will subscribeÂ€– gentle adieus and greetings. Say that I wish he never more find cause To change a master. Oh, my fortunes have Corrupted honest men! (4.5.12–17; 4.6.29–30)

Blaming himself entirely for Enobarbus’s desertion, Antony dismisses any thought of rational calculation and advantage. When Enobarbus learns that Antony has sent his treasure, with a generous supplement, after him, his reaction is equally spontaneous, as he praises his noble master and condemns himself in the most severe terms for violating the obligations of ‘service’. He begs forgiveness of Antony, convinced that the ‘flint and hardness of my fault’ (4.9.19) can only properly be punished by death. Though the terms ‘paid’ and ‘gold’ might suggest a residual element of rational calculation even in this moment of painful insight, Enobarbus’s vocabulary here is overwhelmingly moral, suggesting higher standards of conduct by which he finds himself wanting. e nob a r bu s. I am alone the villain of the earth, And feel I am so most. O Antony, Thou mine of bounty, how wouldst thou have paid My better service, when my turpitude Thou dost so crown with gold! This blows my heart … I fight against thee? No, I will go seek Some ditch wherein to die; the foul’st best fits My latter part of life. (4.6.31–5, 38–40)

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In a characteristic Shakespearean subplot, Enobarbus’s journey toward death, admitting his fault, foreshadows the death of Antony, caught up in a similar conflict he finds difficult to resolve. Cleopatra in Act 5, attempting a posthumous rehabilitation of Antony, extravagantly praises Antony’s ‘bounty’, attributing to him a generosity of spirit and indifference to selfish worldly concerns. Antony, as imagined here, is a god among men: c l e opat r a . For his bounty, There was no winter in’t; an autumn it was That grew the more by reaping. His delights Were dolphin-like:Â€they showed his back above The element they lived in. (5.2.85–9)

Cleopatra does not remain on this exalted level throughout this scene, consoling herself by imagining heroic acts ‘past the size of dreaming’. A moment later she turns to the practical question, ‘Know you what Caesar means to do with me?’ (5.2.96, 105). I m mor ta l l ong i ng s One aspect of Cleopatra’s ‘infinite variety’ is a tendency, disrupting the preconceptions of theatrical audience or strait-laced Romans, to turn the play into comedy. A queen who can hop forty paces through the public street or play a practical joke on Antony by attaching a salt fish to his hook does not adhere to customary notions of dignity and decorum. Where Roman ideology insists on fixity and clear-cut moral distinctions, Cleopatra exults in unpredictability. As she advises Alexas, in seeking out Antony, ‘If you find him sad, /Say I am dancing; if in mirth, report /That I am sudden sick’ (1.3.4–6). In scenes set in Egypt in the first half of the play, such as the two scenes with the ‘half-afeard’ messenger (3.3.1) bringing news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, the predominant tone is comic. The incident of cross-dressing, in which a laughing Cleopatra, having ‘drunk him to his bed’, puts her female ‘tires and mantles’ on Antony, ‘whilst I wore his sword Phillipan’ (2.5.21–3), is in the Roman view a shameful violation of the natural order, signifying moral degeneration in the effeminized, emasculated Antony. Recalling the myth of Hercules unmanned by Omphale, Antony in Act 4 shows that he partly shares this Roman view of proper and improper behaviour:Â€‘O thy vile lady! /She has robbed me of my sword’ (4.14.22–3). Cleopatra’s behaviour is a deliberate challenge to Roman values and to Roman hegemony, asserting a rival set of values contesting imperial Rome’s domination over Egypt. Her

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‘becomings’ (Antony speaks of her as one ‘whom everything becomesÂ€– to chide, to laugh, /To weep’) are partly strategies to exercise control (1.1.50–1; 1.3.98), as when, to comic effect, she reduces Antony to sputtering silence in 1.3. Egyptian fluidity and theatricality present themselves in Shakespeare’s play as attractive alternatives to the rigid, unbending ideology of Rome exemplified in Octavius. As several critics have pointed out, ‘the play questions the very concept of identity’, disrupting the Roman ideology of competitive masculine endeavour, in which women are no more than trophies to be won and displayed by men, and suggesting that on the contrary, human identity is ‘multiple, varied, and protean’.38 After the battle of Actium, both Antony and his hitherto loyal soldiers characterize his behaviour at this critical moment as a violation of the integrity of the self:Â€‘Had our general /Been what he knewÂ€– himselfÂ€– it had gone well’ (3.10.26–7). Overwhelmed with shame, Antony, feeling that having ‘lost command’ he no longer possesses a coherent self (‘Let that be left /Which leaves itself’), in despair cries out ‘I /Have lost my way for ever’ (3.11.3–4, 19–20, 23). Iras describes him to Cleopatra as being ‘unqualitied with very shame’ (3.11.44). After a second, catastrophic defeat, Antony, recognizing that the only course left open to him is to die, feels that he has lost even his ‘visible shape’ and is disintegrating, melting awayÂ€ – like a cloud that ‘even with a thought’ dissolves before our eyes, becoming ‘indistinct, /As water is in water’ (4.14.9–14). Where earlier, buoyed up by false hope, he arms himself for further battle, laughing with Cleopatra as she helps him put on his armour, and bidding her farewell with ‘a soldier’s kiss’ (4.4.30), now he no longer deludes himself that he can inhabit the role of Roman hero, going forth ‘gallantly’ into combat, ‘a man of steel’ (4.4.33, 36). a n t on y. Unarm, Eros. The long day’s task is done And we must sleep. (4.14.35–6)

To an unusual extent, Antony in Shakespeare’s play is subject to violent oscillations of mood, veering suddenly from one extreme to another. Unlike Brutus, Hamlet, or Macbeth, he is not given a soliloquy in which he debates or agonizes over a choice he faces.39 After his headlong flight from the battle at Actium, Antony condemns his conduct by the same Roman standards as the soldiers Canidius, Scarus, and Enobarbus. This scene is the play’s turning point, the moment after which any balancing act between Egypt and Rome becomes impossible. Plutarch, who points out that up to this point ‘the battell was yet of even hand, and the victorie doubtfull’, judges Antony’s conduct harshly.

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He was so caried away with the vaine love of this woman, as if he had been glued unto her … For when he saw Cleopatras shippe under saile, he forgot, forsook, & betrayed them that fought for him … to follow her that was already begun to overthrow him, & would in the end be his utter destruction.40

Antony’s own reaction is full of self-loathing at having ‘offended reputation’, shame at having violated the principles of conduct by which, as a Roman soldier, he had previously been ruled. His sense of self-abasement finds expression in images of warring contraries:Â€the land is ashamed to bear him, his very hairs are in mutiny (3.11.1–2, 13–14). Dishonour has destroyed all his previous achievements, wiping them out in an instant: a n t on y. O, whither hast thou led me, Egypt? See How I convey my shame out of thine eyes By looking back what I have left behind ’Stroyed in dishonour. (3.11.51–4)

Yet, surprisingly, this scene ends with a partial recovery, a defiant assertion that all is not lost, that the blows of fortune are to be endured, even welcomed, and that the love of a ‘mutual pair’ (1.1.38) provides recompense sufficient to overcome temporary setbacks. a n t on y. Fall not a tear, I say; one of them rates All that is won and lost. Give me a kiss. Even this repays me … Love, I am full of lead. Some wine Within there and our viands! Fortune knows We scorn her most when most she offers blows. (3.11.69–71, 73–5)

Though Shakespeare follows North’s Plutarch throughout Acts 3 and 4, he devotes more attention than Plutarch or than any other dramatic version to Antony’s varying fortunes and fluctuating moods between Actium and his suicide. The incident in which Thidias, Caesar’s envoy, is whipped by Antony, jealous of the attention paid to the messenger by Cleopatra, is included in Plutarch, but without the passages of vituperation directed at Cleopatra by Antony.41 No other Roman in the play exceeds Antony here in the violence of his condemnation of Cleopatra, or in making the case against her as whore, ruled by base, undiscriminating appetite (3.13.121–5), and as a malign influence, ‘filth’, blinding him and leading him to destruction: a n t on y. You were half blasted ere I knew you … You have been a boggler ever. But when we in our viciousness grow hardÂ€–

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O misery on’t!Â€– the wise gods seel our eyes, In our own filth drop our clear judgements, make us Adore our errors, laugh at’s while we strut To our confusion. (3.13.110, 115–20)

Yet once he has dismissed the messenger, soundly whipped, he quickly accepts Cleopatra’s apology, saying ‘I am satisfied’, and adopts the stance of gallant warrior, eager to prove his worth in battle, ‘treble-sinewed’, love’s soldier once again. a n t on y. Where hast thou been, my heart? Dost thou hear, lady? If from the field I shall return once more To kiss those lips, I will appear in blood. I and my sword will earn our chronicle. There’s hope in’t yet. (3.13.172, 177–81, 183)

Plutarch treats the change of fortune in a second battle, a ‘skirmish’ in which Antonius ‘fought very valiantly’, forcing a retreat by Caesar’s forces, as no more than a brief interlude (p. 1003). Shakespeare, in contrast, includes eleven short scenes which show the preparations for battle and the renewed confidence in Antony and his followers after they return to their camp, along with several scenes, in counterpoint, foreshadowing a tragic endingÂ€ – the departure, overheard by soldiers, of ‘the god Hercules whom Antony loved’ (4.3.21) and the desertion of Enobarbus. The defeat, as narrated in 4.12, is absolute, and, in language of extreme violence, Antony blames his overthrow on Cleopatra, accusing her of betraying him to Caesar. He is presented here as maddened by rage, like Hercules envenomed by the shirt of Nessus, as he threatens the ‘monsterlike’ Cleopatra, the worst ‘of all thy sex’, with death. Like Othello banishing ‘all my fond love’ as an illusion, Antony defaces Cleopatra’s image, projecting his desire to destroy the hated deceiver on to an idealized Octavia, the perfect, sexless Roman wife:Â€ ‘Let /Patient Octavia plough thy visage up /With her prepared nails!’â•›42 When he receives a false report of Cleopatra’s death, in an instant he becomes yet again the dedicated servant of love, whose only desire is to find fulfilment in joining Cleopatra in death. I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and Weep for my pardon. So it must be, for now All length is torture; since the torch is out, Lie down and stray no farther. (4.14.45–8)

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Although, in wooing death, Antony speaks of himself as ‘no more a soldier’ (4.14.43), he hopes in death to regain his honour, acting in a manner befitting a Roman warrior. In characteristic Roman emulation, he sees himself as competing with Cleopatra in dying bravely; recalling his former victories, he expresses the fear that he may be shown, damaging his reputation: to lack The courage of a woman; less noble mind Than she which, by her death, our Caesar tells ‘I am conqueror of myself’. (4.14.60–3)43

Antony’s hope that in a heroic death he will unite the lover and warrior, reconciling his inner conflict, is expressed in moving lines that equate sexual consummation and the embrace of death: â•…â•…â•… But I will be A bridegroom in my death, and run into’t As to a lover’s bed.

(4.14.100–2)

In a shocking anticlimax, Antony bungles his death and, bleeding and humiliated, in the least heroic posture imaginable, has to be lifted up awkwardly into Cleopatra’s monument, before he can die in her arms. His last words, addressed to Cleopatra, are an attempt to reassert his identity as a Roman. Like Othello killing the ‘turbaned Turk’ within him and recalling the ‘service’ he has done to the state, Antony seeks to banish all thought of his ‘miserable’ present condition, dying bravely, as a Roman should. … my former fortunes, Wherein I lived the greatest prince o’th’world, The noblest; and do not basely die, Nor cowardly put off my helmet to My countryman; a Roman by a Roman Valiantly vanquished.44

Cleopatra’s extravagant praise of the dying Antony, appropriate to the moment and heightening the tragic effect, is another attempt to rescue Antony’s reputation, presenting him as ‘the greatest prince’ not in terms of his worldly position and achievements, but in his ‘huge spirit’ (4.15.93). In this tribute, Antony is depicted as more like a god than a man, and as an embodiment of values of a heroic past, dying with him. As Cleopatra says in Act 5, ‘’Tis paltry to be Caesar’.

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â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… O see, my women, The crown o’th’earth does melt. My lord! O withered is the garland of the war, The soldier’s pole is fallen; young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon.

(4.15.64–9, 5.2.2)

One problem in the latter part of the play is an evident ‘disparity between stage action and rhetoric’:Â€the Antony we have seen on stage does not measure up to the godlike creature described in Cleopatra’s tribute. Antony is a particularly difficult part for an actor, who needs to suggest a figure ‘past the size of dreaming’ half-hidden under the battered ‘exhausted old lion’ in decline.45 This discrepancy is particularly acute in Cleopatra’s lines addressed to the emissary Dolabella in Act 5, where Antony is associated with the limitless, overflowing abundance possible only in dreams: c l e opat r a . I dreamt there was an emperor Antony. O, such another sleep, that I might see But such another man! d ol a be l l a . If it might please yeÂ€– c l e opat r a . His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck A sun and moon which kept their course and lighted The little O, the earth. d ol a be l l a . Most sovereign creatureÂ€– c l e opat r a . His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arms Crested the world; his voice was propertied As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder … â•…â•…â•… In his livery Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket. (5.2.75–85, 89–91)

In lines 89–91 Antony is described both as exercising extraordinary worldly power and as sublimely indifferent to the power at his disposal. HyperboleÂ€– in statements which ‘assert that which is literally untrue’ but at the same time elicit ‘belief or assent’Â€– is the characteristic mode defining Cleopatra’s Egypt, overflowing the insistent measurement, calculation, literalism of Octavius’s Rome.46 In praising Antony in these extravagant terms, Cleopatra is not only giving expression to an overwhelming sense of loss, but is justifying her own way of life, in defiance of a Rome that hates and fears her as an enemy.

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It is possible, of course, to resist or be suspicious of the appeal of speeches such as this one. Bernard Shaw considered the rhetoric of Act 5 of Antony and Cleopatra as no more than a series of ‘tricks’, a theatrical sleight of hand intended to deceive a gullible audience: After giving a faithful picture of the soldier broken down by debauchery, and the typical wanton in whose arms such men perish, Shakespear finally strains all his huge command of rhetoric and stage pathos to give a theatrical sublimity to the wretched end of the business, and to persuade foolish spectators that the world was well lost by the twain.47

To some extent, Shakespeare anticipates and deflects such criticism by giving Cleopatra a sceptical interlocutor who, like Antony in 1.2, finds it difficult to get a word in, leavening the transfiguring rhetoric with a touch of comedy, and by having Cleopatra openly admit that her flight of fancy does not correspond to the mundane reality we may have observed in the terrestrial Antony. ‘Nature’, with its inevitable limits, is one thing, the world of imagination or dreams is another. d ol a be l l a . CleopatraÂ€– c l e opat r a . Think you there was or might be such a man As this I dreamt of? d ol a be l l a . Gentle madam, no. c l e opat r a . You lie up to the hearing of the gods! But if there be or ever were one such, ’Tis past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff To vie strange forms with fancy. (5.2.91–7)

The rest of Act 5 is a struggle for dominance between Octavius Caesar and Cleopatra, in which Shakespeare maintains suspense as to whether the changeable, worldly Cleopatra will be able to maintain her resolve to ‘do that thing which ends all other deeds’ (5.2.5), embracing the finality of death. There is nothing equivalent in Garnier or Daniel, whose plays begin and end with a repentant Cleopatra longing to die. Daniel includes a confrontation of Cleopatra and Octavius in Act 3, but it consists largely of stern lectures by Octavius and debate on whether a victor should show clemency. In North’s Plutarch, Cleopatra is abject before the victorious Caesar:Â€ ‘she had martired all her face with her nayles, and besides, her voyce was small and trembling, her eyes sunk into her head with continuall blubbering’ (p. 1007). In Shakespeare, Cleopatra’s resolution to do ‘what’s brave, what’s noble’ and die by her own hand ‘after the high Roman fashion’ (4.15.90–1) is immediately followed by a scene in which Caesar prudently sends emissaries to sound her out. What is primarily at issue is whether Cleopatra will ‘be deceived’, deflected from her intended

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course, or whether she will ‘fool their preparation’ and Caesar instead will be ‘beguiled’ (5.2.14, 224, 322).48 In this battle of wits, Cleopatra shows her practical side, and the comic touches in 5.2 bring out the pull of ordinary, unheroic life, the desire for self-preservation. The presence of the clown, endlessly delaying his exit with yet another bit of gallows humour and interrupting Cleopatra’s desired consummation in death, is a characteristic Shakespearean touch, very different from the monotonous striving after pathos in Daniel’s or Dryden’s death scenes. As several critics have pointed out, Cleopatra’s death is yet another performance, a dramatic tableau:Â€ ‘Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch /My best attires’ (5.2.226–7).49 Cleopatra’s royal state, emphasized throughout the final scenes, is a matter of appropriate dress and demeanour, the robe and the crown (5.2.289), rather than, as in Daniel and May, bringing out her political role as ruler of Egypt. Where Caesar wishes to put Cleopatra on display in Rome, as a trophy illustrating Rome’s triumph over its enemies, Cleopatra plans a rival spectacle, to foreclose the possibility that ‘Mechanic slaves /With greasy aprons, rules and hammers shall /Uplift us to the view’ (5.2.208–10). A metatheatrical touch brings out the conscious artifice in this staged scene, as the dramatist daringly comments on the inadequacy of his own representation, with a boy actor trying to do justice to the role of Cleopatra: â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… Antony Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness I’th’ posture of a whore.

(5.2.217–20)

In modern productions of Antony and Cleopatra, the problem of the inability of the actor playing Cleopatra to do justice to the full range and complexity of the character still persists. Nature rarely measures up to fancy. Cleopatra’s metamorphosis in Act 5 presents special problems. Twentiethcentury critics have sometimes been uncomfortable with ‘Husband, I come! /Now to that name my courage prove my title!’ (5.2.286–7), arguing that allowing Cleopatra to dwindle into a spouse in her final moments makes her less of a threat to Roman hegemony.50 Shakespeare differs from Garnier and Daniel in bringing out the erotic aspects of death’s embrace. Antony’s expressed wish to ‘be /A bridegroom in my death and run into’t /As to a lover’s bed’ (100–2) is not a celebration of marital fidelity but of death as heightened sexual pleasure. Cleopatra’s courting of deathÂ€ – ‘as sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle’Â€– similarly presents death as sexual consummation, fulfilling desire, uniting pleasure and pain:Â€‘the stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch /Which hurts and is desired’ (5.2.294–5, 310). The

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erotic side of Cleopatra’s suicide is brought out in the exchange of kisses, in which she urges Charmian and Iras to ‘take the last warmth of my lips’ (5.2.290), whereupon Iras, after the kiss, falls and dies. In addressing the phallic worm ‘that kills and pains not’, Cleopatra sees it as yet another lover. The expressive simplicity of ‘Dost thou not see my baby at my breast /That sucks the nurse asleep?’ is suffused with an eroticism far removed from the cloying sentimentality of Garnier’s or Daniel’s concerned mother and loyal, obedient spouse (5.2.242–3, 308–9). As the clown’s pun on mortal/immortal suggests, Cleopatra’s ‘immortal longings’ are consonant with more ordinary, quotidian desires (5.2.246, 280). A similar convergence of the two is illustrated by her calling on Antony to ‘rouse himself’ (5.2.283) from the passivity of death, meeting her in ecstatic union. The word ‘noble’, repeated several times in this scene, suggests that she seeks to stage a death ‘after the high Roman fashion’ (4.15.90–1), but it is not a capitulation to Rome and its values. In her final moments Cleopatra hopes to transform herself into ‘fire and air’, leaving the ‘baser’ elements of earth and water behind (5.2.288–9). Her stated intent is, by a miraculous alchemy, to change flesh and blood into marble and thus form a lasting monument, making sure that her story will be told in her terms and not Caesar’s: My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing Of woman in me. Now from head to foot I am marble-constant. Now the fleeting moon No planet is of mine. (5.2.237–40)

Yet Cleopatra’s death scene, in its unstinting eroticism, may be seen as the transformation of marble to flesh and blood, as in the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea or the reawakening of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. A final tribute in the words of Octavius Caesar, denied his expected victory, presents Cleopatra as exercising her seductive appeal even after death, reaching out for further conquests: â•…â•…â•… She looks like sleep, As she would catch another Antony In her strong toil of grace.

(5.2.345–7)

In Shakespeare’s version of the conflict between Rome and Egypt, Cleopatra remains untamed at the end of the play.

Ch apter 7

The city and the battlefield:Â€Coriolanus

‘I b a n i s h you ’:Â€a h e ro’s Rom e No play by Shakespeare is more obsessively concerned with Roman Â�values, or more critical of these values, than Coriolanus. The words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ recur more times in Coriolanus than in any Shakespeare play other than Titus AndronicusÂ€ – eighty-eight for ‘Rome’, twenty-two for ‘Roman’. The terms are sometimes used in a ceremonial way, as in the Herald’s speech in 2.1 honouring Coriolanus with his newly won title: h e r a l d. Know, Rome, that all alone Martius did fight Within Corioles’ gates … Welcome to Rome, renowned Coriolanus! (2.1.158–9, 162)

In the early republic, citizens were expected to serve Rome on the Â�battlefield, demonstrating their patriotism by the wounds they have endured. Cominius, who at one point says ‘I have been consul, and can show for Rome /Her enemies’ marks upon me’, praises Martius, emerging from the battlefield covered in blood:Â€‘We thank the gods /Our Rome has such a soldier … /Rome must know /The value of her own’ (1.10.8–9, 20–21; 3.3.111–12). In praising ‘the deeds of Coriolanus’, Cominius identifies ‘valour’, martial courage, as the primary virtue: It is held That valour is the chiefest virtue, and Most dignifies the bearer. If it be, The man I speak of cannot in the world Be singly counterpoised. (2.2.80–5)

At the beginning of Plutarch’s ‘Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, Martius is presented as exemplifying the equation of virtus with manly courage in the early republic: 165

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Now in those dayes, valiantnes was honoured in Rome above all other vertues:Â€which they called virtus, by the name of vertue it selfe, as including in that generall name, all other special vertues besides. So that virtus in the Latin, was as much as valiantnes.1

As in Julius Caesar, ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ in Coriolanus frequently have ethical connotations, signifying possession or lack of qualities perceived as quintessentially Roman. The patricians and plebeians, locked in contention, each claim exclusive ownership of Rome.2 Patricians tend to associate ‘our Rome’ with an ideal of public service, and make ‘Roman’ a term of praise or abuse. Cominius, leading his troops in battle, says ‘We are come off /Like Romans’ (1.7.1–2), and later in the play complains that ‘This palt’ring /Becomes not Rome’ (3.1.60–1). When Rome is under siege by a Volscian army led by the banished warrior Coriolanus, Cominius taunts the Tribunes with repetitions of ‘Rome’:Â€ there are two Romes, one for the patricians and one for the cowardly, selfish plebeians. He’ll shake your Rome about your ears … â•…â•… For his best friends, if they Should say, ‘Be good to Rome’… â•…â•… You have brought A trembling upon Rome such as never S’incapable of help … â•…â•… Desperation Is all the policy, strength, and defence That Rome can make against them.

(4.6.103, 117–18, 124–6.134–6)

Volumnia, no less contemptuous of the Tribunes who have been Â�responsible for her son’s banishment, contrasts an ideal of service to the state, concern for the public good, with ‘mean’ birth and character. The empty words of the Tribunes are set against deeds demonstrating manly courage:Â€her son is a true Roman, they are not. … To banish him that struck more blows for Rome Than thou hast spoken words … More noble blows than ever thou wise words, And for Rome’s good … Good man, the wounds that he does bear for Rome! … As far as does the Capitol exceed The meanest house in Rome, so far my son … Whom you have banished does exceed you all. (4.2.21–4, 30, 42–3, 45)

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The distinction between true and false Roman is even more clear-cut in speeches by Martius, who denies even the name of Roman to those of whom he disapproves. Before the walls of Corioles, he berates the Roman soldiers hesitant to follow him into battle as ‘geese’ masquerading as men:Â€‘All the contagion of the south light on you, /You shames of Rome!’ (1.5.1–2, 5). In a violent confrontation with the Tribunes, where Menenius and Cominius urge some form of compromise, patching up the quarrel, Coriolanus conflates civil dissension and war against Rome’s external enemies:Â€the citadel must be defended, the enemy, less than human, must be crushed. c or iol a n u s. I would they were barbarians, as they are, Though in Rome littered; not Romans, as they are not, Though calved i’th’porch of the Capitol. (3.1.238–40)

When a Senator says that the actions of the Tribunes serve ‘to unbuild the city, and to lay all flat’, the Tribune Sicinius responds ‘What is the city but the people?’ (3.1.198–9). Neither side admits the legitimacy of the other, their right to be considered Romans. After the Tribunes banish Coriolanus ‘as enemy to the people and his country’, to be forever excluded from ‘our city … never more to enter our Rome gates’, Coriolanus replies ‘I banish you!’ (3.3.102–5, 118, 124) With martial virtus exiled, he predicts, the cowardly and foolish Roman populace will be the prey of some foreign conqueror: … As most abated captives to some nation That won you without blows! Despising For you the city, thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere.

(3.3.133–6)

This powerful speech, charged with dramatic irony, is the play’s Â�turning point. For a Roman, brought up in the ideal of service to the commonwealth, striking blows ‘for Rome’, there can be no elsewhere:Â€he carries Rome with him wherever he goes. In 5.3, Martius claims to be able to resist the prompting of ‘instinct’ and ‘stand /As if a man were author of himself /And knew no other kin’ (5.3.35–7); but in this scene alone, the words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ echo no fewer than fifteen times, ten of them spoken by Martius himself. Throughout the play, Rome and its traditions are associated with Â�family ties, parentage. Volumnia, appealing to her son on behalf of endangered

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Rome, states the bleak choice he faces, win or lose; in either case, he leaves a legacy of dishonour: â•…â•…â•… For either thou Must like a foreign recreant be led With manacles thorough our streets, or else Triumphantly tread on thy country’s ruin, And bear the palm for having bravely shed Thy wife and children’s blood.

(5.3.114–19)

In bringing wife, mother, and child before him, kneeling in supplication, Volumnia gives inescapable visual proof to support her argument. Martius, brought up to be greedy for honour won in battle, has, in marching on Rome, gained for himself ‘such a name /Whose repetition will be dogged with curses … /To th’ensuing age abhorred’, as the destroyer of mother and mother country. â•…â•…â•… Thou shalt no sooner March to assault thy country than to treadÂ€– Trust to’t, thou shalt notÂ€– on thy mother’s womb That brought thee to this world. (5.3.123–6, 144–5, 148)3

In Acts 4 and 5, nearly all the references to Rome are to Rome at war with itself, the city under assault, with the Roman general turning his martial skills and experience ‘against the gates of Rome’ (4.5.142). Cominius and Menenius, friends and associates who find themselves impotent to deflect Coriolanus from his course, emphasize his machinelike implacability, single-mindedly bent on destruction, ‘his eye /Red as ’twould burn Rome’ (5.3.63–4). Cominius, despairingly, says that Martius refuses to admit ‘our old acquaintance and the drops /That we have bled together’, and even declines to answer to the name ‘Coriolanus’, awarded to him in token of his victories: He was a kind of nothing, titleless, Till he had forged himself a name i’th’fire Of burning Rome.

(5.1.10–15)

The theme of namelessness or denial of one’s name is brought out in Martius’s first appearance among the Volscians, when the disguised Roman refuses again and again, asked ‘What is thy name?’ six times, to identify himself.4

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The Volscian warrior Aufidius, asserting common cause and new-found friendship with the man toward whom elsewhere in the play he expresses unsleeping hate, accepts Martius’s evaluation that ‘ungrateful Rome’ (4.5.131) is to blame for Martius’s defection. In offering his ‘revengeful services’ to the Volscians, Martius sees himself as innocent victim, forsaken by his Roman allies and persecuted by ‘the cruelty and envy of the people’, compelling him to ‘fight /Against my cankered country’ (4.5.75–7, 90–2). The instability of the shifting loyalties in Acts 4 and 5 is apparent in Martius’s soliloquy:Â€ ‘My birthplace hate I, and my love’s upon /This enemy town’ (4.4.23–4). Clowns and minor characters, with no heroic pretensions, provide ironic counterpoint:Â€the spy Nicanor, who says to a Volscian acquaintance ‘I am a Roman, and my services are, as you are, against ’em’ (4.3.23–4), or the comic exchange between Menenius and the Volscian watchman. f i r s t wat c h m a n. You are a Roman, are you? m e n e n i u s. I am as thy general is. f i r s t wat c h m a n. Then you should hate Rome as he does. (5.2.36–9)

Volscian and Roman soldiers agree in seeking spoils from the battleÂ� field, more interested in looting than in fighting, and the Volscian servingmen, looking forward to war instead of the ‘lethargy’ of peace, comment, cynically:Â€ ‘The wars for my money! I hope to see Romans as cheap as Volscians’ (4.5.229, 237–8). The predatory imagery associated with military conquest is most explicit in speeches by the fierce Aufidius: au f i di u s. I think he’ll be to Rome As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it By sovereignty of nature. (4.7.33–5)

Images of predatory nature, one animal feeding off another, are a recurrent motif. Menenius compares ‘the hungry plebeians’ to a wolf seeking to ‘devour’ Martius, and in exile Martius finds the world a ‘city of kites and crows’, reduced to eating carrion. Aufidius, who later in this scene sees himself as preying on the predator Martius, imagines a universal war of the stronger against the weaker, in which predation is justified by ‘sovereignty of nature’. There are those who, by birth, by character, or by unremitting dedication to their goal, are natural rulers, and others, destined by their natural inferiority to be slaves, cannon fodder, fit only to be devoured.5

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The city and the battlefield:Â€Coriolanus Li v y, Plu ta rc h, a n d t h e e a r ly r e pu bl ic

In Book II of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, the story of Coriolanus is one of several episodes illustrating the difficulties faced by the early republic after the expulsion of Tarquin and the institution of a new form of government. According to Livy, the early republic faced two related but separate dangers, internal discord and invasion by a foreign enemy:Â€‘as the Volscian warre was now at hand, so the cittie was at discord among themselves. The Senators and commons hated one another at the heart.’ News of an invasion by the Volscians was, according to Livy, actually welcomed by the Commons, who, in large numbers, refused service in the Roman army. The comminaltie lept for joy, and said the gods were now come downe from heaven to be revenged on the Senators pride … Let the Nobles (qd they) serve as soldiers; let them take weapon in hand, & abide the brunts and hazards of war, who receive the profits, the prizes & rewards thereof. (Romane Historie, II, pp. 58–9)

In Livy’s account of the early republic, the Volscians were one of a number of Italian tribes with whom, in these years, the Romans were engaged in endless wars. The bitter hostility of the rich and the poor, those privileged by birth or wealth and those living on a bare subsistence, feeling themselves excluded from power, is a recurrent theme in the first five books of Livy. In Livy and in Plutarch, the story of Coriolanus includes at the beginning an incident omitted by Shakespeare:Â€ the physical withdrawal of a large number of plebeians to the Sacred Mount, outside Rome, complaining ‘that the rich men had driven them out of the cittie’.6 As in Shakespeare, Menenius addresses the citizens with the parable of the rebellion of the ‘body’s members’ against the belly, and in Livy and Plutarch (though not in Shakespeare’s version) Menenius’s intervention ‘turned quite the peoples hearts’.7 The creation of the position of Tribune as a concession to the disaffected plebeians, a major constitutional innovation of the early republic, is in Livy and Plutarch a direct consequence of Menenius’s moderating influence. As Livy says, Tribunes are by the nature of their office ‘sacred and inÂ�violable’ (p. 65), with specific designated powers, elected by and representatives of the common people. Modern historians generally agree that ‘the very nature of the tribunate and of the organization of the plebs, as a kind of state within a state, virtually implies a bitter class conflict’. The Tribunes, who could ‘enforce their will by coercion … against anyone

Livy, Plutarch, and the early republic

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who challenged their authority’, had the power to intervene ‘to protect individual plebeians from ill treatment by the rich and powerful, and from arbitrary punishment by the magistrates’.8 In Livy, Coriolanus was one of a number of patrician Senators, jealous of their privileges, who opposed the institution of Tribunes and sought to curb or abolish the Tribunes’ power, loathing the common people. According to Livy, each of the opposing factions sought supremacy: For whiles the Tribunes for their part would needes have all, and the Consuls on the other side draw all to them:Â€betweene their plucking and haling, there was no strength left in the midst:Â€and to conclude, the Commonweale was rent, torne, and dimembred betweene the rulers thereof:Â€ who strove rather for the managing and rule, than for the safetie and preservation of the State. (Romane Historie, II, p. 83)

In Livy, Menenius disappears from the narrative after the establishment of the office of Tribune, dying in the same year as Martius’s victory at Corioles. Though implicitly contrasted with Coriolanus as a ‘mediator for civile attonement’ (p. 66), he is not, as in Shakespeare, Coriolanus’s friend and surrogate father. In Livy, Coriolanus is not a candidate for consul, and as a result does not stand in the marketplace soliciting the citizens’ votes. Though the commons are angry at him and threaten him with violence, there is no scene of confrontation like Shakespeare’s 3.1 and 3.3, in which the Tribunes accuse him of treason. Here as elsewhere, Livy’s account is brief. When the date of his trial came: he made default and appeared not, yet continued they still in their angrie mood against him. And being condemned in his absence, for contumacie, departed into banishment to the Volscians, menacing his own countrie as he went, and carying even then with him the revenging stomacke of an enemie. (p. 67)

The end of the story is in many respects similar to that in Plutarch and in Shakespeare:Â€ Coriolanus rejects ambassadors from Rome, then a delegation of women is sent, and, after an appeal by his mother, he is ‘overcome’ and relents (p. 70). In Livy, Coriolanus does not return to die at the hands of Aufidius among the Volscians, and little is made of Aufidius’s hatred of his rival. Instead, Livy provides several alternative endings:Â€ Coriolanus may have been murdered, ‘some report one way, some another’, and other reports say that ‘he lived untill he was an old man’, a bitter exile (pp. 70–1). In keeping with Livy’s overall aim of illustrating in his narrative the seeds of Rome’s greatness and of its decline, how ‘their dominion was

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atcheeved and enlarged’ and ‘how at the very first their behaviour and manners sunke withall’, the career of Coriolanus may be seen as one of a series of examples and warnings, models of behaviour to follow or to avoid (Book I, p. 2). Marcus Furius Camillus, another warrior, as Livy portrays him, is to some extent a controversial and divisive figure. He is a stern disciplinarian, who ‘taught his soldiours not to feare their enemies most, but likewise to stand in awe of their own Commander’, and in the factional disputes in Rome, like Coriolanus, he allies himself with the patrician Senators against the plebeian Tribunes, ‘whome of all other they most feared to be their adversarie’ (Book V, pp. 192, 197). Not long after his great victory at Veii, and at a time when Rome was threatened by the Gauls, Camillus, like Coriolanus before him, is exiled by his enÂ�emies, having ‘thrust himselfe daily more and more into mens anger and displeasure’ by his forthright criticisms of his fellow Romans. Even ‘his kinsfolke and followers’ refuse to defend him against unjust charges, so that, ‘spending his spirits and wasting his bodie with crying out, upon gods and men’, he bitterly reflects upon the ingratitude of his countrymen:Â€‘By my skill herein, I flourished in my countrie, and being in warre invincible, was in peace by unthankefull neighbours and unkinde citizens banished’ (Book V, pp. 200–1, 207–8). Unlike Coriolanus, Camillus is called back from exile after the Gauls have occupied Rome, and instead of threatening to burn Rome to the ground, saves Rome from burning. He rallies his troopsÂ€– soldiers who at the time of the initial assault had fled in panic, ‘possessed with feare’, concerned only to save their own skinsÂ€– and calls on his fellow Romans to redeem their country, reminding them of the sacred ties of home and family (Book V, pp. 204, 211–15). In contrast to Coriolanus, Camillus, as well as demonstrating exemplary martial courage, is presented as the embodiment of pietas, selfless love of his native land. Plutarch’s ‘Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus’, Shakespeare’s principal source, places a much greater emphasis than Livy on Volumnia’s role in moulding her son’s character. At the outset, Plutarch presents Martius as a mixture of good and bad qualities, with his weaknesses presented as the results of a faulty or unbalanced education: A rare and excellent witte untaught, doth bring forth many good and evill thinges together:Â€ like as a fat soile bringeth forth herbes & weedes that lieth unmanured. For this Martius’ naturall wit and great hart dyd marvellously sturre up his courage, to doe and attempt notable actes. But on the other side for lack of education, he was so chollericke and impacient, that he would yeeld to no living creature:Â€which made him churlishe, uncivil, and altogether unfit for

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any mans conversation … His behaviour was so unpleasant to them, by reason of a certaine insolent and sterne manner he had, which because it was too lordly, was disliked.9

For the young Martius, ‘the onely thing that made him to love honour, was the joye he sawe his mother did take of him’ in hearing ‘everie body praise and commend him’ (p. 237). Shakespeare follows Plutarch in making Volumnia the conduit through which the Roman ideology of martial virtus is transmitted to her son.10 Like the Stoic Cato or like the Antony praised by Octavius for being able to endure hardships without flinching, Plutarch’s Martius is able to ‘endure easilie all manner of paines and travaiiles’. He takes joy in battle, ‘not only terrible, and fierce to lay about him, but to make the enemie afearde with the sounde of his voyce and grimness of his countenance’ (pp. 236, 238–9). As in Shakespeare, when Martius is praised in the presence of ‘the whole armie’ and offered tangible reward for his exploits at Corioles, he declines, embarrassed by the praise:Â€‘as for his other offer, which was rather a mercenarie rewarde, then a honorable recompence, he would have none of it, but was contented to have his equall part with other souldiers’ (p. 240). Unlike Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, solitary and ‘alone’ throughout the play, Plutarch’s Coriolanus is surrounded by followers among the young noblemen, encouraging him in his actions: Being accompanied with all the lustiest young gentlemen, whose mindes were nobly bent, as those that came of noble race, and commonly used for to follow and honour him … They flockt about him, and kept him companie, to his much harme:Â€for they did but kindle and inflame his choller more and more.11

In the two scenes of confrontation, 3.1 and 3.3, Shakespeare follows Plutarch in having Coriolanus urge the abolition of the office of Tribune as promoting ‘insolencie and sedition … amongst the people’, and after a scuffle, with ‘the noble Patricians gathering together about him’, agreeing to stand trial (pp. 243–4). Asked what the charge would be, ‘the Tribunes aunswered him, they would shewe howe he did aspire to be king, and would prove that all his actions tended to usurpe tyrannical power over Romeâ•›’. Plutarch’s Coriolanus, rather than exploding in rage, stipulates as condition ‘that you charge me with nothing else besides’. Where Shakespeare’s defiant Coriolanus is banished by a declaration by the Tribunes, Plutarch goes into detail about the voting arrangements, and has Martius condemned by a vote of ‘three voyces odde’ (p. 246). Throughout this part of Plutarch’s narrative, Coriolanus is presented as a member of a faction of conservative patricians rather than as a solitary

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individual. When he leaves for exile, he is accompanied to the gates of Rome by ‘a great number of Patricians that brought him thither’ and, rather than rejecting Cominius’s offer to ‘follow thee a month, devise with thee /Where thou shalt rest’, he ‘went on his way with three or foure of his friendes onely’ (p. 247; Cor, 4.1.39–40). In the scenes of exile in Act 4, Shakespeare follows Plutarch closely in presenting Martius’s entry into Antium ‘ill favouredly muffled and disguised’ (p. 247). Volumnia’s speech to her son in Shakespeare follows her speech in Plutarch, emphasizing the conflict in pietas: For we cannot (alas) together pray, both for victorie, for our countrie, and for safetie of thy life also … The bitter sop of most hard choice is offered thy wife and children, to forgo the one of the two:Â€either to lose the person of thy selfe, or the nurse of their native countrie.12

Martius’s speech of surrender in North’s Plutarch is again followed closely by Shakespeare, who expands on Plutarch by having Martius describe the mother’s victory as ‘most mortal’ to her son (5.3.190). Plutarch goes on to say that after Martius’s death, ‘the whole state of the Volsces hartily wished him alive againe’, since the Volscians were then defeated in battle by the Romans and forced ‘to accept most shamefull conditions of peace’ (p. 257). Plutarch ends his life of Coriolanus with a comparison between Coriolanus and Alcibiades, another great warrior, ‘hardie & valiant’, successful in the wars, who led an army against his native land. In character, Martius ‘lacked no good commendable vertues and qualities’, and in his ‘temperance, and cleane handes from taking of bribes and money’ he was a model of conduct, unlike Alcibiades, who is described by Plutarch as ‘licentious’ and deceitful. A ‘fault in nature’ led Coriolanus to a disastrous course of action: And of all his misfortune and ill hap, the austeritie of his nature, and his haughtie obstinate minde, was the onely cause:Â€the which of it selfe being hateful to the world, when it is joyned with ambition, it groweth then much more churlish, fierce, and intollerable.13

Plutarch characterizes Coriolanus as a man who, for all his private Â�virtues, brings disaster upon himself and the commonwealth, threatening to destroy Rome not out of ‘contention in matters of governance … but onely following his cholericke moode, that would be pleased with no thing’ (p. 258). In his self-destructive obstinacy, Plutarch’s Coriolanus is presented as an example of behaviour to be avoided in public and in private life.

The politics of â•›Coriolanus T h e p ol i t ic s of

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coriol anus

In the opening scene of Coriolanus, an assembly of ‘mutinous Citizens with staves, clubs, and other weapons’ is addressed by two of their number, one advising caution and one urging direct action, the use of ‘strong arms’ to defend their interests. Though he modifies the account of plebeian discontent in Plutarch and Livy in some respects, Shakespeare retains their emphasis on the bitterness of the poor against the rich, and against a Roman political establishment indifferent to the suffering of Roman citizens. The Roman plebeians, as presented here, are not a ‘rabble’ or a mob, but are capable of rational deliberation.14 In the manner of the Shakespearean clownÂ€– Touchstone or Feste rather than DogberryÂ€– the First Citizen in a series of puns deconstructs the Second Citizen’s conventional phrase ‘good citizens’: f i r s t ci t i z e n. We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely, but they think we are too dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes. (1.1.14–21)

In this speech, Shakespeare gives voice to the grievances of those who feel themselves exploited and ignored. In its contrast of ‘surfeit’ and want, its criticism of a society in which the terms ‘good’ and ‘dear’ are stripped of their moral content, its implicit argument that ‘superfluity’ is in itself unhealthy and a sign of injustice, the passage resembles Lear’s newfound awareness of the suffering of ‘poor naked wretches’, ‘houseless’ and ‘unfed’: â•…â•…â•… O, I have ta’en Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou might shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.

(King Lear, 3.4.28–36)

The First Citizen has little faith in the susceptibility of the Â�rulers of the state to rational persuasion, and relies instead on a common Â�resolution ‘rather to die than to famish’ (Cor, 1.1.3–4, 58). It is characteristic of Shakespeare, and of the Roman rhetorical tradition of arguing in utramque partem to which, here and elsewhere, he is indebted, that positions strongly held and powerfully argued are counterpoised against contrasting positions, no less plausibly argued.

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Menenius’s fable of the belly can be interpreted in different ways.15 In the versions of Livy, Plutarch, and Shakespeare, the outlines of the fable and its application to the rebellious citizens are similar. That on a time all the members of mans body did rebell against the bellie, Â�complaining of it, that it onely remained in the middest of the bodie, without doing any thing, neither did it beare any labour to the maintenaunce of the rest. (North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 238)

The belly’s answer, in Plutarch as in Shakespeare, is that the belly is ‘the storehouse and the shop /Of the whole body’ and, receiving nourishment, circulates it to the other parts (Cor, 1.1.130–3). One interpretation of the fable emphasizes interdependence, the need for ‘unitie and concord’, arguing that the health of the body or the body politic depends upon the health of each of its constituent parts. Livy’s version of the fable is informed by an essentially comic vision of mutuality, spelling out in detail the unintended consequences of the body’s rebellion: That neither the hands should reach & convey food to the mouth, nor the mouth receive it as it came, ne yet the teeth grind & chew the same … Whiles they were minded to famish the poore bellie, behold the other lims, yea & the whole bodie besides, pined, wasted, & fel into an extreme consumption. (Livy, Romane Historie, Book II, p. 65)

This version of the fable is non-hierarchical and egalitarian:Â€ the First Citizen, developing Menenius’s metaphor, enumerates the constituent elements of the body politic, each providing ‘helps’ in accordance with its appropriate role (1.3.113–16). Another way of interpreting the fable distinguishes sharply between the ‘lowest, basest’ parts of the body politic and those who are their rightful rulers. In this conservative version of the myth, those being governed have no right to complain, no right to claim a role in the government, and must patiently submit to those who, by a ‘sovereignty of nature’ (4.7.35), are their rulers. Toward the end of his oration to the citizens, Menenius draws a moral from the fable that characterizes the belly as ‘good’ and the ‘mutinous members’ as naturally subservient: â•…â•…â•… For examine Their counsels and their cares … â•…â•…â•… you shall find No public benefit which you receive But it proceeds or comes from them to you, And no way from yourselves.

(1.1.145–51)

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The traffic flows only one way:Â€there is no reciprocity, no mutual benefit, not even a sense that rulers have an obligation to behave responsibly, conscious of limits on their power. Anything that subjects receive is a free, unmerited gift from the rulers. The exchange between Menenius and the First Citizen before Menenius’s fable presents two incompatible ways of viewing the Roman commonwealth and class divisions within Rome. Menenius’s tone is patronizing. ‘The Roman state’, seen as unchanging, divinely ordained, beyond criticism, is wholly identified with his own class, the patricians. Those in power ‘care for you like fathers’, and the noisy citizens are behaving like fractious children. m e n e n i u s. I tell you, friends, most charitable care Have the patricians of you. For your wants, Your suffering in this dearth, you may as well Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them Against the Roman state, whose course will on The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs Of more strong link asunder than can ever Appear in your impediment.

Menenius admits that the ‘dearth’ has caused ‘suffering’ among ordinary Romans, but sees such recurrent crises, however calamitous they may appear, as inevitable. In this speech, Menenius’s arguments resemble those of Tudor orthodoxy, as represented, for example, in the ‘Homily against Wilfull Disobedience’. â•…â•…â•… For the dearth, The gods, not the patricians, make it, and Your knees to them, not arms, must help. Alack, You are transported by calamity Thither where more attends you, and you slander The helms o’th’state, who care for you like fathers, When you curse them as enemies.

(1.1.62–75)

The response of the First Citizen presents a sharply contrasting conception of the Roman state and of the causes of the sufferings of the poor. Rather than being benevolent, caring parents, those in power are concerned only with their own self-interest, favouring the rich against the poor and perverting the law to support privilege and ‘chain up and restrain the poor’. The unrelieved hunger of the ordinary citizens is not caused by impersonal forces beyond human control but by greed, the profit motive, with rich men hoarding grain in their storehouses and usurers preying on

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their helpless victims. The First Citizen’s reply to Menenius is not so much a plea for redress of grievances as a challenge to established authority: f i r s t ci t i z e n. Care for us? True, indeed! They ne’er cared for us yet:Â€ suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us. (1.1.76–83)

Martius’s attitude toward the plebeians is consistently hostile. They are fickle, unreliable, instinctively opposed to the ‘worthy’ and virtuous:Â€‘You cry against the noble Senate, who /Under the gods, keep you in awe.’ The existing form of government in Rome, with all power vested in the senatorial class, is in Martius’s view entirely satisfactory, and any concession to ‘the rabble’ is unjustified, ‘dangerous lenity’, a recipe for disaster (1.1.172, 183–4, 215–16; 3.1.101). In language that is frequently Â�violent, lacking discretion, Martius treats his domestic opponents like foreign enemies encountered on the battlefield and his allies as weak and irresolute: Would the nobility lay aside their ruth And let me use my sword, I’d make a quarry With thousands of these quartered slaves as high As I could pitch my lance.

(1.1.194–7)

In his view, there are some who by ‘gentry, title, wisdom’ are natural rulers, and others, dismissed contemptuously as ‘general ignorance’, to be kept in check. â•…â•…â•… Thus we debase The nature of our seats, and make the rabble Call our cares fears, which will in time Break ope the locks o’th’Senate and bring in The crows to peck the eagles. (3.1.137–41, 146–8)

Successive generations of critics have created their own versions of Coriolanus, each one in harmony with the critic’s own ideological assumptions. Roman history and Roman values are reinterpreted in ways reflecting, or occasionally contesting, the presuppositions of later ages. Highly partisan critics line up on one side or another of the conflict between the patricians and plebeians, and between the solitary hero Coriolanus and the Rome that has cast him out. Nahum Tate’s adaptation


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of Shakespeare’s play, The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth (1687), for example, turns Coriolanus into an attack on the Whigs, ‘the busie Faction of our own time’, directed at ‘those Troublers of the State, that out of private Interest or Mallice, Seduce the Multitude to Ingratitude, against Persons that are not only plac’t in Rightful Power above them; but also the Heroes and Defenders of their Country’. In this version of the story, Coriolanus (James, Duke of York) is noble and misunderstood and his adversaries plumb the depths of villainy.16 A once flourishing tradition of criticism, in the wake of Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture, endorses Coriolanus’s attitude toward the unruly citizens, seeing Shakespeare’s play as an attack on ‘those principles of democracy, subversive in the eyes of sixteenth-century theorists, which allow the unqualified masses to act in a political capacity of any sort’. The title of a chapter in James Phillips’s The State in Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman Plays (1940) is ‘Violation of Order and Degree in Coriolanus’. Phillips sees the activities of the plebeians in the play as disturbing ‘the natural order of political society’:Â€ ‘as nature decrees one head for the human body, so it decrees one authority’. Phillips, like other critics of the ‘Tudor myth’ school, cites William Fulbecke as evidence of beliefs he claims to be universally held in Shakespeare’s day:Â€‘It is against the nature of the people to beare rule; for they are as unfitte for regiment, as a mad man to give counsaile.’â•›17 The same passage in Fulbecke is cited by W. Gordon Zeeveld in ‘Coriolanus and Jacobean Politics’ (1962) as illustration of ‘the sentiments of his Elizabethan readers toward Roman history’ and toward Coriolanus as a man ‘of rare vertues’. Critics who see Shakespeare as an advocate of traditional conservative values and the play as ‘an object lesson in the hazards of popular government’ regularly cite a speech by Coriolanus as reflecting Shakespeare’s own beliefs. When two authorities are up, Neither supreme, how soon confusion May enter ’twixt the gap of both and take The one by th’other. (3.1.111–14)18

An interesting variant occurs in A. P. Rossiter’s Angel with Horns (1970), where the critic finds such political sentiments unpalatable, but nevertheless sees them as representing Shakespeare’s own deeply held views and in particular ‘his fear of disorder, civil commotion, the disintegrated State’.19

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William Hazlitt’s comments on Coriolanus, first published in 1816, are his response to a production of a version adapted by and starring John Philip Kemble, which presented ‘an idealized, wholly heroic Coriolanus’. Hazlitt sees the play as expressing Shakespeare’s own conservative views, which the radical Hazlitt finds deplorable. Shakespear himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of baiting the rabble.

Where Kemble’s production, full of pageantry, portrayed the plebeians as ‘clownish, ineffectual dolts’, Hazlitt’s sympathies were republican. Not only the plays of Shakespeare, but ‘the language of poetry’ itself, he argued, tended to favour the strong over the weak, glamorizing those with ‘an imposing air of superiority’. The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject for poetry:Â€it admits of rhetoric, which goes into argument and explanation, but it presents no immediate or distinct images to the mind … The language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power.20

Hazlitt distrusted ‘the insolence of power’, the appeal of ‘a single man’ asserting his greatness and his contempt for ordinary, unheroic people forced to scratch a living. There is nothing heroical in a multitude of miserable rogues not wishing to be starved, or complaining that they are like to be so; but when a single man comes forward to brave their cries and make them submit to the last indignities, from mere pride and self-will, our admiration of his prowess is immediately converted to contempt for their pusillanimity … We had rather be the oppressor than the oppressed. (p. 107)

In an eloquent passage, Hazlitt goes on to attack the ideology of Shakespeare’s play as licensing privilege and oppression. Where Coleridge, characteristically, sees in Coriolanus ‘the wonderful philosophic impartiality of Shakespeare’s politics’, ‘dispassionate’, with no more than a ‘good-humoured laugh at mobs’, his contemporary Hazlitt sees Shakespeare as highly partisan and as reactionary, favouring ‘the few’ against ‘the many’. The whole dramatic moral of Coriolanus is, that those who have little shall have less, and that those who have much shall take all that others have left. The people are poor; therefore they ought to be starved. They are slaves; therefore they ought to be beaten. They work hard; therefore they ought to be treated like beasts of burden.21


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Bertolt Brecht, less despairing, takes Hazlitt’s reading of the play one step further, constructing an alternative Coriolanus. In ‘A Study of the First Scene of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’ (1953), Brecht explores the possibility of interpreting or revising the play in a way that will enable an audience ‘to experience not only the tragedy of Coriolanus but also that of Rome and the plebeians’, ‘the tragedy of a people that has a hero against it’. Sceptical of heroism, Brecht’s adaptation and commentary seek to bring out those factors that either promote or impede ‘the unity of the plebeians’.22 Arguing that Shakespeare’s play ‘is written realistically and includes sufficient material of a contradictory sort’, Brecht sees the ideology of Menenius in his confrontation with the plebeians as ‘based on force, armed force, wielded by Romans’. His revised Coriolan, left unfinished at his death, presents the plebeians as dignified ‘honest workmen’ and as conscious moral agents, ‘more knowing politically’ than in Shakespeare, and aware of their collective power. Brecht turns the Tribunes Sicinius and Brutus into astute, far-sighted political leaders, cutting lines that show them as devious and manipulative, and substituting speeches such as ‘Be valiant soldiers for a better Rome … We will keep watch while you are in the field’ to the citizens.23 When in Act 5 Coriolanus is besieging Rome, the Tribunes organize armed resistance. Volumnia, less prominent in Brecht’s version than in Shakespeare, tells her son when she leads a Â�delegation to urge him to spare his native city, ‘You are no longer indispensable’ (Coriolan, 5.4, p. 142). Rome has changed, becoming more democratic and less a bastion of privilege, and Martius’s kind of heroic individualism has become outmoded, a victim of historical change. Brecht’s Coriolan was completed, with further revisions, by his colleagues in the Berliner Ensemble, and performed in 1964, touring the UK, the USA, and Europe in the following yearÂ€– with mixed reviews, often hostile, by British critics. This production featured highly ritualized, choreographed battle sequences in the later part of Act 1, a part of the play Brecht had not been able to revise before his death. The Italian director Giorgio Strehler produced a Brechtian ‘epic theatre’ version of Coriolanus in 1957. Using Brechtian devices of estrangement, in which the actors sought to ‘maintain an objective distance from the role’, Strehler interpreted the play in ‘dialectical’ terms:Â€‘the contradictions of the play were not solved in any neat way but exposed in all their complexity’.24 Coriolanus has been more popular in continental Europe than in Britain, with over a hundred performances in Germany in each of the decades between 1910 and 1940. Translations published in Nazi Germany described Coriolanus as ‘the true hero and Führer’, opposed to ‘a misled people, a

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false democracy … weaklings’. In 1933–4, a production at the Comédie Française led to riots by rival groups of socialists and fascists, both of which saw the play as ‘right-wing polemic’, ultimately causing the theatre to be closed. In contrast, in a 1977 German production, ‘everything which made the audience sympathize with Coriolanus’ was eliminated.25 In recent years, critics have tended to be sympathetic to the plebeians. Where E. C. Pettet in 1950 had no doubts that Shakespeare, as a ‘substantial landowner’, saw the Midlands Rising of 1607 as a threat to property, which ‘hardened and confirmed … what had always been his consistent attitude to the mob’, Annabel Patterson in 1989 argued that parallels with the Midlands Rising in Coriolanus gave prominence to ‘the popular voice and its grievances’. Rather than portraying the citizens of Rome as an ‘aimless and inarticulate’ rabble, easily swayed, Patterson claims, Shakespeare presents his plebeians as ‘capable of reasoning’, aware both of ‘power in ourselves’ (2.3.4) and of the limits on that power, with the practical, visceral wisdom of the Shakespearean clown. Shakespeare ‘shows us that popular, food-centered protest could work, since it resulted in the creation of the tribunate’.26 Both Patterson and Anne Barton cite Machiavelli’s contention that discord between patricians and plebeians in the Roman republic, rather than being damaging and destructive, was beneficial, helping to make ‘the Republic both Free and Powerful’: To me those who condemn the quarrels between the nobles and the plebs, seem to be cavilling at the very things that were the primary cause of Rome’s retaining her freedom … Nor do they realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the populace and that of the upper class and that all legislation favourable to liberty is brought about by the clash between them … If tumults led to the creation of the tribunes, tumults deserve the highest praise, since, besides giving the populace a share of the administration, they served as the guardian of Roman liberties.27

Barton and Patterson set out to contest ‘the settled conviction that Shakespeare’s view of history was orthodox, conservative, rooted in the political theories expounded in the Homilies’. Essays by Michael Bristol and Thomas Sorge, published in 1987, interpret the play as ‘about the emergence of a new, fairly self-contained social order that finds its centre in the citizens’, contrasting a society ‘based on solidarity … in which the members of a group participate in a more or less equal footing’ with a rival principle of ‘hierarchically ordered … social structure’. Like Brecht, these critics see Menenius’s fable of the belly as failing ‘to persuade the people to remain obedient’.28 To Bristol and Sorge, as to Patterson, the heart of the play is in the conflict between patricians and plebeians. Other

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recent critics, including Janet Adelman and Coppélia Kahn, place their emphasis on other aspects of the play, and in particular on the relationship between mother and son, and what it reveals about the ideology of Shakespeare’s Rome. Mo t h e r a n d s on The insult which Coriolanus finds intolerable is ‘boy of tears’ (5.6.103), hurled at him by Aufidius in the play’s last scene. Enraged, he repeats the term three times, twice in a speech where he seems to court death, stirring up memories of the Volscian sons and fathers he has killed, invoking Volscian pietas to his own detriment. He disclaims any solidarity with the Volscians, whose army he has just led, defiantly asserting his view of himself as a solitary heroic individual, with no ties. c or iol a n u s. Cut me to pieces, Volsces. Men and lads, Stain all your edges on me. ‘Boy’! False hound, If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there, That like an eagle in a dovecote, I Fluttered your Volscians in Corioles. Alone I did it, boy! (5.6.112–17)

This is more or less the way Martius behaves in the Roman Â�marketplace and Senate, indifferent to the claims of propriety and self-Â�preservation, mocking the plebeians whose votes he has agreed to solicit, and openly challenging the authority of the Tribunes, whom he treats with undisguised contempt. North’s Plutarch describes Martius as ‘churlishe, uncivill, and altogether unfit for any mans conversation’, and Aristotle comments, as a general axiom:Â€ ‘he that cannot abide to live in companie … is not esteemed a part or member of a Cittie, but is either a beast or a God’.29 In many ways, Coriolanus’s failure is one of incivility. Like Othello, he is bred in the wars, uncomfortable with and unskilled in ‘those soft parts of conversation /That chamberers have’ (Othello, 3.3.268–9). Unlike the eminently sociable Menenius, who enjoys a convivial glass of wine, Coriolanus is more at home on the battlefield than in the city. In his defiant solitariness, scornful of the claims of society, Coriolanus resembles such fierce, uncompromising, doomed epic heroes as Homer’s Achilles and Virgil’s Turnus. Cominius’s speech in praise of his heroic deeds describes him not only as matchless in prowess, raised above ordinary mortals, but as somehow inhuman, a killing machine made almost unrecognizable by his coating of blood.

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The city and the battlefield:Â€Coriolanus c om i n i u s. His sword, death’s stamp, Where it did mark, it took. From face to foot He was a thing of blood, whose every motion Was timed with dying cries. Alone he entered The mortal gate of th’city, which he painted With shunless destiny, aidless came off, And with a sudden reinforcement struck Corioles like a planet. Now all’s his. (2.2.105–12)

Coriolanus’s solitary nature, his preference for being ‘aidless’ in all Â�circumstances, has been brought out effectively in productionÂ€– Â�memorably in the ‘alien otherness’ of Alan Howard’s performance in 1977, where on the line ‘O, me alone! Make you a sword of me?’ (1.8.77), he was raised aloft on the spears of soldiers, gazing down from on high ‘like some all-conquering god’. In this production, Cominius’s speech praising Coriolanus was delivered in horrified tones, with a Cominius who ‘doesn’t at all like what he sees in Coriolanus … appalled by the man’s recklessness and extravagance’. Howard’s dominating performance presented him as a kind of ‘angel of death’, in ‘the sheer enjoyment he gets out of physical violence and killing’.30 Yet there is one relationship that is central to MartiusÂ€– his bond with his formidable mother, Volumnia. When, on two separate occasions, she sets out to deflect Coriolanus from his intended courseÂ€– and she is the only character ever to dent his unyielding resolveÂ€– she relies on his acceptance of her role as guide and mentor, starting in childhood and continuing into adulthood. v ol u m n i a . I prithee now, sweet son, as thou hast said My praises made thee first a soldier, so, To have my praise for this, perform a part Thou hast not done before. (3.2.109–12)

When Martius agrees to her entreaties to go to the marketplace and ‘dissemble with [his] nature’, ‘speak fair’ to his enemies, he reverts to the petulance of a small child, comparing himself to a baby, a eunuch, violating or belying his masculinity by shameful ‘baseness’. c or iol a n u s. My throat of war be turned, Which choired with my drum, into a pipe Small as a eunuch or the virgin voice That babies lull asleep! The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys’ tears take up The glasses of my sight! (3.2.64, 72, 114–17, 125)

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In one recent production, the 24-year-old Toby Stephens played Coriolanus as quite literally a ‘boy’, someone who has ‘never quite grown up’, a supercilious public-school sixth former, inadvertently revealing ‘the emotional inadequacy behind the arrogant façade’.31 According to the ideology of the Roman republic and early empire, the Roman mother was praised not for any nurturing qualities of ‘affection and understanding’, but for ‘moral vigilance’, ‘strength and firm moral purpose’. Widows such as Volumnia and Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, acted as both mother and father to their children, and acted as ‘disciplinarians, custodians of Roman culture and traditional morality’.32 Cornelia, praised by Plutarch and by Tacitus for ‘carefully’ directing her sons’ education and thus making her children ‘more civill, and better conditioned, than any other Romaines in their time’, refused to shed any tears at the death of her sons, both ardent republicans, but patiently bore her suffering. Her tombstone, bearing the inscription ‘Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi’, suggests a self-effacing mother finding fulfilment in the deeds of her sons. When asked why she never wore any ornament, she replied, looking at her sons, ‘These are my jewels.’33 Shakespeare’s Volumnia, in contrast, is a dominant figure in her relationship with her son, doling out praise or dispraise to keep him in line, training him to make him fit for the role of indomitable Roman warrior: c or iol a n u s. You were used to load me With precepts that would make invincible The heart that conned them. (4.1.9–11)

Tellingly, almost the first lines she speaks in the play are ‘If my son were my husband’. Throughout the play, Coriolanus shows himself to be closer to his mother than to his conventional, fearful wife Virgilia. Plutarch says that Volumnia directed him in his choice of a wife:Â€‘at her desire he tooke a wife by whome he had two children, yet never left his mothers house’.34 When Virgilia says ‘Heaven bless my lord from fell Aufidius’, Volumnia responds, fiercely, ‘He’ll beat Aufidius’ head below his knee /And tread upon his neck.’ To her, honour won in battle is far superior to the tranÂ� sient pleasure of sexual congress: If my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love … I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man. (1.3.2–5, 15–17, 46–8)

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After describing how, ‘when yet he was but tender-bodied’, she sent her son out to ‘seek danger where he was like to find fame’ in an early experience of warfare, Volumnia goes on to say, like the proverbial Spartan mother whose five sons died in battle: Hear me profess sincerely:Â€had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Martius, I had rather have eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action. (1.3.5–6, 12–13, 21–5)

Denied a role in serving the Roman state by bearing arms or by direct participation in political lifeÂ€– virtus, as the root vir suggests, is an exclusively masculine preserveÂ€ – the Roman mother serves as the conduit through which the ideology of virtus is passed on to succeeding generations. When Volumnia in Act 1 imagines her son, with ‘bloody brow’, confronting the Volscians in battle, her words are virtually identical to the words he speaks later: Methinks I see him stamp thus, and call thus: ‘Come on, you cowards, you were got in fear Though you were born in Rome!’

(1.3.33–5)

Each acts as the other’s surrogate:Â€the lines can be read either as Volumnia vicariously taking pleasure in the battles she is not allowed to fight, or as Martius acting out a script written for him by his mother, and by the martial ideology they share.35 Shakespeare shows the process of training a warrior to be continued in a second generation, in references to young Martius, Volumnia’s grandson. In at least two recent productions, the child, brought on stage in 1.3, is dressed as a miniature version of his father, a pocket warrior. The description of the child at play, a brief comic interlude, suggests not childish innocence or vulnerability, as with Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, but a potential for violence, a single-minded concentration on a destructive end, similar to that of his father. va l e r i a . O’ my word, the father’s son. I’ll swear ’tis a very pretty boy … ’has such a confirmed countenance! I saw him run after a gilded butterfly, and when he caught it he let it go again, and after it again, and over and over he comes, and up again, catched it again. Or whether the fall enraged him, or how ’twas, he did so set his teeth and tear it! O, I warrant, how he mammocked it! v ol u m n i a . One on’s father’s moods. (1.3.60–4)

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When the timid Virgilia, hearing reports of her husband’s exploits in battle, cries ‘O Jupiter, no blood!’, Volumnia calls her a ‘fool’ (1.3.39–40) and continues with lines of extraordinary ferocity. This is not quite Lady Macbeth’s ‘Come to my woman’s breasts /And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers’, but it involves a similar rejection of any ‘compunctious visitings of nature’, converting mother’s milk to blood (Macbeth, 1.5.42–6). v ol u m n i a . Away, you fool! It more becomes a man Than gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba When she did suckle Hector looked not lovelier Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood At Grecian sword. (1.3.40–4)

In the Roman ideology of virtus, martial courage, heroism is proved by being wounded, and the most convincing proof is dying in battle. Later in the play, Volumnia rejoices that her son has been wounded, adding to the twenty-five wounds he has already been able to show to illustrate his prowess:Â€‘O, he is wounded, I thank the gods for’t!’ (2.1.118). To Volumnia, nothing is more beautiful than blood, the emblem of masculinity. There is no suggestion that Volumnia’s pride in the wounds Martius has received is aberrant, showing her to be particularly bloodthirsty. Menenius, a pillar of Roman orthodoxy, shares her view that the wounded Martius has ‘cause to be proud’:Â€‘the wounds become him … Every gash was an enemy’s grave’ (2.1.119–20, 141–2, 151–2). Virtus and pietas assume that the Roman family is integral to the Roman commonwealth, and that the primary obligation of male citizens is, when needed, to bear arms in defence of Rome. Equating maternity with warfare, Volumnia speaks of her son as having in infancy sucked ‘valiantness’ from her breast (3.2.131). Mother and son share qualities of rigidity, aggressiveness, a preference for ‘no softer cushion than the flint’, for ‘steel’ rather than ‘the parasite’s silk’ (1.10.45; 5.3.53); but the ideology of virtus, subjected to critical scrutiny in the play, is shared by the more accommodating Menenius and Cominius, and in the final scenes, the obligations of virtus and pietas clash violently. After her son is exiled, Volumnia carries on warfare against his enemies:Â€‘Anger’s my meat:Â€I sup upon myself /And so shall starve with feeding’ (4.2.53–4). The lines, as several critics point out, equate virtus with anger, the opportunity in warfare to find a recognized outlet for aggression and for unsatisfied desire.36 Volumnia sees her son as fulfilling her ‘very wishes’ (2.1.195), reliving his battles in her imagination, as he performs

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deeds and gains honours not by custom permitted to women. Martius says of her, half-joking, as he urges her to ‘leave your tears’ and continue to demonstrate her ‘ancient courage’ as he leaves Rome for exile: Nay, mother, Resume that spirit when you were wont to say, If you had been the wife of Hercules Six of his labours you’d have done, and saved Your husband so much sweat.

(4.1.1–3, 16–20)

Throughout the play, the embraces of lovers are equated with hand-tohand military combat, with the marital embrace coming off second-best. The homoerotic element in male bonding, implicit in the ideology of Â�virtus, is brought out in Martius’s greeting to Cominius on the battlefield: m a r t i u s. O, let me clip ye In arms as sound as when I wooed, in heart As merry as when our nuptial day was done, And tapers bent to bedward. (1.7.29–32)

It is possible to read this passage as conventional, an expression of Â�affectionate solidarity with the fellow Roman soldier in the heat of Â�battle, hinting that sexual pleasure is somehow demeaning and the Â�companionship of men is morally superior to the softer attractions of the bed. Aufidius’s outburst on recognizing Martius in the Volscian camp, immediately dissolving the powerful legacy of ‘ancient envy’, is overt in its expression of desire. au f i di u s. Let me twine Mine arms about that body where against My grained ash an hundred times hath broke, And scarred the moon with splinters. [He embraces Coriolanus.] Here I clip The anvil of my sword, and do contest As hotly and as nobly with thy love As ever in ambitious strength I did Contend against thy valour. (4.5.104, 107–14)

The key words here are ‘contest’ and ‘contend’, the equivalents of ‘emulation’ in an earlier speech by Aufidius (1.11.12). What they are contending for, in the ideology common to Romans and Volscians, is honour, the

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hope of being the subject of praise during one’s lifetime and leaving a ‘noble memory’ (5.6.154) after death; but in this speech by Aufidius, the erotic component is unusually direct and potentially disruptive: Know thou first, I loved the maid I married; never man Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here, Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart Than when I first my wedded mistress saw Bestride my threshold.

(4.5.114–19)

The Roman ideal of pietas saw the bond of husband and wife as ultimately constitutive of the commonwealth, through the intermediate state of family ties. As Cicero argued in De Officiis: The first bond of union is that between husband and wife; the next, that between parents and children, then we find the household, which shares all things. And this is the foundation of civil government, the nursery, as it were, of the state.37

When, urged by Menenius to ‘pardon Rome and thy … countrymen’, Coriolanus responds ‘Wife, mother, child, I know not’ (5.2.74–5, 80), he is equating family and commonwealth, and disavowing allegiance to both. Volscian society, as Shakespeare presents it, is a ‘warrior state’, simpler than that of Rome:Â€there are no women depicted among the Volscians, no domestic ties to detract from the business of war.38 In welcoming Martius as comrade in arms, Aufidius tells Martius of a recurrent dream he has had, charged with sexual energy, which is virtually a dream of copulation, with the dreamer awaking tumescent and unsatisfied. Here, as elsewhere in this speech, eros and philia, the ties of friendship, rivalry, emulation, and sexual union, are confounded. Thou has beat me out Twelve several times, and I have nightly since Dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and meÂ€– We have been down together in my sleep, Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throatÂ€– And waked half dead with nothing. (4.5.122–7)39

In production, the performances of Ian McKellen and Greg Hicks in 1984 brought out the homoerotic bonding of Coriolanus and Aufidius, in part because they did not overplay it. Both actors in interview commented on how ‘the sexuality about their relationship … is quite clearly transmitted into the language’ and ‘doesn’t need any bolstering up’. This production

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also showed how each of the rivals saw the other as a kind of mirror image of himself, a projected ideal warrior to be lovingly overcome.40 Martius says at one point, ‘envying’ the ‘nobility’ of the Volscian leader, ‘were I anything but what I am, /I would wish me only he’ (1.1.228–30). In Aufidius’s speech in Act 1, ‘emulation’, the desire to imitate and excel, is pure hate, and rather than being a spur to honour, is seen by him as a deliberate, shameful violation of honourable conduct. Like Laertes offering to use an unbated, poisoned sword against Hamlet, saying he would ‘cut his throat i’th’church’ (Ham, 4.7.125), Aufidius says he would stop at nothing to destroy his enemy. au f i di u s. Mine emulation Hath not that honour in’t it had, for where I had thought to crush him in an equal force, True sword to sword, I’ll potch at him some way, Or wrath or craft may get him … Where I find him, were it At home upon my brother’s guard, even there, Against the hospitable canon, would I Wash my fierce hand in’s heart. (1.11.12–16, 24–7)

In the early Roman republic, there were no professional soldiers. Citizens were expected to serve the Roman state in the army when required and then return to civilian life. Whether Roman citizens served as officers or as common soldiers, in the cavalry or the infantry, partly depended on wealth and social status. Though the Consulship was a political office, the principal duty of a Consul during this period (as with Cominius, serving as Consul at the beginning of the play) was to lead the Roman troops in battle. Cominius and Menenius, one an active, seasoned soldier and the other grown too old for military service, are equally at home in the city’s marketplace, in senatorial debate, and striking ‘noble blows’ for Rome (4.2.23) on the battlefield (or cheering from the sidelines). Coriolanus, unlike his fellow patricians, is acutely uncomfortable away from the heat of battle, loathing the marketplace and any contact with ordinary citizens:Â€‘Bid them wash their faces /And keep their teeth clean’ (2.3.58–9). When Menenius urges him to follow ‘the custom’ and like his ‘predecessors’ submit himself to public view, Coriolanus demurs, considering the ceremony humiliating and shameful (2.2.141–2). This reluctance to follow the customary procedure is not in Plutarch, who praises the convention ‘that such as did sue for any office, should for certaine dayes before be in the market place, onely with a poore gowne on their backes’, as preferable

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to the ‘corruption’ of the later Republic, with open ‘buying and selling’ of votes in elections (North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 242). In Shakespeare’s play, Coriolanus’s attitude toward the plebeians is a product of his class and upbringing, not significantly different from that of his fellow patricians; but his inflexibility, his unwillingness to ‘be counselled’ and to use ‘fair speech’ (3.2.28, 98) in pursuit of a desired end, differentiates him from his closest Roman associates. In 2.3, the scene in the marketplace, the Roman citizens consistently follow the rules of the game, demonstrating a civility and forbearance that the contemptuous Coriolanus patently fails to show. He considers it an outrage to be forced to play ‘a part’ alien to his nature ‘that I shall blush in acting’ (2.2.143–4). To him, such behaviour is ‘counterfeit’ (2.3.97), dishonourable, unmanly. In this scene the citizens, rather than being the mindless rabble Coriolanus imagines them to be, exercise their choice responsibly, weighing Coriolanus’s strengths and weaknesses as a candidate, and decide that his former deeds deserve their votes. c or iol a n u s. Well then, I pray, your price o’th’consulship. f i r s t ci t i z e n. The price is to ask it kindly … c or iol a n u s. Your voices! For your voices I have fought, Watched for your voices, for your voices bear Of wounds two dozen odd; battles thrice six I have seen and heard of; for your voices Have done many things, some less, some more, Your voices! Indeed I would be consul. [s i x t h] ci t i z e n. He has done nobly, and cannot go without any honest man’s voice. [s e v e n t h] ci t i z e n. Therefore let him be consul. The gods give him joy and make him good friend to the people. (2.3.109–10, 122–31)

The scene can be played several ways. Alan Howard delivered the lines with biting irony, ‘a mocking sardonic singsong’, with a crescendo on the repeated ‘voices’, not disguising his contempt. Ian McKellen, like Olivier before him, played the scene as comedy, deliberately overacting the role he had been asked to play.41 A second scene in which Coriolanus expresses his reluctance to play a part is 3.2, where Volumnia urges him to return to the marketplace. Coriolanus’s counter-argument is that, whatever the circumstances, ‘yet will I still /Be thus to them’ (3.2.2–6), unchanging, unmoved by vicissitudes. Like Othello, Coriolanus tries to assert the integrity of his being, in a world where ‘men should be what they seem’ and anything less than

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a rigid adherence to truth is shameful lying:Â€‘My parts, my title, and my perfect soul /Shall manifest me rightly’ (Oth, 1.2.31–2; 3.3.131). Coriolanus stubbornly equates acting with insincerity and deception, violating the integrity of self. c or iol a n u s. Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me False to my nature? Rather say I play The man I am.

And later: To th’market-place. You have put me now to such a part which never I shall discharge to th’life.42

He wants ‘the man I am’ to be constant, not dependent on any outside forcesÂ€ – ‘a great sea-mark, standing every flaw’, he tells his son, urging the boy, as an extension of himself, to ‘prove /To shame unvulnerable’ (5.3.73–5). Martius’s first capitulation prepares the way for the second one. His fixed resolve is undermined from the beginning of 3.2 by worrying about his mother’s reaction:Â€‘I muse my mother /Does not approve me further’ (3.2.7–8). In a scene that has comic aspects, the mother, far more practical than her son, easily gains dominance over him, speaking sixty-one lines to eight fragmentary, largely monosyllabic lines by her sulking, inarticulate son. Volumnia gives her son solid, shrewd political advice (‘I would have had you put your power well on /Before you had worn it out’), showing herself to be a skilled rhetorician. Her argument, a very shaky one in moral terms, is that ‘honour and policy’ are compatible. In war, it is legitimate to lie to achieve one’s desired aim and ‘seem /The same you are not’, so in politics it ‘no more dishonours you at all’ to ‘dissemble’ if it will give you an advantage over your opponents. v ol u m n i a . Not by your own instruction, Nor by th’matter which your heart prompts you, But with such words that are but roted in Your tongue, though but bastards and syllables Of no allowance to your bosom’s truth.43

She then goes on to coach him in how to woo his ‘ignorant’ audience, with appropriate gestures, ‘waving thy head’ and feigning to be ‘humble as the ripest mulberry’ (3.2.78–81). When Coriolanus consents, it is with full awareness that in dissembling, he is violating ‘honour’ and his own nature by such base ‘flattery’ (3.2.123, 139).

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When Volumnia seeks for a second time to deflect her son from his intended course, her appeal is to pietas and his sense of honour, Roman values she has inculcated in him. The power she has over him, here as in the earlier scene, is partly the result of her role in moulding his character, as she keeps reminding him:Â€‘There’s no man in the world /More bound to’s mother’ (5.3.159–60). Martius is ‘bound’ to his mother in more ways than one:Â€ not simply by ‘the duty which /To a mother’s part belongs’ (5.3.168–9) in Roman custom, but by a dependency continuing unbroken into adulthood. The comparison with a mother hen and her one chick serves to reinforce this sense of prolonged infancy, suggesting a ‘neediness’ he has been unwilling to acknowledge. When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood, Has clucked thee to the wars and safely home, Loaden with honour. (5.3.163–5)44

Evocations of honour as an ideal play a major role in Volumnia’s Â�eloquent appeal, as do patriotic reminders of allegiance owed to ‘thy country’. In speaking of Rome as ‘our dear nurse’, she associates Rome and its tradition with her own parental role. The powerful image of an attack on Rome as an assault on ‘thy mother’s womb’ /That brought thee to this world’, with its hint of incest, prompts a response from Coriolanus that suggests a weakening of resolve, as he warns himself against showing ‘a woman’s tenderness’.45 Ultimately, Volumnia’s appeal transcends words. She begins ‘Should we be silent and not speak’ and concludes with a powerful visual image of the women and young child kneeling, which she bids Martius ‘behold’: This boy, that cannot tell what he would have, But kneels and holds up hands for fellowship, Does reason our petition with more strength Than thou hast to deny’t. (5.3.95, 174–8)

The stage direction that follows Volumnia’s appeal is ‘He holds her by the hand, silent.’ In most productions, the silence is a long one, and eloquent. In 1984, Irene Worth, a ‘quietly invincible’ matriarch, turned her back on her son at line 179, ‘This fellow had a Volscian for his mother’: She looks him in the eye, then deliberately turns away in a powerful gesture of maternal rejection. Coriolanus literally clutches at her retreating figure … Still turned away, Volumnia straightens her back, and the expression on her face shows her knowledge that she has triumphed.

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One reviewer called this moment, with its ‘immensely prolonged pause’, ‘as spellbinding a demonstration of emotional blackmail as I have ever seen’.46 Coriolanus’s response makes it clear that in surrendering to his mother and to ‘compassion’ (5.3.197), he has made his own death inevitable. Defeated for the first time, like Brutus in Julius Caesar and Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, at the end the only choice left him is how to die. c or iol a n u s. [w e e pi ng] O mother, mother! What have you done? Behold, the heavens ope, The gods look down, and the unnatural scene They laugh at. (5.3.183–6)

‘Unnatural’ is always a highly charged word in Shakespeare:Â€ it violates the customary order of nature for a mother to kneel before her son, for a woman to prevail over a male warrior, for a Roman to lead an army against Rome, and, most poignantly, for a mother to be the instrument of her son’s destruction. The gods, indifferent to the fate of mere humans, can only laugh at the blind folly displayed before them. A victory for Rome, saved from destruction, is a catastrophic, irremediable defeat for the man who has been Rome’s soldier and Rome’s sworn enemy, and now must be an outcast, welcome neither among the Romans nor among the Volscians. O my mother, mother, O! You have won a happy victory to Rome; But for your son, believe it, O believe it, Most dangerously you have with him prevailed, If not most mortal to him.

(5.3.186–90)

When Coriolanus returns to the city of the Volscians, his words of triumphÂ€ – that ‘prosperously’ he has led the Volscian army ‘even to /The gates of Rome’Â€ – are patently unconvincing (5.6.75–7). The audience is aware that Aufidius, jealous of Martius’s success in supplanting him in the estimation of the soldiers and the cheering populace, will use any ‘pretext to strike at him’ (5.6.19). Martius’s death, unarmed amid a crowd shouting ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him’, is in no sense heroic. The Volscian populace, made aware for the first time of the costs of warÂ€– ‘He killed my son!Â€– My daughter!Â€– He killed my cousin Marcus!Â€– He killed my father!’ (5.6.121–3)Â€– turn against him and he meets a death like that of

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Sejanus or Cinna the poet, slaughtered like a beast. The stage direction reads ‘Aufidius stands on him’, and productions have made the desecration of the corpse explicit.47 Volumnia, proclaimed the saviour of RomeÂ€– ‘This Volumnia /Is worth of consuls, senators, patricians, /A city full … / Behold our patroness, the life of Rome!’Â€– is awarded a hero‘s triumph, as Rome celebrates its delivery from destruction:Â€‘A merrier day did never yet greet Rome, /No, not th’expulsion of the Tarquins’ (5.4.42–3, 52–4; 5.5.1). In this scene of ceremonial procession, Volumnia remains silent, and her son, in the scene that follows, is in ironic counterpoint struck down in the Volscian marketplace, defiantly proclaiming his solitary nature and rejection of all ties. Cicero in De Officiis argues that greatness of spirit, appropriate ‘in times of danger and toil’, when not allied with a concern for justice and the common good, becomes barbarism, the wilfulness characteristic of tyrants. But if the exaltation of spirit in times of danger and toil is devoid of justice and fights for selfish ends instead of for the common good, it is a vice; for it not only has no element of virtue, but its nature is barbarous and repellent … From this exaltation and greatness of spirit spring all too readily self-will and excessive lust for power.48

The example Cicero has in mind when he speaks of the dangers of Â�ambition in men of ‘the greatest spirit and most outstanding talent’, threatening the stability of the Roman commonwealth, is Julius Caesar rather than Coriolanus. The figure of Caesar similarly lies behind Cicero’s criticism of the common assumption ‘that the achievements of war are more important than those of peace’.49 However, these observations by Cicero, writing in the last days of the Roman republic, a year before his own death, proscribed by Octavius and Antony, are equally applicable to the career of Caius Martius Coriolanus in the turbulent period that followed the expulsion of the Tarquinian monarchy. Despite the Â�accusations of the Tribunes, Coriolanus at no times aims at ‘a power tyrannical’ (3.3.65); but the action of the play exposes the contradictions inherent in the belief, central to the ideology of the early Roman republic, that ‘Â�valour is the chiefest virtue, and /Most dignifies the haver’ (2.2.82–3). The martial hero, ‘despising … the city’ and the rituals associated with civility (3.3.134–5), becomes a ravenous beast in a world where, in a moment, predator can turn into prey.

Ch apter 8

Tyranny and empire

F r e e d om a n d s l av e r y i n M a s s i ng e r Philip Massinger’s Believe As You List (1631) includes in its Prologue a Â�thoroughly disingenuous disclaimer, saying that ‘what’s Roman here’ should not be interpreted as having any English or contemporary relevance. yf you finde what’s Roman here, Grecian, or Asiaticqe, draw to nere a late, & sad example, tis confest hee’s but an English scholler at his best, a stranger to Cosmographie, and may erre in the cuntries names, the shape, & character of the person he presents.1

Believe As You List is one of several plays by Massinger that ran into trouble with the censors. In January 1631 an earlier version of the play was refused a licence because it included potentially ‘dangerous’ material, direct or indirect commentary on recent events. The Master of the Revels ‘did refuse to allow of a play of Messinger’s, because it did contain dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian king of Portugal, by Philip the [Second], and ther being a peace sworen twixte the kings of England and Spayne’. Massinger rewrote the play, changing its setting to the Roman world, and renaming the principal character Antiochus, a deposed king of Lower Asia, instead of Don Sebastian of Portugal. In its revised form, the play was approved four months later, and was acted by the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s old company, in 1631. The play was not printed in Massinger’s lifetime, and survives in an autograph manuscript (in which, at times, the name ‘Sebastian’ is corrected to ‘Antiochus’ and ‘Venice’ corrected to ‘Carthage’).2 Since the unrevised text is no longer extant, it is impossible to tell how extensive Massinger’s revisions were; but one significant difference between Don Sebastian and Antiochus, both outcasts and wanderers subjected to 196

Freedom and slavery in Massinger

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persecution by a powerful adversary (Rome in one case, sixteenth-century Spain in the other), is that Don Sebastian was a pretender, like Perkin Warbeck or the false Dimitri in Boris Godunov, where Antiochus was a true monarch, reduced to a ‘lowe, and desperate condition’. a n t io c h u s. O memorie! memorie! of what I was once! When the easterne world with wonder in my may of youth look’d on mee. embassadors of the most potent kinges with noble aemulation contendinge to court my friendship … Rome her selfe, and Carthage aemulous, whose side I showlde confirme in my protection. (1.1.15–20, 22–4, 27)

In the course of the play, Antiochus is the victim of relentless Â�persecution by the Roman ambassador Flaminius, which the virtuous Antiochus endures with stoic constancy. Reduced at one point to the condition of a galley slave, Antiochus seeks relief from his suffering in Carthage, Bithynia, and Sicily, and in each case his enemy Flaminius convinces those in positions of power who look on Antiochus with sympathy to refuse any aid to the deposed monarch. Consistently, Flaminius is an adherent of ‘policie’ (4.1.95), serving the interest of Roman power. ‘My reason’, he says, can overcome any feelings of Â�compassion or doubt: that assures mee that as I am a Roman to preserve and propagate her empire … â•…â•… by my birth I am bounde to serve thee Rome, and what I doe necessitie of state compells mee to.

(2.1.115–18, 124–6)

The same pattern is repeated in each of the play’s three major Â� locations:Â€Carthage, ‘that greate Cittie /which in Her empires vastnesse rivalls Rome /at her prowde height’ (1.1.1–2); Bithynia, an independent Asian kingdom allied to Rome; and Syracuse, a Roman colony in Sicily ruled by a proconsul. Deserted and robbed by his former servants and followers, Antiochus appeals to the rulers of each of these countries for sanctuary, and in each case considerations of honour, compassion, and national pride are balanced against prudence, what ‘may bee done with safetie’, an awareness of the power of Rome (2.2.61). In Carthage, assertions that a ‘servile feare /of the Roman power’ would show the Carthaginians

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to be ‘degenerate’ and lacking in ‘integritie’ give way to a reluctance ‘in his ruines /to bury our selves’, incurring the enmity of Rome. a m i l c a r . but since wee cannot as such protecte you but with certaine danger untill you are by other potent nations proclaimde for such, our fittinge caution cannot be censur’d. (2.2.64–6, 73–4, 359–63)

Prusias, King of Bithynia, confronts Flaminius with bold words about ‘honour’ and reputationÂ€– ‘shall I for your endes /infringe my princelye word? Or breake the lawes of hospitalitie?’Â€– and about Roman injustice: or is it not sufficient that you Romans in your unsatisfied ambition have seasd with an unjust gripe on halfe the worlde, which you call conquest [?]

(3.3.99–102, 105–7)

Flaminius’s response is to threaten Bithynia with invasion, bringing Â�consequent famine and humiliation, with Prusias and his queen ‘chainde by the necke’ as Roman captives:Â€how can Bithynia measure up to a Rome willing to unleash its power? f l a m i n i u s. you keepe in pay tis true some peace-traynd troopes which awe your neighbours but consyder when our eagles shall display their sayle stretchde winges hovering ore our legions, what defence can you expect from yours? (3.3.136–40, 160)

Surrendering to force majeure, Prusias cites ‘necessitie of state’ to justify his submission, and when his queen objects on the grounds of humanity that he should behave ‘as a kinge shoulde’, he orders her to be carried off in disgrace (3.3.195, 244). Flaminius, described by Antiochus as a ‘tyrant’, is untiring in his pursuit of Antiochus, trying through torture to get Antiochus to admit that he is an impostor. Antiochus’s ‘passive fortitude’, presented in the play as admirable, is dismissed by Flaminius as ‘foolishe obstinacie’ (4.4.2; 5.2.17). Any compassion is a sign of weakness, and acts performed ‘for the service of the republicqe /& propagation of Romes glorious empire’ are by definition justified: f l a m i n i u s. such as are selected instruments for deepe designes


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as things unworthie of em, must not feele or passions, or affections. (4.4.5; 5.1.158–61)

Rome and its sphere of influence in Believe As You List are a world where virtue is not rewarded, and where expediency and the power of the sword hold sway.3 Massinger’s play was politically ‘dangerous’ in 1631 in more ways than one, because ‘the late, & sad example’ whose situation resembled that of the deposed Antiochus was Frederick of Bohemia, James I’s son-in-law, expelled from the Palatinate by an invading Catholic army in 1620. The cause of the exiled Prince Frederick was popular among English and European Protestants, and James I was widely criticized for his proÂ�Spanish policies and for refusing to come to the aid of his son-in-law and daughter. The vacillations of the rulers of Bithynia and Carthage may thus have looked too much like disguised criticism of James I, especially in a Â�version where the oppressive, tyrannical power was Spain rather than Rome.4 Massinger’s problems with censors for including ‘dangerous matter’ in his plays extended through most of his career as a dramatist. Sir John Olden Barnavelt (1619), written in collaboration with Fletcher, an antiSpanish play based on contemporary events, was heavily cut by the censor and, like Believe As You List, was not published at the time. The republican Barnavelt, toward the end of the play, is given one of several speeches contrasting slavery and freedom, in which he characterizes Octavius, founder of the Roman Empire, as the enemy of the ‘auncient freedoms’ of Rome: Octavius, when he did affect the Empire, and strove to tread upon the neck of Rome, and all her auncient freedoms, took that course that now is practisd on you:Â€for the Cato’s and all free speritts slaine, or else proscribd that durst have stird against him, he then seized the absolute rule of all … And here I prophecie, I that have lyvd and dye a free man, shall, when I am ashes … and when too late you see this Goverment changed to a Monarchie, you’ll howle in vaine and wish you had a Barnavelt againe.

Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels, marked several lines as unacceptable, and then deleted the entire speech, along with other passages in the play characterizing the Dutch under ‘the Spanish yoak’ as ‘Freemen Â�growen slaves’.5

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Nearly twenty years later, in 1638, in a play with the incendiary title The King and the Subject, not only the censor but Charles I himself objected to a passage as ‘too insolent, and to bee changed’. Massinger here seems to be commenting directly on Charles’s attempts to raise money through Ship Money and forced loans, once again characterizing ‘the Caesars in Rome’ as tyrants. Moneys? Wee’le rayse supplies what ways we please, And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which We’le mulct you as wee shall thinke fitt. The Caesars In Rome were wise, acknowledgeing no lawes But what their swords did ratifye, the wives And daughters of the senators bowing to Their wills, as deities.

In this case the censor’s efforts were completely successful, since the play, written for the King’s Men, was neither performed nor published, and except for this one passage, has disappeared entirely.6 Massinger’s The Bondman (1624), set in Syracuse, on the periphery of the Roman world, is concerned throughout with issues of liberty, slavery, tyranny, and ‘the Art of government’.7 In Act I of The Bondman, the Syracusans call on the Corinthian general Timoleon ‘to defend /Our Country, and our Liberties’ (1.3.8–9) against Carthage. When the noblemen of Syracuse are away from the city, a revolt of slaves, led by Pisander, seizes control of Syracuse, demanding ‘Libertie’ (2.3.114). A subplot involves the virtuous Cleora, her proud and jealous lover Leosthenes, and Pisander, who behaves honourably toward Cleora when he has her in his power during the slaves’ revolt, and at the end of the play is rewarded with her hand in marriage, when it is revealed that he is a gentleman by birth as well as conduct. Speeches by Timoleon, Cleora, and the Syracusan magistrate Archidamus employ the ‘rhetoric of Roman virtue’ and decline, familiar in Tacitus, Sallust, and the republican tradition.8 Timoleon castigates the Syracusans for corruption and indifference to ‘the publike good’. You have not, as good Patriots should doe, studied The publike good, but your particular ends, Factious among your selves … To hold a place In Counsell, which was once esteem’d an honour, And a reward for vertue, hath quite lost Lustre, and Reputation, and is made A mercenary purchase. (1.3.171–3, 189–93)


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Timoleon’s criticisms echo the passages in Sallust lamenting the decline of the later Roman republic from an imagined primitive virtue to a corrupt state in which ‘Worship, Superiority, and Attendance, depended upon wealth’.9 Lines anatomizing a ‘Countries sickness’, enfeebled by luxury, in which the citizens of Syracuse ‘adorne your walls with Persian Hangings wrought of Gold and Pearle’ (1.3.214, 145–6), resemble passages in Juvenal’s satires as well as the Roman historians. In Act I of The Bondman, Timoleon is presented as one who has ‘ever lov’d /An equall freedome’, enemy of ‘all such /As would usurpe on others liberties’.Â€Evidence of ‘how much I detest /Tyrannous Usurpation’, Timoleon tells the citizens of Syracuse, is that he resisted the attempt of his brother, acting ‘like a Tyrant’, to change the government of Corinth ‘into an absolute Monarchy’ (1.3.89–91, 127–8, 132, 136). The play’s title proclaims its links to the ideology of classical republicanism. Timoleon, urging the reluctant citizens of Syracuse to act in defence of their liberties, challenges them: â•…â•…â•… Doe you prize your mucke Above your liberties? And rather choose To be made Bondmen, then to part with that To which already you are slaves? (1.3.231–4)

It is possible that The Bondman, like Believe As You List and Sir John Olden Barnavelt, is an anti-Spanish play, responding to immediate local circumstances. If Carthage can be seen as representing Spain, then Timoleon’s speeches in Act I could be read as a disguised appeal to James I to come to the aid of the Dutch Protestants in their struggle to throw off Spanish rule. Pamphlets by Thomas Scott and others attacking Spanish tyranny and praising Dutch republicanism were circulated widely between 1620 and 1624, and may be echoed in Massinger’s play. In 1624, after the return of Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham from an abortive attempt to arrange a Spanish marriage, anti-Spanish sentiments might have been welcome to the court, since Buckingham, on the whole an unpopular figure, was for the moment in favour of an interventionist foreign policy. English troops were sent to fight on the side of the Dutch in 1624, with the ultimate aim of restoring Frederick of Bohemia to the Palatinate, an enterprise that ended in disaster in the following year.10 The Bondman was one of several plays by Massinger during this period performed by Lady Elizabeth’s Players (also called The Queen of Bohemia’s Players), a company under the patronage of the exiled Queen of Bohemia, a victim of aggression by Spain and its allies.

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In its portrayal of the slaves’ revolt against their masters, The Bondman is ambivalent, hedging its bets. Pisander is given a number of stirring speeches about liberty and equality, but in each case the dramatic context undercuts the forceful assertions. Addressing the disgruntled slaves, Pisander tells them: Equall nature fashion’d us All in one molde:Â€the Beare serves not the Beare, Nor the Wolfe, the Wolfe … Why then, since we are taught, by their examples, To love our Libertie, if not Command, Should the strong serve the weake, the faire deform’d ones? … All’s but the outward glosse And politicke forme, that dost distinguish us. (2.3.32–4, 37–9, 41–2)

The response of the slaves, comic figures consistently base in their Â�attitudes and behaviour, is to use their ‘Libertie’ to behave even worse than their former masters, hoping to heap up wealth, enough ‘money to buy a place’, and taking the opportunity ‘to burne a Church or two’ and cut a few throats (2.3.53, 89–91). Pisander’s speech to the slaves, like Catiline’s address to his followers in Sallust and in Jonson’s Catiline, or like the rebellion of Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban in hopes of seizing power from Prospero, makes the cry of ‘Libertie’ into an invitation to plunder, serving licentious appetite. pi s a n de r . Now if you dare Fall on their Daughters, and their wives, break up Their Iron Chests, banquet on their rich Beds, And carve your selves of all delights and pleasures You have beene barr’d from, with one voyce cry with me, Libertie, Libertie. a l l . Libertie, Libertie. (2.3.109–14)

When, later in the play, Pisander reveals himself to be a disguised Â�nobleman, manipulating his followers ‘as instruments to serve my ends’, he treats the ‘thick-skinn’d slaves’ with contempt, and, comfortably above the fray, comments on the inability of the freed slaves to appreciate the true nature of liberty. These Bond-men by their actions shew, That their prosperitie, like too large a Sayle


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For their small barke of judgement, sinkes them with A fore-right gale of libertie, e’re they reach The Port they long to touch at.

(3.1.2–3; 3.3.98–102)

A similar distrust of the common people can often be found in the Â�tradition of classical republicanism, exemplified in Milton’s fears of ‘a misguided and abus’d multitude’, incapable of understanding the true nature of liberty, as distinguished from licence.11 Pisander’s lengthy speech in Act 4, justifying the revolt, argues that its cause was the failure of those in power to behave responsibly:Â€‘your tyranny /Drew us from our obedience’ (4.2.52–3). The tyrant, in this familiar republican argument, brings about his own downfall. Rather than claiming a fundamental equality or invoking a state of nature where private property did not exist, Pisander imagines an ideal patriarchal society, where fathers ruled their extended families benevolently: â•…â•…â•… Happy those times, When Lords were styl’d fathers of Families, And not imperious Masters; when they numbred Their servants almost equall with their Sonnes, Or one degree beneath them; when their labours Were cherish’d, and rewarded. (4.2.53–8)

In Pisander’s version of the nature and origin of government, the Â�family, under the unquestioned leadership of fathers, serves as model for the state. Rulers, in the family and in the state, are reminded that those under their control are rational creatures, but their power is seen as unlimited, subject only to voluntary restraint. Indeed, as Pisander presents the relationship of master and servant, there is no distinction between ‘faithfull dogs’ or ‘the noble horse’ and the ‘service’ of human slaves. â•… All things order’d With such decorum, as wise Law-makers, From each well-govern’d private house deriv’d The perfect model of a Common-wealth; Humanity then lodg’d in the hearts of men, And thankfull Masters carefully provided For Creatures wanting reason. (4.2.61–7, 72, 76)12

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In Syracuse, Pisander complains, slaves are treated worse than animals by their cruel masters. The ‘rigor’ of Syracusan masters, swollen with pride and prosperity, has caused the slaves to ‘shake our heavy yokes off’, since their ‘just grievances’ have been ignored (84–6). In this account, the slaves’ revolt, rather than being intended to bring about a reordering of society on a more equal basis, is a demonstration suggesting to the Syracusan aristocracy that they need to be more aware of their responsibilities. It is no surprise that order is restored at the end of the play, with Pisander casting off his disguise and resuming his rightful place as a nobleman. T y r a n t s a n d T y r a n n ic i de Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626/9) is one of several plays of the mid and late 1620s that depict Roman emperors as vicious tyrants. Other similar plays include the anonymous Tragedy of Nero (1624) and Thomas May’s Tragedy of Julia Agrippina (first performed 1628). These plays are strongly influenced by Jonson’s Sejanus and, like Jonson, draw in detail on the Roman historians, especially Tacitus.13 In their emphasis on court intrigue in a polity riddled with corruption, where ‘Caesars chamber did command the world, /And rule the fate of men’, these plays may be commenting indirectly on the state of England during the period when Buckingham’s influence was at its height. Again and again during the 1620s, the powerful courtier Buckingham, favourite successively to James I and Charles I, is compared to Sejanus or to Catiline. Thus is our land made weake, our treasure wasted. Our court corrupted, and our honour blasted, Our lawes are broke, our justice sold:Â€and they That should reforme these mischiefes, give them way. All symptomes of a Kingdome, that hath beene Declining long, may be in England seene: Our strength’s decayd, the flow’re of the land Have perish’d under Buckinghams command.14

Nero and Julia Agrippina, like Sejanus, have as a leading character a Machiavellian court favourite of humble birth, greedy for power, who eventually overreaches himself. In Nero, the ambitious, corrupt Nimphidia, like Sejanus, ‘rais’d to the envious height of second place’, seeks to supplant the Emperor whose vices he serves, hoping to make his ‘way unto a Crowne’. The Roman Actor and Nero, like Jonson’s play, include a group of virtuous characters critical of the Emperor’s abuses of power, ineffective in their opposition to ‘Romes enemie, /An enemie to Vertue’.15

Tyrants and tyrannicide

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In The Roman Actor, there is no figure analogous to Buckingham, and the role of court favourite is divided between the actor Paris, well-meaning but corruptible, and the beautiful, amoral Domitia, who exercises erotic mastery over the Emperor and in the final scene helps to kill him. In The Roman Actor, as in Sejanus, the handful of virtuous Romans, remnants of an earlier Rome, complain of how ‘dangerous the age is’, with their words and actions subject to surveillance by spies and informers. ru s t ic u s. Such bad acts Are practis’d every where, we hardly sleepe Nay cannot dreame with safetie. All our actions Are cal’d in question … They are onely safe That know to sooth the Princes appetite, And serve his lusts.16

Later in the play, these characters, unaffected by the corruption prevalent in the Emperor’s court, show a stoic’s constancy in facing death. Where the ambitious, unscrupulous Sejanus is the central figure in Jonson’s play, the Emperor is unquestionably the star part in The Roman Actor. In the 2002 RSC production, Domitian was played by Antony Sher, and reviewers again and again commented on how he dominated the production, with a bravura display of actingÂ€ – a ‘dazzling performance’, with ‘malign energy’, bringing out the play’s black humour and the vulnerability behind the tyrant’s facade. Reviewers stressed the element of conscious theatricality in the play and in the production.17 The title of Massinger’s play refers both to the actor Paris (played in the original production by Joseph Taylor opposite John LowinÂ€– the same two actors who played Antiochus and Flaminius in Believe As You List) and to an Emperor always conscious of playing before an audience. In The Roman Actor, as in Nero and Julia Agrippina, the Emperor is clearly a tyrant, revelling in his ‘unlimited power’, which, his flatterers tell him, is ‘equall, and omnipotent heere, /With Jupiters above’ (Roman Actor, 2.1.136, 160–1). Nero, scorning ‘th’ayrie names … /Of Justice, and ne’re certain Equitie’, as well as ‘weake pittie’, boasts that as ‘commander of the World’, his will is absolute and unbounded. Let meane men cry to have Law, and Justice done And tell their griefes to Heaven, that heares them not. Kings must upon the Peoples headlesse courses Walke to securite, and ease of minde … The Gods revenge themselves, and so will we; Where right is scand, Authoritie’is orethrowne,

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Tyranny and empire We have a high prerogative above it; Slaves may doe what is Just, we, what we please, The people may repine, and thinke it ill, But they must beare, and prayse too, what we will.

(The Tragedy of Nero, Act 2, Sig. C2V–C3)

With its mention of ‘prerogative’ and ‘kings’, the passage would appear to be a coded criticism of Stuart theories of divine right and non-resistance, as promulgated in James I’s True Law of Free Monarchy and other writings. ‘Right’ here refers to the divine right of kings, not to the rights of subjects. Domitian in The Roman Actor takes pride in his utter indifference to the welfare of his subjects, seeing them ‘as dust /Before the whirlewinde of our will and power’. Can we descend so farre beneath our selfe As, or to court, the peoples love, or feare Their worst of hate? … Mankind lives In few, as potent Monarchs and their Peeres.

He sees himself as of another species from ordinary men:Â€ the gods, indifferent to the fates of ‘mankind’ in general, are his familiars and servants: And all those glorious constellations That doe adorne the firmament, appointed Like groomes with their bright influence to attend The actions of Kings and Emperours.

(The Roman Actor, 3.2.25–9, 34–9)

In May’s Julia Agrippina, a prologue indicates the perspective of nostalgic republicanism from which the action that follows is viewed:Â€Rome, once made great by the pursuit of virtue in its citizens, has now grown a slave to vice. Vice in Romes Imperiall Palace reignes, And rules those breasts, whom all the world obeys. What though the Gods and Vertue first did raise Rome to that height it holds? … Though Vertue made the Romans greatnesse grow: She now forsakes it at the height. (Act 1, Sig. A4)

In May’s play, in which there is no single dominant figure, the Â�emphasis is on the desire for power, with Agrippina, the mother of Nero, Nero


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himself, and the lowly born Pallas all seeking advancement at the expense of others, untrammelled by any considerations of morality or loyalty. Pallas in Act 1 in soliloquy expresses pride in his ability to ‘rise’ despite his humble birth, gaining ‘respect and power’ by his wits and making ‘dull Patricians’ his ‘instruments’ (Sig. A7–A7 v). At the beginning of the play, the weak, irresolute Claudius is Emperor, and his chief adviser, a former slave like Pallas, is no less willing to cite ‘the times necessity’ for immoral acts, including murder (Act 2, Sig. B8v), though outmanoeuvred by his rival. At the end of Act 2, Agrippina and Pallas poison Claudius, in order to provide ‘a timely helpe /Unto our safety’ and secure the succession for Nero (Sig. B12v). Agrippina then exults in her success, comparing herself to a ‘Roman Deity’, greater even than Juno: This is the day that sets a glorious Crown On all my great designes this day declares My power, and makes the trembling world to know That Agrippina only can bestow The Roman Empire, and command the wheel Of suffring Fortune.

(Act 3, Sig. C6v)

Later, before her inevitable downfall, Agrippina thinks she has gained the summit of power, fulfilling all her desires: There is no power, no state at all, but what Is independent, absolute and free … I was an Empresse but ne’re reigned till now. (Act 4, Sig. C11v)

Following Tacitus here as elsewhere in the play, May has the young Nero, newly crowned Emperor, turn against his mother, wanting absolute power for himself, without a ‘rivall’ or ‘partner’. Shall I that am an Emperor, bee check’d, Control’d and baffled in my Pallace thus? While Agrippina lives, must shee then live To make mee nothing? must the name of mother Outweigh a scepter?

(Act 4, Sig. D6v, D9)

The play ends with the death of Agrippina, moralizing on the instability of earthly power and how ‘the Gods /To punish us oft grant what wee desire’ (Act 5, Sig. D11v).

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In The Tragedy of Nero, the Emperor is wholly evil, a monster of Â�tyranny, in whom the will to power is the will to destroy: n e r o. A Princes anger must lay desolate Citties, Kingdomes consume, Roote up mankind. O could I live to see the generall end, Behold the world enwrapt in funerall flame … Then, like the Salamander, bathing me In the last Ashes of all mortall things Let me give up this breath:Â€Priam was happie, Happie indeed, he saw his Troy burnt.

Where Tacitus leaves it ‘uncertaine’ whether the burning of Rome was due to ‘chaunce, or devise of the Prince’, The Tragedy of Nero, like Suetonius, has him ‘set the citie of Rome on fire’, refusing to take any action in putting the fire out, and ‘taking joy … at the beautiful flame it made’.18 The Roman Actor and The Tragedy of Nero differ from earlier Elizabethan and Jacobean plays depicting tyrants in their overt republicanism. Tyrannicide and active resistance to tyranny are treated in strongly positive terms. In Richard III and Macbeth, the tyrant is a usurper, conscious of his own breaches of the moral law in gaining and securing a throne by murder. Sejanus is one of many plays written during this period in which characters express the orthodox doctrine that the only recourse aggrieved subjects of a wicked or irresponsible king have is patient endurance. s a bi n u s. No ill should force the subject undertake Against the sovereign, more than hell should make The gods do wrong. A good man should and must Sit rather down with loss, than rise unjust. (Sejanus, 4.163–6)

Sometimes the duty of non-resistance is made applicable only to legitimate monarchs ruling by ‘lineal succession’, sometimes to all rulers, however they acquired their power. In The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), James VI and I argued that rebellion against a monarch was ‘monstrous and unnatural’: I grant, indeed, that a wicked king is sent by God for a curse to his people and a plague for their sins; but that it is lawful for them to shake off that curse at their own hand, which God has laid on them, that I deny and may do so justly … Patience, earnest prayers to God, and amendment of their lives are the only lawful meanes to move God to relieve them of that heavy curse.

King James added that this doctrine did not mean that ‘whatsoever errors and intolerable abominations a sovereign prince commit, he ought


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to escape all punishment, as if thereby the world were only ordained for kings’; but kings in this view are responsible to God alone:Â€any limits on their power are wholly voluntary, as they choose by their own free will not to exert a ‘king’s right over all the land and subjects thereof’.19 Fletcher’s Valentinian (1614) is one of several Jacobean plays in which two characters debate the ethics of resistance to tyranny. In this play, Â�despite its explicitly Roman setting, the issue of resistance or nonÂ�resistance is stated in terms applicable to Renaissance monarchs:Â€ the words ‘Prince’ and ‘Emperor’ are used interchangeably. Aëtius, an honourable, plain-speaking soldier, is critical of the Emperor Valentinian’s misrule and courageous enough to tell him so, but nevertheless counsels obedience, even to a monarch who has proved himself unworthy:Â€‘Majesty is made to be obeyed, /And not inquired into.’ Whatever provocation one has, Aëtius says, one must resist the temptation to take arms against the worst of monarchs. On foreign foes, We are our own revengers, but at home, On princes that are eminent and ours, ’Tis fit the gods should judge us.

Faced with a monstrous tyrant who has made one’s life intolerable, the only recourse is ‘dying well and Roman’, following the example of Cato in honourable suicide.20 Maximus, wronged by the Emperor, takes revenge on Valentinian, defending tyrannicide in exchanges with his friend Aëtius, but Fletcher presents Maximus as a less attractive figure than the upright Aëtius or Lucina, victim of the tyrant’s lust. Maximus is aware that ‘my way was crooked’ and that he has unleashed ‘a sluice of blood’, setting the empire ‘all afire’. He is ruled partly by the desire to ‘rise’ and become Emperor:Â€‘Why may not I be Caesar?’ (5.3.1, 3, 16, 26, 39). At the end of the play, Maximus is poisoned by Valentinian’s widow, and the play concludes with uncertainty as to whether Rome will be able to find ‘a Caesar /Above the reach of envy, blood, and murder’ (5.8.119–20). Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1619) ends with equivocation:Â€bad kings deserve punishment, but tyrannicide is unjustified. In the play’s closing lines, the new King takes his predecessor’s fate as a warning, to guide his future conduct. k i ng ly s i pp u s. May this a fair example be to me To rule with temper; for on lustful kings Unlooked-for sudden deaths from God are sent, But cursed is he that is their instrument.21

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Tyranny and empire

Here the setting is not Rome but a contemporary principality, and the offending monarch is identified throughout as ‘the King’:Â€he is never given a name. There is no emphasis here, as in Valentinian and the other plays under discussion, on a decline from ‘ancient virtue’ (Valentinian, 1.3.172), and in the modern setting much is made of the obligations of honour. Amintor, injured by the King’s arbitrary and dishonourable behaviour, debates with his friend Melantius the ethics of revenge against a serving monarch. Where Melantius feels that honour compels him to take revenge on ‘this proud man’, the King, Amintor recoils from the prospect of rebellion: a m i n t or . In that sacred name, The King, there lies a terror; what frail man Dares life his hand against it? Let the gods Speak to them when they please, till when let me Suffer, and wait. (2.1.287–91; 3.2.191)

The powerful scene in which the King’s mistress Evadne, a morally ambiguous figure complicit in the King’s corruption (‘I am as foul as thou art’), humiliates and kills the King refutes any lingering notions of the sacredness of monarchy, but The Maid’s Tragedy, like Valentinian, cannot be said to justify tyrannicide.22 A particularly odd example of equivocation over tyrannicide occurs in The Tragedie of Julius Caesar (1607), a closet drama by William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. In a speech strikingly at variance with the general drift of the play, Brutus is made to say that the conspirators’ projected actions are praiseworthy only because Caesar is a usurper and not a ‘lawfull’ hereditary monarch. If Caesar had been borne, or chusde our Prince, Then those that durst attempt to take his life, The world of treason justly might convince. For still the states that flourish for the time, By subjects should b’inviolable thought; And those no doubt commit a monstrous crime, That lawfull soveraignty prophane in ought.

The tyrannicide Brutus is turned into an apologist for divine right Â�monarchy, urging non-resistance to established monarchical authority. It is possible that Alexander, seeking preferment under James I, softened any dangerous implications of the received narrative.23


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In The Tragedy of Nero, written later in the reign of James I, the initial attempt to overthrow Nero is unsuccessful, but the rebels are presented in consistently favourable terms, without the moral ambivalence of the flawed revengers Maximus, Melantius, and Evadne. Here, the Roman setting, with its repeated contrasts of the ‘happy dayes’ of republican liberty and the rampant evil of Nero’s reign, allows for a more positive treatment of tyrannicide. In several scenes, Scevinus, Piso, Seneca, and Lucan mourn the decline of Rome from standards of republican virtue. s c e v i n u s. We seeke not now, as in the happy dayes O’th common wealth they did, for libertie; O you, deere ashes, Cassius and Brutus, That was with you entomb’d, there let it rest … We seeke no longer freedome, we seeke life At least, not to be murdred, let us die On Enemies swords.

In earlier generations, Romans, famous for their heroic deeds, fought ‘other warres, and brought home other conquests’, striving with ‘Kings, and kinglike adversaries’. To Scevinus and his fellow conspirators, their cause is motivated by ‘vertue’ and ‘love to th’ Common-wealth’, and they should be willing to risk death, preferring ‘what is honest’ to ‘what’s safe’.24 There is none of the irony with which Shakespeare treats the conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius. The ardent republican Lucan, after their plot has been discovered, says, boldly, ‘all noblenesse, and worth on earth / We see’s on our side’: There’s not a soule that claimes Nobilitie Either by his, or his fore-fathers merit, But is with us.

(Act 4, Sig. F3–F3v)

In Tacitus, the motivation of the plotters is less principled than in The Tragedy of Nero, since most of them seek personal advancement. Scevinus is presented as dissipated, ‘lascivious’, leading ‘a lazie & drowsie life’, and breaks down under the threat of torture, readily implicating his fellow conspirators.25 In The Tragedy of Nero, those who resist Nero’s tyranny have as a consolation the consciousness of dying well, ‘free’ and ‘secure’ from ‘Neroes cruelty’ (Act 4, Sig. F4, G3). Nero, in contrast, facing a second, successful rebellion, is terrified at his approaching death, and a Roman soldier comments that ‘so base an end’ deserves no sympathy.26

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Tyranny and empire T h e t r ag ic s c a ff ol d

Like Nero, whose obsessive love of theatre, performing on stage in public ‘even among common Actors and Stage players’, is presented by Tacitus, Suetonius, and the author of The Tragedy of Nero as dishonourable, unworthy behaviour, the Emperor Domitian in The Roman Actor refuses to allow any distinctions between life and art.27 To Domitian, theatrical power and royal or imperial power are one:Â€all life in the Emperor’s court is a performance, in which he writes the script and hands out the parts. In Act 4, when Domitian, like Hamlet with ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, asks the actors to act a scene specially prepared for the occasion, he cites the precedent of Nero, saying that he will perform one of the roles himself: c a e s a r . We can performe it better. Off with my Robe, and wreath; since Nero scorn’d not The publike Theater, we in private may Disport our selves. (4.2.223–6)

With references to ‘my cue’, ‘prompt me’, and ‘be but perfect’, Domitian pretends to be ‘but a new Actor’, hiding his intended purpose with a pretence of stage fright (4.2.236–7). When his cue comes, rather than speaking the lines in the part, he kills Paris, turning a stage death (with blunted sword) into a real one. c a e s a r . O villaine! thanklesse villaine! I should talke now; But have forgot my part. But I can doe, Thus, thus, and thus. [Kils Paris.] pa r i s. Oh, I am slaine in earnest. (4.2.280–3)28

The role that Domitian most enjoys playing is that of an earthly god, with power over life and death, for him to exercise at his pleasure. In two scenes he humiliates the hapless Lamia, whose wife, like any of Lamia’s other property, he chooses to appropriate. His agent Parthenius tells Domitia, who briefly objects on the grounds of ‘honour’ and ‘lawe’: pa r t h e n i u s. When power puts in its Plea the lawes are silenc’d. The world confesses one Rome, and one Caesar, And as his rule is infinite, his pleasures Are unconfin’d; this sillable, his will, Stands for a thousand reasons. (1.2.39–41, 44–8)

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Lamia protests ‘Is this legall?’ and tries fruitlessly to assert his property rights: l a m i a . Cannot a man be master of his wife Because she’s young, and faire, without a pattent? I in mine owne house am an Emperour, And will defend what’s mine. (1.2.65–8, 84)

In a later scene, the Emperor toys with Lamia, and when the squirming Lamia fails to commend his ex-wife’s singing sufficiently, the Emperor declares him ‘Guiltie’ of treason, commanding his death ‘with as little trouble heere, as if /I had kild a flye’ (2.1.234–5, 245–6). With overweening pride, Domitian expects ‘Celestiall Sacrifice’ to be done to him, as to a god: c a e s a r . I am above All honours you can give me. And the stile Of Lord, and God, which thankfull subjects give me (Not my ambition) is deserv’d. (1.4.34–8)

Caesar is both actor and patron of actors, and the violent death of Paris the actor suggests how uncertain and dangerous the Emperor’s patronage may be. The acting company and its principal player rely on their ‘grace, and power with Caesar’, while, within the Emperor’s court, their ‘enemies’, competing for Caesar’s ear and acting as the Emperor’s agents and spies, accuse them ‘as libellers against the state and Caesar’ (1.1.28, 33; 1.3.34). In 1.3, Aretinus, speaking for the censors and censurers of Massinger’s and Jonson’s time and our own, as well as in the period of Roman history depicted in the play, makes the case against the prying, seditious troublers of the state. a r e t i n u s. You are they That search into the secrets of the time. And under fain’d names on the Stage present Actions not to be toucht at; and traduce Persons of rancke, and qualitie of both Sexes, And with satiricall, and bitter jests Make even the Senators ridiculous To the Plebeans. (1.3.36–43)

Paris then, in the best-known passage in the play, defends the freedom of the artist in much the same terms that Cremutius Cordus in Sejanus

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defends the freedom of the historian against similar attacks.29 Paris’s speech was greeted with applause at performances of the 2002 production, and at least three famous actorsÂ€– Kemble, Macready, and KeanÂ€– performed truncated versions of the play, with this speech, ‘adapted to the present time’, as its centrepiece.30 Paris’s defence follows the argument of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry:Â€the dramatist teaches by example, presenting vices as things to be shunned and ‘active virtue’ in heroic figures from Roman history (Camillus, Scipio) to encourage ‘emulation’ in the viewers (1.3.56–67, 79–81). The dramatist presents types rather than individuals:Â€ if a member of the audience recognizes his own ‘secret crimes’ in the personages on stageÂ€– a covetous man, an adulterer, a corrupt judgeÂ€– then the blame must lie with the guilty viewer and not with the ‘innocent’ actor or dramatist (1.3.108). The refrain in the second half of Paris’s defence is ‘we Â�cannot helpe it’, denying intentionality, rather than, as in the earlier part of this eloquent defence of the stage, claiming that the artist outdoes ‘grave Philosophers’ in guiding conduct (1.3.114, 122, 130, 140).31 Yet when, later in the play, Paris and his fellow actors present three exemplary plays before an onstage audience, each of them is extraordinarily ineffective, undermining the argument of Paris’s oration. The first play-within-aplay is The Cure of Avarice, performed as wholesome medicine before the miser Philargus, in the hope that Philargus ‘may see his owne deformity, and loath it’ when it is ‘presented on the Stage as in a mirror’ (2.1.97–9). Though Philargus recognizes ‘my selfe’ in the play, he stubbornly resists the intended moral, scornfully dismissing the miser in the playlet as ‘an old foole to be guld thus’ and resolves ‘to dye as I have liv’d’, obsessively in love with gold. In yet another unintended result, Caesar summarily orders his immediate execution, with another version of Paris’s ‘we cannot helpe it’:Â€responsibility for Philargus’s death, the Emperor claims, lies not with his own ‘crueltie’, but with Philargus’s ‘wilful’ actions.32 If the first play-within-a-play illustrates the problematics of reception, the second has unintended consequences both for the actor Paris and for the patron and dramatist Domitia, who has ‘been instructing /The Players how to act’ and has rewritten the text to be performed (3.2.131–2). Like one of the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Domitia breaks the dramatic illusion, when Paris, in the role of Iphis, says he will kill himself. c a e s a r . Why are you Transported thus Domitia? ’tis a play, Or grant it serious, it at no part merits This passion in you.

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pa r i s. I nere purposed Madam To do the deed in earnest. (3.2.282–6)

Attracted by Paris’s performance as a lover, the lustful, imperious Domitia then sets out to seduce him, convinced that ‘Thou must be reallie in some degree /The thing thou dost present’ (4.2.38–9) and can play the part of lover effectively in real life. Paris initially tries to defend himself by saying that once his ‘borrowed ornaments’ are removed, he is ‘no more, nor lesse than what I was’ before acting a part, and then, rather feebly, objects that cuckolding Caesar would be ‘ingratitude’ to his master, as well as possibly proving dangerous. In the last play-within-a-play, The False Servant, Paris plays a version of himself, a servant tempted by the adulterous embraces of his lord’s wife, and Caesar, taking on the role of the avenging husband, turns a feigned death into a real one. Caesar then addresses the dead body of Paris, saying that, combining tribute and revenge, he has arranged a final performance for Paris as a kind of memorial: c a e s a r . As thou didst live Romes bravest Actor, twas my plot that thou Should dye in action, and to crowne it dye With an applause induring to all times, By our imperiall hand. (4.2.296–300)

Paris, though the play’s most sympathetic figure, is infected by the Â�corruption prevalent in the Emperor’s court, compromised by his dependence on ‘the Emperour’s pleasure’ (2.1.65). In his relationship with an Emperor who prides himself on the arbitrary exercise of power over life and death and an Empress no less accustomed to command, Paris is never able to cast off the shackles of subservience. Unlike the other courtiers, he has a conscience, feeling a conflict in loyalties, and when confronted by Caesar, accepts responsibility for his actions. Massinger’s Paris is a more complex figure than the actor Paris in Juvenal’s SatireÂ€VII, a court favourite who, despite his lowly status, uses his influence to appoint men to military commands and political office, giving and receiving bribes.33 Both Domitian and DomitiaÂ€– and the similarity of their names suggests their equivalenceÂ€ – deny any moral restraints on their conduct:Â€ might makes right. c a e s a r . Let such as cannot By force make good their actions, though wicked, Conceale, excuse or qualifie their crimes.

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Whatever ‘our desires grant leave, and priviledge to’, even if ‘contradicting all divine decrees’, is justified by the fact of imperial power (2.1.143–9) Massinger departs from his source, Suetonius, by making Domitia and her rivals Domitilla and Julia take a leading role in the assassination, stabbing Caesar in revenge for injuries they have received. In Suetonius, the Emperor, who by his actions has become ‘both terrible and odious also unto all men’, is killed by a conspiracy of ‘his friends and freedmen that were most inward with him’, led by the courtier Stephanus, who is described as having been accused of embezzlement. There is no mention either of personal grudges or of political principle motivating the killings in Suetonius, who says that the death of Domitian was greeted with indifference by the general public and with delight by the Senators, who ‘strived … to rent and teare him now dead with the most contumelious and bitterest’ insults.34 In Massinger, Stephanos is the only one of the conspirators who can be called disinterested, acting in accordance with republican principles. In 3.1, though cautious, aware of the ‘readie swords’ at the Emperor’s command, Stephanos speaks about ‘service’ and honour as motivation, and about the ignominy of being forced to ‘live ever slaves’. s t e p h a no s. I am confident he deserves much more That vindicates his country from a tyranne, Then he that saves a citizen. (3.1.28–30, 47–9, 76–8)

In 5.1 and 5.2 he characterizes both Domitian and Domitia as a ‘tyranne’, and here, as earlier, speaks of the Emperor as a ‘Monster’, deserving to die. Again, his language is overt in its republicanism: s t e p h a no s. For could you bring him but within my swords reach The world should owe her freedome from a tyranne To Stephanos. (5.1.27; 5.2.10–12, 77)35

The other conspiratorsÂ€– Parthenius, who willingly serves Caesar’s tyranny for most of the play, the jealous, proud Domitilla and Julia, jockeying for power within the court, and Domitia, Caesar’s doubleÂ€ – have no public motive, entirely caught up in court intrigue. Even Aretinus, the most corrupt of all the courtiers, exulting in his ‘power, /To tread upon the necke of slavish Rome, /Disposing offices, and Provinces, /To my kinsmen, friends and clients’ (4.1.63–6), joins with others in plotting against Domitia and Paris, as rivals in the struggle for preferment.

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The play’s closing lines, spoken by a Tribune, make the conventional distinction between ‘good Kings’ and tyrants:Â€one is a blessing, the other a curse. 1 .t r i bu n e . Good Kings are mourn’d for after life, but ill And such as govern’d only by their will And not their reason, unlamented fall; No Goodman’s teare shed at their Funerall. (5.2.90–3)36

There are other concessions to orthodox views of kingship in the play. The same Tribune (a soldier charged with guarding the Emperor, rather than a civilian official, as in Coriolanus) says ‘Yet he was our Prince /How ever wicked’ and his murder will be avenged by ‘whoso’ere succeeds him’ (5.2.77–9). Domitilla, earlier in the play, justifies her reluctance to take action against Caesar by the conventional argument that only heaven can judge princes. â•…â•…â•… The immortal powers Protect a Prince though sould to impious acts, And seem to slumber till his roaring crimes Awake their justice.

(3.1.58–61)

Yet in this scene the conspirators suggest that the Emperor’s misdeeds may render him ‘odious’ even to his ‘supporters’ and ‘familiar friends’, and bring about his downfall ‘when he is most secure’. The ‘secret judgements’ of heaven may be reinforced by the actions of resolute Romans (3.1.64–71). Act 5 of The Roman Actor, like the account in Suetonius of Domitian’s last days, is full of portents, indications that the Emperor’s ‘fatall hour’ is approaching. In his final moments, Massinger’s tyrannous Emperor shakes with terror, consumed by ‘despaire’. In a speech patently based on a soliloquy by Shakespeare’s Richard III, the terrified Emperor, bathed with ‘the cold sweat of death’ as he awakens from a nightmare, reveals a sense of guilt absent earlier: c a e s a r . Who dares speak thus? Am I not Caesar? how? againe repeat it? Presumptuous traytor thou shalt dye. What traytor? He that hath beene a traytor to himselfe And stands convicted heere. (5.1.184, 191–5, 264, 288)37

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As in Richard III, there is a supernatural or providential element in The Roman Actor, differentiating it from the essentially secular perspective of Sejanus:Â€Domitian, scoffing at auguries and openly defying the gods, is punished for his presumption. But there is no figure in The Roman Actor equivalent to Richmond at the end of Richard III, no restoration of order, no rightful king to be enthroned amid promise of ‘smiling plenty, and fair prosperous days’ (Richard III, 5.5.34). The Tacitean perspective of The Roman Actor and other Jacobean plays about Roman tyrants allows for nostalgia for a remembered past when virtue did not go unrewarded, but, at best, uncertainty for the future, and the courage to endure hardships without flinching.

Ch apter 9

Ancient Britons and Romans

B a r b a r i a n l i be r t y Cymbeline (1609–10) is one of several plays written early in the reign of James I depicting an encounter between Romans and ancient Britons. Other plays on similar themes include Fletcher’s Bonduca (1611), The Valiant Welshman (1615) by R. A. (possibly Robert Armin, Shakespeare’s Touchstone), William Rowley’s A Shoo-maker a Gentleman (1609), and, several years later, Jasper Fisher’s The True Trojans (1625). All these plays are concerned with the growth of the Roman empire and resistance to it, contrasting Romans and barbarians, and all the plays treat Roman values with a degree of scepticism.1 There are two traditions in the representation of ancient Britain in Shakespeare’s day. One, stemming from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfthcentury History of the Kings of Britain, is patriotic myth. It gives special prominence to two invented figures:Â€Brutus, who, like Aeneas, fled from burning Troy to establish a new nation, a second Troy, and Arthur, a heroic, doomed king. According to Geoffrey, Julius Caesar, though recognizing that the Britons, like the Romans, were descended from Trojan stock, saw the island as ripe for conquest. Cassivelaunus, King of the Britons, fighting in defence of liberty, to resist ‘perpetual bondage’, led an army which defeated the Romans in two separate battles, causing Caesar to flee to the European mainland. How remarkable the British race was at that time! Twice it had put to flight the man who had subjected to his will the entire world … The Britons were ready to die for their fatherland and for their liberty.2

After the death of Cassivelaunus, Cymbeline, ‘a powerful warrior whom Augustus Caesar had reared in his household’, became King of the Britons, and his sons Guiderius and Arviragus resisted a second Roman invasion, led by the Emperor Claudius, refusing to pay tribute to the Romans. Recognizing ‘the bravery of the Britons’, Claudius negotiated 219

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peace, on condition that the Britons acknowledged the overall sovereignty of Rome, as ‘overlords of the whole world’ (pp. 119–21). Later, under King Arthur, the embodiment of British glory, the Britons renewed hostilities with Rome, defeating and killing the Roman general Lucius. Geoffrey’s narrative, treated with some scepticism by later ages, ‘glorified Britain by defining it through its eternal adversarial stance toward Rome’. William Camden’s Britannia (1610), like Holinshed, saw Geoffrey’s narratives as ‘fable’, a series of ‘fictions and tales’: Let Antiquitie heerein be pardoned, if by entermingling falsities and truthes, humane matters and divine together, it make the first beginnings of nations and cities more noble, sacred, and of greater majestie.3

A second tradition, represented by Camden and Holinshed, takes its origins from Roman sources. The two primary Roman accounts of the confrontation of Rome and ancient Britain, both drawing on personal experience, are Caesar’s De Bello Gallico and Tacitus’s Agricola. Camden’s lengthy account of ‘Romans in Britain’ (seventy-six folio pages) consists largely of extended quotations from Caesar, Tacitus, and other Latin authors. Following Caesar, Camden presents the ancient Britons as a primitive tribe, barbarians as yet unacquainted with the advantages of civilization. According to Caesar, the Britons, who have not yet discovered agriculture: sow no corne, but live of milk and flesh, and clad themselves in skins … The Britans all in general depaint themselves with woad, that maketh a blew colour; and hereby they are the more terrible to their enemies in fight … Ten or twelve of them together use their wives in common.

Another Latin source cited by Camden, Strabo, speaks of the Britons as ‘rude and barbarous … altogether ignorant in gardening and planting of orchyards, yea and in other points of husbandry’.4 Caesar, like Tacitus, presents the British barbarians as courageous and as motivated by a love of freedom. Caesar treats the Britons, as he does brave warriors among the Gauls and the Germanic tribes, as worthy adversaries. After the Romans had suffered damage to their fleet in violent storms, Caesar writes, the British ‘conceaved good hope to free themselves for ever’.5 Their leader Cassivelaunus, praised for his tactical skill and courage, finally surrenders, after he ‘had taken so many losses, & had had his country wasted’. In one of many similar passages in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, a rebellious Gaul, surrounded by Roman troops, shouts defiantly over and over again ‘that he was a free man of a free Citie’.6 The heroic Vercingetorix, the most formidable of Caesar’s adversaries among

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the Gallic tribes, consistently cites ‘the libertie of all Gallia’ as his aim, urging sacrifice, including the ‘losse of their private goods’, in the hope that ‘they shold attaine soveraintie & libertie for ever’. When finally defeated by Caesar, acknowledging that ‘there was no shift but to give place unto fortune’, Vercingetorix declared ‘how he had taken that war in hand, not for any necessitie that he was driven to himselfe, but for the libertie of the whole Realme’.7 Tacitus places an even greater emphasis on a love of liberty as a defining characteristic of the ancient Britons. In Agricola, an account of his father-in-law Agricola’s success in bringing the rebellious Britons under Roman control, the British are presented as motivated by a hatred of ‘the miseries of bondage’. In a powerful oration to the British troops, their general Galgacas characterizes his fellow Britons as ‘never subdued, borne to be free, not to be the slaves of the Romans’. Britain, protected by its remoteness, is the last land free from the Roman yoke, ‘unpolluted, and free from all contagion of tyranny’:Â€ ‘beyond us is no lande, besides us none are free’. Only ‘our jarrings and discords’, he says, have kept the Britons until now from regaining their native liberty.8 Here and elsewhere in the Agricola and Annals, Tacitus gives full, sympathetic expression to the colonized, the victims of Rome’s expansion. The best-known passage in the Agricola, often quoted by republicans in the Renaissance and later, is Galgacas’s attack on empire:Â€Rome is presented as insatiable, devouring everything in its path. Robbers of the world, that having now left no lands to be spoyled, search also the sea. If the enemy be rich, they seeke to winne wealth:Â€if poore, they are content to gaine glorie:Â€whom not the east, nor the west hath satisfiyed … To take away by maine force they terme Empire and government:Â€when all is waste as a wildernesse, that they call peace.9

In another passage in the Agricola often discussed by later writers, Tacitus describes Agricola’s success in civilizing the British barbarians, educating them in Roman values. Tacitus presents Agricola’s initiative as ‘a most profitable and polliticke devise’, evidence of his wise and prudent rule as governor, but also indicates that for the British it brought a loss as well as gain: For whereas the Britans were rude and dispersed, and therefore prone upon everie occasion to warre, to induce them by pleasures to quietnesse and rest, hee exhorted them in private and helpt them in common to builde temples, and houses, and places of publicke resorte, commending the forward and checking the slowe, imposing thereby a kinde of necessity upon them, while ech man contended to gaine the Lieutenants good will. Moreover the noble mens

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sonnes he tooke and instructed in the liberall sciences, preferring the wittes of the Britans … as being now curious to attayne the eloquence of the Roman language.

As the Britons under Agricola’s benevolent direction came more and more to live in a smaller, distant version of Rome, they began to dress like Romans, and to imitate Romans in their vices, taking on the less attractive aspects of civilization. The increase in civilized sophistication entailed the loss of liberty, a retreat from the exacting standards of republican virtue: After that our attire grew to bee in account, and the Gowne much used among them; and so by little and little they proceeded to those provocations of vices, to sumptuous galleries, and bathes, and exquisite banquettings; which things the ignorant termed civilitie, being indeed a point of their bondage.10

Milton, paraphrasing Tacitus in his History of Britain, describes Agricola’s treatment of the Britons as ‘worthie actions; teaching and promoting like a public Father the Institutes and customes of civil life’, which yet were ‘a secret Act to prepare them for bondage’. In another passage Milton compares the English of his own day with the ‘rude … headstrong and intractable’ ancient Britons: For the sunne, which wee want, ripens witts as well as fruits; and as wine and oyle are imported to us from abroad, so must ripe understanding and many civil virtues bee imported into our minds from forren writings & examples of past ages:Â€ wee shall else miscarry still and com short in the attempt of any great enterprise.

Milton’s fellow republican James Harrington, in another passage indebted to Tacitus, presents the influence of the Roman occupation of Britain as wholly beneficial in civilizing the barbarous, ‘ignorant’ British tribes: If we have given over running up and down naked and with dappled hides, learned to write and read, be instructed with good arts, for all these we are beholding to the Romans … by whose means we are as it were of beasts become men.11

In his Annals, Tacitus presents two contrasting instances of British resistance to Roman rule:Â€Boadicea (Bonduca, Voadica), the barbarous Queen, and Caractacus (Caratacus, Caradoc), the gallant, honourable warrior, whose ‘name’ was ‘not meanly esteeemd of at Rome’. Boadicea, according to Tacitus, is savage and a victim of savagery. In the Agricola, Tacitus comments that the British ‘make no distinction of sex’ either ‘in matter of governing’ or in leading troops into battle, and the Britons

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under Boadicea’s command behave with uncontrolled violence:Â€‘no kind of crueltie was omitted, which either anger or the rage of victorie might induce a barbarous people to practise’. According to the Annals, the ‘fierce nation’ of Britons under Boadicea do not observe the conventions of warfare, but slaughter all within their reach:Â€‘neither did they … take one prisoner, or use any entercourse of traffick of warre, but kill, hang, burne, crucifie, as though they would requite the measure they had suffered, and … hasten to anticipate revenge’.12 Boadicea thus embodies the Other in any number of ways:Â€as a savage untouched by Roman civilizing influences, as a woman violating convention by leading an army into battle, and, as, Medea-like, consumed with destructive rage, seeking revenge. But Tacitus also presents her as wronged, mistreated by the Romans, and as a patriot, urging her followers to regain ‘their lost libertie’. The particular wrong she suffers is that, in violation of the customary laws of war, she is whipped and her daughters are raped by Roman soldiers, and her subjects, ‘not yet broken to the yoke of servitude’, are made destitute. Boadicea then addresses her troops, with her violated daughters by her side, displaying them as emblems of violated British liberty: She fought neither for kingdome nor wealth, but a revenge as one of the common people, of their lost libertie, of her body beaten with stripes, and the chastitie of her daughters violated. That the desire of the Romaines was growen to that passe, that they left none, of what age soever, nor any virgin undefiled. Nevertheless that the gods favored just revenge … They should resolve either to vanquish in that battell or die. That, for her own part being a woman, was her resolution, the men might live if they pleased, and serve.(Annales, Book 14, pp. 210–11)13

If Boadicea, vanquished in battle amid a ‘heape of bodies’ and then committing suicide by poison, is an ambivalent figure, Caractacus (from the same British tribe, the Iceni) is a wholly exemplary figure of primitive virtue, honourable, steadfast, a guardian of the traditions of his nation. Indeed, his martial virtus is precisely that which the Roman historians, Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, associate with the early Roman republic, not yet corrupted by luxury and the greed for conquest: a respect for Â�ancestral tradition and ‘the religion of his country’, unyielding courage, proving one’s manhood in battle by honourable emulation, a conviction that ‘there was nothing which valour could not overcome’. Motivated above all by a love of liberty, Caractacus can face death with equanimity, fortified by his consciousness that he has behaved honourably, as befitting his ‘reputation’, gained ‘thorow manie dangers, and in many adventures’. Before the battle, he addresses his soldiers:

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That that day, and that battell should be either the beginning of the recovering of their libertie, or perpetuall servitude. He called upon the names of his auncestors, which chased Caesar the Dictator out of the Ile; by whose valour they were delivered from … tribute; and injoyed freely their wives and childrens bodies undefiled.14

In defeat, when paraded in chains in Caesar’s triumph (Cleopatra’s great fear), he shows no ‘feare’ or dejection, but retains his dignity and his resolute courage. The Romans, Tacitus strongly implies, recognize him as a kindred spirit. Where Boadicea dies by her own hand, Caractacus receives Caesar’s pardon, and is set free, unpunished. If my moderation in prosperitie had been as great as my nobilitie and fortune, I had come rather as a friend into this citie, then a captive:Â€ neither wouldest thou have disdained to receive me with covenants of peace, being descended of ancient progenitors, and commaunding over many nations. My present lot, as it is to me dishonorable, so it is to thee magnificent. I have had horses, men, armes, wealth:Â€What marvell is it if unwillingly I have lost them? for if you will command all men, it followeth that all men become bondmen.

By his refusal to submit, preserving his honour and dignity, free even in captivity, Caractacus says, he will receive a hero’s immortal name, and Caesar, victorious over Britain, can earn the praise of future generations by his clemency. If presently I had yeelded and beene delivered into thy hands; neither my fortune, nor thy glorie had beene renowned; and oblivion would have followed my punishment. But if thou keepe me alive, I shall be for ever an example of thy clemency. (Annales, Book 12, pp. 165–6)

The True Trojans, first performed by ‘the Gentlemen Students of Magdalen College in Oxford’ in 1625 and published in 1633, takes its materials from Caesar’s Gallic Wars, from Tacitus, and, primarily, from the patriotic tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth. In this version of Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain, Caesar, undefeated previously and seeking ‘more worlds to conquer’, is defeated twice by the resolute Cassibelan and his British followers. Cymbeline’s Queen and her foolish, brutal son Cloten, in confronting the Roman envoy Caius Lucius, present a similar view of Caesar, humiliated by defeat at the hands of the courageous Britons: qu e e n. With shameÂ€– The first that ever touched himÂ€– he was carried From off our coast, twice beaten; and his shipping, Poor ignorant baubles, on our terrible seas Like eggshells moved upon our surges, cracked As easily ’gainst our rocks. (Cymbeline, 3.1.24–9)

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Cymbeline, no less defiant in backing up his Queen, criticizes Caesar’s ambition, and deploys the familiar rhetoric of British freedom, stoutly resisting the Roman yoke. Until ‘the injurious Romans’ came, ‘we were free’. c y m be l i n e . Caesar’s ambition, Which swelled so much that it did almost stretch The sides o’th’world, against all colour here Did put the yoke upon’s, which to shake off Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon Ourselves to be. (3.1.45–51)15

Lucius’s tone is far more conciliatory, praising Cassibelan as sharing Roman valuesÂ€– ‘famous in Caesar’s praises no whit less /Than in his feats deserving it’ (3.1.5–6)Â€– and depicting the British king as entering into a voluntary league with the conquering Caesar. In Caesar’s own account and in Geoffrey of Monmouth, there is considerable emphasis on the difficulties faced by the Romans in the raging seas surrounding Britain (forcing the Roman soldiers to ‘stand amid the very billowes’, fighting with their enemies) and on the stoutness of the British resistance. In The True Trojans, Caesar, unaccustomed to defeat, complains that ‘Heaven, Sea, and Wind, and all the Element, /Conspire to worke us harme’, as for the first time he feels ‘feare’ and doubt that Rome’s imperial ambitions might be too ‘bold’.16 In The True Trojans, Cassibelan’s brother Nennius, a figure invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth, fights Caesar in single combat, and delivers a number of speeches breathing heroic defiance. n e n n i u s. We have a world within our selves, whose breast No Forainer hath un-revenged prest These thousand years. (2.1, Sig. C2)

Mortally wounded in his combat with Caesar, whose sword he Â�captures, Nennius dies with the words ‘I leave my Country free.’ Protect this Ile, confound all forraine plots … Before this land shall weare the Romane yoke; Let first the adamantine axell cracke, Which bindes the Ball terrestriall to her poles.

(3.5, Sig. E4v)17

In Act 5, Cassibelan, blaming internal ‘discord, child of hell’ for giving the Romans the prospect of victory, as he does in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account, addresses his troops before the final, decisive

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battle. Here again, in characteristic republican discourse, the emphasis is on the preservation of freedom, as contrasted with the ‘bondage’ of slavery. Imperial ambition, searching for prey ‘from East to West’, is seen as wholly destructive. The speech is closely based on Galcagas’s oration in Tacitus’s Agricola: Subjects and Fellow-souldiers:Â€We must now try For ancient freedome, or perpetuall bondage. There is no third choice … Thinke on these Objects: Then choose them for your Lords, who spoyle and burne Whole countryes; and call Desolation, Peace.18

At the end of the play, Caesar and Cassibelan negotiate a ‘peacefull League’, ‘on equall termes’ compatible with ‘honour’. Cassibelan is acknowledged as ‘the totall Monarch of this Ile’, and Britain, ‘by this ingrafting /Into Romes Empire’, is made a Roman colony (5.6, Sig. I3;Â€5.7, Sig. I4v). The two leaders, British and Roman, then praise one another and exchange gifts in a gesture of amity. The Valiant Welshman (1615) has as its principal figure Caradoc (Caractacus), a wholly exemplary figure, ruled entirely by considerations of ‘honour’, martial virtus that the Romans he encounters in battle Â�recognize and praise. Like Coriolanus, the heroic Caradoc ‘in pupill age … /Was brought up in honours rudiments, /And learnde the elements of warlike Arts’, and like Coriolanus, he is able to turn the course of a battle virtually single-handed. With ‘dauntless valour’, he fights against RomeÂ€– a nation he praises as ‘in all warre, /All courage, all compact of manly vigour’Â€– in the hope of performing ‘memorable acts’ worth Â�celebrating ‘in verse’, ‘that immortal fame /May canonize his Acts to aftertimes’.19 Dressed in the ‘meane habite’ of a common soldier, he captures the Emperor Claudius on the battlefield, and then, scorning Caesar’s offer of a large sum paid in ransom, releases him: Know, Romane, that a Brittayne scorns thy gold … â•…â•…â•…â•…â•…â•… The wealth we crave, Are noble actions, and an honoured grave.

(2.4, Sig. D2v)

In an episode similar to the exchange of tokens between Shakespeare’s Henry V and the soldier Williams (a part Robert Armin may well have played), the Emperor, no less honourable than Caradoc, hands him a ‘golden Lyon’ to wear, so that the Welshman may ‘quickly finde me out’ if they meet again. In the play’s final scene, loosely based on Tacitus’s Annals, Caradoc, a prisoner in Rome, refuses to kneel before the Emperor, and

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defiantly proclaims his scorn of ‘flattery’ and his unconquered ‘honour, which, he says, ‘should stand /First at the Center, at no Kings command’. Thinks Caesar, that this petty misery Of servill bonds, can make true honour stoope? No, tis enough for Sicophants and slaves, To crouch to Tyrants, that feare their graves. (5.5, Sig. I4)

Claudius then, as in Tacitus, behaves magnanimously and sets Caradoc free, praising his valour and, on seeing the ‘golden Lyon’ on his neck, the ‘kind courtesie’ Caradoc had shown earlier. Despite the mention of ‘Tyrants’ and ‘servill bonds’, the language of The Valiant Welshman is only intermittently republican, though consistently heroic and patriotic, as it memorializes one of the ‘valiant Princes of our English Nation’. Caractacus’s speech before the Emperor in Tacitus, rather than illustrating a warrior’s and patriot’s honour, emphasizes the vicissitudes of fortune:Â€ ‘I have had horses, men, armies, wealth. /What marvell is it if unwillingly I have lost them.’â•›20 In The Valiant Welshman, Caradoc becomes the ruler of Wales not through birth, but through merit, proved in warfare. In much of the play, he is dressed as a common soldier, and his friend Morgan, a Fluellen-like figure speaking in comic prose with a marked Welsh dialect, is no less heroic in his conduct, though less dignified than Caradoc. There is very little criticism of Roman values or imperial expansion in the play, aside from statements by Romans expressing surprise that ‘such a petty Iland’ should be able to resist ‘the Roman strength’ (3.5, Sig. F1v). Other Britons, proud of their lineage, intrigue against him, and defect to the Romans. The deceitful Queen Cartismanda, a figure appearing in Tacitus, who believes that ‘the desire of Principality and Kingly rule … is boundless’, promises Caradoc ‘Sanctuary’ and then basely betrays him. In The Valiant Welshman, the distinction between honourable and base conduct is absolutely clearcut:Â€ intrinsic nobility is immediately recognized as such, and is either honoured or resented, depending on the character of the perceiver.21 In Fletcher’s Bonduca, there are no such sharp distinctions between Â�conduct to be admired or abhorred. The most consistently admirable figure in the play is the British general Caratach (whose name suggests that he is another version of Caractacus). Aside from him, virtue and vice, strength and weakness of character, are equally divided among the Britons and the Romans, with most of the characters a mixture of good and bad qualities. Penius, a Roman commander, sulks like Achilles in his tent, refusing to lead his troops into battle, and then, humiliated when

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Suetonius wins a victory without his aidÂ€– ‘I have lost mine honour, lost my name’Â€ – commits suicide. Judas, as his name suggests, is the most base of the play’s Romans, ruled entirely by his appetite. Early in the play, he is captured by Bonduca and her daughters while foraging for food, and at the end of the play, he kills the boy Hengo in a cowardly, dishonourable act. In a sub-plot, the love-lorn Junius and his carefree, cynical friend Petillius provide a comic counterpoint to the main plot. At one point, Petillius, like Penius, contemplates suicide, feeling that he has been ‘disgrac’d’ and has ‘grown ridiculous’.22 The only Roman who consistently behaves in accordance with exacting standards of honour is the general Suetonius, who addresses his troops as ‘the sons of ancient Romans, / Heirs to their endlesse valours’. To win, is nothing: Where reason, time and counsel are our Camp-masters: But there to bear the field, then to be conquerours, Where pale destruction takes us … Names for after-ages, Must steel the Souldier:Â€his own shame helps to arm him. (1.2.225–8, 238–9; 3.2.80–1)

At several points in the play, Suetonius praises the British warrior Caratach, recognizing a natural affinity between them: â•…â•…â•… He’s a Souldier So forg’d out, and so temper’d for great fortunes, So much man thrust into him, so old in dangers, So fortunate in all attempts, that his meer name Fights in a thousand men, himself in millions, To make him Romane. (1.2.255–60)

In the play’s opening scene, Caratach and Bonduca are sharply contrasted in their reaction to a victory over the Romans. Bonduca exults, calling the Romans weak and effeminate:Â€‘Shame, how they flee!’ Caratach, conscious of honour and the need to balance ‘Discretion /And hardie Valour’, objects that the Roman enemy should be treated with respect. For then it leaves to be a vertue, Lady, And we that have been Victors, beat our selves, When we insult upon our honour’s subject.

(1.1.7, 21–2, 29–31)

War to Caratach, as to his counterpart the Roman general, is not merely a matter of survival, with success to be gained by any means, however

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dishonourable. When Bonduca’s daughters capture Junius by a ruse, and earlier, try to hang Judas and his fellow soldiers, Caratach is indignant at their ‘base’ conduct as an offence against ‘our honours’ and frees the captives. c a r at ac h . Our great day given us, Not to be snatch’d out of our hands but basely; And must we shame our gods from whence we have it, With setting snares for Souldiers? (2.3.43; 3.5.74–7)

In a passage similar to speeches by Martius and Aufidius in Coriolanus, Caratach, a veteran of many battles against Rome, speaks of his desire to ‘try these Romanes’, from whom he has received many ‘honour’d scars’, not simply as emulation, competitive striving for Â�mastery, but as ‘love’: c a r at ac h . I love an enemy:Â€I was born a soldier; And he that in the head on’s Troop defies me, Bending my manly body with his sword, I make a Mistris. Yellow-tressed Hymen Ne’er tyed a longing Virgin with more joy, Than I am married to that man that wounds me.23

It is clear enough that, in the terms outlined in Tacitus’s Agricola, Caratach represents Britons exposed to the civilizing influence of Rome, sharing Roman values, where Bonduca and her daughters represent a primitive Britain as yet untouched by and hostile to these values. Yet it is a gross oversimplification to assume that Bonduca and her daughters are simply presented as bad examples, or that their characterization in the play is an example of the dramatist’s misogyny. In the scene where Bonduca and her daughters, under siege by the Romans, face death, they behave in a manner that is both compatible with the values of Roman republicanism and critical of a Rome which has fallen short of these ideals. Bonduca’s speech of defiance draws on several speeches by Britons in Tacitus, especially the orations before battle by Boadicea and by Galgacas. Her courage and dignity are praised by the Roman general:Â€ ‘We love thy noblenesse … She was truely noble, and a Queen’ (4.4.11, 156). Refusing to yield and sue for mercy, Bonduca contrasts the ‘impietie’ of Romans who demand ‘bending adoration’ with ‘the thatched houses where the Britains dwell’ in ‘chaste and simple puritie’ among their ‘household gods’. The Britons, she implies, uphold the time-honoured Roman virtues better than the proud, luxurious Romans do.

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Ancient Britons and Romans ’Tis not high power that makes a place divine, Nor that the men from gods derive their line. But sacred thoughts in holy bosoms stor’d, Make people noble, and the place ador’d.

(4.4.16–18, 20–6)

Unlike Tacitus, Fletcher does not include as part of Bonduca’s motivation the dishonourable rape of her daughters and her flogging by the Romans, but he carefully differentiates the reaction of the two daughters to the prospect of death. The second daughter fears death (‘Alas, I am young, and would live’), where the first daughter, resolute, chooses like Cleopatra to die like a Roman, refusing to ‘gild ore your Conquests’, as she provides for the Roman onlookers a lesson in how to behave. 1 daug h t e r . Shew me a Romane Lady in all your stories, Dare do this for her honour … â•…â•…â•… Would ye learn How to die bravely, Romanes, to fling off This case of flesh, lose all your cares for ever? (4.4.64, 94, 115–16, 127–9)

The play ends, after more pathos in the death of the child Hengo and the fruitless attempts of Caratach to protect him from the Romans, with reconciliation between Britain and Rome, as each ‘brave soldier’ pays tribute to the matching virtues of the other. ‘To be my friend’, Suetonius says to Caratach, is ‘more to me then Conquests’. s u e t on i u s. For Fames sake, for thy Sword sake, As thou desirest to build thy vertues greater: By all that’s excellent in man, and honestÂ€– c a r at ac h . I do believe:Â€Ye have had me a brave foe; Make me a noble friend. (5.3.115, 179–85)

The play closes with a symbolic embrace of the two old soldiers, as Caratach accepts that he will be sent to Rome, not humiliated as a captive but honoured for his exemplary courage. C y m be l i n e’s Rom e Cymbeline, like Bonduca, rounds off its action with a reconciliation of Britain and Rome. After the King is reunited with his two lost sons and Imogen restored to her husband Posthumus, the King, somewhat unexpectedly, decides to pay tribute as a sign of submission to the Romans his troops have defeated in battle.

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c y m be l i n e . My peace we will begin. And Caius Lucius, Although the victor, we submit to Caesar And to the Roman empire, promising To pay our wonted tribute, from the which We were dissuaded by our wicked Queen. (5.4.457–61)

A Soothsayer, praising ‘the harmony of this peace’ between Britain and Rome, gives an interpretation of a vision, shown to him by ‘the very gods’, which before the climactic battle he had read as predicting ‘success to the Roman host’ (4.2.345–50). Now the vision where the Roman eagle, ‘soaring aloft’, disappears into the sunbeams, becomes an emblem of a Â�new-forged unity of Britain and Rome. Our princely eagle, The imperial Caesar, should again unite His favour with the radiant Cymbeline, Which shines here in the west. (5.4.569, 471–4)

It is open to question whether the harmonious vision projected in these lines is, as in Bonduca and The True Trojans, an affirmation of Rome’s imperial rule, with Cymbeline recognized as a legitimate but subordiÂ� nate ruler of his own portion of the empire, or whether it is a vision of Â�equality. Cymbeline’s closing lines suggest the latter reading, or even a more audacious reading in which Britain is seen as supplanting Rome, inaugurating a new era of divinely ordained peace.24 Certainly, the lines are far removed from the belligerent anti-Roman patriotism of Cloten and the Queen earlier in the play. c y m be l i n e . Laud we the gods, And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils From our blest altars. Publish we this peace To all our subjects. Set we forward. Let A Roman and a British ensign wave Friendly together … Never was a war did cease, Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace. (5.4.474–9, 482–3)

Throughout the play, Britain and Rome are seen less as rivals, Â� ideologically distinct, than as complementary, interrelated. For Posthumus Leonatus, Imogen, and Cymbeline, Britain is already part of the Roman empire. Cymbeline, even while defying Rome, points out that as a young man he served under Augustus Caesar and was honoured for his services in Roman wars (the detail is found in Holinshed).

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Ancient Britons and Romans c y m be l i n e . Thy Caesar knighted me; my youth I spent Much under him; of him I gathered honour, Which he to seek of me again, perforce, Behoves me keep at utterance. (3.1.67–70)

Where the boorish Cloten is confident that ‘Britain’s /A world by itself’ (3.1.12–13), Imogen, rejected by her husband and forced to leave Cymbeline’s court, is aware that there is a world outside Britain. i mo g e n. Hath Britain all the sun that shines? Day, night, Are they not but in Britain? I’th’world’s volume Our Britain seems as of it, but not in’t; In a great pool a swan’s nest. Prithee, think There’s livers out of Britain. pi s a n io. I am most glad You think of other place. (3.4.135–40)

Posthumus Leonatus, whose very name is Roman, spends the play shuttling back and forth between a British and Roman identity. The son of a father who gained his cognomen in honourable battle against the Romans (1.1.28–32), Posthumus leaves Britain in Act 1 for residence in Rome, banished by the British King. In Rome, he lives among a company of young gentlemen, who then come as ‘most willing’ volunteers to serve in the Roman army, fighting against Britain (4.2.337–8). After two scenes in Rome in Acts 1 and 2 and an anguished soliloquy in 2.5, Posthumus, absent from the play for an extended period, reappears in Act 5, ‘dressed as a Roman’, in that army: p o s t h u m u s. I am brought hither Among th’Italian gentry, and to fight Against my lady’s kingdom.

At this point, deciding that he will ‘give no wound’ to his native kingdom, he changes his garments once again as a visible index of his identity, as he changes sides in the expected battle, to ‘fight /Against the part I came with’. â•…â•…â•…â•… I’ll disrobe me Of these Italian weeds, and suit myself As does a British peasant.

(5.1.17–25)

The frequent references in the play to garments that may be put on, discarded, or changed suggest that identity is not fixed and that appearances

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are not to be trusted. Cloten dresses in Posthumus’s clothing (‘how fit his garments serve me’), planning to rape Imogen dressed that way as revenge for her earlier claim that ‘his meanest garment’ was more worthy of respect than Cloten (2.3.127–9; 4.1.2). After Cloten is killed, Imogen mistakes Cloten’s headless body, dressed in Posthumus’s suit, for her dead husband, misled by what she sees before her: I know the shape of’s leg; this is his hand, His foot Mercurial, his Martial thigh.

(4.2.307–9)

Imogen herself changes her visible identity, dressing in boy’s clothing and then, convinced that her ‘master, /A very valiant Briton’ (4.2.367–8), is dead, agrees to serve the Roman general Lucius. The plot device by which husband and wife are sundered, with Posthumus rejecting his wife as a strumpet and a ‘counterfeit’, again involves false appearance, misinterpretation of visible signs. The villainous Iachimo deceives Posthumus by giving a full, accurate description of Imogen’s bedroom, as well as describing a mole under her breast, convincing Posthumus that the only way he could have attained this information was by having ‘tasted her in bed’. In scenes echoing both Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece and Iago’s deception of Othello by providing a false ‘ocular proof’, Iachimo first commits a virtual rape of the sleeping Imogen and then, encouraging Posthumus to imagine her ‘mounted’, infects Posthumus with the humiliating belief that his wife has deceived him.25 The play’s most striking anomaly, often remarked by critics, is the glaring anachronism in which Iachimo, clearly a contemporary Italian with all the vices conventionally attributed to Italians in the Renaissance, has a prominent role in a play where most of the characters are ancient Britons or Romans from the time of Augustus. Anachronism is, of course, fairly common in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Rowley’s A Shoo-maker a Gentleman (1609) has the sons of a king of the ancient Britons apprentice themselves to a London shoemaker, with comic scenes of contemporary London life juxtaposed with other scenes depicting the martyrdom of Christians by tyrannous, bloodthirsty Roman emperors and their subordinates. In Cymbeline, the anachronism does not reflect authorial indifference or confusion, but a ‘radical dislocation’, forcing a revaluation of the play’s contrasts of Roman and British by adding a disconcerting third element.26 Many of the play’s references to ‘Italy’ or ‘Italian’ associate Italy with deception, cunning, poison, and the ruthless pursuit of one’s own advantage. Imogen, Pisanio, and Iachimo himself

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present the same view of super-subtle Italians preying on their innocent victims: â•…â•…â•… What false Italian, As poisonous tongued as handed, hath prevailed On thy too ready hearing? … That drug-damned Italy hath outcraftied him … â•…â•…â•… Some jay of Italy, Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him.

And Iachimo, proud of his amoral cleverness even in repenting his villainy: Mine Italian brain ’Gan in your duller Britain operate Most vilely; for my vantage, excellent. (3.2.4–6; 3.4.15, 47–8; 5.4.196–8)

This is the Italy of The White Devil and The Revenger’s Tragedy, the world of Machiavellian intrigue, poisoned smiles, where betrayal is the norm. It can be argued that there is ‘a sharp distinction between Roman and Italian elements’ in Cymbeline, with ancient Rome as ‘the seat of honour’ and Renaissance Italy ‘all but equated with the devil’.27 Certainly, the Roman general Caius Lucius, upright and honourable, represents Rome at its best. Defeated in battle, he behaves with stoic courage, accepting death as ‘the chance of war’: But since the gods Will have it thus, that nothing but our lives May be called ransom, let it come. Sufficiently A Roman with a Roman’s heart can suffer.

(5.4.75, 78–81)

Yet the play does not maintain a strict separation between ‘Rome’ and ‘Italy’. Indeed, in several passages, the two terms are seen as roughly interchangeable. Posthumus speaks of himself as enlisted in the Roman army ‘among the Italian gentry’ and describes his Roman costume as ‘these Italian weeds’; Lucius in an exchange with a Roman soldier, asking for the news ‘from Rome’, is told that the senate has recruited ‘gentlemen from Italy’ to serve with the Roman army; and Iachimo at one point speaks of himself and his companions as ‘some dozen Romans of us’ (1.6.184; 4.2.335–8; 5.1.18, 23). At the time depicted in Cymbeline, Roman citizenship was extended to Italians born outside Rome and to those coming from distant colonies, and most of those serving in the

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Roman army were in a strict sense non-Romans. At the very least, the play Â�suggests that Rome can be the seat of honour and betrayal, of Lucius and Iachimo, and that ancient Rome is capable of turning into a degraded Italy where the very air corrupts the unwary visitor. The potential for the Rome of Tiberius, Nero, and Domitian is already present in the tradition of martial virtus. In Act 5, the repentant Iachimo characterizes Posthumus as wholly virtuous, a ‘true knight’, ‘most like a noble lord’: What should I say? He was too good to be Where ill men were, and was the best of all Amongst the rar’st of good ones. (5.4.158–60, 171, 186)

At the beginning of the play, two courtiers describe Posthumus in similar adulatory terms, contrasting him with Cloten, ‘a thing too bad for bad report’: a creature such As to seek through the regions of the earth For one his like, there would be something failing To him that should compare. (1.1.17, 19–22)

However, even in the early scenes, Posthumus shows by his actions that he is no such paragon. In the scene of the wager, as in the equivalent scene in Shakespeare’s Lucrece, the repeated financial imagery suggests pride in ownership, a tendency to treat Imogen as a marketable commodity in a competition among young men with time on their hands. As a young traveller in France, a quarrelsome Posthumus had threatened to fight a duel, after similar competitive boasting. In 1.4, Iachimo and Posthumus share the same assumptions, as they agree the terms of a wager, equating Imogen to a ring or other precious possession, to be worn for adornment or passed hand to hand:Â€‘I praised her as I rated her; so do I my stone’; ‘sold or given … wealth enough for the purchase’; ‘you have store of thieves … I fear not my ring’. By entering into competition with Iachimo’s ‘unworthy thinking’, daring Iachimo to ‘make your voyage upon her’ (another mercantile metaphor), Posthumus is encouraging an assault on her Â�honour, exposing her to danger and undermining the mutual trust between husband Â� and wife at a time of their forced separation.28 In the scene in Imogen’s bedchamber, Iachimo compares himself to Tarquin, at the moment when, before the rape, the sleeping Lucrece lies exposed to his gaze, tempting and defenceless.

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Ancient Britons and Romans i ac h i mo. Our Tarquin thus Did softly press the rushes, ere he wakened The chastity he wounded. Cytherea, How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! Fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch, But kiss, one kiss! (2.2.12–17)

The comparison with Tarquin suggests not only stealth, but qualms of conscience on Iachimo’s part, as well as an emphasis on the seductiveness of the recumbent female figure. In a sense, Iachimo is blaming Imogen, deflecting responsibility for the act he is about to commit:Â€it is her fault for being so attractive, awakening desire. In its voyeuristic appeal, the speech encourages complicity in the theatrical audience. When Iachimo returns to Rome and confronts Posthumus with evidence of carnal knowledge of Imogen, proof that he has been ‘the winner of her Â�honour’, he describes two works of art decorating her bedchamber:Â€ a tapestry of Cleopatra meeting Antony at Cydnus and a Â�carving of ‘chaste Dian bathing’. These two figures, described Â�lovingly by Iachimo, represent the complementary stereotypes of woman as Â�virgin and whoreÂ€ – one of woman as irresistible seductress, one of Â�chastity violated and, in the death of the hunter Actaeon, punished severely. The problem posed for Posthumus, as for Othello, Leontes, and Claudio in Much Ado, is how to distinguish one from the other, and make ‘partition …’twixt fair and foul’.29 Like his near-namesake Iago, Iachimo sees all women as whores, Â�virtue a mere word, and all things available to be bought and sold:Â€‘If you buy ladies’ flesh at a million a dram, you cannot preserve it from tainting’ (1.4.109–10). Where Posthumus is susceptible to Iachimo’s tempting words, Imogen is not. Cautious, questioning, aware that ‘the heart’ is more to be trusted than the ear and that judgements ‘in haste’ are unreliable, she is immune both to Iachimo’s flattery and to his attempt to blacken Posthumus’s reputation. i mo g e n. Away, I do condemn mine ears that have So long attended thee. If thou wert honourable Thou wouldst have told this tale for virtue, not For such an end thou seek’st, as base as strange. Thou wrong’st a gentleman who is as far From thy report as thou from honour, and Solicits here a lady that disdains Thee and the devil alike. (1.6.130–1, 141–8)

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Although Cloten is Posthumus’s double in the play, representing both his opposite and his mirror imageÂ€– in one recent production, the two, compared again and again by the other characters and never onstage at the same time, were played by a single actorÂ€– Iachimo can also be seen as embodying Posthumus’s dark desires, as he plays on the young man’s insecurities.30 Posthumus’s hidden violence erupts in the play’s most powerful, unsettling speech, his ‘women’s part’ soliloquy, where, like Hamlet and Othello, he condemns all women for the presumed frailty of one woman. One structural oddity in Cymbeline, presenting a problem in production, is the absence of Posthumus from the middle of the play, where his name is frequently invoked by the other characters, and the introduction of an entirely new set of characters and subplot in Acts 3 and 4. The disguised princes, brought up in a remote mountain cave distant from ‘the art o’th’ court’, are, like Imogen, uncorrupted. Their guardian Belarius, banished from a court where, like the court of Tiberius’s Rome, ‘doing well’ is punished and noble deeds, rather than gaining ‘the name of fame and honour’, are met with ‘slander’, seeks to protect them from such dangers (3.3.46, 51–4). Like the banished Duke in As You Like It, he hopes to draw ‘a profit from all things we see’, secure in a pastoral landscape: O, this life Is nobler than attending for a check, Richer than doing nothing for a bribe, Prouder than rustling in unpaid-for silk.

(3.3.18, 21–4)

However, the two boys, rather than being grateful to their Â�protector, are discontented, feeling frustrated that they have been kept in ‘Â�ignorance’, seeing their mountain retreat as ‘a prison’, a ‘cage’:Â€‘we have seen nothing’ Â� (3.3.32–4, 39–42). Although Arviragus complains ‘we are beastly’, the scenes in the remote Welsh mountains serve as refutation of the conventional association of the ancient British with savagery. If any character in the play approaches this stereotype, it is Cloten, brought up in a court, who, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is everything that a knight or a gentleman should not be, and who, like Tarquin or the Romans in the Boadicea myth, seeks to relieve his frustrations in a violent rape. In some ways, the ‘hard pastoral’ of the Welsh scenes reconfigures the conventional contrast between Roman civility and barbarism. The untutored civility of the two young men, brought up to be self-sufficient and schooled in an environment where they will find ‘no enemy /But winter and rough weather’, is akin to that of Caradoc, the valiant Welshman. Pastoral tends to be egalitarian, as The Faerie Queene, Book VI, and As

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You Like It illustrate. Orlando, brought up ‘rustically’ among the ‘hinds’, has, like Guiderius and Arviragus, by an ‘invisible instinct’, qualities of valour, civility, ‘honour untaught’, that are lacking in his arrogant, jealous elder brother. In Spenser, the influence of ‘divine Nature’ is evident in the ‘sparkes of gentle mynd’ in the noble-spirited ‘salvage man’, brought up ‘rudely’ and ‘undisciplined’ away from the softening influences of civilization, or in Sir Satyrane, similarly bred ‘amongst wild beasts and woods’, growing ‘wildly’ in uncultivated ground.31 Yet, in a convention common in fairy-tale and romance, Guiderius and Arviragus turn out not to be rough diamonds but princes, unaware of their heritage. When young Guiderius strains at the leash, longing for the chance of ‘warlike feats’ of his own, his foster father Belarius attributes this not to untaught instinct but to his ‘princely blood’ (3.3.90–5). Later, together with Posthumus, dressed as a common soldier, they hold off the entire Roman army, and thus realize their untapped potential, exhibiting their native courage in defence of their native land. As such, the two boys and Posthumus, though they are fighting against the Romans, illustrate both martial virtus and moral virtue. De at h a n d r e bi r t h As in All’s Well and Measure for Measure, the final scene of Cymbeline ties the various plot strands together, bringing most of the cast together for a denouement, with a series of discoveries, some of which seem initially to create problems rather than solving them. Cymbeline, who plays a minor role in the play named after him, is, for once, given a position of prominence:Â€he speaks the first and last lines in this scene and, like the disguised Duke in Measure for Measure and the King of France in All’s Well, demonstrates the power inherent in his office. In production, the final scene of Cymbeline, with its multiple revelations, including Iachimo’s confession, the reported death of the wicked Queen, the discovery of the true identities of Guiderius, Arviragus, and Belarius, and the reunion of Imogen and Posthumus, is problematical. In eighteenthand nineteenth-century productions, the play was extensively rewritten, with major cuts in the final scene, making Posthumus, Iachimo, or (most frequently) Imogen the play’s central figure. Garrick played Posthumus, Henry Irving Iachimo, and Helen Faucit and Ellen Terry an idealized Imogen. Twentieth-century productions, heavily ironic or overloaded with spectacle, have tended to be uncomfortable with the last act of Cymbeline.

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One critical tradition sees in Cymbeline a significant topical element, in praise of James I. In this reading of Act 5, ‘Cymbeline finds his family’, reunited, thus guaranteeing ‘the future stability of the kingdom through orderly familial succession’, and inaugurates a reign in which Britain, as the Soothsayer prophesies, will ‘flourish in peace and plenty’. The harmony established between Britain and Rome, in this allegorical interpretation, ‘mirrors James’s own policy’ of ‘creating a united Britain out of nations in discord’, a new ‘Great Britain’ uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland and thus, it is claimed, beginning an era of imperial peace comparable to the age of Augustus.32 A second critical tradition, less intent on topical identification, sees the restoration of ‘paternal authority’ in the reconstitution of Cymbeline’s scattered family, a ‘pure male lineage’, as central to the play.33 The problem with these readings, as with Act 5 of the play, is that Imogen and Posthumus, the play’s most interesting figures, are marginalized, lost in a rapid succession of discoveries:Â€‘Thou art my brother … You are my father too.’ Cymbeline’s comments, ‘New matter still’ and ‘When shall I hear all through?’ (5.4.243, 382, 399–400) suggest a certain ungainliness in the denouement. Of the three interlocking plot lines in CymbelineÂ€ – the marital, the familial (the restoration of the lost princes), and the national (Britain’s rebelling against Roman domination)Â€– the main plot, in any production of the play, must be the sundering and reunion of Imogen and Posthumus. Imogen is the play’s central figure, with the most lines to speak, and the play’s most effective scenes are those involving the triangular relationship of Imogen, Posthumus, and Iachimo. As compared to The Winter’s Tale and Pericles, little is made of the relationship between father and daughter, or their reunion. In the Imogen–Posthumus scenes, the predominant tone is tragic, and it is not surprising that in the First Folio, Cymbeline is printed among the tragedies. Like The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure, for at least the first half of the play, Cymbeline appears to be heading for a tragic outcome, and then veers off in another direction, ending with reconciliation rather than a stage full of dead bodies. In the course of the play, Imogen is threatened repeatedly with death. Her husband orders his servant Pisanio to kill her and, after the conscience-stricken Pisanio relents, she seeks refuge, exhausted, in the Welsh mountains. Rather than, like Rosalind and Portia, being liberated by the assumption of male clothing, unlocking her potential, Imogen sinks into a passive, ‘heart-sick’ melancholy, with ‘grief and patience’ mingled (4.2.37, 57–8). Feeling ‘very sick’ and ‘distressed’ (4.2.5, 47), Imogen drinks the poison prepared for her by the Queen, thinking it to be a cordial that

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might restore her health, and is discovered, apparently dead. The stage direction is ‘Enter Arviragus, with Imogen dead, bearing her in his arms’, as with Lear carrying the body of Cordelia. After her funeral rites, she awakens, to find an image of horror, which makes her ‘tremble still with fear’:Â€ ‘The dream’s here still, even when I wake, it is /Without me, as within me; not imagined, felt’ (4.2.302, 305–6). Throughout the play, Imogen is identified with her homeland, Britain. When Iachimo tries to convince her that Posthumus has been unfaithful, her response is ‘My lord, I fear’ /Has forgot Britain’ (1.6.112–13). Later in the play Posthumus, racked with guilt, makes a similar identification of the realm and its princess, saying that he is no longer willing ‘to fight / Against my lady’s kingdom. ‘’Tis enough /That Britain, I have killed thy mistress’ (5.1.18–20).34 The dangers Imogen endures are those of her native Britain, threatened by tyrannous misrule and by invasion. In Cymbeline, as in Titus Andronicus and Lucrece, rape and tyranny are equated, as violent assaults on the integrity of a woman’s body and on the endangered commonwealth. In the course of the play, Imogen is threatened with actual and virtual rape, as well as murder narrowly averted, once by poison and once by sword. Shakespeare, like Fletcher in Bonduca, is drawing on the dual image of Rome in the Renaissance, as victimizer and victim, as ‘the implacable invader … its soldiers raping the queen of Britain’s daughters’, and as ‘the invaded, the sacked city’.35 In Tacitus and Sallust, Rome the conqueror, creating a desolate wilderness and calling it peace, as in Galgacas’s speech in Agricola, is contrasted with an idealized early Roman republic characterized by a respect for tradition and a love of freedom. In Cymbeline, as in Bonduca, civilized, honourable behaviour, associated not with ‘high power’ or ‘place’ but with ‘sacred thoughts in holy bosoms stor’d’ (Bonduca, 4.4.23–5), can be found among Romans and non-Romans. Yet in Cymbeline, ancient Britain, as personified in Imogen, her brothers, and Posthumus, is presented as heir to, and repository of, the endangered traditional values of Rome. The term generally used to describe the claim that the heritage of ancient Rome has been passed on to Britain is translatio imperii. It takes its origin from some invented history, widely accepted as fictional in Shakespeare’s day:Â€the legendary foundation of Britain by Brutus (Brute), in parallel with his supposed ancestor Aeneas, founder of Rome. In The True Trojans, drawing on Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Romans and the Britons, meeting in battle, proclaim their common Trojan ancestry. According to Wilson Knight’s influential reading of Cymbeline, the Italy

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of Iachimo represents a debased version of the Roman heritage, where the Britain of Guiderius, Arviragus, and Imogen, purged of the malevolent influence of Cloten and the ambitious Queen, represents the hope of a new and better Rome.36 There are two Romes and two Britains in Cymbeline, presented as contrasting paths or as contending forces, as well as being geographical locations:Â€ the Rome of Caius Lucius and of Iachimo, and, in Britain, the court of Cymbeline, from which virtue is banished, and a Welsh pastoral landscape, distant from the court and its influence. The distinctions, however, are not always clear-cut, and the choices facing Imogen and Posthumus involve pain and suffering, with a strong possibility of a tragic outcome.37 The scene in which the horrified Imogen discovers the body of a headless man beside her, a grotesque ‘bedfellow’, provides riddles that, like equivocating prophecies, can be interpreted in more than one way. The audience is aware that the dead body is that of Cloten, not Posthumus, but Imogen, rising from the dead to encounter the apparent destruction of all her hopes, treats this discovery as fully tragic. Her words on arising, unwillingly, from a state not fully distinguishable as ‘dead or sleeping’, suggest a stripping down of all illusions, all hopes:Â€‘I am nothing; or if not, /Nothing to be were better’ (4.2.355, 366–7). Posthumus enacts a similar journey into despair, longing for death and dissolution, but in his case it is motivated by his own feelings of guilt, a consciousness that he has done a great wrong that deserves to be punished. His soliloquy in 2.5, notable for the violence of its misogyny, imagines a world from which women are excluded entirely, attributing all vices, ‘all faults that earth can name, nay, that hell knows’, to women or to ‘the woman’s part’ in man. If one woman is guilty, then all women must be. ‘We are all bastards’, since we are born as a result of sexual congress which is, by its nature, corrupting. Like the tyrannous, maddened Leontes, seizing his son from Hermione (‘Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you /Have too much blood in him’), Posthumus fantasizes an all-male family, free from contamination by the ‘lust and rank thoughts’ of women.38 When Posthumus reappears in Act 5, he believes that Imogen has been killed by his unjust command. At this point in the play, he still believes that she has committed adultery with Iachimo, but forgives her, on the grounds that such transgressions are ‘little faults’ only to be expected among fallible humans. He is still assuming male superiority in any relationshipÂ€– it is for husbands to forgive wives ‘for wrying but a little’, using their power benevolentlyÂ€– but speaks of Imogen as ‘noble’ and of husbands who mistreat wives ‘much better than themselves’ (5.1.4–5, 10, 12). Although he hopes to

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restore his manhood and ‘make men know /More valour in me than my habits show’, in battle he courts death, in expiation for his mistreatment of Imogen, rather than pursuing honour or fame: So I’ll die For thee, O Imogen, even for whom my life Is every breath a death.

(25–7, 29–30)

After the battle, Posthumus is even more resolute for death, Â�motivated not by love, compassion, or forgiveness, but by obsessive feelings of unworthiness, a conviction that Imogen’s death, in a strict accounting, must be repaid by his own, an eye for an eye. ‘My ransom’s death’:Â€only ‘th’ sure physician, death’ can free him from the burden of overwhelming guilt. Regretting that he has not yet been able to ‘find death’ while seeking it, he welcomes imprisonment, hoping that further punishment will help him repent:Â€‘For Imogen’s dear life take mine, and though /’Tis not so dear, yet ’tis a life;Â€ you coined it’ (5.3.69, 80, 101, 116–17). What Imogen and Posthumus have in common in these scenes is that, like Lear or Poor Tom on the heath, they are reduced almost to ‘nothing’, forced to strip away their illusions and pretences as they strip away their usual clothing. Posthumus in these scenes is dressed in ‘rags’, his ‘naked breast’ contrasted with the ‘gilded arms’ of the invading Romans. Several characters comment on the meanly dressed man, seemingly appearing from nowhere, who fights by the side of Guiderius, Arviragus, and Belarius against the might of the Roman army:Â€‘so poor a thing … that promised naught /But beggary and poor looks’.39 In many ways, Cymbeline challenges conventional distinctions between civility and barbarism. Cloten, boorish and inordinately proud of his noble rank, combines the disadvantages of court life and barbarous ignorance. Thoroughly materialistic in his outlook, he seeks to bribe Imogen’s waiting woman with the gold that Guiderius and Arviragus scorn as ‘dirt’. Posthumus, he tells Imogen, is contemptible as a ‘base wretch, / One bred of alms’, ‘mean’, ‘a base slave’ (2.3.107–8, 111, 116; 3.6.52–4). The tyrannous, angry Cymbeline shares these values:Â€ to him, Posthumus is ‘thou basest thing … a beggar, wouldst have made my throne /A seat for baseness’ (1.1.125, 141–2). The contrast between intrinsic worth and the outward trappings of rank and station is explicit in Cloten’s confrontation with Guiderius:Â€‘Thou villain base, /Know’st me not by my clothes?’ and ‘Hear but my name, and tremble’ as against Guiderius’s ‘Have not I /An arm as big as thine, a heart as big?’ (4.2.76–7, 80–1, 87).

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In the play’s geography, Wales, the home of Imogen’s lost brothers, both is and is not part of Cymbeline’s kingdom. Maps in Shakespeare’s day depicted Wales both as within ‘the Kingdome of England’ (unlike Scotland, always depicted as a separate realm) and as distinct from it.40 In Cymbeline, Milford Haven is the Welsh port at which the invading Roman army enters and leaves Britain, and the place to which Imogen is summoned by Posthumus, followed by Cloten, and threatened with violence by both. Much is made of the physical distance from the court to Milford Haven, across the Severn:Â€the exhausted Imogen, ‘almost spent with hunger’, finds it a tiring journey lasting three days and two nights (3.6.1–3, 60). Like Orlando in As You Like It Imogen is initially uncertain whether this ‘rude place’ in the mountains of Wales is ‘savage’ or ‘civil’, whether food and companionship will be freely offered in the spirit of hospitality and civility or jealously kept from intruders by drawn swords. In the egalitarian Welsh mountains, in contrast with Cymbeline’s court and the Italianate Rome of Iachimo and the ‘gentlemen of Italy’ (4.2.337), differences of rank and status are levelled. Imogen, touched by the gentle, courteous behaviour of her new companions, comments:Â€‘Gods, what lies I have heard! /Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court’ (4.2.32–3). The primitive simplicity of the mountain retreat, providing a space where virtue can flourish, free from the enervating effect of luxury, corruption, ‘the frown o’ th’great’, and ‘distinction /Of place ’tween high and low’ resembles the idealized vision of the early Roman republic, so prominent in the writings of the Roman historians. The ultimate leveller, the play makes clear, is death:Â€‘Mean and mighty rotting /Together have one dust’ (4.2.245–8, 263). In such a world, threatened by violent invasion and toughened by hardship and the proximity of death, the heroism of Livy’s Horatius at the bridge, Camillus recalled from exile, or Coriolanus at the walls of Corioli, is possible, as is the gallantry of two boys, an old man, and a ragged soldier saving their country in a narrow lane, demonstrating virtus in action while others flee.


In considering the relationship of Shakespeare’s plays to the republican tradition, two recent books argue opposite positions. Andrew Hadfield’s Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005) has been acclaimed by reviewers as ‘an important and even groundbreaking book … showing how significant and prevalent republican discourses were in the Elizabethan theater’.1 To Hadfield, Lucrece and Titus Andronicus demonstrate ‘Shakespeare’s decision to fashion himself as a republican author’. In Hadfield’s reading, the republican allegiances of the early Shakespeare are straightforward. ‘The most significant aspect’ of Titus Andronicus ‘is its republicanism’, and Lucrece’s resistance to Sextus Tarquinius illustrates ‘a political awakening’ on her part, the inevitable conclusion that the Romans ‘would be better off without kings ever again’. One work after another by Shakespeare and his contemporaries reveals ‘how clearly republicanism had set the political agenda in Shakespeare’s England’.2 A very different Shakespeare emerges from the essays in Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought (2009). In the editors’ introduction and in essays by Conal Condren, David Colclough, and Eric Nelson, Shakespeare is presented as deeply sceptical about some of the principal tenets of republican thought or even as hostile to republicanism. As Quentin Skinner says in the Afterword, ‘for Shakespeare … the world of politics and the life of virtue appear to be largely incompatible’. According to the introduction: It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare, refusing to commit clearly either to republican or monarchical government, was simply cynical about politics … What mattered was not any particular constitution but the patterns of conduct and value that should prevail.3

In some respects, these essays seek to uncouple two aspects of the republican tradition as they construct a pessimistic Shakespeare with attitudes akin to those of ‘black Tacitism’:Â€rejecting the view that individual liberty 244


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can best be preserved in a ‘free state’, while maintaining that in ‘a dangerous and corrupt political world’, the virtuous individual’s primary concerns must be ‘survival and self-interest’. Far from being a committed republican, the ‘unremittingly bleak’ Shakespeare of these essays does not appear to believe in anything, other than finding a temporary shelter from any storms one may encounter. To Colclough, writing of Julius Caesar: The absence of any common language or any solid premises to which characters may appeal calls into question the whole sphere of political life … Julius Caesar does not … treat seriously republican thought in either its Roman or its early modern manifestations. Instead … it ruthlessly exposes the limits on political advice and action.

To Nelson, racing through Titus Andronicus, Lucrece, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, the same pattern is repeated again and again, directly contrary to the pattern Hadfield purports to discover: The Shakespeare of the Roman plays … seems insistently to deny the orthodoxy that different constitutions yield different levels of virtue and greatness … Shakespeare offers a view of Roman history that dissolves the question of ‘the best state of a commonwealth’ … because he believes that the choice does not matter … Republicanism, as it appears in the Roman plays, is neither better nor worse than its ideological rivals. It is, on the contrary, just more of the same.4

What these two incompatible approaches have in common is their imposition of a single rigid pattern on a wide range of writing, underestimating differences among authors or within the body of work by a single author. In seeking to define the republican tradition, Hadfield lists a number of ‘issues’ central to ‘political discussion’ in the age of Shakespeare and Jonson: When one could resist a tyrant; whether hereditary monarchy was the best form of government; what were the effects of the rule of queens; who could and who should occupy political offices; how exactly the people at large should be represented by their rulers, and so on. (Shakespeare and Republicanism, p. 12)

In Hadfield’s summary, though not in his detailed discussion of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, and Julius Caesar, each of these political issues is formulated as a question, open to debate and discussion. The question of ‘when one can resist an tyrant’ is clearly relevant to Lucrece and Julius Caesar; the ‘rule of queens’ to Antony and Cleopatra and Titus Andronicus; representation of ‘the people at large’ to Coriolanus; but in none of these works is either a republican or an anti-republican agenda discernible. Shakespeare’s characteristic approach, as critics have often noted, is argument in utramque partem, an ‘unclosed argument’, ‘putting both

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sides of a case’, doing equal justice to each.5 In Coriolanus, 1.1, neither Menenius nor the disgruntled Roman citizens can be said to win the argument, and this is equally the case in the confrontation between Coriolanus and the citizens in the marketplace, with their incompatible assumptions about virtus and heroism, the responsibility of the individual to the commonwealth, and the roles of the senatorial class and the plebeians in the recently established Roman republic. Coriolanus, like Antony, is at war with himself, revealing potential fissures in the ideology of the Rome they have served on the battlefield. The impossibility of reconciling the competing claims of virtus and pietas, or in Antony and Cleopatra the claims of reason and impulse (‘A diminution of our captain’s brain /Restores his heart’, Enobarbus comments), makes a tragic outcome inevitable. A messenger from Rome, in the opening lines of Antony and Cleopatra, accuses Antony of ‘dotage’, a shameful decline from ‘the triple pillar of the world’ to becoming no better than ‘a strumpet’s fool’ (1.1.1, 12–13; 3.13.203–4); but hardly anyone encountering Shakespeare’s play is likely to accept this as the last word, an authorial perspective directing judgement on Antony and on Cleopatra, any more than we accept Malcolm’s ‘this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen’ (Macbeth, 5.9.36) as a final judgement on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, rather than as one possible perspective among many. As Falstaff says to Prince Hal at the end of what may be the most theatrically effective instance of argument in utramque partem in Shakespeare, ‘I have much to say on behalf of that Falstaff’ (1 Henry IV, 2.4.466). Argument in utramque partem allows for the possibility of treating any position with a degree of irony, as an instance of the power of self-delusion. Brutus’s ‘Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, /Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds’ is an attempt by Brutus to convince himself and his fellow conspirators that the proposed assassination of Caesar is honourable, dignified, an act of pietas, and a purgation ‘necessary’ for the health of the commonwealth (JC, 2.1.171–2, 177–9). Coriolanus’s ‘I banish you!’ is an attempt to assert the absolute sovereignty of the individual will, casting off all ties as impediments, to mask any recognition that for a Roman, bred in the tradition of virtus to serve the Roman commonwealth, defending it against its enemies, there is no ‘world elsewhere’ (Cor, 3.3.123, 135). Antony’s dying assertion that he ‘lived the greatest prince i’th’world, /The noblest’ and by his suicide retains his integrity as ‘a Roman by a Roman /Valiantly vanquished’ (AC, 4.15.56–60) reconfigures his death to make it far less messy and unheroic, more in accordance with the dominant ideology of Rome.


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Republican commonplaces serve a different function in Julius Caesar and in Sejanus. When Cassius, using the topos of a decline from the age of ‘our fathers’, a ‘breed of noble bloods’, attacks the adulation of ‘one man’, he is deploying a number of interrelated arguments to persuade Brutus to join the conspiracy: c a s s i u s. Why, man, he does bestride the narrow world Like a colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves. (â•›JC, 1.2.134–7, 147–52, 157)

Cassius is simultaneously invoking the principle of egalitarianism and patrician snobbery, in an appeal to family tradition and an idealized Roman past:Â€one reason the name of Brutus is at least ‘as fair’ (1.2.143) as that of Caesar is that Marcus Brutus had distinguished ancestors, where the earlier Julian line were nobodies. Republican principles, however strongly held, are in this passage intermingled with resentment. The Roman ideology of competitive emulation assumes that if ‘new honours … are heaped’ on one man, his peers and rivals are likely to feel themselves dishonoured, judged to be ‘petty men’, wretched creatures (1.2.115–18, 133). In Sejanus, Arruntius makes a number of similar assertions, but as an indication of shared allegiances, republican principles that his friends and associates accept as axiomatic: a r ru n t i u s. The men are not the same; ’tis we are base, Poor and degenerate from the exalted strain Of our great fathers.

To Arruntius, ‘the constant Brutus’ and ‘brave Cassius’, like ‘godlike Cato’, are heroes of liberty, resisting attempts to reduce free Romans to slavery, and Caesar, who ‘sought unkindly to captive his country’, is a ‘monster’ intent on doing ‘evil’ (Sejanus, 1.87–91, 93, 95–6, 104). Where Caesar’s potential tyranny in Shakespeare’s play is open to debateÂ€– ‘You all did see that on the Lupercal / I thrice presented him a kingly crown,â•›/ Which he did thrice refuse’Â€ – in Sejanus, the tyranny of Tiberius and Sejanus is demonstrated again and again in the action of the play. Silius’s complaint that the Romans, ‘betraying first our liberties’, have as a result ‘since become the slaves of one man’s lust’, is shown to be an accurate description of Tiberius’s Rome, a state where ‘no laws resist /The sword, but that it acteth what it list’.6 Sejanus, like Massinger’s The Roman Actor

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and Kyd’s Cornelia, is a play with a definite republican agenda, and as such it differs from all of Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Brutus’s ‘Th’abuse of greatness is when it disjoins /Remorse from power’ (JC, 2.1.18–19) is an axiom equally applicable to Julius Caesar and to Sejanus, but there is a difference between what might or might not happen and what has already happened, with damaging consequences. Roman republicanism, in the historical narratives of Tacitus and Sallust, and in such plays as Sejanus and The Roman Actor, tends to be nostalgic. Where Livy, writing about the early republic, depicts a ‘free state’ in which virtuous conduct is possible, presenting ‘lively examples’ by which a reader can ‘chuse for himselfe and his countrey what to follow’ and what to ‘eschew’, Tacitus depicts a Rome from which virtue, like justice, has fled:Â€‘As our ancestours attained and sawe the highest pitch and perfection of liberty, so we of servility.’ In the Tacitean Rome of Sejanus, The Tragedy of Nero, and The Roman Actor, ‘the lawes are silenc’d’, and Roman citizens, ‘deprived by intelligencers and spies of the commerce of hearing and speaking togither’, are unable ‘to speake our thought freely… / And not fear the informer’.7 Plays about Rome written during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, even when they depict life under tyranny as intolerable, rarely go further than to contrast a debased present with an idealized Roman past. Even The Roman Actor, which ends with the assassination of a terrified tyrant, brought down as a consequence of his own misdeeds, makes a distinction between ‘good Kings’, ‘mourn’d for after life’, and tyrants, ‘govern’d only by their will’, who like Domitian ‘die unlamented’ (5.2.90–3). Elizabethan and Jacobean plays which, unlike Julius Caesar, can be said to have an overt or hidden republican agenda, inveighing against the slavery endured by free-born Romans, do not argue a case for popular sovereignty or the right of resistance, or approach the radical, uncompromising republicanism of such writers as Milton, who in 1649 boldly asserts: That since the King or Magistrate holds his autoritie of the people, both originaly and naturally for their good in the first place, and not his own, then may the people, as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retaine him or depose him though no Tyrant, meerly by the liberty and right of free born Men to be govern’d as seems to them best.8

For Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists, the violent overthrow of a ‘Prince, /How ever wicked’ (The Roman Actor, 5.2.77–8) remained deeply problematical, to be approached with great caution in their plays.

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

I n t r oduc t ion:Â€a R om a n t houg h t Hunter, ‘A Roman Thought’, p. 94. McDonnell, Roman Manliness. On the Roman ‘ideology of masculinity’, see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare. Both episodes are in Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Book 8. On the ‘characteristic virtues of Rome’, as expressed by Livy and others, see P. G. Walsh, Livy, pp. 66–91; and Hunter, ‘A Roman Thought’, pp. 94–9. See the discussion in Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 47–51, 70–2. Hunter, ‘A Roman Thought’, p. 95. Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, pp. 33–54; cf. Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature, pp. 121–33. John Peacock, ‘The image of Charles I as a Roman emperor’, pp. 50–73. Jonson, Sejanus, ed. Ayres, I.102–3. Clifford Ronan, ‘Antike Roman’, pp. 165–85. Cf. Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700, 3rd edn. From information in a supplementary list of undated plays in the Annals, pp. 208–10, it is possible to add five more titles to Ronan’s list, making a total of fifty-four extant Roman plays. Examples of books with limited scope in defining the ‘Roman play’ include Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays (1961); Paul Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome (1976); J. L. Simmons, Shakespeare’s Pagan World (1973); and Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare’s Roman Worlds (1989). Exceptions include Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (1983), especially helpful on classical echoes in the plays; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, a wide-ranging study, feminist in approach, and Ronan, ‘Antike Roman’ (1995), with its listing of the forty-nine ‘Roman’ plays of the period.

C h a p t e r 1 :Â€R om a n h i s t or i a ns a n d t h e m y t h of Rom e 1 Jonson, ‘To the Memory of … Mr. William Shakespeare’, 31, in Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson; ‘L’Allegro’, 133, in Milton, Complete Shorter Poems. See Martindale and Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, pp. 1–7. 2 Richard Brinsley, Ludus Literarius (1612), quoted in Burrow, ‘Shakespeare and humanistic culture’, p. 12. 249

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Notes to pages 8–17

3 Baldwin, Small Latine, I.701; II.564–8, quoting Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570). 4 Martindale and Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, pp. 45–7. On Shakespeare and Ovid, see Baldwin, Small Latine, pp. 417–55; and Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 7–9, 19–25. 5 Martindale and Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, p. 11. 6 See Martindale and Martindale, p. 143; and Spencer, ‘Elizabethan Romans’, pp. 27–38, esp. 29. 7 Spencer, ‘Elizabethan Romans’, p. 32. On possible sources for Titus Andronicus, see Titus Andronicus, ed. Bate, pp. 83–92. 8 See Womersley, N&Q, 230 (1985), 468–73. 9 Livy, Romane Historie (1600), Book 2, p. 44. Cf. Brunt, Social Conflicts, pp. 45–7. 10 Brunt, Social Conflicts, pp. 1–5. 11 Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, Book VI, pp. 303, 308, 315, 318. 12 Livy, Romane Historie, Book 2, p. 74; Book 3, p. 133. 13 Cor, 1.1.14–20, 217–20. See Brunt, Social Conflicts, pp. 117–58. 14 See Appian, The Civil Wars, tr. Carter, pp. 5–16; and Crawford, Roman Republic, pp. 94–103, 107–12. 15 Velleius Paterculus, Res Gestae Dios Augustus, 2.6, p. 61; Crawford, Roman Republic, pp. 113–21; and Brunt, Social Conflicts, pp. 83–93. 16 Sallust, Warre of Jugurth, tr. Heywood (1608), chapter 13, p. 168; Appian, The Civil Wars, p. 16. 17 Fulbecke, Historicall Collection (1601), Sig. A2–A2v, pp. 1, 25, 170–1. On Fulbecke’s attempt ‘to make the progression of Roman history conform to the expectations of Tudor political doctrine’, see Hunter, ‘A Roman Thought’, p. 101. 18 Machiavelli, Discourses, I.4, pp. 113–15. 19 Discourses, I.37, pp. 201–4; cf. Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 17. 20 Discourses, III.24, pp. 473–4. 21 Syme, Roman Revolution, p. 38. Cf. Wells, Roman Empire, pp. 6–7, 50–8. 22 Res Gestae Divi Augusti, par. 34, p. 21; and the editors’ introduction, pp. 5, 8–16. 23 Tacitus, Annales, tr. Grenewey (London, 1598), Book 1, p. 1. Syme’s brilliant, influential Roman Revolution argues a similar thesis. 24 Virgil, Aeneid, 6.851–3; Res Gestae Divi Augusti pp. 18–19. Cf. Wells, Roman Empire, pp. 76–7. 25 Suetonius, Augustus, par. 28, Twelve Caesars, tr. Holland (1606), p. 88. See Favro, ‘Making Rome a World City’, pp. 243, 259, 261. 26 Tacitus, Annales, Book 1, pp. 2–3. Cf. Wells, Roman Empire, pp. 61–7. 27 Suetonius, Tiberius, par. 41–2, Twelve Caesars, pp. 170–1. 28 Tacitus, Fower Bookes, p. 3. 29 See Butler, ‘Romans in Britain’, pp. 139–70; and Bradford, ‘Stuart Absolutism and the “Utility” of Tacitus’, pp. 127–55. 30 Gibbon, Decline, I. 79.


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31 Burke, ‘Survey’, History and Theory, 5 (1966), pp. 149–51. On the changing reputation of Livy, Tacitus, and Sallust, 1470–1650, see also Osmond, ‘Sallust in Renaissance Political Thought’, pp. 101–39. 32 Montaigne, Essays, Book 3, Chapter 8, quoted in Burke, ‘Tacitism’, in Tacitus, p. 161. On the ‘political reading’ of Tacitus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Catalogus Translationum, VI.94–6. 33 See Bradford, ‘Stuart Absolutism’, pp. 128–9; and Burke, ‘Survey’, p. 150. 34 Quoted from the translation of Edmund Bohun (1685), in Bradford, ‘Stuart Absolutism’, p. 128. Cf. Smuts, ‘Court-centred Politics’, p. 25. 35 Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, tr. Stradling (1594), I.1, p. 72; ‘The Grassehopper’, 22, 37–40, in Lovelace, Poems. On Lipsius and contemplative retreat from a troubled world, see Røstvig, Happy Man, pp. 48–54, 126. 36 Womersley, ‘Savile’s Translation of Tacitus’, pp. 313–42, esp, 316; Smuts, ‘Court-centred Politics’, pp. 25–30; Conversations with Drummond, in Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, p. 603. 37 ‘To the Reader’, Tacitus, Fower Bookes, Sig. ٩3. 38 See Smuts, ‘Court-centred Politics’, pp. 29–31, 36–7; and Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, pp. 126–32. 39 Tacitus, Fower Bookes, p. 3. On ‘politic history’, see Bradford, ‘Stuart Absolutism’, pp. 132–5; and Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, pp. 249–51. 40 Tacitus, The Ende of Nero, pp. 1, 6–7. There is an excellent discussion of this passage in Womersley, ‘Savile’s Translation of Tacitus’, pp. 318–21. 41 Burke, ‘Tacitism’, pp. 162–5; Smuts, ‘Court-centred Politics’, pp. 28–9. 42 Smuts, ‘Court-centred Politics’, p. 35; The Ende of Nero, pp. 1–2; Fower Bookes, III.15, pp. 165–6. 43 Fower Bookes, I.1, p. 1. The passage is cited by the republican Leonardo Bruni in the fifteenth century:Â€see Burke, ‘Tacitism’, p. 163. 44 Fower Bookes, I.4, p. 12; I.21, pp. 51–2; Life of Agricola, Fower Bookes, pp.Â€237–8. 45 Warre of Jugurth, ch. 13, p. 167. 46 Cor, 2.1.118; 2.2.82, 102. On Roman virtue and masculinity, see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 15–19. 47 Sallust, Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 3, pp. 61, 63. Cf. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in Milton, CPW, III.190:Â€ ‘Hence it is that Tyrants are not oft offended, nor stand much in doubt of bad men, as being all naturally servile, but in whom vertue and true worth most is eminent, them they feare in earnest … against them lies all their hatred and suspicion.’ 48 Sallust, Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 3, pp. 61–2; Machiavelli, Discourses, II.2, p. 175. Cf. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 61–2; and Osmond, ‘Sallust and Machiavelli’, pp. 407–38. 49 Milton, letter to Henry de Brass, CPW, VII.500; First Defence, tr. S. L. Woolf, in Works, V.285. 50 Warre of Jugurth, ch. 20, pp. 189–90; ch. 30, p. 224; Shakespeare, Othello, 1.3.82–6.

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51 Warre of Jugurth, ch. 28, pp. 209, 211. For differing views, see Syme, Sallust, pp. 17–19, 166–76; and Earl, Political Thought, pp. 32–4, 68–73. 52 Warre of Jugurth, ch. 8, pp. 154–5. 53 Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 16, pp. 108–9, 110–11. On Sallust’s portrayal of Cato, see Earl, Political Thought, pp. 96–102; and Syme, Sallust, pp. 111–17. 54 Warre of Jugurth, ch. 28, pp. 211, 213. 55 Milton, Areopagitica, CPW, II.515; Readie and Easie Way, CPW, VII.458. 56 Livy, Romane Historie, Book 6, p. 216. 57 Livy, Romane Historie, Book 1, pp. 2, 3, 5. 58 Wiseman, Clio’s Cosmetics, p. 50; Prowse, ‘Livy and Macaulay’, in Livy, ed. Dorey, p. 161; Cornell, ‘Formation’, p. 83. 59 North, ‘Amiot to the Reader’, Plutarch’s Lives (1595), Sig. iiiv–*iiii. 60 Book 2, p. 52. On Roman virtus and stoic endurance of pain, see McDonnell, Roman Manliness, pp. 29–31, 301. 61 See Cornell, Beginnings of Rome, pp. 309–20. 62 On the figure of Coriolanus and Shakespeare’s use of Livy in Coriolanus, see Chapter 7. 63 Book 5, p. 210; Book 6, p. 213. On Manlius’s outstanding valour, see McDonnell, Roman Manliness, pp. 119, 196. 64 See Cornell, Beginnings of Rome, pp. 330–1; and Book 6, p. 231. 65 Book 6, pp. 225, 226; see Wiseman, Clio’s Cosmetics, pp. 24–6, 36–7; and Cornell, Beginnings of Rome, pp. 242–5, 327–33. 66 Book 6, pp. 20–1. 67 Gabriel Harvey comments on this passage, ‘A wise oration of Hannibal’s. Full of sagacity, tried and tested, and maturely reflected upon … The spirit of youthful courage is one thing; that of mature prudence, another; that of old age’s temperance, yet another. Each has its own diction, its own style’:Â€see Jardine and Grafton, ‘How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, pp. 58–9. 68 Polybius, Rise of the Roman Empire, Book I, p. 41. 69 Jardine and Grafton, ‘How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, pp. 36, 56, 66. Latin passages in Harvey’s annotations of Livy are translated by Jardine and Grafton. 70 Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, p. 44. 71 Jardine and Grafton, ‘How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, pp. 77, 73. 72 Machiavelli, Discourses, III.8, p. 426; on Manlius, cf. ibid., I.8, pp. 128–31. 73 Discourses, Preface to Book I, p. 99; III.5, pp. 395–6. For the differing treatment of the exclusion of Tarquin in Shakespeare and other authors, see Chapter 2. C h a p t e r 2 :Â€T h e w r ong e d L uc r e t i a a n d t h e e a r ly r e p u blic 1 No English translation of the Fasti existed in the sixteenth century. Colin Burrow has argued that Shakespeare may have used an edition of Ovid’s Fasti with commentary by Paulus Marsus, frequently reprinted in the


2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19

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sixteenth century, which includes extensive quotations from Livy on the same page as Ovid’s text:Â€ see Burrow ed. Complete Sonnets and Poems, pp. 48–50. Shakespeare could have consulted Livy, like Ovid, in Latin, though a translation was available in Painter’s Pallace of Pleasure (1566). ‘The Argument’, Lucrece, in Burrow ed. Complete Sonnets and Poems, pp. 240–2. James Tolbert in ‘The Argument of Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, pp. 77–90, argues that the discrepancies suggest an author other than Shakespeare for the Argument, Livy, Romane Historie, tr. Holland, Book I, p. 40. In Ovid, the episode is expanded, to show Lucretia not only as virtuously engaged in domestic pursuits but as weeping for the absence of her husband. Burrow ed., Lucrece, 16–19, 33–5. See the discussion in Vickers, ‘Blazon of sweet beauty’s best’, pp. 95–115; and Dubrow, Captive Victors, pp. 84–7. Burrow ed., Complete Sonnets and Poems, pp. 50–2. Cf. Livy, Romane Historie, Book I, p. 42; and Ovid, Fasti, II.851–2. Ovid, like Livy, specifically refers to the change of government to consuls, elected annually. Machiavelli, Discourses, III.5, p. 395. Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia, pp. 8–9, 103–6, 113. On the variant versions of the myth of Lucretia and the question of whether it is a ‘story about rape, or about liberty’, see Complete Sonnets and Poems, pp. 45–50. Macbeth, 2.1.55; Julius Caesar, 2.1.53–4. In Cymbeline, Iachimo compares himself to Sextus Tarquinius:Â€‘Our Tarquin thus /Did softly press the rushes, ere he wakened /The chastity he wounded’ (Cymbeline, 2.2.12–14). See Belsey, ‘Rape of Lucrece’, pp. 90–2, 95. Titus Andronicus, 3.1.299; 4.1.89–93. The other two passages explicitly present the rape of Lavinia as a re-enactment of the rape of Lucrece: ‘Lucrece was not more chaste /Than this Lavinia, Bassianus’ love’ (2.1.109–10); and ‘As Tarquin erst, /That left the camp to sin in Lucrece’ bed’ (4.1.63–4). See Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia, pp. 13–20. Lucrece, 735, 743; Donaldson, Rapes of Lucretia, pp. 63–71. Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus, p. xii. See Romane Historie, Book II, pp. 46–7, bringing out how the father ‘was forced of necessitie to be the principal actor in this tragicall execution’. Machiavelli, Discourses, III.3, pp. 392–3. Heywood, Rape of Lucrece (1608), Sig. A3, A3v. Heywood, Rape of Lucrece, Sig. C4v. Livy presents Tarquin as seeking ‘to sit safely in his seat by servile feare and dread’ and as abandoning ‘the custome of consulting with the Senate in all matters’ (Romane Historie, Book I, p. 35). On the politics of Heywood’s play, with possible topical allusions associating Tarquin with the court of James I, see Paulina Kewes, ‘Roman History’, pp. 259–63. Fletcher, Tragedy of Valentinian, 3.1.32–4, 91–4. Lucina’s Rape, 5.5, 165–6, 170–5, in Rochester, Complete Poems and Plays.

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20 Livy, Romane Historie, Book III, pp. 116–17; Webster, Appius and Virginia, 5.3.168–71, 174–7, in Works, Vol. II. The play, according to the editors of the Cambridge edition, may be a collaboration between Webster and Heywood. 21 Livy, Romane Historie, Book III, p. 117; Webster, Appius and Virginia, 3.3.71–7. See Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 36–47. Skinner uses the term ‘neo-Roman’ rather than ‘republican’ to describe this tradition in the Renaissance. 22 Titus Andronicus, 5.3.35–51. On the explicit parallels of the rape and death of Lavinia and the myths of Lucrece and Virginia, see the editor’s introduction, Titus Andronicus, ed. Bate, pp. 90–2; and my discussion in Chapter 3. 23 In the Tudor interlude Apius and Virginia (1575), Virginia asks her father to kill her and send her severed head to Apius, thus preserving her honour ‘undefiled’:Â€ ‘Thou knowest, O my father, if I be once spotted, /My names and my kindred then forth will be blotted … /Then rather, deare father, if it be thy pleasure, /Graunt me the death; then keepe I my treasure’:Â€ lines 795–800, in Tudor Interludes, ed. Happé. On Virginius as patriarchal tyrant, see Arnold, The Third Citizen, pp. 127–31. 24 King Lear, 1.1.148–9; Appius and Virginia, 1.3.87, 110, 113, 117–18, 131. On Jacobean topical allusions in Appius and Virginia, see the editor’s notes in Webster, Works, II.443–5, 468–72, 474. For Massinger, see Chapter 8. 25 Ovid, Fasti, II.792, 804, p. 115. On the blazon and voyeurism, see Vickers, ‘Blazon of sweet beauty’s best’, pp. 103–7; and Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 71–3, 80. There is no equivalent passage in Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece. 26 See Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 35–6. As Catherine Belsey points out, Shakespeare’s text differs from most other versions in making it clear that Lucrece ‘does not consent to the rape’:Â€see ‘Tarquin Dispossessed’, p. 329. 27 Heywood gives Lucrece two speeches decrying Sextus’s ‘shame’ and ‘sinne’, but immediately before and after the rape, Lucrece is given nothing to say other than ‘Oh!’ (Heywood, Rape of Lucrece, Sig. G2v, G3, G3v). On the way Shakespeare departs from his sources in Lucrece’s eloquence at this point in the poem, see Berry, ‘Woman, Language, and History’, pp. 33–4. 28 See Dubrow, Captive Victors, pp. 143–51; and Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, pp. 104–8, 113–17. 29 Saint Augustine, The City of God, I.24. Cf. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, pp. 36–9; and Kahn, ‘The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, pp. 62–3. 30 See Kahn, ‘The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, pp. 47–67; and Belsey, ‘Rape of Lucrece’, pp. 93–8. 31 On the myth of Philomel and ‘shared emotion’, see Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 75–7. For interpretations of the myth of Philomel as representing alternative traditions of female resistance, see Newman, ‘Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece’, pp. 304–26; and Joplin, ‘Voice of the Shuttle’, pp. 35–64. 32 In Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece, Brutus exacts the oath before Lucrece kills herself, in keeping with his dominant role in this scene and in the play generally.


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33 Romane Historie, Book I, p. 42; Lucrece, 1841, 1852. The Argument is much closer to Livy, specifically referring to the change in government from kings to consuls. 34 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics, pp. 116–17. Cf. Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. 133–53. 35 Nass, ‘Law and Politics’, pp. 291, 300, 302. 36 Berry, ‘Woman, Language, and History’, p. 34. Cf. Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines, pp. 307–12. 37 Michael Platt, Rome and Romans, pp. 16–20. Eric Nelson in a recent essay, noting the discrepancy between poem and Argument, draws the unwarranted conclusion that in this poem and elsewhere, Shakespeare is ‘highly dubious that constitutional form matters much at all, either for Rome or for any other commonwealth’:Â€ ‘Shakespeare and the best state of a commonwealth’, pp. 256–60. 38 Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, pp. 25–9; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, p. 33. 39 Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 27, 37–8; Newman, ‘Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, p. 305. Oliver Arnold in The Third Citizen argues that Lucrece can be read as an anti-republican poem, presenting ‘the origin of Roman republicanism as an act of bad faith’, in which Brutus turns Lucrece’s justified desire for revenge into an excuse for political rebellion (pp. 123–7). 40 Jed, Chaste Thinking, pp. 10–11; and Newman, ‘Philomela, Female Violence, and Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, pp. 317–18. Jed’s study does not treat Shakespeare’s poem, but the myth of Lucretia in its origins and in several texts of Renaissance Italy. 41 Only Shakespeare has Lucrece delay in naming Tarquin until after her kinsmen are bound by an oath in ‘knighthood’ and honourÂ€– possibly aware that they might be reluctant to act against a powerful adversary. 42 Cf. Belsey, ‘Tarquin Dispossessed’, pp. 327–33; and Complete Sonnets and Poems, pp. 66–73.

1 2 3 4 5

6

C h a p t e r 3:Â€S e l f -i n f lic t e d w ou n d s Lodge, Wounds of Civil War (1594), pp. xii–iii; Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 970–1700, pp. 54–5. Appian, Auncient Historie (1578), title page, Sig. Aii. Tacitus, Fower Bookes, II.15, p. 76; North, ‘Life of Caius Marius’, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 451. On ‘the presence of Tamburlaine’ in Lodge’s play, see Hunter, English Drama 1586–1642, pp. 56–9. Appian, Auncient Historie, pp. 43, 45. Cf. Wounds, 4.1. 197–202:Â€‘That Scilla with his friends, allies and all, /Are banish’d exiles, traitors unto Rome; /And to extinguish both his name and state, /We will his house be razed to the ground, /His goods confiscate.’ Appian, Auncient Historie, pp. 37, 38.

256


7 Tacitus, Fower Bookes, p. 75. 8 Titus Andronicus, 4.2.18–28. The passage is discussed in Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, p. 47. In the 1594 Quarto, the Folio, and most modern editions, there is an act division at Aaron’s soliloquy (1.1.500–24 in Bate, 2.1.1–25 in other editions). I follow these editions rather than Bate in all references to 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4. 9 On parallels with The Spanish Tragedy, see Bate’s introduction, p. 30; Hunter, English Drama 1586–1642, pp. 86–92; and Dillon, Cambridge Introduction, pp. 25–6, 31–2. 10 Waith, ‘Metamorphosis of Violence’, pp. 39–49; Brower, Hero & Saint, p. 74. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, sees the play’s ‘aggressive imitations’ as constituting ‘a critique of imperial Rome on the eve of its collapse’ (p. 42). 11 Spencer, ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’, p. 32. 12 Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, VI.35, 38–9. On the relationship between chap-book and play, see Bate’s introduction, pp. 83–7. 13 Edward Hellowes, A Chronicle (1577), pp. 330–71. See Spencer, ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’, pp. 31–2. 14 Andrew Hadfield in Shakespeare and Republicanism makes heavy weather of this opening scene, with its rival claimants to power, arguing that the play is a ‘republican morality tale, warning of the dangers of tyranny and the problem of the inevitable decline of republics’, and that it shows that ‘a more constitutional form of government … would be of benefit to any regime’ (pp. 156–7, 165–6). 15 Titus Andronicus, 1.1.39, 42, 45. For evidence of Peele’s authorship of Act I, see Brian Boyd, ‘Common Words in Titus Andronicus’; Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, pp. 166–84, 210–43; and the review of Shakespeare, Co-Author by Jonathan Bate, TLS, 18 April 2003. 16 I follow Bate’s text in assigning the first speech to Marcus and the second to a Roman Lord, with lines 87–94 spoken by Marcus. The 1594 Quarto gives all of lines 72–94 to a ‘Romane Lord ’ and the Folio assigns 72–94, confusingly, to a ‘Goth’. 17 This is the penultimate line in Q2 and the Folio, omitted in Q1 and in Bate’s text. Critics who find something positive in Lucius’s accession as emperor include Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, pp. 68–72. Critics who see the play as pessimistic include James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 79–84. 18 There is an excellent commentary on these lines in Francis Barker, Culture of Violence, pp. 146–9. 19 Rhodes, ‘Shakespeare the Barbarian’, p. 100; cf. Barker, Culture of Violence, pp. 147–51, 193–4. 20 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 52–5, 235. On the clash of ‘familial and civil values’ in this episode, see Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, pp. 46–50. 21 King Lear, 1.1.114, 264–6, 294–5; H. R. Woudhuysen, TLS, 22 May 1987; Brian Cox in Players of Shakespeare 3, p. 181. 22 Brian Cox, pp. 178, 180; Alan C. Dessen, SQ, 39 (1988), 224. 23 Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, II.27; Waith, ‘Metamorphosis of Violence’, p. 39.


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24 James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 60–3. Waith calls this ‘the most unpalatable passage in the play’, in which ‘the suffering becomes an object of contemplation’ (‘Metamorphosis of Violence’, p. 47). In the celebrated Peter Brook production of 1955, this entire 47-line speech was omitted, and in other productions it has been cut radically. 25 On Saturninus and injustice, see Lorna Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, pp.Â€96–7; and Karen Cunningham, ‘Scars Can Witness’, pp. 68–72. 26 Heather James comments that Marcus ‘has no way to know if his speech gives even a partial voice to Lavinia’s mind’ (Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 67–8). James and Kahn see the attempts of Marcus and Titus to translate Lavinia’s gestures into their own terms as ‘appropriative and colonizing’, instances of ‘the erasure of the feminine in patriarchy’ (Roman Shakespeare, p. 58). 27 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.515, 533, 537, 547, 574–86. For commentary on Shakespeare’s use of the Ovidian story, see Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, pp.Â€59–61; and Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 63–7. 28 Antony Sher and Gregory Doran, Woza Shakespeare, p. 213. 29 Rhodes, ‘Shakespeare the Barbarian’, pp. 108–9; cf. Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, p. 90. 30 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 6.619–47. Line 192 in Titus Andronicus is a close translation of Metamorphoses, 6.647. 31 See Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 70–2. 32 Players 3, p. 177. 33 Players 3, p. 188; Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, p. 71. C h a p t e r 4 :Â€‘ L I K E A C O L O S S U S ’:Â€J u li u s C a e s a r 1 Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 77–8, 83–5. 2 K. Burke, ‘Antony on behalf of the play’, p. 338. On Brutus’s oration, cf. Julius Caesar, ed. Daniell, pp. 55–6. 3 2.1.78, 131–2, 165. On Brutus’s rhetoric in Julius Caesar as an attempt to ‘reshape reality’, see Greene, ‘Language of Tragedy in Julius Caesar’, pp.Â€67–93. 4 Mommsen, History of Rome, V.305–8, 713. See the discussion of Mommsen’s account of Caesar as ‘unique and visionary political genius’ in Wyke, Caesar, pp. 164–8. 5 Gundolf, Mantle of Caesar, p. 9; cf. Wyke, Caesar, pp. 171–2. 6 Wyke, pp. 172–80; cf. pp. 82–8. 7 Wyke, pp. 227–9. On Welles’s production, see Ripley, Julius Caesar on Stage, pp. 222–32. 8 Dante, Inferno, canto 34, 61–7; Paradiso, canto 6, 55–81. 9 Gundolf, Mantle of Caesar, pp. 125–32; Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, pp. 29–30, 34–40. 10 Clarke, Noblest Roman, p. 88. 11 Thomas May, Lucan’s Pharsalia (1627), Book 2, Sig. C3v. 12 Quint, Epic and Empire, p. 133. On Lucan and the English republican tradition, see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, pp. 23–40.

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13 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.10, 1.17, pp. 135–6, 158; Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, I.83, 161–2. 14 Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, p. 8; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, p. 37. Harrington, like Machiavelli, sees Caesar as worse than Catiline. 15 Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey (1607), ed. Boas, ll. 1, 8, 2549–54. 16 On the inconsistency of the treatment of Caesar in The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, see Schanzer, Problem Plays of Shakespeare, pp. 20–2. 17 Chapman, Caesar and Pompey (1631), Sig. B1–B1 v, K1. 18 Ibid., Sig. A4v, B4, B4v, C3, E3. On the presentation of Caesar, Pompey, and Cato in Chapman’s play, see Lever, The Tragedy of State, pp. 70–5. 19 Chapman, Caesar and Pompey, Sig. F4, G1v. Chapman is following Plutarch’s Life of Pompey in his emphasis on the overconfidence of Pompey’s army and the multiple omens forecasting Caesar’s victory. 20 Thomas Kyd, Cornelia, Act 4, Sig. H1, H1v. On republican motifs in Cornelia, see Perry, ‘Uneasy Republicanism of Thomas Kyd’s Cornelia’, pp. 535–55. 21 The lines are an accurate translation of a passage in Garnier (1573). Garnier, a Catholic but not a courtier and associated with the moderate politiques, wrote Cornélie a year after the St Bartholomew Massacre. His preface speaks of Cornélie as ‘propre aux malheurs de nostre siècle’, but its statement of the play’s subject matter as ‘une grande République, rompue par l’ambicieux discord de ses Citoyens’ seems at variance with the play’s positive treatment of tyrannicide. In a later play, he urges non-resistance to a bad king. See Jondorf, Robert Garnier, pp. 33–4, 43–6; McGowan, ‘Presence of Rome’, pp. 12–29; and Robert Garnier, Cornélie, pp. 3–4, 11. 22 Cornelia Act 4, Sig. F4v, G1, G2, G3v, G4v. Cf. Julius Caesar, 1.2.82, 85; and 2.1.10–12:Â€‘For my part /I know no personal cause to spurn at him /But for the general’. Caesar is treated as a tyrant in Alexander’s Tragedie of Julius Caesar:Â€ see the discussion in Paulina Kewes, ‘Julius Caesar in Jacobean England’, pp. 157–60. 23 North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 765. 24 On the use of proper names, especially the name ‘Caesar’, in Shakespeare’s play, see Doran, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language, pp. 120–53. 25 1.2.97, 100–15; North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 1056. The swimming incident was invented by Shakespeare. Plutarch presents Caesar as a strong swimmer. 26 North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 1070. Cf. King Lear, 1.2.118–26. 27 On the ‘varied and divided views of Caesar’ presented in the play, see Wilders, Lost Garden, pp. 91–2; and Schanzer, Problem Plays, pp. 24–36. 28 North, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 786–7. 29 Doran, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language, p. 77. 30 On Welles’s production, see John Houseman, Run-through, pp. 298, 313; and Ripley, Julius Caesar on Stage, pp. 222–9. See reviews of the Nunn and Daniels productions by Michael Billington, Guardian, 4 May 1972 and 31 March 1983.


259

31 On Warner’s modern dress production, see Rutter, ‘Facing History’, pp.Â€71–85; and reviews and interviews by Patrick Marmion, Times, 9 April 2005; and Benedict Nightingale, Times, 18 April 2005. 32 Macbeth, 1.7.12–20; Julius Caesar, 1.2.116. 33 Miola, ‘Tyrannicide Debate’, pp. 274–5. 34 North, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 1061–2. In Plutarch, the debate over whether or not to kill Antony comes after the assassination. 35 Ripley, Julius Caesar on Stage, pp. 68, 128–9. Ripley is describing celebrated nineteenth-century performances. 36 For Nunn’s production, see reviews by Irving Wardle, Times, 4 April 1972; Michael Billington, Guardian, 4 April 1972; and Peter Thomson, SS, 26 (1972), 145. 37 Rutter, ‘Facing History’, pp. 72–5. The Warner production’s treatment of Brutus is in keeping with the tendency of twentieth-century critics to treat Brutus with hostility, even disdain:Â€see, e.g., Wayne Rebhorn’s ‘Crisis of the Aristocracy’ (1990), pp. 78–96. 38 Appian devotes three books to the aftermath of the assassination and, in the Penguin translation, fewer than twenty-five pages in Book II to the assassination itself. See Appian, Civil Wars. 39 On the pivotal role of this speech in the play’s structure, see Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, pp. 114–16; and Burke, ‘Antony on Behalf of the Play’, p. 341. 40 The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, ll. 1975, 2095–6, 2281. 41 3.2.193–200. In the play-text of Orson Welles’s production, the director carefully choreographed the responses of the crowd, assigning speeches to a dozen actors by name, with instructions on dynamics and tempo. See Orson Welles on Shakespeare, ed. France, pp. 142–52. 42 Houseman, Run-through, p. 308; Rutter, ‘Facing History’, p. 83; Benedict Nightingale, Times, 18 April 2005. 43 See reviews by Irving Wardle, Times, 10 April 1987; Peter Thomson, SS, 10 (1972), 146; and Michael Billington, Guardian, 7 July 1995. 44 Greene identifies the rhetorical device of ironic negation as paralypsis, ‘disclaiming the very things the speaker wishes to emphasize’ (‘Language of Tragedy’, p. 87). See also K. Burke, ‘Antony on Behalf of the Play’, pp. 338–9. 45 Rutter, ‘Facing History’, p. 83. 46 On the two-part structure, see Schanzer, Problem Plays, pp. 65–70; Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, pp. 105–19; and Jones, Scenic Form, pp. 76–8, 106–13. 47 The scene is singled out for praise by Dryden, Theobald, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and A. C. Bradley, among others. Johnson, who described the scene as ‘universally celebrated’, saw it as ‘somewhat cold and unaffecting’:Â€see Julius Caesar, New Variorum edition, pp. 201–3, 420; and Ripley, Julius Caesar on Stage, pp.Â€3–4. 48 On the quarrel scene and Brutus’s ‘tragic disillusion’, see Schanzer, Problem Plays, pp. 63–6; and MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays, pp. 255–67.

260


49 On misjudgement as a recurrent motif in Julius Caesar, see Donaldson, ‘â•›“Misconstruing Everything”â•›’, pp. 93–9. 50 5.5.57–8, 77–80; North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 1066. The details of Brutus’s death are also drawn from North’s Plutarch. 51 On the politics of Julius Caesar in relation to the tradition of arguing in utramque partem, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’ pp. 102–5; and Rebecca Bushnell, ‘Julius Caesar’.

1 2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

C h a p t e r 5:Â€Be n Jons on ’s R om e ‘Apologetical Dialogue’, 88–94, in Poetaster, ed. Cain. On the War of the Theatres, see Poetaster, ed. Cain, pp. 30–6. Jonson’s text indicates that the satiric characters wore contemporary costume, though it is possible that, as in the well-known 1595 drawing of Titus Andronicus, the characters wore a mixture of stage-Roman and Elizabethan dress. Poetaster, Induction, 25; 5.3.136; ‘Conversations with Drummond’, in Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, p. 600. On parallels between the literary careers of Jonson and Horace, see Riggs, Ben Jonson, pp. 76–7; Maus, Ben Jonson, pp. 9–10; and Poetaster, ed. Cain, pp. 10–12. Isobel Rivers, Poetry of Conservatism, p. 26; Poetaster, 5.3.604. Riggs sees the action of the play as ‘Jonson’s fantasy of self-vindication’ (Ben Jonson, p. 77). Jonson’s highly critical view of the later years of Elizabeth’s reign is discussed in Tom Cain, ‘Jonson’s Humanist Tragedies’, which he has generously shown me in advance of publication. Thomas Dekker, Satiro-mastix; or The untrussing of the Humorous Poet (1602), Sig. L4. In the play, the Jonson figure is humiliated, punished severely by several of the characters he invented in Poetaster. Poetaster, 1.2.73, 137, 232, 255; 3.1.249. Poetaster, 4.6.61–2, 73–4; 4.10.96; 5.3.43–4, 57–8. On Ovid and Horace in Poetaster, see Poetaster, ed. Cain, pp. 4–7, 19–23; and Haynes, Social Relations, pp. 78–86. Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, pp. 523, 554. The first of these passages is translated from the humanist Vives and the second adapted from Lipsius. ‘An Epistle to Master John Selden’, 19–22; Discoveries, pp. 524–5. Discoveries, pp. 552–3; Sejanus His Fall, 1.27–31. Both passages are adapted from Seneca, the first from De Clementia and the second (identified by Jonson in a marginal citation) from De Beneficiis. ‘Parallels between ancient and modern worlds’ in Sejanus and other works by Jonson are discussed in Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, pp. 67, 89; and in Cain’s ‘Jonson’s Humanist Tragedies’. Discoveries, p. 542; ‘To the Readers’, Sejanus, ed. Ayres, pp. 51–2. On the first page of the Quarto, there are nine marginal notes, extending the full length of the page:Â€see Sejanus His Fall (1605), Sig. B1.


261

12 Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, p. 79; ‘Induction’ to Poetaster, 67–70. Annabel Patterson, discussing the preface to Sejanus, argues that an author’s ‘disclaimers of topical intention are not to be trusted, and are more likely to be entry codes to precisely that kind of reading they protest against’:Â€Censorship and Interpretation, pp. 50–8. 13 ‘Epistle to Katherine, Lady Aubigny’, 9–10; in Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson; Martin Butler, ‘Servant but not Slave’, p. 84. 14 ‘On The New Inn. Ode. To Himself’, 1–2, 41; ‘An Ode. To Himself’, 16–18; ‘Epistle to Katherine, Lady Aubigny’, 1–2, 55–6. Cf. Barish, Antitheatrical Prejudice, pp. 132–54. 15 ‘An Ode. To Himself’, 31–6; ‘Apologetical Dialogue’, Poetaster, 225–6; Sejanus, 4.137. Cf. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, pp. 52–5, 120–2, 126–35. 16 Maus, Ben Jonson, pp. 3–5. On Stoic ethics in Jonson, see Rivers, Poetry of Conservatism, pp. 26–33. 17 ‘Epistle to Katherine, Lady Aubigny’, 61–8; ‘To William, Earl of Pembroke’, 1–20. Passages imitated from Seneca include lines 3–4, 9–10, 13, and 16:Â€see notes in Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, p. 662. 18 On the ‘bipartite’ structure common in satire, see Randolph, ‘Structural Design’. 19 Areopagitica, in Milton, CPW, 2.514; Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Oakeshott, Part I, chapter 6, p. 32. 20 Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, p. 221; Riggs, Ben Jonson, pp. 226, 231. 21 ‘Conversations’, Ben Jonson, pp. 607, 609; Loewenstein, ‘Script in the Marketplace’, pp. 265–78. 22 Riggs, Ben Jonson, pp. 232, 234; Evans, Ben Jonson, p. 117. On the emphasis on ‘Jonson the place-seeker’ in recent New Historicist criticism, see Butler, ‘Servant but not Slave’, pp. 67–8; and essays in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. Bevington and Holbrook. 23 Fish, ‘Authors-Readers’,Â€pp. 243, 262. 24 Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 175–80, 314, in Jonson, Complete Masques, ed. Orgel. On the political context of Neptune’s Triumph, see Orgel, Illusion of Power, pp. 70–7. In his important recent book, Martin Butler sees Neptune’s Triumph as an unsuccessful attempt to paper over disagreements between the King and Prince Charles about relations with Spain:Â€see Stuart Court Masque, pp. 264–71. On the ‘admonitory’ elements in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, see Marcus, Politics of Mirth, pp. 106–27; and Butler, Stuart Court Masque, pp. 230–5. 25 Oberon, 261–6. See the discussion in Orgel, Illusion of Power, pp. 66–70. As Butler points out, in Oberon praise of the King is balanced against praise of Prince Henry, heir to the throne, ‘to accommodate father and son in a common mythology with space for acknowledging each other’s status’ (The Stuart Court Masque, p. 191). 26 See Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, pp. 42–51; and Cogswell, Blessed Revolution, pp. 13–19.

262


27 Butler, ‘Servant but not Slave’, p. 69. Cf. Orgel, Illusion of Power, pp. 40–3. 28 The Golden Age Restored, 214, 218; Marcus, Politics of Mirth, pp. 120–1. Cf. Butler, Stuart Court Masque, pp. 234–5, on how Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue reflected a competition for royal favour in James’s court. 29 Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 141, 314; A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 769–70. 30 ‘Conversations’, Ben Jonson, p. 602; Sejanus, p. 52. The ‘second pen’, coauthor of the 1603–4 version, may have been George Chapman, author of a commendatory poem nearly 200 lines long:Â€ see ibid., pp. 52–63. On the ‘highly distinctive’ character of the Sejanus Quarto as a text proclaiming its differences from the play as performed, see John Jowett, ‘“Fall before this Booke”:Â€The 1605 Quarto of Sejanus’, TEXT, 4 (1988), 279–95. 31 ‘For his worthy friend, the Author’, 5, 11–14; ‘To him that hath so excelled’, 11, Sejanus, pp. 63–8. See Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, pp. 49–58. 32 Annales, IV.1, p. 89. 33 Sejanus, 2.150–4, 160–2; Annales, IV.1, p. 89; IV.9, p. 102. In this passage, Jonson is imitating Seneca’s Thyestes and in the final couplet, Petronius:Â€see Sejanus, pp. 119–20. 34 The speech paraphrases lines in Lucan’s Pharsalia, Book 8, in which the villainous Pothinus urges Ptolemy to murder Pompey:Â€see notes in Sejanus, ed. Ayres, p. 121. 35 See Edward II, ed. Richard Rowland, in Marlowe, Complete Works, III. xix–xxiv. 36 George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho, ed. Van Fossen, 1.2.40–2; 4.1.197–8; and pp. 220–4. 37 Edward II, 1.101; 2.50; Richard II, 3.4.34–5, 47, 55. On ‘tyrannical absolutism’ in Sejanus, see Perry, Literature and Favoritism, pp. 245–8. 38 Machiavelli, Discourses, III.6, p. 404. 39 Since there is a gap in the manuscript of Tacitus’s Annals in the passages relating Sejanus’s fall from power, Macro plays a less prominent role in Tacitus. Jonson’s primary sources for Macro’s character and role as servant of arbitrary power, as indicated in his marginal notes, are Cassius Dio and Suetonius. Cassius Dio is the principal source for Act 5 of Sejanus and, as with Tacitus earlier, Jonson follows his source closely. 40 Tacitus, Agricola, pp. 237–8. Cf. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp.Â€36–47, 90–2; and Perry, Literature and Favoritism, pp. 235–7. 41 On the trial of Cremutius Cordus, see Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, pp. 52–6; and Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, pp. 76–80. 42 In presenting the patently unjust trial and condemnation of Silius and Cremutius Cordus, Jonson follows Tacitus closely, paraphrasing Cordus’s speech in defence of the historian’s liberty in Sejanus, 3.407–60:Â€cf. Tacitus, Annales, IV.8, pp. 100–2. The key scene in Act 3 where Tiberius turns against Sejanus is also imitated from Tacitus. 43 At about the time that Jonson was writing Sejanus, he received payment from Henslowe for a play, ‘Richard Crookback’, now lost.


263

44 Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 58, tr. Cary, VII.211–15. The account in Cassius Dio differs from Jonson in having Tiberius send earlier messages of ambiguous import, causing Sejanus to be ‘in constant suspense’ about the emperor’s attitude. 45 See Tacitus, Annales, IV.15, p. 114:Â€‘Tiberius of all his vertues was fond of none so much as of his dissimulation:Â€and therefore disliked much that he shuld be urged to disclose that which he went about to conceale.’ In Greg Doran’s RSC production, this aspect of Tiberius was brought out particularly strongly:Â€see Michael Billington’s review, Guardian, 28 July 2005. 46 Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, pp. 181, 186–7; Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, p. 82. 47 Ayres sees these lines as ‘crucial’, expressing Jonson’s own ‘fatalism’ and adherence to the ‘orthodox Elizabethan attitude’ toward monarchy (Sejanus, ed. Ayres, pp. 34–6). Perry, on the other hand, characterizes such passages as a ‘nod toward Elizabethan orthodoxy’, rather than expressing Jonson’s own political convictions (Literature and Favoritism, p. 244). 48 Milton, CPW, 3.212. The view of Sejanus as ‘arguing against tyranny’ in the tradition of counsel to princes is developed in Cain, ‘Jonson’s Humanist Tragedies’ and in Worden, ‘Ben Jonson among the Historians’, pp. 81–9. Perry in Literature and Favoritism sees Sejanus as deeply pessimistic in its presentation of the workings of ‘absolute power’ in a state in which ‘the old liberties have already been lost’ (pp. 247–8). 49 North, ‘Amiot to the Reader’, Plutarch’s Lives (1595), Sig. *iiiv–iiii; Sejanus, 4.298; Sir John Holles in 1610 on how he found ‘Tacitus his opinion confirmed’, in Smuts, ‘Court-centred Politics’, p. 35. See the discussion of ‘red’ and ‘black’ Tacitism in Chapter 1. 50 Catiline, ed. Bolton and Gardner, pp. 3–4. 51 See Osmond and Ulery, ‘Constantius Felicius Durantinus’; and Blair Worden, ‘Politics in Catiline’. 52 Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 2, p. 59. 53 Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 3, p. 64; Warre of Jugurth, p. 167. See the Â�discussion of Sallust’s myth of the decline of Rome and the historian’s later influence in Chapter 1. 54 Paradise Regained, IV,132–42. On Milton and Sallust, see Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in Milton and Republicanism, pp. 22–3. 55 Catiline, 3.5.52, 59–60, 63–4. Cf. Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 3, pp. 65–7. 56 See Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, pp. 61–4; and Armitage, ‘John Milton’, pp. 208–11. 57 Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 7, p. 75. 58 Sonnet 12, ‘I did but prompt the age’, 11–12. See the discussion of Massinger’s Bondman in Chapter 8. 59 See Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 11, pp. 88–90. On the relative lack of emphasis in Jonson’s play on ‘antagonism between the nobles and the people’, see Worden, ‘Politics in Catiline’, pp. 154–5.

264


60 Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 9, p. 83. Cicero’s speech in Jonson’s play Â�follows In Catilinam I closely:Â€‘Whither at length wilt thou abuse our patience? /Still shall thy fury mock us? To what license /Dares thy unbridled boldness run itself?’ (Catiline, 4.2.116–18). Cf. In Catilinam I, 1–3. 61 Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 16, pp. 109–10. Felicius in his version of the episode inserts a speech by Cicero, In Catilinam IV, between the orations of Caesar and Cato. Jonson draws on In Catilinam IV for Cicero’s speech in this scene:Â€Catiline, 5.6.80–96. 62 Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist, p. 161. Jonathan Goldberg sees no moral distinction between Cicero and Catiline as contenders for power:Â€ see James I and the Politics of Literature, pp. 196–202. See also Lemon, Treason by Words, pp. 150–7, arguing that Cicero is ‘compromised’ and guilty of ‘corruption’ in ‘fabricating evidence’. 63 Catiline, 3.2.240–2, 245–6; ‘To William, Earl of Pembroke’, 9–10. 64 Worden, ‘Politics in Catiline’, pp. 166–71; An Answere to Certain Scandalous Papers (London, 1606), Sig. D2v, D4v. 65 Dutton, Ben Jonson, p. 127. William Slights, in Ben Jonson, argues that Cicero’s use of spies and counterspies has a destabilizing effect that ‘simultaneously legitimates and subverts authority’ (pp. 130–44). 66 The passage is adapted from Felicius:Â€see Kay, Ben Jonson, pp. 122, 216. 67 On Jonson’s Caesar as Machiavellian villain, see Bryant, ‘Catiline and the Nature of Jonson’s Tragic Fable’, pp. 151–4. Robert Harris’s fine recent novel Lustrum presents Caesar as deeply implicated in Catiline’s conspiracy and as taking revenge on Cicero afterwards, bringing about his exile and disgrace. 68 Conspiracie of Cateline, ch. 15, pp. 98–100. For the view that Cicero’s refusal to move against Caesar and Crassus is an instance of ‘moral compromise’ and an error in judgement, see Dutton, Ben Jonson, pp. 128–32. Cicero’s actions are defended by Worden, ‘Politics in Catiline’, pp. 161–71; and Cain, ‘Jonson’s Humanist Tragedies’. 69 Cassius in Julius Caesar sees Caesar in more or less these terms, but Antony’s funeral oration presents a highly favourable view of Caesar, and Brutus has mixed feelings toward Caesar:Â€see Chapter 4. 70 On classical republicanism in Catiline, see Cain, ‘Jonson’s Humanist Tragedies’ and Bryant, ‘Catiline and the Nature of Jonson’s Tragic Fable’, pp. 155–8. C h a p t e r 6: Â€O’e r f l ow i ng t h e m e a s u r e :Â€ a nton y a nd cleopatr a

1 2 3 4

Horace, Odes, 1.37. 6–12, tr. Bennett. Horace, Epode 9, 11–16. Horace, Odes, 1.37, 20–32. Virgil, Aeneid, VIII.678–9, 685–8; Aeneis, Book VIII, tr. Dryden (1697), 899–900, 907–10, in Dryden, Poems, ed. Kinsley, III. Subsequent references, except as noted, are to Dryden’s translation.


265

5 Quint, Epic and Empire, pp. 23–7; Virgil, Aeneid, VIII.698–700. See also Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra, pp. 56–73, on the ‘imaginary Cleopatra’ in ‘the story according to Augustus’. 6 Aeneid, VI.791–4; Aeneis, tr. Dryden, VI.1978–81. 7 Aeneid, VI.851–3; translation adapted from Loeb edition, p. 567. On how for Rome ‘the word “pax” can seldom be divorced from notions of conquest’, see Syme, Roman Revolution, p. 304. 8 Dryden, ‘Dedication of the Aeneis’, in Poems, ed. Kinsley, III.1016; Syme, Roman Revolution, pp. 462–3. 9 Parry, ‘Two Voices’, pp. 111, 120. 10 Brower, Hero & Saint, pp. 350–1. Janet Adelman similarly sees Antony and Cleopatra as in many ways ‘a revision of the Aeneid ’, with Cleopatra as ‘a new Dido’:Â€Common Liar, pp. 68–75. 11 See Adelman, Common Liar, pp. 68–9; and James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp.Â€130–2. 12 5.2.5–6, 325–6; cf. Aeneid, IV.660. 13 Aeneis, tr. Dryden, IV.123–7, 323, 330–1; Aeneid, IV.231, 267. 14 Dickey, pp. 153, 159–60, 183, 185, 188. Dickey, who claims that the opening scenes serve ‘to convince us that what Philo says is true’, speaks of Octavius Caesar as the man ‘whom the Elizabethans regarded as the ideal prince’ (pp. 182–3). 15 Dickey, p. 175; Stempel, ‘Transmigration’, SQ,7 (1956), 62–3. 16 Stempel, ‘Transmigration’, pp. 65, 72; Tennenhouse, Power on Display, pp. 142–6. See the entertaining essay by L. T. Fitz, ‘Egyptian Queens’, Â�showing how widespread similar hostile views of Cleopatra are in twentiethÂ�century criticism. 17 Jodelle, Cléopatra captive, Act I, pp. 27–8; Daniel, Tragedie of Cleopatra, pp. 406–49. 18 Jodelle, Cléopatra captive, Act 3, pp. 74–83; Daniel, Tragedie of Cleopatra, 4.828–50. 19 Pembroke, Tragedie of Antonie, 1.30–3, 54–6, 120–1, in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, V. Cf. Garnier, Marc Antoine, Act 1, pp. 7–8; here and elsewhere Pembroke’s translation follows Garnier’s text closely. 20 Schanzer, Problem Plays, pp. 151–2. 21 Tragedie of Antonie, 2.277, 743, 804, 831–8. On parallels between Rome and contemporary France and on the theme of ‘downfall of empire’ in Garnier, see McGowan, ‘Presence of Rome’, pp. 13–25; and Hughes-Hallett, Cleopatra, p. 177. 22 Tragedie of Cleopatra, Argument, p. 407; Chorus, Act 3, 769, 776–80, 794, 801–4. 23 Ibid., Act 3, 510, 525–6, 537–9, 545–8, 553, 764; The Complaint of Rosamond, 411–13, in Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme. On fate and individual responsibility in The Tragedie of Cleopatra and other works by Daniel, see Schanzer, Problem Plays, pp. 170–1, 174–5. 24 In a revised, expanded version of the play published in 1607, Daniel adds a scene in which Cleopatra entrusts the care of her son Caesario to his tutor

266


Rodon and a second scene in which Caesario, betrayed by Rodon to the Romans, is led to his execution and, like his mother, faces death courageously:Â€see The Tragedie of Cleopatra (1607), in Daniel, Certaine Small Workes. 25 Dryden, All for Love, 1.101, 105–6, 293–4, 337. 26 Life of Sir Philip Sidney, in Greville, Selected Writings, pp. 150–2. 27 Sedley, Antony and Cleopatra, 2.1, p. 11; 3.1, pp. 20, 21, 23. On Sedley’s play as an attack on Charles II and his court, see Hughes, English Drama, p. 246. 28 May, Tragedie of Cleopatra (1639), Act I, Sig. B1, B1v, B2v–B3. 29 Act 5, Sig. E1v, E2–E2v; Antony and Cleopatra, 4.14.54. 30 On this passage, see Paster, ‘Tragic subject and its passions’, pp. 150–1; and Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference, pp. 117–18. 31 See Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 88–92, 112–16; and Rebhorn, ‘Crisis of the Aristocracy’, p. 77. 32 Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, pp. 288–9; Danby, Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets, pp. 140, 143–4. Julian Markels sees Octavius as ‘repellent’, ‘the play’s most conspicuous example of Roman opportunism and duplicity’:Â€Pillar of the World, pp. 42–3. 33 Review by John Barber, Telegraph, 16 August 1972. 34 Markels comments on the ‘measured tone’ of these lines, couched in the ‘passionless impersonal style of the public Roman’ (Pillar of the World, p. 19). 35 1.1.15; Adelman, Common Liar, p. 127. 36 Cleopatra herself uses a similar metaphor, but without pejorative implications:Â€‘Broad-fronted Caesar, /When thou wast here above the ground, I was /A morsel for a monarch’ (1.5.30–2). 37 See Adelman, Common Liar, pp. 130–1. 38 See Adelman, Common Liar, pp. 142–9; and Jyotnsa Singh, ‘Renaissance Antitheatricality’, 107–19. 39 See Schanzer, Problem Plays, pp. 143–5. 40 North, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 999–1000. 41 North, p. 1003. 42 4.12.35–9, 43; Othello, 3.3.448. 43 Shakespeare follows North’s Plutarch:Â€‘I am sory, that having bene so great a Captaine and Emperour, I am indeede condemned to be judged of lesse corage & noble minde, than a woman’ (North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 1004). 44 4.15.53, 55–60; Othello, 5.2.337, 351. Shakespeare follows North’s Plutarch closely in this speech (p. 1005). 45 5.2.96; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, p. 134; Michael Ratcliffe, Observer, 12 April 1987. 46 See Adelman, Common Liar, pp. 113–22, 157–9. 47 Shaw, Three Plays for Puritans, pp. 29–30. 48 On the dramatic tension in Act 5, injecting an element of uncertainty before the final outcome, see Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare, pp. 261–3; and Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, pp. 129–32.


267

49 See, e.g., Rackin, ‘Shakespeare’s Boy Cleopatra’, pp. 201–12; and Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, pp. 131–5. 50 Kahn argues that death conceived as ‘wifely duty to a dead husband’ allows Shakespeare to reconstruct Cleopatra as ‘a Roman wife’ and thus ‘renders her infamous sexuality benign’ (Roman Shakespeare, pp. 137–9). See also Loomba, in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, arguing that Cleopatra is ‘tamed’ in the ‘false resolutions’ of Act 5 (pp. 124–30). C h a p t e r 7:Â€T h e c i t y a n d t h e b at t l e f i e l d:Â€ c o r i o l a n u s 1 North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 236. On changes in the meaning of virtus in the early and late Roman republic, see McDonnell, Roman Manliness, pp. 2–11, 59–71. 2 See Paster, ‘To Starve with Feeding’, pp. 125–9. 3 See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 146–64. To Coriolanus, in Adelman’s psychoanalytic reading, ‘Rome and his mother are finally one … The return to Rome is an act of retaliation against the mother on whom he has been dependent’ (pp. 157–8). 4 4.5.53–65. See Gordon, ‘Name and Fame:Â€ Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’, pp. 203–19. 5 2.1.9–10; 4.5.42; 4.7.56–7. On imagery of predation in Coriolanus, see Paster, ‘To Starve with Feeding’, pp. 135–7. 6 North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 238; cf. Livy, Romane Historie, II, p. 65. 7 Romane Historie, II, p. 65; Coriolanus, 1.1.93–4. 8 Brunt, Fall of the Roman Republic, p. 349; Cornell, Beginnings of Rome, pp. 258–60. 9 North, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 235–6. 10 On the role of Shakespeare’s Volumnia in moulding the character of her son, see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 144–59. 11 North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 243. On Coriolanus as ‘alone’, see 1.7.77; 2.2.108; and 5.6.117; and Brower, Hero & Saint, pp. 359–62. 12 North, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 247–8. 13 North, pp. 257, 259, 260. 14 Coriolanus, 1.1, s.d., 58. For commentary on the opening scene, see Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, pp. 139–43; and Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, pp. 131–41. Patterson is one of several critics who cite parallels with the Midlands Rising of 1607, violent insurrections of the ‘distressed poore’ put down by force. See also George, ‘Plutarch, insurrection, and dearth in Coriolanus’, in Shakespeare and Politics, pp. 110–29. 15 On argument in utramque partem and different ways of interpreting the fable of the belly, see Peltonen, ‘Political rhetoric and citizenship in Coriolanus’, pp. 249–52; and Shrank, ‘Civility and the City in Coriolanus’, pp. 413–15. 16 Tate, The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth, Sig. A2–A2v. ‘The Moral … of these Scenes’, according to Tate, is to ‘Recommend Submission and Adherence to Establisht Lawful Power’ (Sig. A2v).

268


17 pp. 147–8, 154, 157–8; Fulbecke, Pandectes of the Law of Nations (1602), p. 29. 18 Zeeveld, ‘Coriolanus and Jacobean Politics’, pp. 323–4. Parker in the Oxford edition says that these lines are ‘the political heart of the play’, with relevance beyond Martius’s ‘individual situation’ (Coriolanus, ed. Parker, p. 252). 19 Rossiter, Angel with Horns, pp. 241–2. 20 Hazlitt’s Criticism of Shakespeare, pp. 106–7; Coriolanus, ed. Parker, p. 118. 21 Coleridge, Shakespeare Criticism, I. 79; Hazlitt’s Criticism of Shakespeare, p. 109. 22 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, pp. 253, 258; Margot Heinemann, ‘How Brecht Read Shakespeare’, p. 221. 23 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, pp. 257, 258; Coriolan, tr. Ralph Manheim, in Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, Vol. 9, 1.1, p. 67; 5.4, p. 142. 24 Gunter, ‘Brecht and Beyond’, pp. 113–14; Hirst, Giorgio Strehler, pp. 69–71. Negative reviews of the Berliner Ensemble production on its British tour outnumbered the favourable ones, with terms such as ‘travesty’ and ‘perverse’. 25 Coriolanus, ed. Lee Bliss, pp. 80–1; Daniell, Coriolanus in Europe, p. 92. 26 Pettet, ‘Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607’, pp. 34–42; Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, pp. 132–4, 138, 141–3. 27 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.4, pp. 113, 115. See Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, pp. 126–7, 143; and Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, pp. 148–51. 28 Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, p. 160; Bristol, ‘Lenten butchery’, and Sorge, ‘Failure of orthodoxy in Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Reproduced, pp. 209–10, 237. 29 Loys le Roy, Aristotles Politiques (London, 1598), 1.2, p. 15; North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 235. 30 Ripley, Coriolanus on Stage, p. 320; Mulryne, ‘Coriolanus at Stratford-Â�uponAvon’, SQ, 29 (1978), 324, 331; interview with Alan Howard in Daniell, Coriolanus in Europe, pp. 164–5. 31 See reviews of this 1994 RSC production by Alistair Macaulay, Financial Times, 26 May 1994; Charles Spencer, Telegraph, 27 May 1994; Paul Taylor, Independent, 26 May 1994; and Benedict Nightingale, Times, 26 May 1994. 32 Dixon, Roman Mother, Preface, pp. 121, 188; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 145–54. 33 North, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 864, 876, 881; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 146–9; Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters, p. 130. 34 North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 287. 35 Cf. Coriolanus, 1.5.1–2; 3.1.238–40. On Volumnia and the Roman ideology of virtus, see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 145–9. 36 See Stanley Cavell, ‘Who does the wolf love?’, pp. 199–204; Paster, ‘To starve with feeding’, pp. 133–40; and Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 148–58.


269

37 ‘prima societas in ipso coniugio est, proxima in liberis, deinde una domus, communia omnia; id autem est principium urbis et quasi seminarium rei publicae’:Â€Cicero, De Officiis, I.xvii.54, pp. 56–7 (with minor alterations in the Loeb translation). See Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, pp. 194–5. 38 On Volscian society as ‘far simpler than that of Rome … where everyone seems to regard war as a natural condition of existence’, see Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean, pp. 152–6. 39 See Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire, pp. 33–40, 53–9. Smith points out that the homoerotic element in the bonding of the two rival Â�warriors is absent from Plutarch’s account (p. 35). See North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 248:Â€ ‘Tullus hearing what he said, was a marvellous glad man, and Â�taking him by the hand, he said unto him. Stand up, O Martius, and be of good cheere, for in profering thy selfe unto us, thou dost us great honour:Â€and by this meanes thou maiest hope also of greater things, at all the Volsces handes.’ 40 Interviews with Ian McKellen and Greg Hicks in Bedford, Coriolanus at the National, pp. 141, 149, 151. On the ‘fantasy of twinship’ in the two rivals, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 156. 41 Michael Billington, Guardian, 21 October 1977; Daniell, Coriolanus in Europe, p. 164; Michael Coveney, Financial Times, 17 December 1984; Ripley, Coriolanus on Stage, p. 325. 42 3.2.14–16, 106–8. On theatrical metaphors in this scene, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 152–3; and Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 154–5. 43 3.2.17–18, 44, 55–60, 64. Miola sees Volumnia’s speeches in this scene as the ‘debasement of Roman oratory’, turning Ciceronian principles to the service of corrupt ends:Â€Shakespeare’s Rome, pp. 189–90. 44 See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 147. 45 5.3.111, 124–6, 130. In the first of Volumnia’s two speeches, the word ‘country’ appears four times, and in the second speech, ‘honour’ or ‘honourable’ four times. 46 Bedford, Coriolanus at the National, p. 129; Irving Wardle, Times, 17 December 1984. 47 In Plutarch, Coriolanus’s ‘murder was not generally consented unto of the most part of the Volsces’, and the Volscians pay tribute to the warrior hero, in accordance with ideas of honour:Â€‘Men came out of all partes to honour his bodie, and did honourably burie him, setting out his tombe with great store of armour and spoiles, as the tombe of a worthy person and great captaine’ (North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 257). 48 ‘Sed ea animi elatio, quae cernitur in periculis et laboribus, si iustitia vacat pugnatque non pro salute communi, sed pro suis commodis, in vitio est; non modo enim id virtutis non est, sed est potius immanitatis omnem humanitatem repellentis … Sed illud odiosum est, quod in hac elatione et magnitudine animi facillime pertinacia et nimia cupiditas principatus innascitur’:Â€De Officiis, I.xix.62, 64, pp. 64–7. 49 De Officiis, I.viii.26; I.xxii.74, pp. 26–7, 74–5.

270

1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17


C h a p t e r 8:Â€T y r a n n y a n d e m pi r e Believe As You List, Prologue, 3–9, in Massinger, Plays and Poems, Vol. III. Believe As You List, III, 293–4; The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, p. 19. On Massinger and the censors, see Douglas Howard, ‘Massinger’s Political Tragedies’, in Philip Massinger, pp. 117–37; and Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, pp. 86–91. On Flaminius as instrument of Rome’s ‘tyranny’, see, e.g., 3.3.249; 4.2.63, 75; and 5.2.8. On ‘necessitie of state’, see Howard, ‘Massinger’s Political Tragedies’, pp. 128–34. On the Palatinate and James I, see Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, pp. 215–21; Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, pp. 74–80; and Cogswell, Blessed Revolution, pp. 13–20, 24–9. Fletcher and Massinger, Sir John Olden Barnavelt, 721–38, 2434–42, 2444–6; quoted in Thomas Fulton, ‘Massinger’s The Bondman’, pp. 159–62. Herbert, Dramatic Records, pp. 22–3; Fulton, ‘Massinger’s The Bondman’, pp. 159–60. The Bondman, 1.3.3 205, in Plays and Poems, Vol. I. See Heinemann, ‘Political Drama’, in Cambridge Companion, pp. 200–1. Sallust, Conspiracy of Cateline, pp. 65–6. See Fulton, ‘Massinger’s The Bondman’, pp. 162–74; and Limon, Dangerous Matter, pp. 64–88. Scott’s pamphlets, with titles like Vox Populi (1620) and The Spaniards Perpetuall Designes for an Universall Monarchie (1624), like Timoleon’s speeches in Act 1, satirize parasitic courtiers, unwilling to defend their country against its enemies. A Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, in Milton, CPW, 7.463. This passage has as its source Seneca’s Epistles 47 and 90, along with Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la République, Book I:Â€see Plays and Poems, V.136. On echoes of Jonson in The Roman Actor, Nero, and Julia Agrippina, see W. D. Briggs, ‘Influence of Jonson’s Tragedy’, pp. 284–7, 296–303, and 311–22; and Plays and Poems, III.1–4. May, Tragedy of Julia Agrippina, Act 1, Sig. A7v; J. R. [John Russell?], The Spy (1628), quoted in Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, p. 273. On Buckingham as a new Sejanus, see ibid., pp. 280–1; and Perry, Literature and Favoritism, pp. 229–32, 250–2. The Tragedy of Nero (1624), Act 1, Sig. B2v, B4. See the discussion of Nero and Julia Agrippina in Butler, ‘Romans in Britain’, pp. 146–50, 160–2; and Perry, Literature and Favoritism, pp. 252, 258–63, 267–75. The Roman Actor, 1.1.70–3, 79–81, in Plays and Poems, Vol. III. On surveillance in Sejanus, see Chapter 5 above. Reviews of Sher’s performance in The Roman Actor include Paul Taylor, Independent, 4 June 2002; Michael Billington, Guardian, 31 May 2002; Benedict Nightingale, Times, 1 June 2002; and John Peter, Sunday Times, 9 June 2002.


271

18 Nero, Act 3, Sig. D4v; Tacitus, Annales, Book 15, pp. 233–4; Suetonius, Historie of Twelve Caesars, p. 199. 19 James I, The True Law of Free Monarchies, pp. 71, 74, 77, 80. King James cites Nero as an example of a wicked monarch who should be obeyed (p. 77). 20 Fletcher, Tragedy of Valentinian (1614), 1.3.27–8; 3.3.155–8; 4.4.50, 258, in Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies, ed. Wiggins. 21 The Maid’s Tragedy, 5.3.288–91, in Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies. 22 The Maid’s Tragedy, 5.1.22, 73. On the treatment of tyrannicide in Valentinian and The Maid’s Tragedy, see Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants, pp. 163–71. 23 William Alexander, The Tragedie of Julius Caesar, in The Monarchicke Tragedies (1607), 3.1, Sig. V4–V4v. See Paulina Kewes, ‘Julius Caesar in Jacobean England’, The Seventeenth Century, 17 (2002), 157–9. The title page identifies Alexander as ‘Gentleman of the Princes privie chamber’. 24 The Tragedy of Nero, Act 1, Sig. B2v–B3; Act 2, Sig. C4v, D1v. On the treatment of the conspirators as ‘dignified heroes’, see Butler, ‘Romans in Britain’, pp. 146–7. 25 Tacitus, Annales, Book XV, pp. 237, 240. 26 Act 5, Sig. I3. Suetonius, the principal source for Act 5, places less emphasis on Nero’s abject terror, but presents him as irresolute, as he seeks ‘many and sundry shifts’ to escape death:Â€see Historie of Twelve Caesars, pp. 204–7. 27 Suetonius, Historie of Twelve Caesars, p. 184; Tacitus, Annales, Book XV, pp. 232–4; Book XVI, p. 248. Cf. Scevinus in Nero:Â€ ‘Behold an Emperor dauncing, /Playing o’th’ stage, and what else, but to name /Were infamy’ (Act 1, Sig. B2v). 28 On the relationship of theatrical power and royal power in Massinger’s play, see Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, pp. 203–9. 29 See the discussion of the historian’s defence in Sejanus in Chapter 5. 30 Jonas Barish, ‘Three Caroline “Defenses” of the Stage’, pp. 195–6. 31 Cf. Sidney, Apology for Poetry, pp. 84–96. Recent critics of a deconstructionist bent have tended to foreground issues of intentionality and reception:Â€see, e.g., Richard Burt, ‘’Tis Writ by Me:Â€Massinger’s The Roman Actor and the Politics of Reception’, pp. 332–46. Burt argues that Massinger’s plays demonstrate that ‘how a play is received’ often clashes with any ‘intended meaning’ as it is ‘rewritten’ according to the interests of a particular audience. 32 2.1.304, 407, 435, 446–7. See Barish, ‘Three Caroline “Defenses” of the Stage’, pp. 197–201; and Hogan, ‘Imagery of Acting’. Reviewers of the 2002 RSC production frequently commented on the way that the play undermines Paris’s plea for the morally educative function of the theatre:Â€ see Charles Spencer, Telegraph, 1 June 2002; Paul Taylor, Independent, 4 June 2002; and Ian Johns, Times, 17 December 2002. 33 See Juvenal, Satire VII, 86–95. 34 Suetonius, Historie of Twelve Caesars, pp. 268, 271–2. In Suetonius, Domitia is involved in the conspiracy, but not one of the actual murderers.

272


35 See the discussion of tyrannicide in Act 5 of The Roman Actor in Perry, Literature and Favoritism, pp. 266–8. 36 On the distinction between good kings and tyrants, a ‘formula cited over and over again’ during the Renaissance, see Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants, pp. 45–9, 69–79. 37 Cf. Richard III, 5.3.180–6; on portents in Suetonius, see Historie of Twelve Caesars, p. 269. On the theme of ‘divine revenge’ in The Roman Actor, see Butler, ‘Romans in Britain’, pp. 155–8.1. C h a p t e r 9:Â€A nc i e n t Br i t ons a n d R om a ns 1 Critics who have compared some or all of these plays with Cymbeline include Jodi Mikalachki, ‘The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain’, and Legacy of Boadicea; and John Curran, ‘Royalty Unlearned, Honor Untaught’. 2 Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, Part 3, pp. 108, 117. 3 Curran, Roman Invasions, pp. 18, 231–5; William Camden, Britannia, tr. Philemon Holland (1610), pp. 8–9. 4 Camden, Britannia, pp. 28–9. Cf. Curran, ‘Royalty Unlearned’, pp. 278–9. 5 Camden, Britannia, p. 36. 6 The Eight Bookes of Caius Julius Caesar conteyning his martiall exploits in the Realme of Gallia, tr. Arthur Golding (1590), Book 5, pp. 51, 54v. 7 Eight Bookes, Book 7, pp. 98v, 100v, 106v. On the treatment of Vercingetorix as heroic rebel in the Renaissance and afterwards, see Wyke, Caesar, pp. 57–64. 8 Tacitus, Life of Julius Agricola, tr. Savile (1591), pp. 246, 255–6. 9 Agricola, p. 255. On the tradition of ‘epics of the defeated’, contesting Roman hegemony, see Quint, Epic and Empire. 10 Agricola, pp. 250–1. 11 Milton, CPW, 5.1.85, 451; Harrington, Oceana, p. 48. 12 Tacitus, Annales, Book 12, p. 165; Book 14, p. 211; Agricola, p. 247. On Boadicea as representing ‘female savagery’ and Caractacus as ‘a figure of exemplary manliness’, see Mikalachki, ‘Masculine Romance’, pp. 307–12; and Legacy of Boadicea, pp. 12–13. 13 Holinshed gives Boadicea a second oration, beginning with a statement that ‘libertie and freedome is to be preferred before thraldome and bondage’, as well as arguing the disadvantages of ‘an external sovereigntie’ as against ‘the customes and lawes of your owne countrie’:Â€Raphael Holinshed, Historie of England (1586), Book 4, pp. 43–4. 14 Annales, Book 12, pp. 164–5. 15 For commentary on the ‘island-patriotism’ of these speeches, see G. Wilson Knight, Crown of Life, pp. 134–9; and Cymbeline, ed. Butler, pp. 42–3, 144. 16 Camden, Britannia, p. 35; and Jasper Fisher, Fuimus Troes. The True Trojans (1633), 3.4, Sig. E4. Cf. Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, pp. 112–13; 17 On Nennius, see Geoffrey of Monmouth, History, pp. 109–10; and Curran, Roman Invasions, pp. 20–3, 162–3, 166–8.


273

18 The True Trojans, 5.2, Sig. H4; 5.4, Sig. I1v. 19 R. A. [Robert Armin?], The Valiant Welshman (1615), 1.1, Sig. A4; 2.1, Sig. C3v; 4.1, Sig. H2v–H3. 20 ‘To the Ingenuous Reader’, The Valiant Welshman, Sig. A3; Annales, p. 166. 21 4.7, Sig. H2, H3. Cf. Tacitus, Annales, Book 12, p. 165. 22 Fletcher, Bonduca, 3.5.163; 5.3.45–8. 23 1.1.57–63, 65. Cf. Coriolanus, 1.7.29–32; 4.5.107–19, and see the discussion in Chapter 7. 24 On differing interpretations of the closing speeches in terms of translatio imperii and the play’s ‘tricky balance of power’ between Britain and Rome, see H. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 152–6; Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, pp. 160–4; and Knight, Crown of Life, pp. 137–42, 164–7. 25 Othello, 3.3.330; Cymbeline, 2.4.57; 2.5.6, 17. I use the traditional spelling ‘Imogen’ rather than adopting the emendation of the Oxford and Cambridge editors, ‘Innogen’. 26 On the anachronistic ‘invocation of the present’ as disruptive, see Parolin, ‘Anachronistic Italy’;Â€and Rackin, Stages of History, pp. 86–104. 27 Knight, Crown of Life, pp. 150–1. Posthumus calls Iachimo an ‘Italian fiend’ (5.4.210). 28 1.4.34, 62, 68–9, 79–80, 118, 128–9. See the discussion of ‘competitive masculinity’, the ‘triangulation’ in which a woman is the passive, reified object of a transaction between men, in Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, pp. 132–9; and Cymbeline, ed. Butler, pp. 28–30. 29 1.6.37–8; 2.4.53, 70–1, 82. For commentary on the bedroom scene and the pairing of Diana and Cleopatra, see Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, pp. 55–6; and Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, pp. 135–8. Iachimo’s description echoes a number of details in Enobarbus’s account of Cleopatra at Cydnus: see Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, pp. 214–15. 30 In the Cheek by Jowl production of 2007, Cloten and Posthumus were played by the same actor, Tom Hiddleston. On Iachimo and Cloten as Posthumus’s ‘surrogate’, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 214–17; and Nevo, Shakespeare’s Other Language, pp. 72–9. 31 As You Like It, 1.1.7, 19; 2.5.6–7; Cymbeline, 4.2.168–80; Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto 6, stanza 23; Book VI, Canto 5, stanzas 1–2. On The Faerie Queene, Book VI, and the Welsh scenes in Cymbeline, see Cymbeline, ed. Butler, pp. 12–13. 32 5.4.440; Bergeron, Shakespeare’s Romance and the Royal Family, pp. 142, 144; Marcus, ‘Cymbeline and the Unease of Topicality’, pp. 140–2. Emrys Jones in ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, pp. 84–99, arguing that Cymbeline has ‘many of the elements that we normally associate with the Jacobean masque’, sees in the final scene and its ‘peace tableau’ a ‘direct reference to James I, before whom it was presumably acted’. Marcus, like some later critics, points out that the projected union of England and Scotland met with considerable resistance (pp. 142–5); see also Griffiths, ‘The Geographies of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’, pp. 339–58.

274


33 See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 217–20; and Mikalachki, ‘Masculine Romance of Roman Britain’, pp. 319–22. 34 See Thompson, ‘Person and Office’, pp. 77–9. 35 Woodbridge, ‘Palisading the Body Politic’, pp. 272–5. 36 See Knight, Crown of Life, pp. 165–6; and James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 15–22, 151–6. 37 Critics who emphasize problematical elements in Cymbeline that ‘test and trouble models of authority generally used to translate empire from imperial Rome to early Britain’ include James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 152, 159–62; and Parolin, ‘Anachronistic Italy’, pp. 189–91, 195–200. 38 Cymbeline, 2.5.1–2, 19–27; Winter’s Tale, 2.1.57–8. See the excellent discussion of Posthumus’s ‘women’s part’ soliloquy in Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 211–17. 39 5.4.3–5, 8–10. In the 1983 BBC television production, which brought out the tragic elements in these scenes, Michael Pennington was dressed in rags, half-naked, throughout the later part of the play. 40 Griffiths, ‘The Geographies of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’, pp. 340–7. The word ‘England’ does not appear in Cymbeline, though ‘Britain’ and related terms occur fifty-five times. P o s t s c r i p t :Â€S h a k e s pe a r e a n d t h e r e p u blic a n t r a di t ion 1 Graham Hammill, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 21 (2008), 232–5. According to Heather James, Shakespeare and Republicanism is ‘the most cogent and comprehensive statement to date of the significance of republican ideas in Shakespeare’ (SQ, 58, 2007, 130). The 2008 paperback reprint of Hadfield’s book includes extracts from ten such adulatory reviews. For a dissenting opinion, see Debora Shuger, Ben Jonson Journal, 14 (2007), 122–32. 2 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. 95, 100, 143, 155. 3 Armitage et al., Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, pp. 16, 281. 4 Armitage et al., pp. 16, 218, 227–8, 232–3, 256, 269. On ‘black Tacitism’, see Chapter 1. On the emphasis on a ‘free state’ and a ‘politics of virtue’ in the republican tradition, see Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, pp. 22–4. 5 Conal Condren, ‘Unfolding “the properties of government”’, pp. 160–1; cf. also, Skinner, ‘Afterword’, pp. 272–6; and Dzelzainis, ‘Shakespeare and Political Thought’, pp. 102–4. 6 JC, 3.2.97–9; Sejanus, 1.61–2; 2.184–5. Cf. Brutus’s admission in his soliloquy in 2.1 that though ‘Caesar may’ at some later time turn into a tyrant, ‘the quarrel /Will bear no colour from the thing he is’ (JC, 2.1.27–9). 7 Livy, Romane Historie, Book 1, p. 2; Book 2, p. 44; Tacitus, Agricola, pp. 237–8. 8 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, CPW, III.206.

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Works by Jonson and Shakespeare are cited from the following editions, except as noted: Jons on Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford Authors, 1985). Catiline, ed. W. F. Bolton and Jane F. Gardner (London:Â€Regents Renaissance Drama, 1973). Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven and London:Â€Yale University Press, 1969). Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain (Manchester:Â€Revels Plays, 1995). Sejanus His Fall, ed. Philip J. Ayres (Manchester:Â€Revels Plays, 1990) Sha k e spe ar e Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders (Arden Shakespeare, 1995). Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford Shakespeare, 2002). Coriolanus, ed. R. B. Parker (Oxford Shakespeare, 1998). Cymbeline, ed. Martin Butler (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 2005). Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (Arden Shakespeare, 2006). King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (Arden Shakespeare, 1997). Macbeth, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1997). Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (Arden Shakespeare, 1995).

Other plays by Shakespeare are quoted from the Arden editions. A bbr e v iations

Milton, Complete Prose Works:Â€CPW Notes & Queries: N & Q Shakespeare Survey:Â€SS Shakespeare Quarterly:Â€SQ A. R. [Robert Armin?]. The Valiant Welshman, Or The True Chronicle of the Life and Valiant Deedes of Caradoc the Great (London, 1615). 275

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Index

Aaron 61, 65–6, 70–1, 75–6 Actium 20, 135–7, 144, 153–4, 157–8 Adelman, Janet 183, 265–9, 273–4 Aeneas 4, 62, 65, 94, 136–9, 148, 219, 240 Aesop 7 Agrippa 142, 146 Agrippina 206–7 Alarbus 64, 66 Alcibiades 174 Alexander, William 87, 210, 271 All’s Well That Ends Well 238 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 8, 214 Anchises 136–7 Andronicus, Lucius 65, 67, 70, 256 Andronicus, Marcus 63–5, 69–71, 73, 78, 256–7 Andronicus, Mutius 64, 67, 77 Andronicus, Titus 61, 63–4, 66–74, 76–7, 257 Anthony, Mark (in Wounds of Civil War) 59–60, 65 Antiochus 196–9, 205 Anti-theatricality 112 Antony and Cleopatra 1, 5, 9, 135–64, 245–6, 264–7 comic and tragic aspects 138, 141, 156, 162–4 Antony, Mark 3–4, 9, 14, 59, 88, 141–2, 144–8, 195 in Julius Caesar 99–102, 105–6 funeral oration 97, 101, 103–4, 259, 264 in Antony and Cleopatra 135, 138–9, 149–63, 173, 194, 246 as soldier 148–9, 157–60 bounty 154–6 defeat and death 157–62 Apius and Virginia 254 Appian 9, 13, 56–8, 250, 259 Appius Claudius 32, 44, 46–7 Argument in utraquem partem 107, 175, 245–6, 260, 267 Aristotle 183 Armin, Robert 219, 226 Armitage, David 244, 263

Army, Roman 10–11, 13–14, 22, 165, 170, 190, 228–9, 232, 234–5 Arnold, Oliver 254–5 Arruntius 118, 122, 125, 247 Arviragus 219, 238, 241–2 As You Like It 175, 237–9, 243 Aufidius 169, 171, 183, 185, 188–90, 194–5 Augustine, St 49 Ayres, Philip 263 Baldwin, James 75 Baldwin, T. W. 250 Barbarism 1, 4, 53, 66, 71, 75–6, 109, 167, 219–23, 229, 237–8 Barish, Jonas 261, 271 Baron, Hans 257 Barton, Anne 131, 182, 266–7, 269 Bassianus 8, 63, 67, 70–1 Barker, Francis 256 Bate, Jonathan 250, 254, 256 Bedford, Kristina 269 Belarius 237–8, 242 Belsey, Catherine 253–5, 273 Bergeron, David 273 Berry, Philippa 254–5 Bithynia 197–8 Boadicea (Bonduca) 222–4, 228–30, 237, 272 Bodin, Jean 270 Boyd, Brian 256 Bradford, Alan T. 250–1 Bradley, A. C. 150, 259 Brecht, Bertolt 181–2, 268 Briggs, W. D. 270 Bristol, Michael 182 Britain 5, 61, 219–74 and Rome 219–27, 231–2, 239–41, 273 Brook, Peter 257 Brower, Reuben 256, 267 Bruni, Leonardo 86 Brunt, P. A. 250, 267 Brute (Brutus) 4, 219, 240

291

292

Index

Brutus, Decius 93, 96 Brutus, Junius (Tribune) 12, 181 Brutus, Lucius Junius 13, 35–6, 38–43, 45, 51, 72, 80, 90 Brutus, Marcus 38, 79–80, 87, 91, 94, 96, 101, 105, 122, 194, 210–11, 247–8, 264 death of 102–3, 106 differing views of 13, 84–6, 100 funeral oration 82–3, 97 self-deception in 3, 83, 95, 99, 246, 257 soliloquies 83–4, 98, 157, 274 Bryant, Joseph 134–264 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of 201, 204–5, 270 Burbage, Richard 107 Burke, Kenneth 82, 259 Burke, Peter 17, 251 Burrow, Colin 37, 249, 252–3 Burt, Richard 271 Bushnell, Rebecca 260, 271–2 Butler, Martin 250, 261–2, 270–3 Caesar, Gaius Julius 3, 8, 10, 14–15, 20–1, 24–5, 79–83, 93, 96, 107, 150, 195, 210 as conqueror 88–90, 92, 97 as tyrant 86, 89–93, 97, 98–9, 104, 122, 134, 258 death of 91, 101, 103–6 differing views of 84, 92–4, 247, 252, 258 Gallic Wars 134, 220–1, 224 in Catiline 127, 130, 133, 264 invasion of Britain 219–21, 224–6 revenge of 102–5 Caesar, Octavius (Augustus) 4, 9–10, 13–15, 18, 20–1, 25, 103, 127, 141–2, 144–7, 195, 199–200, 231, 239, 250 and self-discipline 139–40, 150–1, 154–5, 157, 161, 259 in Antony and Cleopatra 3, 135–7, 148–51, 154, 160, 161–4, 173, 265 in Jonson 108–9, 116, 125 in Julius Caesar 4, 105–6 in Virgil 136–9, 265 Caesar and Pompey, Tragedie of 5, 87, 102–3, 105, 257 Cain, Tom 126, 134–264 Calhern, Louis 98 Caligula 16–17 Calphurnia 93, 95 Camden, William 220 Camillus, Marcus Furius 18, 28–9, 32, 172, 214, 243 Canidius 146–7, 154, 157 Cannae 30–1 Cantarella, Eve 268

Cantor, Paul 249 Caractacus 222–4, 226–7, 272 Caratach 227–30 Carthage 9, 22, 26, 31–2, 90, 138–9, 196–9 Caska 80, 95, 97, 122 Cassius 79–81, 85, 87, 91, 94, 96, 99, 101–2, 105, 122, 148, 150, 211, 247 Cassius Dio 124, 146, 262–3 Cassivelaunus 219–20, 224–6 Catiline 17, 114, 126, 202 Catiline 25, 29, 86, 127–8, 131, 133, 204, 258, 264 Cato, Marcus, the younger 24–6, 86–8, 122, 130, 133, 173, 209, 247, 252, 264 Cavell, Stanley 268 Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury 119, 132 Censorship 196, 199–200 Cethegus 130 Chamberlain’s Men/King’s Men 115, 126, 196, 200 Chapman, George 6, 262 Caesar and Pompey 87, 122, 134, 257 Charles I 4, 116, 200–1, 204, 261 Charles II 145–6 Charney, Maurice 249 Chiron 61, 69, 72–3, 75 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 7–8, 17, 25, 113, 189, 195, 269 in Catiline 127, 129–33, 264 in Cornelia 89–91 Cincinnatus 18 Cinna 57, 59 Cinna the poet 4, 104, 195 Clarke, M. L. 257 Clemency 2 Cleopatra 5, 145–8, 153–4, 157–60, 224, 236, 265–7, 273 and Dido 138–9 and Roman values 1–2, 156–7, 160–2 as enemy of Rome 135–6, 139–40, 153, 161, 163, 265 death of 2, 60, 138, 141, 145, 147, 159, 163–4, 230 plays about 140–8 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Garnier, Daniel, Dryden, May, and Sedley Claudius 16–17, 207, 219, 226–7 Cloten 224, 231–3, 235, 237, 241–3, 273 Cogswell, Thomas 261, 270 Colclough, David 244–5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 69, 180, 259 Collatinus 35–6, 38, 43, 50–1 Cominius 165–6, 168, 174, 183–4, 188, 190 Condren, Conal 244, 274 Constitution, Roman 11, 13, 15, 255 Consuls 10–11, 14–15, 21, 36, 54–5, 171, 190, 253

Index Coriolanus 1, 3, 5, 9, 12, 22, 24, 28–30, 32, 74, 165–195, 267–9 critics on 178–83 predatory imagery in 169, 195, 267 productions of 181–2, 184–5, 189, 193–4 Coriolanus, Caius Martius and Volumnia 172–3, 183–8, 191–4, 267–9 as warrior 165–7, 173–4, 183–6, 243 banishment 167, 172–4 invasion of Rome 167–9, 173–4 patricians and plebeians 173–4, 178–82, 191 Corioles 167, 171, 173 Cornelia (wife of Pompey) 87, 89–90 Cornell, Tim 26, 252, 267 Counsel 110, 113, 115, 125, 137, 261 Cox, Brian 68, 73, 77 Crassus, Marcus 14, 92, 133, 264 Crashaw, Richard 7 Crawford, Michael 250 Cremutius Cordus 122, 213, 262 Crispinus 108–9 Cunningham, Karen 257 Curran, John 272 Cymbeline 4–5, 36, 38, 219–20, 224–5, 230–43, 272–3 Cymbeline 219, 225, 231–2, 238–9, 242 Danby, J. F. 150 Daniel, Samuel The Civil Wars 143 Complaint of Rosamond 48, 143, 265 Musophilis 143 The Tragedie of Cleopatra 141, 143–4, 146, 162–4, 265 Daniell, David 257, 268–9 Daniels, Ron 98, 258 Dante 85 Dekker, Thomas 108, 260 Demetrius 61, 69, 72, 74–6, 108–9 Dickey, Franklin 140 Dido 62, 138–9, 148, 265 Dignam, Mark 98 Dillon, Janette 256 Divine right 142, 206, 210 Dixon, Suzanne 268 Dolabella 144–5, 161 Domitia 205, 212, 214–16, 271 Domitian 17, 21, 205–6, 212–18, 235, 248 Donaldson, Ian 38–9, 253, 260 Doran, Greg 263 Doran, Madeleine 98 Drummond, William 18, 115 Dryden, John 136–7, 144–5, 163, 259, 264 Dubrow, Heather 253–4

293

Dutton, Richard 264 Dzelzainis, Martin 260, 262, 274 Earl, D. C. 252 Egypt 135–6, 139, 142–4, 145–7, 150–8, 161 Elizabeth I 109, 119, 126, 145, 248 Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia 201 Empire, Roman 10, 14–17, 21, 62–3, 116–22, 135–9, 197–9, 204–9, 219 Emulation 17, 149–50, 160, 188, 190, 214 Enobarbus 144, 146, 149, 152–7, 159, 246, 273 Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of 18–19, 145 Evans, Robert 261 Factionalism 11–13, 24 Faucit, Helen 238 Favourites 118–19, 121, 204–5 Favro, Diane 250 Felicius Durantinus 127, 130, 133, 264 First Citizen 12, 175–8 Fish, Stanley 115 Fitz, L. T. 265 Flaminius 30, 197–9, 205, 270 Flattery 111, 115–16, 120, 205 Fletcher, John 17, 199 Bonduca 219, 227–31, 240 The Maid’s Tragedy 209 Valentinian 17, 43–4, 209–10 Frederick of Bohemia 47, 199, 201, 270 Fulbecke, William 13, 179, 250 Fulton, Thomas 270 Galba 19 Galgacas 221, 226, 229, 240 Garnier, Robert 265 Cornélie 87, 89, 91, 258 Marc Antoine 141–2, 146, 162–4, 265 Garrick, David 238 Gaul 11, 28–9, 92, 131, 172, 220–1 Gaveston, Piers 119 Geoffrey of Monmouth 219–20, 224–5, 240, 272 George, David 267 Germanicus 18 Gibbon, Edward 17 Gillies, John 266 Goldberg, Jonathan 249, 261, 264, 271 Golding, Arthur 8 Gordon, D. J. 267 Goths 1, 61–3, 65–6, 73–5 Gracchus, Gaius and Tiberiius 12–13, 29, 61, 185 Grafton, Anthony 252 Greene, Gayle 257, 259 Grenewey, Richard 9, 15

294 Greville, Fulke 145 Griffiths, Huw 273–4 Guiderius 219, 238, 241–2 Gundolf, Friedrich 85 Gunter, Lawrence 268 Hadfield, Andrew 52, 244–5, 255–6, 274 Hall, Peter 104 Hamlet 1, 41, 100, 157, 190, 212, 237 Hammill, Graham 274 Hands, Terry 103 Hannibal 10, 30–1 Harbage, Alfred 249, 255 Harrington, James 23, 86, 90, 222, 258 Harris, Robert 264 Harvey, Gabriel 32–3, 252 Haynes, Jonathan 260 Hazlitt, William 180–1 Heinemann, Margot 268, 270 Henry, Prince 261 1 Henry IV 246 Henry V 101, 226–7 1 Henry VI 63 3 Henry VI 59, 101 Henslowe, Thomas 87, 262 Herbert, George 7 Hercules 156–7, 258 Herrick, Robert 7 Heywood, Thomas 9, 21, 23, 127, 134, 254 The Rape of Lucrece 37, 40–3, 47–8, 254 Hicks, Greg 189, 269 Hirst, David 268 Hobbes, Thomas 114 Hogan, A. P. 271 Holinshed, Raphael 220, 272 Holland, Philemon 9, 26 Holles, Sir John 20 Homoerotic desire 188–90, 269 Honour 45–6, 59, 63–4, 67–8, 79, 83, 210, 227–8, 230, 234–5 and Antony 141, 151–2, 158, 160 and Coriolanus 173, 185, 188, 190, 192–3, 269 and Lucrece 48–50, 52, 255 Horace 8, 61, 135–6 and Jonson 108–10, 113–14, 260 Horatius Cocles 18, 27–8, 243 Houseman, John 258–9 Howard, Alan 184, 191, 268 Howard, Douglas 270 Hughes, Derek 266 Hughes-Hallett, Lucy 265 Hunter, G. K. 1–2, 4, 250, 255–6 Hutson, Lorna 257

Index Iachimo 36, 233–41, 243, 253, 273 Imogen 36, 230–43, 235–43 Imperial conquest 15–16, 21, 32, 89–90, 136–7, 198, 221 Iras 157, 164 Irving, Henry 238 Italy 233–5, 240–1, 273 James I 4, 17, 20, 41, 114–17, 119, 125–6, 137, 201, 204, 206, 208–10, 219, 239, 248, 253, 270–1, 273 James, Heather 67, 256, 265, 273–4 Jardine, Lisa 252 Jed, Stephanie 54, 255 Jodelle, Estienne 141 Jondorf, Gillian 258 Jones, Emrys 259, 266, 273 Jones, Inigo 4, 117 Jonson, Ben 4, 6–8, 17–18, 107–34, 137, 213, 245, 270 and the court 110–12, 114, 116–17, 119 classical learning 7, 108, 111, 260 Eastward Ho 119 masques 4, 112, 115–17, 261–2 on poetry 109, 115 on the ideal prince 110, 126 poems 113–15 ‘Ode. To Himself ’ 112, 114 ‘Epistle to Lady Aubigny’ 112, 114 ‘To King James’ 115–16 ‘To William Earl of Pembroke’ 113–14 Poetaster 108–13, 260 Volpone 115 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Catiline Sejanus. Joplin, Patricia 254 Jowett, John 262 Julia, daughter of Augustus 16, 108 Julius Caesar 1–5, 9–10, 34, 38, 79–107, 122, 134, 166, 245, 247–8, 258, 264 irony in 93, 95–6, 100, 104–5 productions of 98, 100, 258–9 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Antony, Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar. Julius Caesar, The Tragedie of 210 Juvenal 113, 215, 271 Kahn, Coppélia 54, 81, 183, 249, 251, 254–7, 266–9 Kay, W. David 264 Kean, Edmund 214 Keats, John 107 Kemble, John Philip 180, 214 Kewes, Paulina 253, 258, 271 King Lear 46, 68, 73–4, 76, 94, 175, 240, 242 Knight, G. Wilson 240, 272–4

Index Kyd, Thomas Cornelia 87, 89–92, 248, 258 The Spanish Tragedy 61, 73, 77, 256 Latiaris 123, 125 Latin, Shakespeare’s knowledge of 7–9 Lavinia 5, 51, 61–2, 66–72, 77–8, 253–4, 257 Lee, Nathaniel 37, 39 Lemon, Rebecca 264 Lentulus 130 Lepidus 105, 139, 149, 151–2 in Sejanus 118, 125 Lever, J. W. 258 Levy, F. J. 251 Liberty 13, 20–1, 33, 44–5, 86, 90, 96, 121, 128, 134, 146, 182, 200–3, 219–24, 226 Limon, Jerzy 270 Lipsius, Justus 18, 113–14, 251, 260 Livius, Titus (Livy) 2, 8–12, 17–18, 25–34, 67, 72, 223, 248–9, 252 and Coriolanus 170–2, 175–6 and Elizabethan dramatists 31–4 and Lucrece 35–40, 42, 44, 46–50, 52, 54, 252–3, 255 as moralist 26–7, 32–3 Lodge, Thomas The Wounds of Civil War 5, 9, 56–60, 64–5, 255 Loewenstein, Joseph 261 Loomba, Ania 257, 267 Lovelace, Richard 18 Lowin, John 205 Lucan 86–8, 89, 122, 134, 146, 211, 257, 262 Lucina 43–4, 209 Lucius, Caius 224, 233–5, 241 Lucrece 5, 7, 9, 35–6, 48–9, 235–6, 240, 244–5, 252–5 argument of 35–7, 53, 253, 255 monarchy in 36–7, 41, 52 politics of 37–8, 40, 52–5, 254–5 voice of 47–9, 254 Lucretia 2, 32, 35, 44, 47–55, 62, 235 and voyeurism 47–8 in Heywood 40–3, 47–8 paintings of 39 Lupus 108–10 Luxury 21, 23, 25, 128–9, 201, 223, 243 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 26 Macbeth 38, 40, 42, 47, 83–4, 98, 157, 187, 208, 246 MacCallum, M. W. 260 Machiavelli, Niccolò 13, 20, 23, 33, 38, 40, 86, 90, 111, 120, 133, 152, 258 Macready, William 214

295

Macro 120–1, 123–4, 262 Maecenas 108, 145 Mankiewicz, Joseph 98, 100, 104 Manlius, Marcus Capitolinus 28–30, 33, 252 Manlius, Titus 2, 67 Marcus, Leah 115, 261–2, 273 Marius 9, 14, 21, 23–5, 56–60, 64 Marius the younger 60 Markels, Julian 266 Marlowe, Christopher Edward II 119 Tamburlaine 40, 56–7, 88, 255 Marston, John 108–9 Martial 113 Martindale, Charles 8, 249–50 Young Martius 186, 192–3 Marvell, Andrew 7 Masculinity 2, 22, 81, 157, 186–90, 249, 251, 273 Mason, James 100 Massinger, Philip 6, 47, 196–218, 254, 263, 270–1 Believe As You List 196–9, 201, 205 The Bondman 200–4, 270 The King and the Subject 200 Sir John Olden Barnavelt 199 The Roman Actor 5, 17, 204–6, 208, 212–18, 247–8 Maus, Katherine 260–1 Maximus 43, 209 May, Thomas Lucan’s Pharsalia 146, 257 Tragedie of Cleopatra 146–8, 163 Tragedy of Julia Agrippina 17, 204–7, 270 McDonnell, Myles 2, 252, 267 McGowan, Margaret 258, 265 McKellen, Ian 189, 191, 269 Measure for Measure 238–9 Menas 3, 152 Menenius 167–8, 170–1, 176–8, 181–2, 187, 189–90, 246 Merchant of Venice, The 239 Meres, Francis 8 Metellus Cimber 93 Midlands Rising 182, 267 Mikalachki, Jodi 272, 274 Milton, John 7, 23, 25, 86, 114, 117, 127, 129, 203, 248, 251, 263 History of Britain 222 Miola, Robert 249, 254–7, 269, 273 Mommsen, Theodor 84–5, 257 Montaigne 17–18 Much Ado about Nothing 175, 236 Mussolini, Benito 85 Mutius Scaevola 18, 27–8

296

Index

Nedham, Marchamont 23 Nelson, Eric 244–5, 255 Nero 5, 16–19, 204–8, 211–12, 235, 271 Nero, Tragedy of 204–6, 208, 211–12, 248, 270–1 Ness, Barry 53 Nevo, Ruth 273 Newman, Jane O. 254–5 Norbrook, David 124, 251, 257, 270 North, Sir Thomas 9, 27, 92, 111, 126, 153 Nunn, Trevor 98, 100, 104, 150, 258–9 Octavia 144–6, 156 Orgel, Stephen 115, 261 Olivier, Laurence 73, 191 Osmond, Patricia 251, 263 Othello 24, 42, 160, 183, 191, 233, 236–7 Otho 19–20 Ovid 7–8, 250 and Lucrece 35–7, 39, 47–9, 51, 252–3 and Poetaster 108–10, 260 and Titus Andronicus 60, 62, 71–2, 76, 257 Palatine, Frederick, Elector of 47, 199, 201, 270 Pallas 207 Papirius, Lucius 2 Paris 205, 212–16, 271 Parker, Patricia 273 Parker, R. B. 268 Parolin, Peter 273–4 Parry, Adam 137 Patriarchy 45–6, 54, 67, 77, 203, 254 Patricians 12–13, 24, 28, 30, 166, 171–4, 176–7, 190–1, 246 Patronage 112, 114 Paster, Gail Kern 266–8 Patterson, Annabel 182, 255, 261–2, 267, 270 Peacock, John 249 Peele, George 63–4, 256 Peltonen, Markku 267, 270 Pericles 239 Pembroke, Mary, Countess of 141–3, 265 Pembroke, William, Earl of 113–14, 115, 119, 126, 131 Pennington, Michael 274 Perry, Curtis 258, 262–3, 270, 272 Petrarch, Francesco 85 Pettet, E. C. 182 Philip II 196 Phillips, James 179 Philo 139–40, 265 Philomela 51, 62, 71–2, 76, 254–5 Philostratus 142–3 Pietas 2, 28, 52–3, 66–7, 72, 172, 174, 183, 187, 189, 193, 229, 246 Pisander 200, 202–4

Platt, Michael 255 Plebeians 11–13, 24, 57, 83, 103–4, 129, 166, 169–72, 175–82, 190–1, 246 Plutarch 2–3, 8–9, 27, 87–9, 92, 141, 146, 185, 259–60 and Antony and Cleopatra 136, 153, 157–9, 162, 266 and Coriolanus 165–6, 170–6, 183, 185, 190–1, 267, 269 and Julius Caesar 92, 97, 99–100, 101, 105–7, 258 Pompeius, Gnaeus (Pompey the Great) 21, 79, 86–90, 92, 262 Pompeius, Sextus 3, 148, 150–3 Polybius 9, 11, 31–2 Porsena 27 Posthumus Leonatus 36, 230, 232–43, 273–4 Procne 62, 72, 76 Propertius 108 Prusias 198 Quint, David 86, 136, 272 Rabkin, Norman 259 Rackin, Phyllis 267, 273 Randolph, Mary Claire 261 Rape 36, 38–9, 42–4, 47–8, 52–5, 69–72, 223, 230, 235–7, 240, 253–4 Rebhorn, Wayne 259, 266 Redgrave, Corin 150 Republic, Roman 9–14, 21–3, 25, 31, 35–6, 37–8, 86, 126–9, 165, 170, 182, 190, 223, 243 Republicanism 9, 19, 22–3, 33–4, 45, 47, 52–5, 61, 86, 125–6, 134, 146, 148, 180, 203, 208, 211, 216, 222, 226–7, 229, 244–8, 256, 274 in Julius Caesar 79–81, 83–4, 94, 105–6 in Kyd’s Cornelia 90, 142, 248 in Livy 27, 33, 41 in Lucrece story 38, 41, 42, 52–5 in Sejanus and Catiline 4, 117, 121, 125, 128, 134, 264 in Tacitus and Sallust 20–3, 126–7, 201 Revenge 52, 58, 72, 74, 76 in Julius Caesar 100–3, 105 Revenge tragedy 76–7 Revenger’s Tragedy, The 77, 234 Rhodes, Neil 256–7 Richard II 59, 101, 119 Richard III 118, 123, 208, 217–18 Richardson, Samuel 39 Riggs, David 115, 260–1 Ripley, John 257, 259, 268–9 Rivers, Isobel 260–1

Index

297

Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of 43 Roman historians 6–9, 11–34, 251–2 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€Livy, Plutarch, Sallust, Tacitus Roman plays, Elizabethan and Jacobean 5–6, 17, 56, 249 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€discussion of individual plays Roman values 1–3, 5, 30, 32, 47, 59–60, 62, 67–8, 93, 113, 144, 229 in Antony and Cleopatra 136, 138–40, 146, 148–50, 156, 160, 164 in Coriolanus 165–6, 178 Rome decline of 20, 22–3, 32, 121, 127, 142–3, 171, 200, 211 in Antony and Cleopatra 135–40, 150–4 in Coriolanus 165–9, 177–8, 193–5 in Julius Caesar 79–84 in Titus Andronicus 60–6 in Wounds of Civil War 58–9 Ronan, Clifford, 249 Rossiter, A. P. 179 Røstvig, Maren-Sofie 251 Rowley, William 219, 233 Rubicon, crossing of 11, 92 Rutter, Carol 259

Silius 121–3, 126, 262 Simmons, J. L. 249 Singh, Jyotnsa 266 Skinner, Quentin 33, 45, 244, 251, 254, 258, 262–3, 274 Slights, William 264 Smith, Bruce 269 Smith, Hallett 254 Smith, Sir Thomas 32 Smuts, Malcolm 251, 263 Somerset, Robert Carr, Earl of 119 Sophonisba 32 Sorge, Thomas 182 Spencer, Terence 8, 62, 250, 256 Spenser, Edmund 237–8, 273 Stempel, Daniel 140 Stephens, Toby 185 Strehler, Giorgio 181 Suetonius 7, 16–17, 111, 208, 212, 216–17, 262, 271–2 Suicide 1–2, 39, 46, 49–51, 54, 60, 79, 106, 228, 230 Sulla 9, 14, 21, 23–4, 56–60, 64 Syme, Sir Roland 137, 250, 252, 265 Syracuse 197, 200–1, 204

Sabinus 121, 124 Sallust 8–9, 13, 21–6, 34, 56–7, 60, 65, 81, 200–1, 223, 240, 248, 263 Conspiracy of Catiline 17, 21–5, 126–31, 133–4, 202 Jugurthine War 21, 24–5 Saturninus 5, 8, 63, 67–8, 74, 77, 257 Savile, Sir Henry 9, 18–20, 251 Scarus 135, 157 Schanzer, Ernest 258–9, 265–6 Scipio 9, 31, 214 Scott, Thomas 201, 270 Sebastian of Portugal, Don 196–7 Sedley, Sir Charles 145–6, 266 Sejanus 4, 7, 17, 34, 107, 109–12, 115, 117–26, 146, 204, 208, 218, 247, 260–1, 262 Sejanus 111, 118–19, 122–5, 195, 205, 262–3 Selden, John 110 Selecus 141 Seneca 8, 18, 61, 113–14, 260–2, 270 Shakespeare and Early Modern Thought 244 Shaw, Bernard 162 Sher, Antony 75, 205, 270 Shrank, Cathy 267 Shrapnel, John 98 Shuger, Debora 274 Sicinius 12, 167, 181 Sidney, Philip 32, 214

Tacitus 7, 9, 15–16, 17–23, 26, 56, 60, 65, 81, 185, 200, 207–8, 211–12, 218, 224, 248, 273 Agricola 21, 220–2, 226, 229–30, 240 and Jonson 111, 113, 118, 121–2, 124, 126, 204, 262 Annals 221–4, 226–7 ‘Red’ and ‘black’ Tacitism 20, 126, 244, 274 Reputation in Renaissance 17–19, 34, 251 Tamora 64–6, 68, 71, 74–7 Tarquinius, Lucius (Tarquin the Proud) 10, 13, 23, 33, 35–6, 38–41, 43, 53, 90, 170, 195, 252–3 Tarquinius, Sextus 33, 35–40, 42–3, 47–50, 52–4, 233, 235–7, 244 Tate, Nahum 178–9, 267 Taylor, Joseph 205 Tempest, The 202 Tennenhouse, Leonard 140 Terry, Ellen 238 Terence 7 Tereus 51, 62, 72, 76 Theodosius 62 Thomas, Vivian 249 Thompson, Ann 274 Tiberius 4, 16–18, 111–12, 117–25, 132, 235, 237, 247, 262–3 Tibullus 108, 110 Tillyard, E. M. W. 179

298

Index

Timoleon 200–1, 270 Titian 39 Titinius 79, 106 Titus Andronicus 1, 3–5, 8, 38–9, 46, 51, 60–79, 165, 240, 244–5, 250, 256–7 Tolbert, James 253 Tribunes 11–14, 21, 28, 63, 72, 166–7, 170–3, 181–3, 195, 217 Troilus and Cressida 149 True Trojans, The 219, 224–6, 231, 240 Tucca, Captain 108 Tudor myth 13, 56, 177, 179 Tullia 40, 43 Tullius, Servius 35, 40 Twelfth Night 175, 237 Tyrannicide 82, 86, 90–2, 208–10, 271–2 Tyranny 38, 40–1, 43, 52, 55, 60, 72, 81, 84, 86, 90–1, 93, 97–9, 173, 204, 208–11, 221, 248, 271 in Jonson 117–18, 122, 124–6 in Massinger 198–9, 200–1, 203, 205, 216–18, 270 Valiant Welshman, The 219, 226–7 Valentinian 43–4, 209 Ventidius 3, 144–5 Venus and Adonis 8 Vercingetorix 220–1, 272 Vespasian 17 Vickers, Brian 256 Vickers, Nancy 253–4 Vindex 19 Violence in Julius Caesar 95, 101–5 in Titus Andronicus 69–70, 72, 76–8 Virgilia 185, 187

Virgil 7–8, 15, 60, 67, 108, 110, 183 in Antony and Cleopatra 136–9, 264–5 Virginia 44–6, 62, 254 Virginius 45–7, 62, 254 Virtus 2–3, 25, 27, 78, 107, 148–9, 223, 226, 235, 243, 246, 252, 267 in Coriolanus 165–6, 167, 173, 186–8, 268 Vives, Juan Luis 260 Volscians 10, 166, 168–71, 174, 183, 186, 188–90, 193–5, 269 Volumnia 2, 22, 166–8, 172–4, 181, 184–8, 191–5, 267–9 Waith, Eugene 256 War of the Theatres 108, 260 Warner, Deborah 69, 98, 100, 104–5, 259 Webster, John Appius and Virginia 44, 47, 54, 254 The White Devil 234 Welles, Orson 85, 98, 104, 257–9 Wells, Colin 250 Wilders, John 258 Winter’s Tale, The 164, 186, 236, 239, 241 Wiseman, T. P. 252 Womersley, David 250–1 Wood, John 100 Woodbridge, Linda 274 SeeÂ€alsoÂ€L. T. Fitz. Worden, Blair 124, 132, 260, 262–4 Worth, Irene 193 Wyke, Maria 85, 257, 272 Zeeveld, W. Gordon 179

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