Introduction: Visions of Rome in Shakespeare

This introduction draws attention to the fact that Shakespeare\u2019s Roman world, while having a distinct identity largely built on the characters\u2019 striving to achieve and maintain virtus, is simultaneously inflected with manifold different attitudes towards a broad range of issues that are open to a wide array of possible \u201cvisions\u201d both inside the dramatic world and outside of it, in the realm of criticism. The introduction then quickly surveys the main critical contributions concerning Shakespeare\u2019s engagement with romanitas, especially focusing on the upsurge of studies about Shakespeare and Rome that has characterized the past few years

Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

This volume highlights the crucial role of Roman female characters in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries by exploring with an unprecedented thoroughness and variety of perspectives the diverse issues connected to female identities in the early modern English plays set in ancient Rome. Roman Women in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries puts Shakespeare’s Roman world in dialogue with a number of Roman plays by writers as diverse as Matthew Gwinne, Ben Jonson, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, Thomas May, and Nathanael Richards. Thus, the collection seeks to challenge conventional wisdom about the plays under scrutiny by specifically focusing on their female rather than male characters, as well as sharpening our awareness of the fact that the Roman world on the early modern stage cannot be straightforwardly and simplistically equated with Shakespeare’s, with a view to leading to a more accurate and engaging assessment of the extent to which Shakespeare himself is actually representative of the vibrant and variegated ways of appropriating the classics on the early modern stage and page.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_ltsd/1006/thumbnail.jp

Introduction

It is the ghostly presence of Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra that is the preponderant concern in this introduction, which does not provide the reader with a more traditional survey of the most prominent thematic strands of the play and its main critical interpretations, since as many as three chapters in this collection (\u2018The Critical Backstory\u2019 [21\u201353], \u2018The State of the Art\u2019 [89\u2013111] and \u2018Resources for Teaching and Studying Antony and Cleopatra\u2019 [210\u201327]) do deal, to varying degrees, with the pre-eminent thematic concerns of the play and the leading critical perspectives about it. As is plain to see, the characters in Antony and Cleopatra seem obsessed with Julius Caesar. Many of them mention him at least once, and his spirit seemingly still \u2018walks abroad\u2019 (JC, 5.3.95) to haunt Antony and Cleopatra just as it haunted the second half of Julius Caesar. More specifically, all the major characters appear to be dealing, as it were, with some form of comparison anxiety with the great Roman dictator \u2013 the present apparently unable to measure up to the recent past. One way or another, all the key characters of the play try to shake off Julius Caesar\u2019s shade, but they never succeed. The past repeatedly interrupts their progress towards the future by casting large shadows over the present, and Caesar\u2019s ghostly presentia in absentia incessantly comes back to haunt the world of the play, influencing the main characters\u2019 personalities, Weltanschauungen and decisions. Antony and Cleopatra may not be a sequel to Julius Caesar, but \u2018Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet\u2019 does seem a perfectly fitting tagline for it

Leicester’s Men and the Lost Telomo of 1583

This article proposes a new identification for the lost play Telomo, performed at court by Leicester’s Men in 1583. Challenging previous hypotheses that the play might have been either about a character named Ptolemy or about one of the main character’s friends from the Spanish romance Palmerin d’Oliva, this article suggests that the play may have dramatized either episodes involving Ajax Telamonius or his father or, as appears more likely, the episode of ‘The Vnkindly Loue of Telamon to Castib­ula His Frends Wife’ from Brian Melbancke’s euphuistic romance Philotimus. The Warre betwixt Nature and Fortune (1583)