Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World by Paul A. Cantor (review)

The premise of Paul Cantor's Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy is that Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra work not only as discrete plays but also collectively, as a portrayal of "the tragedy of an entire political community, not just that of its individual heroes" (4). The book's six chapters build upon this premise with varying degrees of interest, creating a purposeful looseness across the study as a whole. The first two chapters—on the plays' composite depiction of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and on the affinities between Shakespeare's and Nietzsche's understandings of late Roman values, respectively—"were written especially for this book and form the core of its new contribution to the study of the Roman plays" (5). The remaining chapters "were written earlier and branch off from [the] main argument in different directions," so that the book offers isolated readings that "can be read in any order, depending on the reader's particular interests" (6). This loose structure; the very notion of these plays as a "trilogy" (a concept notably dependent on the order not of composition but of the eras depicted); and the exclusion with minimal justification of Titus Andronicus, Lucrece, and Cymbeline will reasonably give some readers pause. Even so, Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy brims with lively, engaging readings certain to invigorate discussion of the relation of these three Roman plays to each other and of the cultural impact of late Roman politics on Shakespearean conceptions of tragedy, ethics, and communal identity.

The first chapter provocatively argues that "Shakespeare's mature Roman plays appear to form a trilogy" and, when considered together, highlight the distinction between "republican and imperial principles" as they "form one larger tragedy, what might be called the tragedy of the Republic" (23). Setting "the republican world of Coriolanus" against "the imperial world of Antony and Cleopatra" and perceiving Julius Caesar as marking the transition between the two, Cantor considers the coincident shift from "active citizens" to "passive subjects" (25) as the bounded parameters of the city, which gave definable meaning to communal civic life, yield to the endless horizons of empire. Witnessed by an increasing interest across these plays in philosophy, romantic love, and the supernatural, as well as by a concomitant decline in civic engagement, this massive shift creates, in Cantor's reading, not only the distinctive backdrop that characterizes each play but also the tragic narrative writ large of an entire polity itself, as the citizens of Rome turn elsewhere for fulfillment. Suggesting that "Shakespeare's most original achievement in the Roman plays" may be the revelation that "a city can lead a tragic existence" (83), Cantor reveals how altered political configurations may take on tragic grandeur themselves, even while radically shaping the kinds of heroes populating these plays.

Staying with the matter of Rome's decline, the second chapter turns to "compare Shakespeare and Nietzsche" on "the question of whether ancient Rome was corrupted by Christianity or, on the contrary, prepared the way for it" (103). After an extended reevaluation of Nietzsche on the decline of Rome, Cantor takes up Shakespeare's own apparent interest in "the strange interweaving and interaction of master morality and slave morality as the old Rome dies and a new Rome struggles to be born" (139). For Cantor, Shakespeare's Roman plays give us "a concrete illustration" of what Nietzsche means when he "speaks of master morality and slave morality working at odds in a single soul" (154). Thus, as much as Nietzsche's terms may help "elucidate the contrast between the worlds of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra," charting as they do the kind of civic enervation diagnosed in Cantor's first chapter, Shakespeare's protagonists, in turn, can also provide for us dramatic realization "of what Nietzsche means by ethical hybridity" (155).

Assembled under the heading "Further Explorations of Shakespeare's Rome," the remaining four chapters of the book...