i
This study of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra is based on the assumption that Shakespeare’s Roman plays may provide an opportunity to learn something about Rome as well as about Shakespeare. As innocuous as this assumption seems, it runs counter to the most common critical attitude toward the Roman plays. Ever since Ben Jonson, it has been fashionable to question Shakespeare’s knowledge of Rome, and in some cases even to maintain that his Romans are merely Elizabethan Englishmen in disguise.1 This view does not, however, seem to result from actual study of Shakespeare’s Rome, but rather takes the form of a critical presupposition. For one reason or another, critics assume from the outset that Rome is at most of peripheral interest in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Shakespeare is concerned with universal human nature, one argument runs, and therefore is not interested in whether a given character is a Roman or an Englishman. In the classic formulation of Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare: “His story requires Romans . . . , but he thinks only on men. . . . A poet overlooks the casual distinctions of country and condition, as a painter, satisfied with the figure, neglects the drapery.”2 Other critics feel that as a poet Shakespeare cannot have been interested in so unpoetic a subject as politics, and therefore could not have directly concerned himself with so political a subject as Rome.3 Another argument runs that Shakespeare as an Elizabethan Englishman was simply too remote in time from Rome to be able to understand it correctly,4 and therefore any investigation of his portrait of Rome would be of antiquarian interest only.
Without attempting to criticize these positions at length, one may point out that each in its own way begs the question. Johnson may be right in saying that Shakespeare overlooks “the casual distinctions of country and condition,” but can one be certain without investigation that all such distinctions are merely casual? Only unprejudiced study of Shakespeare’s Roman plays can determine whether or not there is something essentially Roman about his characters. As for the second view, to come to the Roman plays with the assumption that Shakespeare was uninterested in politics is to make a judgment before examining the major piece of evidence on which that judgment must be based. At first sight, Shakespeare’s Roman plays seem to deal with very political subjects; they are certainly the most political of his tragedies. Thus only in the course of studying the Roman plays can one legitimately come to any conclusion about Shakespeare’s interest in politics. As for the third view, as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, it has the defects of any historicist position. If we assume a priori that Shakespeare was incapable of understanding Rome, we will never read his Roman plays carefully enough to determine whether in fact he had any insights into Rome. It is all too easy not to find something when one is convinced from the start that nothing is there.
In short, the problem with making any theoretical presuppositions as to what Shakespeare could or could not have known about Rome is that it prejudices our reading of the Roman plays in the direction of inattention to his actual portrayal of Rome. 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. I hope, then, with this book to reopen the question of Shakespeare’s knowledge and understanding of Rome, in the belief that investigating this subject reveals new dimensions to his achievement in the Roman plays.
Perhaps the decisive heuristic advantage to having provisional respect for Shakespeare’s knowledge of Rome is that it imposes upon the critic himself the task of learning as much as possible about Rome. To give only one example of how lack of knowledge about Rome has led to difficulties, critics seem to disagree over the relatively simple question of what form of government is portrayed in Coriolanus; most call the Rome of Coriolanus an aristocracy, but some speak of Shakespeare’s Rome as if it were instead a democracy.5 If one considers only institutions like the Senate or the consulship in Shakespeare’s Rome, the regime does appear to be based on an aristocratic principle, but if one looks at the tribunate and the plebeians’ veto power, it appears based on a democratic principle. Critics who habitually make light of Shakespeare’s interest in politics might attribute this apparent confusion to the playwright himself. Shakespeare, they could argue, simply portrayed Rome as an aristocracy at some points and a democracy at others, without caring about the contradiction, or perhaps without even being aware of it.
But it is not Shakespeare who is confused about the form of government in Republican Rome. If, as most discussions of the political aspects of Coriolanus seem to assume, only three possible forms of government exist (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy),6 classifying Shakespeare’s Rome would indeed be difficult. But as writers in antiquity themselves pointed out, the Roman Republic cannot be understood on the model of one of the simple regimes. Political theorists have always considered the Roman Republic an example of a fourth form of government, the so-called mixed constitution or mixed regime,7 which involves precisely the blend of aristocracy and democracy that Shakespeare portrays in Coriolanus. In this case, Shakespeare’s knowledge of Rome is evidently better than that of many of his critics. The more one reads about Rome, the more one is impressed by Shakespeare’s grasp of the essential nature of the Roman regime and the central issues involved in Roman history. At the outset I can of course offer this as only one reader’s impression; I hope to document the point in the course of discussing the Roman plays, showing, for example, in Part One that understanding the working of the mixed regime is essential to understanding the action of Coriolanus.
ii
As important as it is in reading Coriolanus to have some grasp of the details of the Republican regime, it is even more important in approaching the Roman plays as a group to be aware of the overall contrast between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. For in studying Shakespeare’s Rome, we are actually confronted by two Romes with fundamentally different natures. We should be aware that the Empire, which fell heir to the unparalleled military conquests of 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 Republican Romans 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 its conquests 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,8 and the extension of Roman citizenship to all the peoples of Italy. Montesquieu writes of this second development:
After this, Rome was no longer a city whose people had but a single spirit, a single love of liberty, a single hatred of tyranny. . . . Once the peoples of Italy became its citizens, each city brought to Rome its genius, its particular interests, and its dependence on some great protector. The distracted city no longer formed a complete whole. And since citizens were such only by a kind of fiction, since they no longer had the same magistrates, the same walls, the same gods, the same temples, and the same graves, they no longer saw Rome with the same eyes, no longer had the same love of country, and Roman sentiments were no more.9
As we shall see, Coriolanus is set long before these developments took place, when the Roman spirit was still intact; Antony and Cleopatra, on the other hand, is set long after the process Montesquieu describes had run its course and the Roman spirit had been thoroughly corrupted.
One must bear in mind these differences between the Republic and the Empire in order to understand why being a Roman in the world of Coriolanus is quite different from being a Roman in the world of Antony and Cleopatra. Coriolanus portrays Rome very early in its history, when the city’s territory did not extend much beyond its own walls, but Antony and Cleopatra takes up Rome’s story at the point when its empire had reached its greatest extent. To live in a small republican city, struggling against hostile neighbors and just beginning to feel its strength, is obviously not the same as to live in a vast imperial realm, with no more worlds to conquer and hence with the peak of Roman achievement behind it. Shakespeare’s sensitivity to the differences between the Republic and the Empire, which informs the setting, characterization, and action—even at times the imagery and style—of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, is the surest indication of how well he understood the phenomenon of Rome and Romanness.
For this reason I have organized this study around the contrast between the Republic and the Empire as portrayed in the last two Roman plays Shakespeare wrote.10 It seemed to me significant that several years after writing Julius Caesar, which deals with the transition from the Republic to the Empire, and in which the issue of Republic versus Empire is the focal point of all the action and much of the dialogue, Shakespeare went on to write two more Roman plays, one dealing with the origins of the Republic and the other with the origins of the Empire. One can easily account for his writing Antony and Cleopatra, since it is the natural historical sequel to Julius Caesar, whose thread of action it does pick up and continue. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s choice of the subject of Coriolanus has often puzzled readers, since this story has never been as famous as that of Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra and has never attracted much attention from artists.11 Other playwrights of Shakespeare’s time took up the period in Roman history at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire; what seems to be most characteristic of Shakespeare is the interest he shows in Coriolanus in the early days of the Republic.12 In a discussion of Coriolanus, Harold Goddard offers the somewhat hesitant suggestion: “If its author had been historically minded, much of the play might be explained as an attempt to present the spirit of an early austere Rome.”13 Much less tentatively Geoffrey Bullough offers a similar explanation of Shakespeare’s choice of Coriolanus as a subject:
What led Shakespeare to write this play on a comparatively minor and early figure in Roman history? By 1607 he had presented in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra two studies of Rome at the end of the Republic. He may have wished to show something of Rome in its beginnings. . . . He had only to glance into Livy and Florus or Plutarch to realize that Rome was not built in a day and that the story of Coriolanus illustrated its early state.14
The story of Coriolanus does take place during what amounted to the founding of the Roman Republic. Although the Republic is customarily dated from the expulsion of the Tarquin kings, its most characteristic institution was the tribunate, which gave the plebeians a share of power, and by introducing the popular element into Roman sovereignty gave the Republican regime its mixed character.15 Since Coriolanus begins with the creation of the tribunate, and goes on to dramatize its precarious survival through a grave constitutional crisis, the play provides a portrait of the origins of republicanism in Rome.
One can hardly be sure of an artist’s intentions merely from his choice of subject matter. The most one can say is that if Shakespeare had wanted to contrast the early days of the Republic with the early days of the Empire, he could not have chosen two better lives from Plutarch to dramatize than those of Coriolanus and Antony. Fortunately more evidence can be found in the texts of the plays that Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra can be profitably read as companion pieces, evidence which I hope to unfold in the course of my discussion. Time and again we find images, motifs, in some cases almost whole scenes from the two plays which work together to contrast the world of one with that of the other. For introductory purposes, I want only to suggest how the individual stories of Coriolanus and Antony illuminate each other. The two heroes embody different mixtures of heroic virtues and vices, and the vices of one serve to set off the virtues of the other. Whereas Antony wavers in command and lets his greatest opportunities escape him, Coriolanus displays a singlemindedness that borders on fanaticism. By the same token, whereas Coriolanus’ arrogance eventually causes even the men for whom he has won great victories to banish him, Antony, with his generosity and human warmth, is able to win the love of even those whom he has led to defeat. If I have begun to sound like Plutarch in the comparisons with which he closes his pairs of biographies, it is a good reminder that Shakespeare had before him in the Parallel Lives a model for using the stories of individual men to develop a comparison between different regimes, Greece and Rome in Plutarch’s case. Anyone familiar with Plutarch’s technique of pairing biographical subjects would not reject out of hand the suggestion that Shakespeare in dramatizing the stories of Coriolanus and Antony created his own parallel lives, highlighting the differences between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.
Consider, for example, the following passage from Plutarch’s comparison of Caius Martius Coriolanus and Alcibiades:
[Alcibiades] passed all others for winning men’s good wills. Whereas all Martius’ noble acts and virtues, wanting that affability, became hateful even to those that received benefit by them, who could not abide his severity and self will, which causeth desolation (as Plato saith) and men to be ill-followed or altogether forsaken. Contrariwise seeing Alcibiades had a trim entertainment and a very good grace with him, and could fashion himself in all companies, it was no marvel if his well doing were gloriously commended and himself much honored and beloved of the people, considering that some faults he did were ofttimes taken for matters of sport and toys of pleasure. And this was the cause that though many times he did great hurt to the commonwealth, yet they did oft make him their general and trusted him with the charge of the whole city. Where Martius, suing for an office of honor that was due him for the sundry good services he had done the state, was notwithstanding repulsed and put by. Thus do we see that they to whom the one did hurt, had no power to hate him, and th’ other, that honored his virtue, had no liking to love his person.16
It is striking how much Plutarch’s Alcibiades sounds like Shakespeare’s Antony, and with the requisite changes of name, this passage could serve to compare Coriolanus and Antony as Shakespeare portrays them.17 Perhaps Plutarch provides a model of the sort of comparisons we ought to attempt in analyzing Shakespeare’s characters. Without getting too deeply involved in the question of Plutarch’s influence on Shakespeare, one can at least put forward the claim that the Coriolanus and Antony of the Roman plays are “representative men” in a Plutarchian sense. 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. Coriolanus is the exemplar of the austere, disciplined life of martial virtue practiced by the nobler citizens of the Republic. Though we can catch glimpses of this way of life in Antony, for him it has basically become a thing of the past (to be sure, not without regret on his part). 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.” As we shall see, Antony hopes to find in love the glory the old Romans found in war. Thus the heroes of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra develop contrasting sides of human nature,18 and a careful study of the Roman plays will show how this development is related to the different regimes under which the characters live. Even if one were only interested in trying to comprehend the individual careers of Coriolanus and Antony, one could not ignore the differences between the Republic and the Empire, for Shakespeare has grounded the stories of his heroes in very specific political and historical settings, which both contribute to the development of their characters and set the ethical terms of the decisions they must make. In studying the Roman plays we gradually become aware that Shakespeare could hardly have understood Romans without understanding Rome.
iii
I hope I have succeeded in giving a certain initial plausibility to the idea of looking for Shakespeare’s understanding of Rome, and looking for it specifically in terms of the contrasted portrayals of the Republic and the Empire in Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. The notion of Shakespeare’s Romes is the sort of critical hypothesis that can be established in one, and only one, way: by illuminating in detail our reading of the Roman plays. Before turning to this task, I should explain why I have not devoted a separate section to Julius Caesar.19 I had initially intended to give equal time to Julius Caesar, but I found I had little to add to what has already been written on the subject,20 and what I did have to say was generally in conjunction with a point about either Coriolanus or Antony and Cleopatra. Therefore I have integrated my discussion of Julius Caesar into my discussion of the other two Roman plays. Although this organization may seem to slight Julius Caesar, it gives coherence to my argument and makes the contrast between the Republic and the Empire stand out in sharper relief. I want to emphasize that I do believe that the three Roman plays form a kind of historical trilogy, dramatizing the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, in a sense the tragedy of Rome itself, in which the Republic is corrupted and eventually destroyed by its very success in conquering the world. In this drama Julius Caesar is not simply important but quite literally central. Such an approach to the Roman plays, first suggested to my knowledge by Harold Goddard,21 could be worked out in greater detail, and I have made some tentative steps in that direction, particularly in Chapter 4, section ii, and Chapter 6, section i. Regarding the Roman plays as a trilogy does, however, raise certain difficulties, for example, the problem of the continuity of the character of Antony in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. And given the gap in time between the composition of Julius Caesar and that of the other two Roman plays, one might legitimately question whether the three plays were meant to be read together. Not wanting to get involved in this sort of controversy, I have confined myself to what I feel I can demonstrate, namely that Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra were written as companion pieces, a notion at least made plausible by their composition at approximately the same time.
Finally, I want to explain why I have not attempted to discuss, as might have been expected, the question of what Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew or thought about Rome. Certainly an interesting book could be written about Elizabethan views of Rome, but the point is the subject would require a whole book of its own. To try to cover so large a topic in an introductory chapter would require simplifications that might easily turn into distortions. The issue of the Elizabethan understanding of Rome is more complicated than may at first sight appear, especially since both growing imperial ambitions and nascent republican sentiments inevitably became bound up with the way the Elizabethans viewed Roman history. If one were to take into account writers as diverse as Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, Thomas Lodge, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Francis Bacon, one would be lucky just to reach Shakespeare in the space of a single volume. And in any case, the most comprehensive account of Elizabethan attitudes toward Rome could not substitute for a careful reading of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, for one could never confidently ascribe to Shakespeare even a widespread view of Rome without first checking what he himself wrote on the subject. In point of fact, no single attitude toward Rome prevailed in the English Renaissance, for many of the great intellectual conflicts of the age had a way of focusing precisely on Rome as a point of dispute. One could, by citing different Elizabethan writers, ascribe to Shakespeare very different—even contradictory—views of Rome. Therefore I have avoided getting involved in substituting quotations from other writers for quotations from Shakespeare, especially when those other writers at times present difficulties of interpretation as great as those one encounters originally in Shakespeare. In the end I have relied on the assumption that the best authorities for learning what Shakespeare thought about Rome are the texts of the plays he wrote about Rome,22 and as elaborate as my argument may occasionally become, I have tried to keep it anchored at all times in the texts of the Roman plays.