Shakespeare and Roman History

I'm John Leonard. I'm an independent scholar,

and this course is going to be about Anthony and Cleopatra in five parts.

We're starting off in the first part

is Shakespeare and Roman history,

because one of the questions is simply,

why should Shakespeare have bothered to write a play

about Roman history?

And he didn't just do it? Once

There are five pieces by Shakespeare, which deal with Roman history.

There is the poem The Rape of Lucretia

or Creech

as the play Titus Andronicus.

There's Julius Caesar,

there's Anthony and Cleopatra,

and there's Coriolanus.

So right throughout his career he's returning again

and again to the question of Roman history.

And as soon as you start looking at all of the pieces together,

you can see one thing about them because one of them is odd.

Man out, and that's Titus Andronicus,

and it's odd man out because you can't tell when

it's set.

It has names that reach right back to the beginning of Roman history,

and it has scenes that make you think about the very end of Roman history,

and you can't tell where it's at.

But the other four

immediately group because two of them

that's the rape of Lucretia and Coriolanus are

set right at the beginning of the Roman Republic

and the other two,

Julius Caesar and Antony Cleopatra.

I said, At the very end of the Roman Republic, it's becoming the Imperium,

and it's those stories

that fascinated Shakespeare,

and they fascinated a lot of people.

The first great political Republican experiment

and the story of Luke Rich in particular, was one that was told frequently.

What happened was that look Rich was very virtuous

matron. She was known to be terribly virtuous,

and she was raped by the king's son, Tar Quinn.

And afterwards she told everyone what had happened to her,

and she killed herself to prove her point.

And the Romans were so outraged that they not

only throughout talk with a throughout his whole family.

They threw out the monarchy

and became a republic,

and that started about 500 years

of the period of the Roman Republic.

So Luke read, Shakespeare's Luke Reach is that story,

and Coriolanus is said immediately afterwards,

in the very early days of the republic,

when people are still trying to get used to the idea.

Does this mean that what happens to aristocrats. What happens to nobles?

What what happens to the people who used to be kings?

What's the position of the crowd? How how does this democracy idea work?

Absolutely fascinated by it.

And then we got these other two plays. Julius Caesar,

written around about 15 99 1600

Antony and Cleopatra direct sequel to it written 67 years later,

which are about the drawn out period of the Death

of the Republic. It didn't come into being

fast.

It didn't sorry, didn't die fast came into being immediately, but it didn't die,

petered out over 15 years with wars and problems, assassinations and battles.

And then it was gone.

For the rest of Roman history, it was an empire.

Now, why should those political issues interest Shakespeare?

And that's not a difficult question to answer,

because there was a lot of interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean, England,

in the concepts of the Republic and government.

Remember that it was only 30 odd years after Shakespeare's death

that for the first and only time in its history, Britain became

a republic.

In 16 49 when Charles King Charles was executed,

what is called the interregnum is also the republic.

This was a hot topic,

but

it was a very difficult topic to speak about openly.

You couldn't write a play saying

we ought to be a republic or attract saying we ought to be a republic

because to do so was to say we ought to get rid of the king

and the king would turn around and get rid of you pretty quickly if you did that,

so you couldn't do that. But what you could do

was write a play about Rome,

and you could broach the subject by doing that.

Now this is something that still happens

in different ways.

I mean, in Poland in the 19 eighties, you could not put on a play saying,

General Jaruzelski is a terrible tyrant and we ought to get rid of him.

But you could do Shakespeare's Richard the third,

and everybody knew what you meant,

which was that General Jaruzelski is a terrible tyrant,

and we ought to get rid of him so you could use Shakespeare

and Shakespeare himself used Rome

in exactly the same way to talk about things

that you couldn't quite address directly,

and that leads to one other feature

of three of the Roman plays, but not Anthony and Cleopatra.

Interestingly, which is that if you look at Luke Rich and

Carolinas and Julius Caesar in all of them, the crowd, the Libyans,

the mass of the people are seriously important, They matter

in the creature is only implicit.

The bulk of the poem is focused on the Christian Tar Quinn and their encounter,

but it's the people who throw the kings out when they hear what Luke reach has to say.

It's not a palace coup. It's a rebellion.

Coriolanus, Shakespeare's most crowded place filled with the pressure of

Is it the crowd? Is it the people, or is it just a mob who don't know what they're doing?

Running riot

in Julius Caesar?

Centrally,

it's that great speech of Marc Anthony's to the assembled people in the Forum

about Caesar's murder, which is the crucial turning point of the play.

All of those plays

sharply politically interested in the crowd or the mob. Antony and Cleopatra.

They're not there.

We have soldiers.

We have minor officials surrounding them,

but we don't have the crowd in the same way,

and that's because they were ceasing to matter

in the same way this was the passage from Republicanism

into imperialism from the rule of all

to the rule of one,

and Antony and Cleopatra focuses on the personalities

in a different way. It's Anthony himself and Cleopatra

and Octavius

and the force of those individuals who are slowly taking

over.

They're the people who matter.

So by putting Shakespeare's Roman works any of his Roman

works into the context of his other Roman works,

we can begin to see certain things about them

and with Antony and Cleopatra that shows us,

firstly,

that what he's talking about here is the death of the Republic.

And secondly, going with that

the birth of empire?

Because the figure we see in the players, Octavius

is known to history

as the Emperor Augustus.

After he's defeated Anthony at the end

and Cleopatra, he becomes the sole ruler, the great Roman emperor,

and from there until Rome falls, it remains an empire.

So it's that political transition that Shakespeare is really focusing on,

and that's why he was concerned to use Roman history