Caesar in the USA by Maria Wyke, and: Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity ed. by Irena R. Makaryk, and Marissa McHugh (review)

For the past two centuries, teachers, journalists, politicians, and playwrights from all political and aesthetic persuasions appear to have hardly ever tired of using real or imagined parallels between what they have read in books or learned at school and their daily experience of the life and culture of the United States. To paint (or caricature) the United States of America as the “New Romans” has become a rather tired cliché, having long outlived its usefulness or originality.¹ Maria Wyke’s generously documented study Caesar in the USA collects a rich assortment of evidence for the pervasive idea of a historical and cultural affinity of the American and the Roman Republics, in particular, the latter’s triumphant rise and its decline with the assassination of Julius Caesar.

The author, a professor of Latin at University College London, is especially interested in Julius Caesar as the subject of his own account of the Gallic wars, the man who famously crossed the Rubicon, and the spectacular victim of the conspiracy immortalized by Shakespeare’s tragedy. Her panorama of Caesar’s conspicuous role in the context of American culture presents extensive material on the surprising prominence of Caesar’s Gallic War in the syllabus of schools in the United States. A curious, but apparently not isolated, example is the enthusiastic account of 1908 from the Baltimore Girls’ Latin School, with a “lively description of the girls dressing themselves up as Roman soldiers and picking up with relish the ‘real’ paraphernalia of war” (31). Wyke’s contention that “Julius Caesar is omnipresent in modern American culture” (10) is supported in particular by the exceptional popularity of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonist: stage and screen productions of Julius Caesar have a number of times turned into major political events; journalists, as well as political commentators, have regularly made rhetorical or satirical capital from historical or literary parallels. Maria Wyke is not specifically a Shakespeare critic, but her observations on the contradictory political or polemical applications of Shakespeare’s play have a solid basis in literary criticism and controversial readings, for instance, Ernest Schanzer’s Problem Plays of Shakespeare (1963).

Her treatment of Julius Caesar is particularly persuasive. Many American presidents have at one time or another been compared to Caesar or one of his assassins, not just in highbrow commentary, but also in more popular settings, from sophisticated caricature to crude joke. The author, who has already published widely on the reception of classical Rome in Western culture, has evidently gathered the fruits of ten years of research in this attractive and informative, not to mention sometimes entertaining, book.

Several of the essays in the disturbing collection Shakespeare and the Second World War, edited by Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh, are based on previously published studies (or observations) by their authors; the originality and rewarding intensity of the volume are chiefly due to the cumulative effort of coming to terms with the reverberations of the cultural cataclysm in the limited arena of Shakespeare reception. Makaryk’s thoughtful introduction explains the creative impetus, which was provided by the 2009 conference “Wartime Shakespeare in a Global Context,” held at the University of Ottawa and source of many of the contributions. Makaryk also outlines some theoretical ideas, implied by the volume’s subtitle, which might provide guidance through the fascinating variety of observed theatrical and literary activities.

As one would expect, Shakespeare’s wartime impact was to a considerable degree determined by the side on which each national culture found itself during various conflicts and how each culture was affected by political events. Of equal relevance for any attempt to reconstruct the regional and local picture is the survival of sources and trustworthy memories...