Introduction Part I. An Initial Perspective: 1. Shakespeare and humanistic culture Colin Burrow Part II. 'Small Latine': 2. 'Petruchio is 'Kated'': The Taming of the Shrew and Ovid Vanda Zajko 3. Ovid's myths and the unsmooth course of love in A Midsummer Night's Dream A. B. Taylor 4. Shakespeare's learned heroines in Ovid's schoolroom Heather James 5. Shakespeare and Virgil Charles Martindale 6. Shakespeare's reception of Plautus reconsidered Wolfgang Riehle 7. Shakespeare, Plautus, and the discovery of new comic space Raphael Lyne 8. 'Confusion now hath made his masterpiece': Senecan resonances in Macbeth Yves Peyre 9. 'These are the only men': Seneca and monopoly in Hamlet 2.2 Erica Sheen Part III. 'Lesse Greeke': 10. 'Character' in Plutarch and Shakespeare: Brutus, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony John Roe 11. Plutarch, Shakespeare, and the alpha males Gordon Braden 12. Action at a distance: Shakespeare and the Greeks A. D. Nuttall 13. Shakespeare and Greek romance: 'Like an old tale still' Stuart Gillespie 14. Shakespeare and Greek tragedy: strange relationship Michael Silk Part IV. The Reception of Shakespeare's Classicism: 15. 'The English Homer': Shakespeare, Longinus, and English 'Neoclassicism' David Hopkins 16. 'There is no end but addition': the later reception of Shakespeare's classicism Sarah Brown.

http://www.gbv.de/dms/goettingen/377615781.pdf

Shakespeare and the Classics

In the late summer or autumn of 1599, Shakespeare’s company brought to the stage the tragedy of Julius Caesar.2 Although it is often read as a play about the killing of a king and expressing a real ambivalence on that score, it would be equally productive to see it as depicting a struggle among aristocrats — senators — aimed at preventing one of their number from transcending his place and destroying the system in which they all ruled as a class.3 In this perspective, then, the assassination is not regicide, but an attempt to restore the status quo ante. The conspirators strike down an individual, Julius Caesar, whose behaviour displays and is characterised in terms that could not help but suggest emulation to an Elizabethan. However, the assassination is carried out by individuals whose actions are presented in the play in exactly the same way. In other words, although the motives of the conspirators, and especially those of Brutus, must be distinguished from Caesar’s as well as Antony’s and Octavius’ in many respects, all are nevertheless animated by the same fundamental drive, the drive to excel all others, to ‘out-imitate’ their fellows.

The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar

The rich and important debate over tyrannicide, in which Julius Caesar figures centrally, engaged the best political minds of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance and raged with particular intensity during Shakespeare's time. The tremendous upheaval of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation ignited fiery polemics on the rights of subjects and on the nature and foundations of civil order. At various times Protestants and Catholics arose to challenge the authority of the earthly crown and to claim the right of deposition and tyrannicide. Monarchomachs like Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, George Buchanan, Francois Hoffman, Theodore de Beze, the author of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, the Ligue, and the Jesuits Robert Persons, Francisco Suarez, and Juan de Mariana drew upon the classics (especially Aristotle), the Bible, and other works (especially those of Aquinas, Salutati, and Bartolus) to reexamine fundamental assumptions about political order.

Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate

Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic introduces Shakespeare as a historian of ancient Rome alongside figures such as Sallust, Cicero, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Gibbon, Hegel, and Nietzsche.
In Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare shows Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire. Why did Rome degenerate into an autocracy? Alternating between ruthless competition, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and self-indulgent fantasies, Rome as Shakespeare sees it is inevitably bound for civil war. Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic considers Shakespeare’s place in the history of concepts of selfhood and reflects on his sympathy for Christianity, in light of his reception of medieval Biblical drama, as well as his allusions to the New Testament. Shakespeare’s critique of Romanitas anticipates concerns about secularization, individualism, and liberalism shared by philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, and Patrick Deneen.

Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: Selfhood, Stoicism and Civil War

Sixteenth-century apologists for the popular theater, including Thomas Heywood and Thomas Nashe, praised the staging of English history on the grounds that it edified spectators by "reviving" the past. This essay shows how one of Shakespeare's early history plays challenges such didactic uses of the past and explores history and performance as fraught, mutually destabilizing concepts. This joint destabilization emerges most clearly in the rhetoric of succession, the topic with which all of Shakespeare's history plays inevitably engage. Through a careful analysis of 1 Henry VI, Brian Walsh links narratives of broken political, biological, and cultural succession with the failure to sustain historical representation in performance. According to Walsh, the play stages a confrontation with the past's elusiveness that is both troubling and teeming with possibility. Enacting history onstage thus becomes a means through which participants in the theatrical event can lay claim to a sense of the past not by reviving what is unrecoverable but by creating something new at the moment of performance.

"Unkind Division": The Double Absence of Performing History in 1 Henry VI

Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition

INCE the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it was realized that Plutarch’s lives of Julius Caesar, Marcus Antos nius, Marcus Brutus, and Caius Martius Coriolanus were Shakespeare’s sources for his three great Roman plays, it has been widely assumed that Shakespeare’s Rome is an entirely Plutarchian world, and that Shakespeare the Englishman and Plutarch the Greek saw Rome from exactly the same sympathetic outsider’s point of view. John Dennis, in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare (1711)’ recognized that the primary source for Julius Caesar and Coriolanus was Plutarch; indeed he blamed Shakespeare for not using other authorities. In A n Essay on the Learning ofShakespeare (1767), Richard Farmer showed that Shakespeare had used North’s translation, not the original Greek, and no one thereafter took any background other than Plutarch very seriously until the middle of the twentieth century. In Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Background (1910), for instance, Sir Mungo MacCallum considered only Plutarch, Amyot, and North in the chapter titled “Ancestry of Shakespeare’s Roman Plays”; MacCallum’s book is still in print-and his bias is still current.’ The tacit assumption that Shakespeare’s Rome was Plutarch’s Rome has enough truth in it to make it understandable. Shakespeare and

Cracking Strong Curbs Asunder: Roman Destiny and the Roman Hero in Coriolanus

Undular Structure in "Julius Caesar"

Sovereignty in the Digby Mary Magdalene

In medieval religious drama, the stage is a moral world stage spaces have moral significance which an audience perceives or apperceives as a complement to the action that takes place in and around them. The classic example is the conventional spatial relation between sinister Hellmouth and dexter Paradise Д An analogous stage direction in the Ordo Repraesentationis Adae makes clear how consciously early drama worked for emblematic effects through use of stage space:

John W. Velz

Papers

Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition

Cracking Strong Curbs Asunder: Roman Destiny and the Roman Hero in Coriolanus

Undular Structure in "Julius Caesar"

Sovereignty in the Digby Mary Magdalene

From Jerusalem to Damascus: Bilocal Dramaturgy in Medieval and Shakespearian Conversion Plays