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  • Plato's Republic and Shakespeare's Rome: A Political Study of the Roman Works
  • Arthur F. Kinney
Barbara L. Parker . Plato's Republic and Shakespeare's Rome: A Political Study of the Roman Works. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press/AUP, 2004. 183 pp. index. bibl. $41.50. ISBN: 0–87413–861–2.

Arguing that Shakespeare's five Roman works — The Rape of Lucrece, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus — follow a general Platonic paradigm while exercising topicality, Barbara Parker sees in these works a third Shakespearean tetralogy with Titus as a kind of summarizing coda. Lucrece, Caesar, and Titus share a concern with the Elizabethan succession and its divisiveness and insecurity; Coriolanus and Antony speak to issues of Stuart absolutism and excess. All five works, however, share Plato's view in the Republic of the [End Page 342] ideal state sliding first into timocracy, or division within the ruling class, and so into factionalism, rebellion, mob rule, and tyranny. The public theory is accompanied in Plato by the more personal one in which the passions overtake reason and so divide and weaken the soul.

Much of the topicality Parker finds in these plays will seem familiar — the threat of Spanish invasion, the uncertainty of Catholic usurpation, the rebellion of Essex — but there are a number of original observations along the way. Lucrece's complexion of red and white suggests that her invasion and rape figure the War of the Roses; Tarquin's Machiavellian "policy" is represented by forced rape, and this vulnerability in turn suggests Elizabeth I's plight before Essex. Coriolanus highlights the battleground between the king and the growing influence of the House of Commons and thus warns James I about ignoring the people. The triumph of the many makes Caesar and then Brutus and Antony vulnerable in Julius Caesar, while Antony and Cleopatra shows how "[t]he shifting alliances of the rulers ethically replicate those of the fickle masses" (93) and government takes on the metaphor of whorishness. Finally, following the line of criticism that argues that the muddle of Titus is unclear on whether succession is by means of primogeniture, election, nomination, or military force, Parker notes that the play also mixes pagan, Catholic, and Reformation elements as it mirrors the various rivalries for the throne of Elizabeth throughout the 1580s and into the 1590s.

Parker is deeply learned in the history of the period and can be astute in parallels that she draws and in analogies among the plays and between the plays and the culture that motivates them. She is strikingly and often persuasively original, moreover, in her readings of some of the plays. She finds that Brutus falls because he comes to function and think like Caesar, and that Antony falls because he follows them both. She sees in Antony and Cleopatra a fierce desire to conquer, noting that the real dispute is between Caesar and Cleopatra, not Antony and Cleopatra, locked in combat for immortality; she argues for a similarity of the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, not for love but to remain unconquered.

Just how much of this topicality depends on the Platonic paradigm, however, is debatable. Parker notes that the irrationality of the tyrant is a political commonplace at least as old as the writings of Sir Thomas Elyot (95), but, except for an instance in Julius Caesar where she finds a departure from Plutarch can be found in the Republic, the paradigm she applies is so broad that it becomes just as general as that she finds in Elyot. Dating can be slippery, too, as when she admits that Lucrece antedates the Essex rebellion of 1601 by at least five years despite the analogies she draws between them (47). Such discrepancies aside, however, most of the analogues she finds are extremely helpful in thinking of the plays as deliberate political commentary; and the analogies she draws between the four plays at the close of her study in an attempt to make of them a third tetralogy is downright alluring.

Arthur F. Kinney
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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