In an essential work of Shakespearean scholarship, the late Paul Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire contrasts two of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies —Coriolanus with Antony and Cleopatra— in an effort to demonstrate Shakespeare’s teaching with respect to the rise of the Roman Republic and its eventual descent into an Empire. In continuing in the tradition of reading “Shakespeare as Political Thinker,” Cantor works out the details of how the Roman Republican and Imperial political regimes operated, and Cantor also offers a corresponding character analysis of the key figures in both plays. Coriolanus deals with origins of the Republic, while Antony and Cleopatra focuses on the origins of the Empire. And each play shows what is lacking in the other –Cantor argues that what is at the heart of both tragedies is a philosophical tension between the city and man, rather than a conflict between mere private and personal virtues and vices.
In his book, Cantor helps to dispel a variety of myths while encouraging a renewed interest in exploring Shakespeare through the lens of politics, a seismic shift away from the fashionable New Criticism at the time he was writing. Hence why Cantor feels compelled to offer an apologia for his reading of Shakespeare. He asserts that “this study of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra is based on the assumption that Shakespeare’s plays may provide an opportunity to learn something about Rome as well as about Shakespeare” (7). In other words, instead of attempting to foist Elizabethan Englishmen upon Rome, Cantor notes that Shakespeare shows us his intimate knowledge of the mixed regime of ancient Rome in Coriolanus as well as the transformative imperial epoch in Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s Rome is remarkably consistent with the portraits featured in the works of Livy, Plutarch, Machiavelli, and Montesquieu. Therefore, since Shakespeare has taken great labors to portray Rome as it was, not as a reflection of Elizabethan England, we should read him as such. “Only by admitting at the outset the possibility that something can be learned about Rome from Shakespeare’s Roman plays will a critic study them with sufficient care to discover whatever insights they may embody.”
At the heart of the contrast between Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra is a conflict between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire:
“We should be aware that the Empire, which fell heir to the Republic, did not preserve the political principles that had made those conquests possible, above all the Republic’s concentration on encouraging martial valor in its citizens. The Empire was, figuratively as well as literally, a gigantic holding action, with the result that many of the special strengths and virtues that had distinguished the Roman Republicans disappeared, or at least began to wither, among the Imperial Romans. Throughout most of the history of the Republic, Roman existence was basically civic in nature, since the city provided the focus for the lives of its citizens. Once Rome began to extend beyond the borders of Italy, however, the city itself began to lose its centrality in Roman life. Particularly important in undermining the primacy of the city were the prolongation of military commands beyond the original limit of one year, which allowed generals to develop private loyalties in their armies, and the extension of Roman citizenship to all the peoples of Italy” (10-11).
Cantor proffers that the heuristic at work in the plays leads one to conclude that Shakespeare likely believes the Republic is superior to the Empire. The Republic is born in casting off the shackles of monarchy, whereas the Empire out of a cultural softening and spiritual malaise that spreads across the known world. Between the characters of Coriolanus and Antony, using Plutarch as his guide, Shakespeare presents his own parallel lives in both plays: “each embodies the way of life characteristic of the regime under which he lives; each achieves the perfection of the virtues and the extreme of the vices characteristic of his era” (15). And of the two, Coriolanus is the “exemplar of the austere disciplined life of martial virtue practiced by the nobler citizens of the Republic.” Whereas “susceptible to the new influences abroad in the Empire, Antony exemplifies a new way of life for Romans, based on a rejection of old notions of nobility and an acceptance of indulgence of the senses, sometimes spiritualized into ‘immortal longings’” (15).
Once identifying the characteristic distinctions in the two plays (which take place some four hundred years apart), Cantor delineates Coriolanus’s Republic from Antony’s Empire. Public spiritedness (or thumos) and civic virtue serve as the chief traits in the ancient Republic, while the pursuit of private interests is what permeates in the Empire –it shows a preference of eros over politics. And this brand of love is boundless, infinite, and perhaps even divine. The burgeoning Roman Empire is eager for its “immortal longings” to find satisfaction in a new imperial religious narrative. Notably, Cantor bookends his key chapters with quotations from Nietzsche –Part I focuses on the Republic and Cantor quotes Nietzsche regarding the necessity of an intolerant aristocratic morality, and Part II examines the nature of Empire in contrast to the politics of cllassical antiquity –both quotations are taken from Beyond Good and Evil.
“The ultimate test of love in Antony and Cleopatra is how much one is willing to sacrifice for one’s beloved, so that Antony’s military losses become a pledge of his faith to Cleopatra, and her willingness to stand by him in his downfall becomes in turn her token of allegiance” (156).
The love of Antony and Cleopatra is a deep and impassioned love affair filled with profound insecurity and it seems vulnerable to pass over into its opposite, a deeply felt hate, or at least bitter mistrust of the other’s fidelity. This is a chief subtextual theme in Cantor’s book –the notion that an extreme (such as a “greatest possible good” or a “highest understanding of the divine) runs counter to an Aristotelian mean, and as such, actually risks amplifying its opposite (such as the greatest possible evil). This is a central problem posed on humanity by modern theological sophistry.
A further criticism of the Rome of Antony and Cleopatra can be found in its portrayal of love relative to convention. Cantor notes that love poses a challenge to convention (i.e. eros naturally challenges nomos). An expression of love that runs counter to convention is potentially tragic whereas love that is in harmony with convention is comic. The challenge with socio-political conventions is that they provide order but they also threaten to stifle emotions and thus eros often finds itself in conflict with politics (Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence explores this tension). One of these troubling conventions is language itself. In other words, the feeling of love often seeks to defy and transcend its own linguistic expression and conceptual understanding. This new type of love in Antony and Cleopatra shows an otherworldly love, which is both boundless and infinite, along with a celebration of self-sacrifice (the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra become the fullest, most complete expression of their love for one another), and this “suicide-as-the-highest-expression-of-love” poses new problems for language as well as for political order. As in Romeo and Juliet, both Antony and Cleopatra dramatically die for one another. They prove, as a matter of cliché, that they cannot live without each other –they have an infinite yearning for a love that transcends the whole world. Cantor wisely notes that this paradoxically exposes a kind of nihilism in their love as the whole world suddenly becomes ancillary to the wayward whims of eros. Death becomes merely the prelude to wondrous future, a pleasant life after death, as if looking forward to “immoral longings” in another life. Here, Cantor notes that the global imperialist project of the Roman Empire has produced a certain kind of softening citizenry which are devoted to eros rather than civic virtue, and thus it serves as the perfect spiritual and superstitious milieu in which Christianity can proliferate and subvert the classical virtues of the ancient world. As such, there is something pious –even divine– about the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra –their demise is a kind of divine comedy. Therefore, the love of Antony and Cleopatra cannot be regarded as simply a form of public versus private love. It is the love of a classical tyrant. When exploring the relationship between love and tyranny, Cantor exposes how intertwined the public and private lives have in fact become in the Rome of Antony and Cleopatra.
“This decision to live dangerously, to sail into uncharted seas, is what is fundamentally heroic about Antony and Cleopatra, for it represents a forthright response to the fundamental fact of their world, the dissolution of the ancient city and resulting hollowness of old conventions and traditional values. In this sense, to understand the special case of Antony and Cleopatra is to take a major step toward understanding life in general under the Imperial regime. For the insecurity the lovers encounter in their attempt to live without the support of convention, the difficulty of validating subjective of modes of thought and feeling, is the characteristic problem of life in the Empire… How the characters in Antony and Cleopatra react to this feeling of being at sea, of suddenly being without guidance in a morally perplexing world of divided allegiances, seems to be the only true test of heroic fortitude remaining to them” (204).
Cantor, Paul. Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2nd edition, 2017 (originally published in 1976).