In a sequel of sorts to Shakespeare’s Rome, the late Paul Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World expands upon his earlier book published many decades earlier. Cantor’s first book, Shakespeare’s Rome, was borne out of his dissertation on Coriolanus entitled “The Rulerless City and the Citiless Man.” But in Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy Cantor is very clear that he has no intention of disowning his earlier book written five decades earlier in the 1970s, but rather he intends to supplement and further clarify its contents. In the newer book Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy –a definitive work of Shakespearean scholarship– Cantor gives less attention to the love of Antony and Cleopatra, since this was a prevalent topic in his earlier book—and instead he incorporates more analysis on the character of Coriolanus, as well as Julius Caesar, and his thoroughly researched essays offer invaluable insights on Nietzsche, Hegel, Rabelais, Machiavelli, and topical issues like “globalization” with respect to Shakespeare’s Rome.
One of the key subtexts toward understanding Shakespeare’s Roman plays, according to Cantor, is to read Shakespeare through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche and his understanding of the “revaluation of values in ancient Rome.” In his first book, Cantor’s debt to Nietzsche was merely esoteric, hidden in two timely quotations, but in Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy Cantor endeavors to make that intellectual inheritance explicit. “As I spell out in this book, the buried theme of Shakespeare’s Roman plays is the way that the dissolution of the Roman republican regime prepared the way for the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire” (3). However, even in the 1970s, it would have been inadvisable to openly pose such ideas. Thus, only in the winter of his life, was Paul Cantor free to more openly and exoterically explore the full range of his ideas on Shakespeare’s Rome –a world which began as a small austere republican polis, but eventually devolved into a vast, bloated Empire ruled by a decadent oligarchy which became ensconced in a new inverted morality which saw defeat as victory, weakness as strength, and death as life.
“Thus, in a remarkable act of imaginative archaeology, Shakespeare uncovers in Coriolanus what it was like too in an ancient city with its republican institutions, civic gods, narrow horizons, and a pagan focus on this-worldly existence. In an equally remarkable act of historical imagination, in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare dramatizes the death of the ancient city and the emergence of a new form of life on an imperial scale, with much broader horizons, which even encompass visions of the afterlife. The Empire transforms the relation of the individual to the political community in ways that anticipate what we think of as the medieval and modern worlds, with a growing division between religion and politics and an increasing distance between ruler and ruled that is simultaneously alienating and liberating” (4).
The kinship between Shakespeare and Nietzsche can be clearly seen in Shakespeare’s demonstration of Nietzsche’s “slave revolt” as it begins among the aristocratic Roman masters who become slavish under the rule of the Caesars. In his book, Cantor takes great labors to challenge various commonly held opinions that Shakespeare’s Rome was merely intended to be a reflection of Englishmen dressed in togas –this was the popular opinion held by Samuel Johnson and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe among others. However, thinkers like Alexander Pope, Machiavelli, Hegel, Montesquieu, and Nietzsche have all recognized Shakespeare’s truly towering achievement in his grand vision of Rome. Cantor cites both Milton’s Paradise Regained and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as two classic literary examples wherein Rome is shown to reach its zenith at the same moment that it falls into decay and decline. And Nietzsche was deeply influenced by Shakespeare’s plays and poetry from a very young age.
While acknowledging that we can say very little with certainty about Shakespeare’s own personal views on politics or religion, Cantor astutely notes that Shakespeare displays (in his plays) a truly remarkable fascination with republics, particularly those of the ancient variety, but also modern commercial republics of the 16th and 17th centuries. In Shakespeare’s day, republicanism was once again a viable regime throughout the small, prosperous cities of Florence and Venice. At the same time, vast global empires were also on the rise, from the Ottomans to the Hapsburgs (and England’s global supremacy was also well underway). With this in mind, Shakespeare confronts us with a deeply critical view of the English monarchy in his History plays, which tend to remind us of the profound flaws rife within a monarchic regime (in particular, Shakespeare was troubled by the problem of succession under a monarchy –since a Henry V is often followed by a Henry VI). “As we shall see in analyzing Coriolanus, Shakespeare understood that to observe a hero singe-mindedly devoted to political life (undistracted, for example, by Christian concerns for the afterlife), one has to go back to the pagan republics of antiquity. In general, Shakespeare’s interest in ancient Rome was rooted in his perception that certain human possibilities were developed more fully in the Roman than in the Christian monarchies of his day” (15). Thus, it is not merely a question of which regime Shakespeare prefers, instead he examines both regimes –a Republic and an Empire—but only in order to raise doubts about both and expose their problems. The Roman Republic, for example, breeds an uncomplicated citizenry whose narrowing horizons are limited only to their city and their life as it exists in the temporal world. However, in the Roman Empire, the old republican virtues are undermined while at the same time all manner of infinite spiritual horizons are opened up, allowing for new forms of human excellence (if not political excellence). But, at the same time, Shakespeare’s whole account of Rome is tragic –Shakespeare recognizes that the descent of Rome was not simply a washing away of classical Rome, but rather it marked an apocalyptic end to the ancient world and the polis itself, a fundamental alteration to the human condition which left lasting scars throughout the modern world.
Rome looms large over Shakespeare’s career –four of his ten tragedies are set in the ancient city; what may have been his first comedy The Comedy of Errors is based on Plautus’s Manaechmi; of his two narrative poems, The Rape of Lucrece is based on the infamous incident in Roman history and Venus and Adonis is drawn from Ovid; Cymbeline is a reminder of Britain’s Roman heritage; and his History plays are riddled with allusions to Rome. In Shakespeare’s day, Rome came to represent the pinnacle of earthly glory within the Renaissance imagination. And the Mediterranean, more broadly, served a pivotal place of geographic centrality in Shakespeare’s plays –of his thirty-seven plays, twenty are set entirely or partially in the Mediterranean world. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, Mediterranean cities like Florence, Venice, Genoa, Rome, and Naples stood at the forefront of economic, political, intellectual, and artistic developments in Europe. Shakespeare seems to have been fascinated with these multicultural Mediterranean cities, as evidenced in his Venetian plays (The Merchant of Venice and Othello). Whereas countries like Spain were expelling minorities at the time, particularly Moors and Jews, other places like Venice were opening their doors to refugees. “Venice appeared to be a radical experiment, an attempt to found a community not on religious or other cultural grounds but on an economic basis” (199). Additionally, in selecting the Mediterranean as a frequent setting for his plays, Shakespeare reveals himself to be a true child of the Renaissance, a poet who is interested in the intersection of classical antiquity and modern Christian civilization, and the moral dilemma posed therein.
Cantor demonstrates the uniqueness of the tragic trilogy portrayed in Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra, a trio of plays which convey the downfall of the Roman republic. And in doing so, Shakespeare displays an extraordinary understanding of the institutions of the republic in Coriolanus, such as the patricians as consuls, as well as the plebians as tribunes. His imagination was deeply informed by historical research using Plutarch and others. And for Shakespeare “The Rome of Coriolanus focuses its citizens so completely on political life that it forms the comprehensive horizon of their existence” (27). The citizenry is shown to be completely devoted to their city, even the gods of ancient Rome are distinctly city gods.
“This is one way of saying that the religion of Coriolanus is pagan. Because the horizon of the republican Romans is formed by the city, they are restricted to this world, and Shakespeare grasps the larger consequences of this pagan orientation for their way of life. By contrast, Christianity is a transpolitical religion. It does not limit itself to the boundaries of any political unit, and, far from suggesting that politics is the most important thing in human life, it denigrates the whole realm of the political and insists that human beings should be concerned with higher, spiritual matters that take them beyond the borders, not just of their communities, but of this world itself. The paganism of Rome is thus crucial to its goal of focusing its citizens on political life. Its civic religion works to keep the Romans cut off from any aspect of human life that might transcend the political and undermine its centrality in Roman existence” (28).
According to Cantor, Republican Romans in Shakespeare strive so mightily to perform great military deeds for their city because they have no other avenue for immortality –and this is also at the heart of Machiavelli’s analysis of Rome in the Discourses on Livy, a work which clarly distinguishes between pagan and Christian conceptions of human excellence. Machiavelli argues that belief in an afterlife, or the wish to “go to paradise” weakens people’s resolve and commitment to this life, with regard to standing up for their own dignity and asserting themselves. He often laments the modern celebration of abjectness, meekness, and an impoverishment of spirit.
But, having easily acknowledged the flaws brought about the Empire, what is the fatal flaw of the old Roman Republic? Cantor argues that “the city is potentially too dependent on its great leaders, as we see when Coriolanus almost brings it to its knees single-handedly.” And this problematic dependency only becomes more pronounced when military leaders begin extending their years of rule –indeed, Machiavelli traces the demise of the republic to the prolongation of military commands, a practice which reached its zenith under Julius Caesar. It corrupts the patricians and the plebians alike, and it leads to the rule of one-man in Rome. The plebians, as it turns out, are essential to the stability of Rome. Their descent into an unruly mob and haphazardly casting their support behind Antony as the new “Caesar” spells the doom of the old republic.
Cantor also notes the significant influence of Greek culture –Hellenization—on ancient Rome, from education in Athens to philosophic schools of thought. By the time of Antony and Cleopatra, we see Stoicism presented in the character of Brutus, and Epicureanism presented in the character of Cassius. We also see unnamed Cynics and Academics, though none in Rome can be truly more considered to be philosophic than the great mind of Cicero (neither Cassius nor Brutus are truly as committed philosophers as they claim to be). However, Cantor is careful to remind us that, as Hegel said, “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” and that as philosophy proliferates in Rome, Shakespeare likewise conveys a strong sense that the sun is actually setting on Rome’s dominance. With the emergence of the Empire, we begin to see the people of Rome start using philosophy as a mere tool, or a set of rules, to serve their own machinations. As such, the people of Rome actually turn away from political philosophy, the likes of which are found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and instead embrace various portents, divine signs, and other troubling superstitions –like prophecies, soothsayers, and the increasing view that humans are merely the playthings of divine puppet otherworldly masters. At the same time, Rome seems keen to reject Athens and instead embrace Egypt as its model of influence.
“Shakespeare captures the difference between the Republic and the Empire in the imagery of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. With their steadfastness of purpose and devotion to duty, his republican Romans live in a world of sharp outlines and firm ground. By contrast, his imperial Romans, who feel acutely that they have lost their way, live in a world of wispy clouds, shifting sands, and swirling currents. The central image of Antony as a soldier in the play is a man lost at sea, without the firm guideposts from the city that anchored Coriolanus and the other republican Romans in their world” (53).
According to Cantor, Shakespeare locates the moral devolution in Rome (or what Nietzsche calls the “slave revolt” with respect to morality) squarely on the shoulders of the softening of the Roman aristocracy over time.
“In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare portrays a nearly moribund Roman aristocracy, corrupted by their wealth and no longer faithful to their traditional values. They have lost their way; they are disillusioned, dispirited, and confused by the death of the Republic. Having lost their faith in human agency, they have become indolent, inclined to think that things will happen to them, rather than that they can make things happen. They have come to doubt themselves, their customs, and their beliefs. In their confusion, they are open to all sorts of new possibilities, including the idea that the values they inherited are hollow and should be overturned… Indeed, the line dividing masters from slaves is being effaced at the end of Antony and Cleopatra. All the paradoxes in the play –defeat is victory, weakness is strength, death is life—show that Rome is already, so to speak, half-Christian. In short, the Rome of Antony and Cleopatra is ripe –overripe—for what Nietzsche calls the slave revolt in morality, and the masters have prepared the way for their own overthrow. The undermining of traditional Roman values results partly from the Romans’ encounter with alien ways of life in the lands the Republic conquered. Succumbing to the allure of exotic customs, the characters in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra become increasingly un-Roman by the standards of the Republic. Adapting to the ways of life of the very peoples they defeated, the Romans come to embrace an ethos of defeat. That is the ultimate tragedy of the Roman Republic” (87).
Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra are generally regarded as among the last tragedies Shakespeare wrote, and they may even be rightly interpreted as an attempt to round out Shakespeare’s career as a tragedian. Across both plays, he shows us how the self-contained polis transforms the consciousness of mankind as its downfall leads to a worldwide empire, the likes of which was only conceived of by Alcibiades, and attempted by Alexander the Great of Macedon, before finally being achieved by the Roman Caesars. Even scholars like T.S. Eliot were forced to admit that new ways of seeing the world, like Stoicism and Christianity, were both responses to the same phenomenon, namely the death of the polis and the corruption of the aristocracy. The cult of Dionysus had much in common with the many mystery religions that swept across the Mediterranean world from the East –the story of Bacchus’s death, dismemberment, and resurrection linked him with other Eastern deities such as Osiris, Thammuz, and Mithras. However, as Shakespeare makes clear, the ultimate mystery religion to sweep across the Empire was Christianity. It served as a new “way” for people to ground themselves within an infinite horizon of a myriad of gods and the widespread feeling of alienation and disorientation as classical antiquity quietly vanished into the twilight.
Cantor, Paul. Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 2017.
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