In exploring Shakespeare’s three later Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, we shall be asking how the idea of Rome in particular engaged his imagination. What did he draw on, and what did he change, in his main source in Plutarch’s Lives? Through the tradition of stoical thought, Rome provides the image of a certain kind of male hero: powerful, self-possessed, in control of his passions rather than being driven by them. It is an image which Shakespeare’s tragic heroes may fall short of or depart from, rather than fulfil, but it is intensely important in how they view themselves and are regarded by others. Rome is a military and a political world, in which the personal and the political are closely entwined: again, Shakespeare both takes this interconnection as his starting point and shows us the tensions it may conceal. It is a predominantly masculine world, but in the two later plays in particular the crisis for the male hero comes in his encounter with powerful women, as if to ask what such masculinity might vulnerably exclude. Republican Rome, especially, is a place of shifting and uncertain authority, where power can depend on a fickle and volatile mob of people, and allegiances are not fixed by family ties or religious beliefs but depend, rather, on rhetoric, on the power of language to influence and persuade. And Rome is above all a famous place, canonised in history and in legend, and when Shakespeare brings these famous figures onto his stage, he dramatizes the question of whether they can live up to the grandeur which others attribute to them, or which history has accorded them. ‘Always I am Caesar’, says Julius, denying that the dangerous Cassius frightens him: but in these plays it is not so easy to be who you are meant to be, to fill your place in the almost mythic history of Rome.
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