Abstract
The conviction that ‘Shakespeare is philosophical’ gives shape to Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy, a series of scholarly monographs that ‘push back against the critical orthodoxies of historicism and cultural studies’ (pp. xi-xii). The proposition that there is something important to be gained by reading Shakespeare’s Roman plays ‘as if Shakespeare were a historian’ (p. 11) animates Patrick Gray’s recent contribution to that series, Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: Selfhood, Stoicism, and Civil War (2019). What is to be gained, according to Gray, is the knowledge that Shakespeare is deeply skeptical of neoclassical as well as classical glorification of the kind of personal autonomy Seneca describes as ‘constancy’. [He] sees this pursuit of individual invulnerability, not only as a defining feature of Roman culture, but also as the most fundamental cause of the fall of the Roman Republic. (p. 1)
From Gray’s perspective, Shakespeare reaches a conclusion at the end of his Roman ‘thought experiment’ in these plays: namely, that ‘a society which adopts this individualistic ethos…will inevitably oscillate between autocracy and civil war’ (p. 20). That thought seems to cast us forward to our own time and acknowledge that Shakespeare is not only an object of study but also something of a live option for us. Shakespeare’s Roman plays ‘are a prescient picture of our own political condition’, Gray wrote in a letter published in The Times Literary Supplement earlier this year.
Following an introduction that trawls through scholarly publications and philosophical texts and summarises the chapters ahead, the book takes shape as two sections, each of which consists of two chapters and a conclusion that extends the arguments of those chapters into new materials. The first section focuses on Julius Caesar, the second on Antony and Cleopatra. A brief essay that aims to triangulate Shakespeare’s position on a range of questions using Buber, Lacan, Levinas, and Ricoeur brings the book to an end.
I do not agree that we ought to approach Shakespeare as an historian (he appeals to me as a reader and an artist), or that Shakespeare draws conclusions about the topics he explores in the theatre (his genius is to pose questions for the audiences and readers to answer as best they can). Both of these ideas appear to spring from an unargued assertion that ‘Keats’ claim about Shakespeare’s “Negative Capability” is a misleading and counterproductive myth, disabling even the possibility of fruitful debate’ (p. 20). Gray wants Shakespeare to take a position on historical and moral questions, perhaps to have a philosophy or a doctrine, and his arguments about the Roman plays seem, to me, to depend on his readers wanting those things too. However, the pithy observation at the heart of Gray’s book – that ‘the “frailty” that [Shakespeare’s Romans] hope to escape proves…an intransigent given of the human condition’ – rings true not only for Shakespeare’s other Roman works, but also for his work as a whole (p. 1). The adolescent scholars in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Richard II, Shylock, Malvolio, Lear, and Prospero, among others, all learn the lesson that behind the will to power (or as Gray would have it, following Augustine and Sallust, the libido dominandi) there stands the unaccommodated man. In this sense, the late Roman Republic of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra is an exemplary case of all experience, as Shakespeare understood it, and Gray’s book is a point of departure for discussing Shakespeare’s development as writer for whom the theatre became a place for exploring broadly human concerns.
The central chapters of the book offer readings of well-known scenes and speeches in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra that begin to make those texts strange again, by asking us to consider how they might have sounded to an audience that was as familiar with the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer as Shakespeare was with Cicero, Virgil, Plutarch, and Montaigne. Perhaps the most valuable thing about Shakespeare and The Fall of the Roman Republic is the view it gives of the tension between classical and Christian texts in these plays: two domains of Shakespeare’s wide reading that modern scholarship rarely considers in the same frame.
Reading this intelligent and original book, about a subject that interests me, occasionally made me feel like the unimportant clerk in Auden’s poem about the fall of Rome. A deterrent to my wanting to keep reading Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic is the approach that Gray takes to the copious source materials that he consulted for this project. Gray is careful, and generous, with the writers he engages. But curiously for a scholar who is invested in the idea that human vulnerability is the best foundation for rewarding relationships with other people, the extensive review of scholarship throughout this book erects a barrier between Gray and his readers.
The introduction alone is forty-six pages long and includes 128 footnotes. In it, Gray transcribes an extraordinary number of quotations from literary criticism and philosophical writing, more often paraphrasing and juxtaposing these texts with each other than using them to clarify his own position. As the names and texts pile up, it becomes impossible to remember why these sources matter for reading Shakespeare, or how they differ from one another; on the occasions when I was able to do so, the reward was not commensurate with my efforts. A typical passage from page thirty-three illustrates the problem: ‘Shakespeare, I propose, sees his Romans much as MacIntyre, Taylor, Ricoeur, and Reiss see us moderns. He sees his Romans’ characteristic Neostoicism, moreover, much as these philosophers see Kantian ethics’. These sentences are intended to clarify what is distinctive and original about Gray’s proposal, but what is the point of making analogies between Shakespeare and modern philosophers, and between his topics and theirs, for the purpose of clarifying one’s own position, if an attentive reader cannot tell the philosophers apart from one another? Instead of struggling to understand how Gray’s perfunctory accounts of four complex philosophical arguments about topics as vast as modernity and Kantian ethics might illuminate Shakespeare, I would prefer for Gray to tell me, in his own words, what he believes Shakespeare thinks about Rome and why it matters.
The introduction sets a pattern for the rest of the book. Chapter 2, for example, which discusses Julius Caesar in conjunction with two of the project’s key conceptual terms, constancy and passibility, is fifty pages long, but it is not until the twenty-seventh page that anything like a close reading of Shakespeare’s language takes place. Before we reach that point, Gray mentions Althusser, Aristotle, Bakhtin, Barth, Buber, Derrida, Dostoevsky, Ewan Fernie, Hegel, Hobbes, Kant, Jane Kingsley-Smith, Lacan, Lévinas, Rabelais, Tillich, and Christopher Tilmouth – and that is only in the chapter’s first two pages! There follows a twenty-five-page survey of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship by Paul Cantor, Coppélia Kahn, James Kuzner, and Wayne Rebhorn, along with detours into ancient philosophy, feminist literary criticism, and Timothy Reiss’s writing about the history of personhood. This material is not without interest, particularly when Gray reflects on the horror of femininity that Shakespeare’s Roman men tend to feel, but it is only when we finally reach Julius Caesar itself that Gray sets to work reading the play in the light of the thesis that, from my point of view, none of these academic excurses was actually necessary to make: ‘Shakespeare’s Romans strive to become impassible, like the wholly transcendent deities of classical philosophy. Shakespeare himself believes that they would be better served, however, if they made peace with their own human passibility’ (p. 98).
‘In the case of Rome’, writes Gray in a succinct restatement of his central argument, ‘the problem with the Romans, as Shakespeare sees it, is, to put it simply, that they are not Christians. They have the wrong ideal in mind’ (p. 115). The idea is provocative, in the best sense of the word. However, I cannot reconcile it to my experience as a reader of these plays – which magnify, rather than diminish, their flawed protagonists, so much so that one feels something precious has been lost when the protagonists commit suicide. I also have trouble believing that Shakespeare simply looked on Roman virtues as a ‘maladaptive value-system’ (p. 29), which is the impression with which this book leaves me. Thanks to his wide reading and formal education, Shakespeare was well aware that Rome’s ‘value-system’ included a number of virtues that acknowledge the importance of one’s relationships with other people, among them: amicitia, fides, humanitas, pietas, and iustitia. Constancy was a dimension of all those virtues and, arguably, only became problematic in the context of ambition or a will to dominate others, with which it was not identical. (As Gray points out, Cicero remarks of ambition that competition for high office and other honours makes it ‘extremely difficult to maintain “sacred fellowship”’ (p. 12).) If we look beyond the ring fence of the category of Roman plays (all of them are tragedies), we find Shakespeare casting Stoic self-possession in a positive light, as against the desire for revenge. Prospero’s conversion in The Tempest is one example: ‘Though with their high wrongs I am stuck to th quick, / Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury / Do I take part’ (V.i.25–7). Here, Prospero demonstrates that Shakespeare understands that Roman constancy need not imply a desire for godlike impassibility. On the contrary, it may also imply patience, from the Latin patior, meaning ‘I suffer’ or ‘I endure’: the rare capacity not to be changed for the worse by the experience of being acted upon by other people, to which all mortal creatures are susceptible. That, too, is a stoical idea. I am unable to agree that Shakespeare’s Roman plays are as hostile to stoicism as Gray makes them out to be (in these plays, Shakespeare shares with the Stoics a clear awareness of the dangers posed by anger, for example), but I acknowledge that Gray has made a case for Shakespeare’s scepticism about Roman ethics that deserves to be heard and discussed.
My favourite section of Shakespeare and The Fall of the Roman Republic is the essay that appears as the conclusion to Part I, ‘Shakespeare’s Passion Play’ (pp. 145–73). In contrast to the other sections, there are very few references to contemporary academic authors here. When they occur, those references clarify Gray’s argument about Shakespeare rather than setting its agenda. The writing is lively, Gray’s powers of observation are keen, and the argument builds towards an original and surprising meditation on ‘the comic aspect of Shakespeare’s depiction of Caesar’, which Gray traces to the buffoonish characterization of tyrants such as Augustus Caesar, Herod, and Lucifer in medieval liturgical drama. To be shown how Roman antiquity looks in the mirror of the vernacular mystery plays was a revelatory experience that enriched my understanding of Shakespeare’s engagement with classical literature and English drama.