In Our Time - Is Shakespeare History? The Romans

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

In the second of two programmes marking In Our Time's 20th anniversary on 15th October, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Shakespeare's versions of history, continuing with the Roman plays. Rome was the setting for Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and parts of Antony and Cleopatra and these plays gave Shakespeare the chance to explore ideas too controversial for English histories. How was Shakespeare reimagining Roman history, and what impact has that had on how we see Rome today? The image above is of Marlon Brando playing Mark Antony in a scene from the film version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, 1953WithSir Jonathan Bate Provost of Worcester College, University of OxfordCatherine Steel Professor of Classics and Dean of Research in the College of Arts at the University of GlasgowAnd Patrick Gray Associate Professor of English Studies at Durham UniversityProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, it's almost impossible to imagine Antonia and Cleopatra or Julius Caesar and ignore Shakespeare's versions of their histories. His accounts eclipsed all others with the power of his storytelling.

He not only retell the stories of Rome, he shaped the idea of what Rome meant what its values were and what we could learn from its example. But it is Shakespeare history, and what used to he make of the sources he had? That's what we're discussing over the two programmes marking the 20th anniversary of in our time. Now we have

the Roman plays. Last week it was a plantagenet's. With me to discuss Shakespeare and his Roman plays are Sir Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College University of Oxford, Catherine Steele, Professor of of Classics at the University of Glasgow, and Patrick Gray, Associate Professor of English Studies at Durham University. Jonathan Bade, at what stage in his career was Shakespeare writing about Rome?

Well, he began writing about Rome very early with a play actually largely fictional called Titus Andronicus. So let's set that aside for today. The three great Roman plays come at the height of his powers, 1599. So he's been writing for nearly 10 years. The English history plays are largely behind him. 1599, his company have just acquired the Globe Theatre. He's working on Hamlet, and he writes Julie. Caesar. Then a few

years later, after King James has come to the throne in 603, he writes Anthony and Cleopatra in 606 and Coriolanus in 608. So this really is mature Shakespearean history and tragedy. The idea of the classics, the

appetite for the classics, was in this country then, was quite strong. It absolutely was. For many reasons. Principally, of course, we need to remember that the Tudor period, Shakespeare's lifetime was a period of a great expansion of education. This is when grammar schools were founded all over the country.

Grammar schools to educate middle-class boys to make them into civil servants, government officials, and of course clergymen. And what grammar school meant was studying Latin grammar. So Shakespeare's education, and those of thousands of his contemporaries, was entirely in Roman literature and history and the Latin language. So it's the absolute bedrock of the education system. But in addition to that, of course, Rome was for the Renaissance period the great model of a political system, of an empire, of a culture. What about the jive that he knew little Latin and less Greek? Well, this is Ben Johnson, who's Shakespeare's rival and friend,

who's a very self-consciously learned dramatist. When Ben Johnson writes Roman plays and publishes them, He puts marginal notes explaining what all his sources are in Suetonius and Tacitus and Diocassius. So he's having a bit of fun about the fact that Shakespeare is less educated than he is himself. But having said that, small Latin by Elizabethan standards, was probably just about as much Latin as one of Catherine's undergraduates today. But overall, he bringing the classics into his plays and into his poetry over a long appearance. wasn't it? Well, that's a very good point

because the work that made Shakespeare's name was not actually a play, but a poem called Venus and Adonis, a poem story out of classical mythology. He read it in Ovid's Metamorphoses, his favourite book, which he read in an English translation. And then after

that, he wrote a second poem called The Rape of Lucrease, which is actually a very important political poem because it's about the moment when early Rome got rid of a monarchy and established a republic. So we can certainly say that those poems reveal the importance of Rome right from the start of Shakespeare's career. Catherine Steele, I understand his biggest source was Plutarch. Can you tell us about Plutarch and what sort of source he was?

Plutarch was writing in Greek, so Shakespeare was accessing him through a translation into English by Thomas North. Plutarch himself was writing in the first century A.D. He's born probably around AD 45, dies probably around 120, 125. So he's not a contemporary of the events that he's writing about. And he was a voluminous writer across a whole range of genres. And we tend to divide his writings into two categories. There are the moral essays which cover a huge range of topics, and then there are the lives. Shakespeare was using his lives of Greeks and Romans

as a main source for these three plays. Parallel lives. They're parallel lives. Plutarch lines up a famous Roman with a famous Greek. and among the lives there's a life of Coriolanus and the life of Anthony and the life of Caesar and the life of Brutus is also very important of course for Julius Caesar. Why does he line them up in this way? Has DiMoconis and Isis Ania Cicero doesn't it?

Yes and Caesar is lined up with Alexander, yes. Well he's looking for comparisons. He's looking for comparisons between Greece and Rome, partly in order to bring Rome into a fully Hellenized pan-Mediterranean culture which he could speak for. as a Greek speaker, as a member of a family with a long history within mainland Greece. He was a priest, wasn't he? He was a priest at Delphi, yes.

And he eschewed any opportunity to hold public office within the wider Roman Empire, concentrating instead on his local community. So that local identity is quite important. But the other thing that the comparison allows Brutarch to do is to draw moral lessons from these lives. And they are strongly moralising works in which the form of biography, and he's writing biography, not history, allows him to concentrate on key moral characteristics of the people he's writing about.

Shakespeare is relying on Plutarch. Who's Plutarch relying on? It varies a bit. And I think for the plays we're interested in, we have to draw a clear distinction between Coriolanus on the one hand and Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra. Because Coriolanus, it's a story about early Rome, and the sources for early Rome are very difficult, very debated,

about how anybody who's in the late Republic writing about early Rome being fifth century. Fifth century, yes. The early years of the Republic knew anything about it. There are no surviving written sources from the period, and as far as we know, there's no Roman historiography until about 250 years later. So these are stories which were passed down. And when Livy, who also deals with Coriolanus and the sources that Plutarch was using, come to write and think the story of Coriolanus,

it's very much refracted through their concerns around political conflict. For Caesar, Brutus, Anthony and Cleopatra, Plutarch was working with sources that were contemporaneous with the events. And don't were they are reliable? Well, most of the people who were contemporaneous with the events and indeed participants were pretty partisan because this is a period of civil war. So Asinius Polio, for example, whose history of the period is absolutely key,

was one of Caesar's adherents. It looks as though Plutarch, for the life of Antony at any rate, used Quintus Delius, who changed sides so many times during the Civil War period that he was called the Circus John. of the civil wars. So one suspects that why... Did that mean he cancelled out his faults or added to his... No, he jumped from horse to horses. He backed different people.

He was with Anthony for most of the 30s BC, but he changed sides to Octavian just in time. So one fancies that some of... Plutarch tells us that Delius had to abandon Anthony because he was too depraved. And that sounds a bit self-serving. In the presence of scholars, can I use very secular terms? Would you say Plutarch was pretty reliable? I think yes, but I think what we need to step back and ask ourselves is not are the individual facts correct. But what is...

I'm going to ask you. But what's the process of selection and compressing and distortion of focus because he's interested in biography, not history? Patrick Gray, was a major influence, but there are other influences and it's been suggested that Sondon came from the medieval mystery plays. He was born at the end of the medieval period. We chopped this up into periods, and he might have well if you've seen those plays and taken his cue from some of the characters in the plays who turned up in his plays.

Yeah, so one of the kind of long-running mysteries of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was this problem of the two Caesars, which is in Plutarch, Caesar is a political genius. I mean, he's a mastermind, and he's arranging things, and he's tough, and he's out there sleeping with his soldiers in the field, and marching. And we don't really get that in Shakespeare. We don't really see how Caesar, as it were, became Caesar.

Instead, we have a figure who is perilously close to a kind of buffoon. You know, he's almost willfully oblivious. And I think what's going on there is that Shakespeare has imported the character of Augustus Caesar as he appeared in Christian biblical drama. So we tend to think of these mystery plays as a medieval genre. But they last up into the 16th century. So Shakespeare, as a boy, as a teenager, he could go and watch these plays. And in their representation of Christian history, there would be figures like Pharaoh and Herod and Augustus Caesar,

who sort of have pretensions to Godhead, who swagger on the stage with all these delusions of grandeur, and then are sort of comically brought low. And I think Shakespeare has taken that representation of Augustus Caesar and made that his Julius Caesar as a way. Excuse me. What evidence you have for that? So throughout Julius Caesar, there are certain changes. So, for example, Julius Caesar dies at the ninth hour in Shakespeare, but not in Plutarch. Because that's when Jesus dies at the ninth hour. Also, a better example might be the business with the cloak and the bloody wounds and so on.

I think this is an allusion to a moment in the mystery plays. where the resurrected Christ would appear and show his wounds to the crowd and say, you know, see what I've done for you, I've helped to save you. We get a kind of ironic contrast to that with Anthony's demonstration of the wounds of Caesar. Earlier, depending, Jonathan pointed up Titus Andronicus briefly,

and we're going to dwell on the three players we've said, but did he in any way set up what Shakespeare were going to do about Romanist dramas? Yes, I think it depends on how we think of Titus and and how we think of historical accuracy. As a sort of blow-by-blow account of Roman history, it's a mess. It's a sort of pastiche of various bits from Libya and so on. But as an act of cultural analysis, it's genius.

It's Shakespeare saying that the savagery of ancient Rome is little different from that of the barbarians to whom they want to consider themselves distinct. And I think that's salient to him because of his own Christian perspective. He's on the other side of Christianity of what Nietzsche would call. the sort of slave revolt and moral. So from someone in his time period, looking back, he senses, man, the Romans, they had this callous, like, indifference to human suffering. And so he captures that in Titus andronicus,

and comes back to it in a more subtle way later. You're bringing the Christian element in Shakespeare's thinking much to the fore? Yes, I think up until recently there was a kind of tendency in Shakespeare studies to see him as more secular-minded than I, I think would be plausible not just for him, but for really anybody in his context. Because of the censorship regime during his career, he wasn't allowed to discuss Christianity as directly, as, say, like, Dante. But it shapes his perspective.

It shapes his sense of right and wrong, and it colors his impressions of Rome. He's sort of measuring the story of Caesar against the passion narrative, for example. Does in that sense turn to Julius Caesar, when the bishops ban, as it were, stopped him writing about British history. Does that liberate him in any way? Yes, it does. I mean, I think one of the advantages of ancient Rome

is that it allows him to think through what sometimes called the weak king problem, you know, to think through the role of the monarch and to do more things with that variable than he would have been able to easily in an English history play. Jonathan Mayne, let's get to Julius Caesar. What do you do with the character to change it from that written by Plutarch? We've had a taste of that already, but can you develop it? Well, I suppose one of the most striking things you did was kill him off halfway through the play.

It's one of the puzzling things about the play. It's called Julius Caesar. But as Patrick says, although I'm a bit skeptical about Patrick's kind of Christian reading of it, but as Patrick says, there's no doubt Julius is represented as this rather hesitant figure. He's not a heroic warrior at all. He can't decide whether or not to listen to his wife when she advises him not to go out on the aides of March. And then he's killed off halfway through, and the play is just as much about how then the conspirators, Brutus and Cassius, fall apart and Rome lapses back into civil war. And we need to remember here, of course, that what Shakespeare is

doing is very skillfully combining, as Catherine said, the life of Julius Caesar, the life of of Brutus, elements of the life of Mark Anthony. And another thing he's doing is very much collapsing the timescale. So, for example, the play begins with Julius returning from a military campaign and a feast called the Lupercalia. In fact, those events were a little bit apart, but Shakespeare makes them happen at the same time. So there's lots of elements of tightening the narrative. And I believe Brutus has twice as, four times as many lines as Julius Caesar's and nevertheless it's called Julius Caesar. And William Haslett and George Bernard and Shaw, among others,

said that he is represented as a much weaker character than Plutarch. And then Plutarch, he has represented Plutarch, as you've affirmed. Why do you think he did that? Well, I think that's a really interesting question. And, I mean, I do think that what Shakespeare is really interested in, in this play, is the question of what kind of a constitution, what kind of a ruler you need. There's a lot of anxiety at this time in the late 1590s

about the danger of an absolute monarchy going over into tyranny. And that's the basic rationale of Brutus joining the conspiracy. Brutus wants to defend the Roman Republic because he thinks that Julius Caesar is going to become a king, a permanent ruler rather than a temporary consul, and that this could lead to tyranny. So what Shakespeare, I think, is doing by putting the title Julius Caesar there,

the assassination of Julius Caesar is probably the most famous assassination in history until that of John F. Kennedy. He's flagging up, this is a play about a political assassination that leads to regime change, although along the way it also leads to chaos and civil war. So he's flagging Julius Caesar in terms of the politics and not so much the character.

One of the things the assassination leads to, Catherine Steele, is two great orations, one by Brutus, and then hold the eclipsed by that by Mike Hinton. Now, he wasn't there. How did he cobble, goodness me, Shakespeare, sorry about that. How did he put together that enormous speech? Well, there's information in Plutarch covers this particular episode, and there's also a sense,

we have to assume, don't we, that Shakespeare was very familiar with Cicero's speeches, at least from his education. And that provides him with the context-appropriate rhetorical grounding to fashion these two very contrasting speeches. And the other thing, of course, that he gets from Plutarch is the characterisation of these two men as different kinds of orator. So the quality of their oratorical education

is something that Plutarch's interested in, and the idea that Anthony was an Asiatic orator. He was flamboyant and copious and spoke at great length, whereas Brutus was perhaps more restrained. Friends, Roman, countryman must be one of the many best-known lines from Shakespeare's, many best-known lines. But can you describe, can you say, what he did, it's a very long speech, it's a wonderful speech. Can you describe how he said about it? You've talked about oratorical devices.

What does that mean? Well, one thing that we can see absolutely from the start of that speech is the characteristic job of the orator to make your audience well-disposed and attentive and benevolent. So we can see Shakespeare constructing the audience by appealing to their various identities that are going to make them be willing to listen to Anthony. And another thing that's very prominent in that speech is the way he, He plays on emotion, and he uses objects which are vested with emotional significance in order to appeal to the non-rational side of his audience.

Like the will, Caesar's will. Yes. So you don't win over people just through rational argument. That's one of the tenets of ancient rhetoric. You need also to appeal to their emotions. Do we have any evidence whatsoever that anything Mark Antonin said in that speech was ever said? We know that... It's a wonderful speech.

It is a wonderful speech. Perfect, and he should have said it, but did he? He said something, which was pretty effective. At least the sources are pretty clear that he spoke at the funeral, and that that was quite decisive. One of the things... But the answer is no, isn't it?

Of course it is, isn't it? Not a word of it is in Plutarch, but nevertheless, as Catherine says, Shakespeare would have studied Cicero at school and there are elements I'm thinking of Cicero in the Philippines where some of the language associated with Antidae I think he did get bits of it from Cicero

but you're absolutely right it's a complete reconstruction of his own but the honourable man that goes on and on and the will of course and his ambition was not his ambition and so on and so forth the realm that Patrick Gray the realm that Shakespeare's talking about is a stoic rome

Am I right? In If I right, what does that mean? I think the actual historical Rome was religiously much more varied. You know, you had polytheism, you had mystery religions like Mithras and Dionysius and the Magna Mater. Shakespeare, by contrast, I think, sees Rome through the lens of stoicism, and I think partly that has to do with his purposes and coming to this history. I think, like Montagna, Shakespeare, tends to use history as a kind of thought experiment, as a way of evaluating the claims of

certain kinds of precepts or ideas. So you have neo-stoicism emerging in this time as an alternative to Christianity as a response to the French wars of religion. And so I think Shakespeare is trying to use the past to think through what are the pros and cons of neostoicism, what are the political implications of this perspective? Do you see him as that sort of man bringing a message back to the audience about this is how they live, we should live like that, Catherine? I'm not sure I necessarily do, but then I'm a classicist, not a... So, I mean, I think one of the issues is what we make of the Plutarchan view and the Plutarchan ethical view, because he's a Platonist, isn't he, in terms of his philosophical adherences. Patrick, I interrupted you.

Oh, that's okay. I mean, I wouldn't want to suggest that Shakespeare is, in favor of neostoicism. In fact, I think he's suspicious of it, and I think that he shows it tending to break down under pressure. And often the things that we most like about characters like Brutus or Antony are their failures. They're falling away from stoicism. And I think Shakespeare is questioning the kind of effort at autonomy, at invulnerability, at sort of individual total liberty that is at the core of stoicism and some other Hellenistic philosophies and showing how it has ethical and political consequences that can be damaging to people. I think Shakespeare is a profound anti-stoic. Stoicism is all about reining in your emotions,

whereas the Shakespearean drama is all about letting your emotions go. Stoicism, the idea of if you cannot survive, you should commit suicide. I think Shakespeare, Shakespeare mocks this. Can I come to you talking about suicide to Cleopatra, and there's an awful lot of suicide in Anthony Cleopatra. Have we any evidence that Cleopatra was anything like, the extraordinary, unique, unbearable, unbelievable woman that he paints Cleopatra as being?

Well, this is one of the very interesting things about Shakespeare's handling of Plutarch, that when Plutarch writes the life of Mark Antony, He's writing about the life of Antony, its effect on the politics of Rome, and Cleopatra is regarded as, as it were, this dangerous temperress from the east from North Africa. Whereas, of course, Shakespeare gives much, much more focus to developing Cleopatra's character. Why do you think he did that? Well, because he was fascinated by women. He wants to see the female point of view in history.

And again, he was fascinated by the emotions. I mean, the basic story of Mark Anthony is the idea that erotic desire overcomes the demands of duty to the state. That's Octavius Caesar, who becomes Augustus, of course, at the end of the play, is Anthony's great opposite, because he lives by a Roman code.

The way Shakespeare represents Anthony and Cleopatra, it's a critique of the Roman code. So he just lets rip creating this extraordinary character of Cleopatra. So, for example, towards the end of the play in Plutarch, Cleopatra has a rather moving address to the dead Antony and asks to be buried beside him. The play does end with them being buried together,

but before that, she has these extraordinary speeches where she sort of makes Antony into a god and herself into a goddess. But although the Plutarchan picture of Cleopatra is, as you say, fundamentally setting her up as the road to ruin for Antonyas as the fatal distraction. It's nonetheless a much more nuanced picture

than we find in a lot of the Augustine poetry. I mean it's not the standard version we find after Ackliam, where Cleopatra is simply represented. After the battle of Ackle where she fled with her fleet and he fled after her and lost the battle and lost his fleet. Yes, that one. That one. That one.

And in the aftermath of Actium, I remember a genre develops of Actium poems for Perchus writes one. There's a section in the Aeneid which covers it. And And they, Horace has one, and they very much simplify Cleopatra to be the barbarian queen in order to rewrite this whole war as not a civil war. If it's Rome versus the outside, the kind of outside world, it's an easier thing to deal with. So Plutarch doesn't do that.

I mean, he's, because of the way he wants to write Anthony's character, he needs to think through who Cleopatra could have been in order to bring this about. Patrick, do you want to spool back a bit? Yes, I think one of the reasons Shakespeare becomes so fascinated with Cleopatra and makes so much of her is because she stands in a line of characters like Richard II or Falstaff as an exploration of the artist or storyteller's capacity to sort of create a world as if and try to step into it and inhabit it. She prefigures in that sense the romantic conception of the artist and hence becomes greatly loved in this incarnation by, various romantic poets and writers like Victor Hugo. But he has an attraction for her as an exploration of a potential and possibly also a danger of being an artist, of getting lost in your own fantasy, your own alternative narrative. She's extraordinary. I mean, reading it again for this program, you keep forgetting how

extraordinary he paints her, her switches of mood, her play acting, her cheating, her lying. She's terrific, isn't she? I know if you look at it that way. Do you want to say any more about Cleopatra? Well, all I would just add is that it's pretty well attested that she had the relationship with Caesar as well as the relationship with... Under child by Caesar? Yep. So we're told.

There were some dubiety about Cesarian's parentage and children with Anthony. So this is a powerful woman who is sole ruler, within Egypt at a time of great political upheaval. The other thing I'd want to say about Plutarch's representation of Cleopatra is that one of the things that makes him a genius as a biographer is his ability to pick out a little tiny detail. And Shakespeare often picks up on these.

So it's a wonderful moment at the end of the play when Cleopatra has died and her servant, Charmient, who's about also to commit suicide herself, Plutarch mentions that Cleopatra's crown isn't quite strong. and Charmian adjusts it. And Shakespeare sees that detail and gives Charmian these incredible lines, Your crowns awry, I'll mend it and then play. And I think it's a perfect example of Plutarch,

you know, just picking up on a little detail. He said, didn't he actually say that his father or grandfather was a doctor who knew somebody? His grandfather had a friend who was a medical student in Alexandria at the time. And there is a sense that perhaps some of the kind of fascinating detail at the end is, you know, grandpa's stories. Yeah. Do we want to, can we talk about tyrannicide, which was a great fear?

And in the British plays, Shakespeare didn't quite dare tell us whether Richard the 2nd was deposed or murdered or you fudged it. He didn't fudge it as soon as he switched the Roman plays. He let rip, and that was straightforward tyrannicide. Why was that so important? I had a friend once I mean I had a you've remarked about this I had a friend once say the most remarkable thing about Julia Caesar is how up until they kill him it seems like such a great idea and then once they've done it it seems like such a terrible obviously terrible idea you know and it's a great pivot and I think yeah I think Shakespeare is trying to think through the role of the monarch and he has more liberty here so for example with Richard II he has to very carefully craft it so it's ambiguous is he deposed or does he actually abdicate you know he's He has to walk a very fine line, where he's here he can just go for it. Okay, what would happen if we killed the king?

How would that play out? You know? Yeah, I mean, this, one of the reasons it's such a kind of hot topic is, and this is where the fact that Shakespeare is writing in the Christian culture is really important, is if you have the notion that the monarch is God's anointed representative on earth, then to kill them is a pretty big deal. Although, interestingly, one of the things that happens with the emergence of Protestantism is that Calvin says that if a monarch has become a tyrant,

then it is legitimate for magistrates to kill them. But it is a really dangerous topic. And of course, what happens in the play is that the arguments, as Patrick says for it, seem to be very good, but the consequences of it are civil war. And for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and we see this in the Plantagenet plays as well as the Roman ones, civil war is the very worst thing of all.

And that's what happened, of course, after the assassination of Julius Caesar. So he had those things balanced in his set. The wars of the roses, the civil wars in Rome. He kept this balance for a while. How did Coriolanus fit into all this, Catherine? Coriolanus is a story about a man whose ambitions can't be compassed within the state he finds himself in. And you can't make accommodation with political and assession. so he can't persuade the Roman people to elect him as consul

and therefore in a fit of peak he or something more than that but he departs to another community in order to fight the Romans but we have things that really he's a military leader he comes back with military power he tries to seize power that had happened was happening in the early days last days of Elizabeth

with Essex the Earl of Essex came back with military power to try to grab power so there's that going on and the idea of him repudiating common people. Yes. There's that going on. So the class thing going on. And there's the big idea.

His mother, Bulumnia, is a key factor, just like Cleopatra, is a key factor. So it's two powerful women. Now, let's talk about the wounds. Oh, right. Coriolanus's wounds. Very important. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, you were asking earlier about, like, why do I think there's this connection between the iconography of the resurrected Christ?

Actually, there's a statue like this. in Stratford in the Holy Trinity Church, although it's much of damage now. But this business where Christ in the biblical drama would come out and show his wounds, they see what I've done for you, I think helps to explain one of the mysteries of Coriolanus, which is a change that Shakespeare makes from Plutarch. So in Plutarch makes it so that the center of the story is Coriolanus running for consul, which is the highest elected office. This is a man about whom we know very little.

Fifth Century BC, a great walk, but fine. Let's talk away. No, wait. Oh, sorry. Okay. Yeah. So he, he, uh, in, as part of his campaign for console, he's supposed to appear in a, in a relatively light garment, um, showing his scars from battle. It's sort of like a way of saying, hey, I'm a wounded veteran in our terms.

Um, and in Plutarch, he's willing to do this. But in Shakespeare, he's not. And it's a big sticking point. And I think it is deliberate on Shakespeare's part to introduce that change because he wants to juxtapose the Messiah of the Christian biblical drama and the sort of failed secular analog of a Messiah in Coriolanus or in Caesar to show that these figures are not able to fulfill

that particular role. So you see a Christian intervention there? I see Shakespeare as implicitly weighing Roman history against Christian history, juxtaposing them, sometimes going out of his way to build in an allusion, or a structural kind of irony. What about Volumnia, his mother?

Why does Shakespeare give her so much power? Presumably, there are no real records proving that? Of course not. Of course not right. Why did you do it then? And was it, first of all, was it plausible? And second, why did you do it? Was it plausible? Who knows?

I mean, the story of Coriolanus, it's made up. And in order, I mean, if there's a story about why does Rome not fall to the Volsians, and you've got this story around Coriolanus, then you need an explanation for why he fails. And you can see how a very dramatic story can then be developed in which exemplifies a conflict between family and state that we can see in a lot of the stories about the early republic. How can you balance your duty to family with the duty to state? I think part of the reason for the introduction of Volumnia is because I think Shakespeare is turns Coriolanus into a kind of rewrite of the Aeneid.

So in the Aeneid, the women are always kind of crazy and fiery-eyed and destroying things. And I think there's a clue when Cori-Lanus is described as the rock, the oak, not to be wind shaken. It's drawing a parallel between him and Aeneas. Except in Cori-Lanus, it's the women who save the day. That's why there's this bit where the women come back in triumph, and that was cut from a recent production. I thought, no, no, that can't be cut. Because part of the point is Shakespeare is showing that femininity, tears, pity, compassion. This is what saves room.

I think it was three reasons why Shakespeare makes so much of Volumnia. One is that by this time in his career, his boy actors playing the female parts have got to be really, really good. He's had Lady Macbeth. He's got Cleopatra, so he's got to have a big female part. Second, I think there's a kind of historical, political reason, which is a sort of mother of the nation idea. The Romans were very keen on the idea of the mother of the gracchi, this idea of the, the exemplary mother who in some sense embodies the values of the nation. But then thirdly, Shakespeare is a great psychological writer, and he's really interested in ideas of masculinity.

And what really interests him is the idea that this supreme masculine warrior figure is a bit of a mummy's boy. The thing that makes Coriolanus most furious is when Orphidius, his great enemy, calls him boy. Boy! Dare! He call me boy, he says. His scandal has being called boy. and yet we see that he is mummy's boy. Well, mummy's boy is a bit rough, isn't it?

I mean, in the fact, well, I don't know. You're the expert. She puts forward very strong arguments, Palamnia. She does put forward very strong arguments, Palomnia. But he should not destroy Rome. Absolutely, and that's the mother of the nation idea. That's the political idea. But, you know, in a way, what's interesting here is that the,

we come back to this idea of the great power of rhetoric, the great speeches, those of Anthony, in Julius Caesar of Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra of Lumnia in Coriolanus. Antony is in many ways a rather feminized figure. It's a famous scene that is described, although not actually played on stage, where Anthony and Cleopatra dress up in each other's clothes.

And I think what Shakespeare is doing is using this kind of what Catherine calls Asiatic rhetoric and applying it to women and contrasting it to the stern male rhetoric of a Coriolanus. You're nodding vigorously. That's an interesting idea. And of course, What we don't have until this period, that is the very end of the Republic, is we have, well, we've got the first women speaking.

So famously Hortensia, the daughter of the orator Hortensius, speaks in public at the very end of the Republic in order to appeal to the tribunes. So there's even within the kind of the historical context, civil war disrupts even that dichotomy, gendered dichotomy between speech and silence. In this place, Patrick Gray, are we seeing Shakespeare seeing Rome as a center of power, something from which the English can learn? Yes. I think Shakespeare is interested in this period of Roman history for much the same reason that he's interested in the Wars of the Roses

because he sees a parallel to what the historian Lawrence Stone would call the crisis of the aristocracy. You know, this idea that you have a period during his lifetime and stretching before it where the aristocrats are going from being sort of independent warrior types to being courtiers, to being, and the monarch becoming more powerful. And this is a crisis for them of self-identity. And so I think one place to look at that is the English Wars of the Roses. Another place to look at that is the consolidation of power under Caesar and then under Octavian. So he is thinking through that contemporary change in his own time in England, through the Wars of the Roses,

and also through this history of the fall of the Republic, if you like. it's an impossible question Jonathan but why don't I ask it do you think that these considerations which I agree with and you can read that from the piece do you think they're in his mind or is he just writing

is he just is he writing a play about these two people with all his powers about these two people no I think they are very much in his mind I strongly agree with Patrick on this one this is one of the things that really brings together the English plays

and the Roman ones it's bound up with the critique of the Code of Honor Honor was an incredibly important idea in ancient Rome and it was an incredibly important idea to the barons in medieval England. The Earl of Essex, who is this figure of the military leader who comes back and then causes political trouble, well, that's Julius Caesar and it's Coriolanus.

The Earl of Essex was a great believer in the aristocratic Code of Honor. And as Patrick says, this is a period where there are others who are coming on, more in a way skilled politicians interested in the arts of courtie, in a mixed model of government. And for them, this military code of honour is very, very old-fashioned. So we see Shakespeare consciously critiquing the Code of Honour. Falstaff has an incredibly famous speech about it, and it's an implicit thing in the Roman plays as well.

Do we know how well these plays went down? We know that Julius Caesar went down very well, indeed. One of the few actual records we have of someone going along to see a play in Elizabeth in England is a visitor to London in 1599, seeing Julius. Caesar. We know that when the great actor Burbage died, elegies in his memories singled out Julius Caesar as one of his most successful

roles. Anthony Cleopatra and Coriolanus, much less evidence of their success. They weren't published in Shakespeare's lifetime. They were only published in the first folio posthumously and there aren't the kind of records of frequent performances in the way that there are for Julius Caesar.

Can we develop a bit more on the idea of Rome, him seeing England in Rome, in terms of the institutions, the way society was constructed. You talked about the fall of the aristocracy. Lawrence Stone brought into play, which I was delighted to hear. So can we just develop that a bit? I mean, the obvious thing is this idea that Rome had a mixed constitution.

So you would have the magistrates for the law, you would have the Senate as the representative of the patricians, and then you'd have the consul and eventually, and you'd have the tribunes of the people. who are very important in Coriolanus. And then eventually you get the imperial period. The thing that really interests political thinkers in Shakespeare's time is that that is a kind of model for a mixed constitution

where Shakespeare's lifetime we need to remember is a period where the law, the judiciary, is becoming increasingly important and independent. And then the commons as the equivalent of the tribunes of the people, the House of Lords, the equivalent of the Senate, the Privy Councils. So it's a very interesting model, and political thinkers are working with this model all the time.

Patrick, what do you think the legacy is of Shakespeare's Roman place? Well, there's a big picture answer to that and then maybe some other interesting bits. I mean, a big picture, I would say, what Shakespeare, the fall of the Roman Republic generally considered becomes a touchstone for later, as Jonathan was saying, later thinking about how to craft a stable society, a stable republic. One answer to that, the kind of answer you get from Plato, is highly trained,

educated people who are able through their superhuman reason to keep everything in line. I think Shakespeare would be very skeptical of that and instead suggests that we need checks and balances against each other. But I mean, Shakespeare pops up in all sorts of ways. I mean, I think, for example, he was very influential on Hegel. One of the earliest bits of Hegel that we have is a bit from Julius Caesar that he's translating in a different. adapting. And I think it informs his account of what he later, of what has come to be known as the master's slave dialectic. And then maybe the, maybe the most striking is, is the assassination of Lincoln, of the U.S. President Abraham Lincoln by the, the man who killed Lincoln,

John Wilkes Booth, was an acclaimed Shakespearean actor. He was, he was thought to be the handsomest man in America. And he was, he was the son of Junius Brutus Booth, who was the great rival of Edward Keene and after he killed Lincoln and then he stabbed the guy next to him and he jumped on stage with the bloody knife, waving the bloody knife around and he records very proudly in his journal and he cried, seek semper

Churhanis, you know, so always to tyrants. And so this, you know, this bit where they imagine their scene being recreated, it is. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Patrick Gray, Jonathan Bay, Catherine Steele. Next week it's the fable of the bees Bernard Mandibald's scandalous 18th century argument for the value of vice to the economy.

Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Well, there's one thing we didn't talk about at all, which often baffles me, is why those three, I mean, if you've got Plutarch in front of you, okay, you can kind of see why Julius Caesar, because he's such a figure in popular culture. even at the time of Pluto No but I'm thinking of Shakespeare Why

Why he chose those? Why that must have to be honest or something Yeah And I mean there were other Cleopatra plays around at the time But Coriagnan is you're right It is a bit of a mystery I mean one of the arguments that some critics use

Is that there were these Midland food riots at the time And the idea of popular uprising Which is something we didn't perhaps talk about Is the element of you know the plebeians the people particularly in Coriolanus. And the idea that, you know, the dispute at the beginning of the play begins with an accusation that the patricians are hoarding the grain.

And we were talking about later influence. I mean, Bertolt Brecht got really interested in this idea of rewriting Coriolanus as a kind of Marxist play. Sorry, just coming on that. I mean, that's a point where he diverges from Plutarch, doesn't he? And he prefers the Livian version,

because in Plutarch, it's debt that is the trigger. Sorry. No, that's right. And Livy, of course, also kind of shapes the fable of the body, which we didn't talk about. So I think it could be that it was, you know, a political reason for it there. It's not a great deal about institutions, is there? It's all men, Muslim, and occasionally, Clay Patron and Volumnia. But it's also, I mean, I was, as you were talking about the mixed constitution, I was thinking about this, because we don't really get the Senate very much in these plays.

And if you compare them with Johnson, I mean, Cateline is all about senators and debates. And you were so tedious, he was taken off. Yes, that's right. So there are good dramatic reasons why you might not think that the Senate is where the action is happening. But it is a... I mean, these are plays about individual charismatic power

and their relationship or failure of relationship with the Roman people to a very large extent. Certainly in Caesar and Coriolanus. Antony, of course, has a different geographical framing that's much more expansive. There's another really interesting kind of nerdy reason why he chose Coriolanus, which is that he wrote it just after, he wrote this strange play, Tiamen of Athens. Tiamen of Athens is a story he finds in the form of a digression in the life

of Mark Antony, but he mingles it with the story of Alcibiades, which is also in Plutarch, and Alcibiades is the pair of Coriolanus, and I think that's what took him to Coriolanus. He thought, who could the Roman be who's like Alcibiades? I think Shakespeare is also very interested in the... in the effort at autonomy, at the effort to sort of separate yourself, to live out on, to live onto yourself as an island unto yourself, and in the ultimate sort of impossibility of that. And so I think, um, we can see in Coriolanus a variation on, uh, stoicism on, we can see this effort to sort of say, I'm going to live as if, as he says, as if I were author of myself. And I think Shakespeare by contrast wants to think about all the ways in which we are not, authors of ourselves, all the ways in which we are embedded in a community, and we can't really escape that. Coriolanus finds he can't actually just walk away from Rome. And this is why I say I think Shakespeare is meditating upon and also questioning some emerging assumptions about

individualism, what we might now today call liberalism. One thing I meant to ring of it, and I didn't, and I annoyed him in myself, is that he took North's translation, translated it into English, Prutak in New English. And the great speech have been in an embalmish. He's more or less ripped off completely. I mean, he's embellished. He'd have been caught.

Embedished it. He's absolutely wonderful. He's got it open on the page. He wonderfully nicked it. Line after line after line. A straight line, no messing about, was there? No copyright law in those days. He got it away with murder. It's interesting that he took it all. And now it's molded. And with what he

molded around it, the whole thing shines now, as if it were all Shakespeare. Yeah. Quite a bit is north. It is, although what he kind of weeds into it are lots of very self-conscious references to art outdoing nature, all about stuff about art. And that's where, I mean, I thought Patrick was really good

about this whole idea of Cleopatra as a kind of artist, a sort of self-creating figure. And the Plutarch, I mean, that passage is, one suspects, probably taken from an eyewitness account. Oh, wow, cool. I mean, Delius was the go-between, and he writes a history. so and it looks seems perfectly plausible that

Plutarch was using it whether through another source so that you know I think there's there's a good argument to say that you know that is actually somebody looking at it and that wonderful detail about Anthony waiting to receive her and actually everybody's gone down I was glad we got Plutarch's grandfather and there's a great essay by one of your fellow classical

scholars debating whether Cleopatra had one asp or two because I've had two Asps it's two Asps in Manet. It's two Asps The Serbian takes a second as Yeah, that's right. But I think in Horace in the Augustan poems, there's only one. And this scholar whose article I was reading suggested that it was actually Plutarch's sort of grandfather.

Yeah, there were two Asps. Plutarch's Grandfather, that sounds like a subject for another program. Not this, though. Okay, but the producer is on his way. Oh, we didn't do any question. I wish we'd done some quotient. Tea, please. Cup of tea, Simon.

Yeah, tea sounds great. Four cheese. In our time with Melvin Brown, is produced by Simon Tillotson. Effort seems to be fought over themselves to play war heroes. It doesn't mean that they can just walk into any job. September 1918.

Just thinking it must be hard for you with your father away fighting. No harder than it is for anyone else. The war continues to cast a shadow. Did he die recently? Your son's friend. He did, yes. The day before yesterday.

While on the home front, society begins to adapt to a new age. Isabel's always been headstrong. stronger now she has the votes. There will be no stopping her. Homefront. You can subscribe to the podcast or download the episodes from the Homefront pages at the BBC Radio 4 website.