Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic: Selfhood, Stoicism, and Civil War. By Patrick Gray

Abstract

The premise of Patrick Gray’s Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic is that Shakespeare explores questions of self-determination that have preoccupied Western philosophers since antiquity. Gray understands Shakespeare’s classical heroes as existing in a pagan world that rejects (Christian) traits like vulnerability, compromise, and collaboration. These characters perform an ideal self that mimics pagan divinity as omnipotent and untouchable by exerting absolute authority over politics (Julius Caesar), the self (Brutus), or their social world (Antony and Cleopatra). Shakespeare’s Roman plays demonstrate at once the appeal of this inviolable self, especially in the wake of early modern England’s crises of aristocracy, and its ultimate undesirability from the early modern Christian perspective. For Gray, Shakespeare offers an alternative understanding that anticipates that of Hegel: a self “embedded” (9) in a “multilateral and reciprocal” web of social relations (39), neither a world within him/herself (as posited by Descartes and Kant) or...