No Spectre, No Sceptre: The Agon of Materialist Thought in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar | No Spectre, No Sceptre: The Agon of Materialist Thought in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
No Spectre, No Sceptre: The Agon of Materialist Thought in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
Stephen M. Buhler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Postremo cur sancta deum delubra suasque
discutit infesto praeclaras fulmine sedes,
et bene facta deum frangit simulacra suisque
demit imaginibus violento volnere honorem?
(Lucretius, De rerum natura 6.417-20: Lastly, why does he shatter holy shrines of the gods, and even his own illustrious habitations, with the fatal thunderbolt, why smash finely-wrought images of the gods and rob his own statues of their grandeur with a violent wound?)1
In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare depicts a cosmological as well as a political struggle. The correspondential order of things is manipulated on all sides of an increasingly bloody conflict, and the downfall of one faction occurs when its members stop manipulating that...
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