The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by Warren Chernaik (review)

Nearly sixty years ago, Terence Spencer remarked of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus that it offered Elizabethan audiences “not the most high and palmy state of Rome, certainly. But an authentic Rome, and a Rome from which the usual political lessons could be drawn.”¹ Spencer recognized then that documentary or “historical” accuracy (whatever that was) mattered less to Shakespeare and his audiences than “an authentic Rome” whose mythos could serve selectively to signpost “the usual political lessons” (whatever those were). From Spencer’s essay forward, readers have understood that Rome is never quite Rome, or rather any particular Rome, in Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, Massinger, or Chapman. In The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Warren Chernaik opens out an array of “Romes” as a resonant, affective touchstone for early modern English poets and dramatists. He is interested mainly in how much of Rome’s history was known to Elizabethans through various textual versions and formats—in what it “meant,” what it might have signaled to a variety of writers, and how it did so. In his introductory invocation of Cleopatra’s reference to Antony’s “Roman thought” (Antony and Cleopatra, 1.2.88) and Horatio’s self-framing as “more an antique Roman than a Dane” (Hamlet, 5.2.374), Chernaik announces his book’s project: these lines “suggest . . . certain values that are characteristically Roman, but not geographically or temporally limited to a particular place” (1). Thus, he opens the inescapable (but surprisingly often overlooked) inquiry: what did it mean to be “characteristically Roman”?

Defining this pervasive romanitas for Shakespeare and his contemporaries seems like defining an elephant by the part you hold. Chernaik’s aim is to “examine Shakespeare’s dramatic use of the myth of Rome, the received tradition of Roman history and Roman values” (5), and to do so via not only Shakespeare’s plays but also his Lucrece and works by contemporaries reflecting a variety of educational exposures. Shakespeare’s Rome was not the same as Jonson’s Rome, or Webster’s, Chapman’s, or Massinger’s: all of these writers came by “their” Rome through different sources. Taking up the “subject of Rome” was a more complicated undertaking for dramatists and poets than has been recognized: they too had their hands on different parts of the elephant. Some texts (Cicero, Plutarch, Ovid, Livy, Virgil) were staples in scholastic curricula; others (Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Suetonius) were available mainly to scholars boasting considerably more than “small” Latin. Reading “Rome” via translation, as Shakespeare did, gives us yet another Rome, again different from Jonson’s or Chapman’s.

Chernaik’s own considerable learning serves him well, supported as it is by due diligence in sorting through the various threads in search of these “Romes.” His inclusive approach displays a wide reach and a firm grasp, as it covers and crosses genres, historical periods, a sampling of authors both classical and Renaissance, and an adept comprehension. This evenhandedness is Chernaik’s strongest achievement. We are all beneficiaries of the studies of Robert Miola, Coppélia Kahn, and Heather James (among others), with their respective focuses on gender, war, constructions of the heroic, and source studies. The special contribution of this book rests in the way it touches upon all of these areas. Chernaik’s talent for both historicist and close textual readings is impressive, as is the sweep of his attention not only to Shakespeare but also to a selection of major and minor plays often overshadowed by Shakespeare’s texts. In this regard, Chernaik’s greatest service is reopening critical awareness.

Occasionally, there are stumbles. Chernaik sometimes brings our attention to modern performances of such staples as Julius Caesar or Coriolanus to remind us that, now as then, the cultural moment in which a production takes place has at least as much to do with how we understand the work as does any archival approach to the...