[In the following essay, Wells provides an overview of the role of Roman values in Renaissance culture generally, and concludes with a discussion of Shakespeare's handling of these values.]

Gerrit Gerritszoon of Rotterdam, better known as Erasmus, made his first visit to England in the autumn of 1499. His arrival, coinciding as it almost did with the new century, could be taken to symbolise the dawning of English Humanism, and the same eye for symmetry might see, in the opening of Hamlet one hundred years later, the culmination of that prolific age. The teaching of Greek also crossed the Channel at the end of the 15th century, pioneered by such scholars as Grocyn, Linacre and Vitelli. In the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, students were now enabled to read Plato and Aristotle in the original language, giving further stimulus to what was already a surge of interest in Classical literature as a whole. The changed climate of academic thought that followed these developments has been described by some historians as signalling a radical break with the medieval world. There was, undeniably, a marked shift of emphasis.

In the ecclesiastical, Latin culture of the medieval Schoolmen—Aquinas, Ockham, Duns Scotus and others—secular and spiritual values had been inseparable. Truth, for them, was first and foremost a matter of revelation, not to be apprehended through the intellect alone. Nothing was knowable but by the light of divine illumination. Man's relationship with God was all-important. Questions of sin and expiation hung heavily in the air, and debate tended to be excessively abstract, esoteric and metaphysical, focusing on mysteries such as Trinity or the nature of essence as the appropriate matters for learned symposia. Moreover, the Catholic Church propounded an effectively self-validating system of thought, which embraced all aspects of human morality and aspiration but which was largely directed towards the contemplation of predetermined certitudes. By contrast the English Humanists, such as Colet, Cheke and More, joined with Erasmus in advocating a new learning, secularised through reference to the human values they found in their study of ancient Greece and Rome. They developed the belief that man could, through empirical observation and rational understanding, take control of his circumstances and improve his lot on earth. By an act of will he might create his own future. Chaucer's 'Clerk of Oxenford' had studied Classical philosophy the better that he might serve God in the office of a priest, but in the 16th century many scholars began to look towards the very different ideal typified by the uomo universale of Renaissance Italy. As the perceived rift between the physical and spiritual widened, so things came to seem ever more complex and variable, and this new way of seeing is summed up in an elegant passage from John Florio's translation of Montaigne:

There is no constant existence … and we, and our judgement, and all mortali things else do uncessantly rowle, turne and passe away. Thus can nothing be certainly established, … both the judgeing and the judged being in continuali alteration and motion.… It would be even as if one should go about to graspe the water: for, how much the more he shal close and presse that, which by its owne nature is ever gliding, so much the more he shall loose what he would hold and fasten.

This conception of events as random, arbitrary and contingent would have made little sense a hundred years before. If all was not bound into a closed, harmonious system by the miracle of faith then decisiveness and resolution, the larger dare of the intrepid individualist, might sway the issue. The Schoolmen had interested themselves little in statecraft but the legitimisation and just exercise of human government had become a matter of prime concern for Renaissance thinkers, linked to a growing belief in the value of action, as opposed to contemplation, and its wider social consequences. What, it was asked, can history tell us about our own nature and how can it help us to take charge of our own destiny?

These questions were addressed most famously and most candidly by Machiavelli. Fortune, he observed, is the ruler of half our actions, but she allows us to govern the other half ourselves. Whoever wishes to foresee what will happen should look to what has already taken place, for all that exists now had its counterpart in times past.

Men themselves are the stuff of history, a point made cogently in Sir Thomas North's translation of Amyot's Preface to Plutarch's Lives (1559):

For it is a certaine rule and instruction, which by examples past, teacheth us to judge of things present, and to foresee things to come: so as we may knowe what to like of, and what to follow, what to mislike and what to eschew.

It was, of course, not a new idea. Cicero had observed:

Histories … are the handmaids of Prudence and Wisdome, the which may be easily and truly purchased out of the deeds and examples of others there written [Abraham Darcie's translation (1625)].

And this view itself reflects the thinking of Thucydides [in Walter Lynne's translation (1550)], writing over three centuries earlier still:

Yea, though the persons do sometyme chaunge in common welthes, neverthelesse so much as is concernynge the qualytye of mattiers, the worlde is and always abydeth lyke to hym selfe.

The impact of Machiavelli's thought in 16th-century England gave further impetus to a reading of ancient history which was seen to reveal the underlying political realities that form the basis of all communities and states. His admiration for Rome, in particular, sprang from his study of its personal values which, he argued, projected themselves into the wider domain of civil life. He held that valour and high-mindedness had been enfeebled by Christian humility and deference, making rulers effete and opening the way for the ruthless to trample them down. This was, in effect, why the Roman Empire fell.

For Machiavelli, too, events were chaotic and anomalous. The outcome of even the most carefully evolved decision was never certain, its wider ramifications often labyrinthine. Erasmus urged [in The Education of a Christian Prince (1516)] that the prince 'should first question his own right' and then 'should carefully consider whether it should be maintained by means of catastrophes to the whole world'. 'Those who are wise', he continued, 'sometimes prefer to lose a thing rather than to gain it, because they realise that it will be less costly.… What is safe anywhere while everyone is maintaining his rights to the last ditch? We see wars arise from wars, wars following wars, and no end or limit to the upheaval. It is certainly obvious that nothing is accomplished by these means.' Machiavelli [in The Prince], on the other hand, read very different lessons in history. 'Love is maintained by a bond of obligation which, because men are wicked, is broken when an opportunity of private advantage offers, but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails.' Moral scruple, he argued [in Discoverses] must be renounced when necessary by any ruler who wished to remain in power and influence events. 'Men do not go in the direction of Good unless forced to by necessity.'

The traditional religious certitudes had of course also been brought into question by the attacks on the institutionalised Church initiated by Luther and Calvin in the name of reformation. At a time of such moral uncertainty it is not surprising that men should have found in the Classical authors a cool common sense and urbanity that they much admired. Greek and Roman patterns of conduct, since necessarily pagan, were, of course, often at variance with church teaching, though certain attitudes, for example, Stoicism, were found to fit comfortably into either system, despite a few inconsistencies such as, in this case, the differing attitudes towards suicide. Both Christianity and Stoicism, after all, placed the highest value on inner, spiritual strength, found merit in self-denial and looked askance at any hint of uncontrolled emotion; thus Hamlet's famous words to Horatio:

Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, aye, in my heart of heart.
                                        (Ham. III.ii.71)

could be endorsed equally from either point of view.

Shakespeare's age saw its problems mirrored in the wide glass of Roman history, staring into it for guidance as to how the stability of the state might be maintained amid the pressures that came crowding in upon it from all sides. Roman constancies appeared alluring, judged against the perplexing moral climate of the time. Referring to the earth's demotion from its place at the centre of the cosmos and the heavenly bodies, John Donne wrote [in "An Anatomy of the World"]:

… new philosophy calls all in doubt.
The element of fire is quite put out;
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it …
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation.

This uneasiness was compounded by the social and economic ruptures marking the end of feudalism, which were, in their immediate effects, far more destabilising than all the realignments of cosmography. The Elizabethan view of Rome thus embodied a rigour and an equilibrium that were felt to have been lost.

In 16th-century contemplations of the Classical world the dominant sense is not so much one of innovation as of restoration of an inheritance that had been shouldered aside by medieval mysticism and its excesses of piety. The growth of printing now enabled many to share in their common European legacy on a scale that had never been possible hitherto. A mood of confident optimism is discernible in the early decades of the century, for example, in a letter of 1517 from Erasmus to Pope Leo X.

I congratulate this age of ours which promises to be an age of gold if ever there was one wherein I see … three of the chief blessings of humanity are about to be restored to her, I mean first that truly Christian piety which has in many ways fallen into decay, second learning of the best sort hitherto partly neglected and partly corrupted, and third the public and lasting concord of Christendom, the source and parent of piety and erudition.

This mood was destined not to last. Though More, Colet and others sought, with some success, to reconcile Classical thought with Christianity, the two very different tempers could never really be made compatible. For the medieval scholar the great ages of Greece and Rome were, despite the magnificence of their accomplishments, a part of the pre-Christian darkness. To Humanists, on the other hand, they represented a light that had been extinguished, to be reawakened after a thousand years by Petrarch and Giotto. Cicero was their shining model of wisdom and oratory; but had not St Jerome in his dream been reproved by Christ Himself for reading those same pagan meditations?

With the Reformation this dichotomy became more pronounced, writers on history tending to see the past in natural rather than supernatural terms: events might, for example, take an unfortunate course not on account of the unseen hand of a wrathful God so much as because those involved were misguided, stubborn, selfish or ambitious. Machiavelli again expressed this change of mood [in Discourses]:

It is necessary that he who frames a commonwealth, and ordains laws in it, should presuppose that all men are bent to mischief, and that they have a will to put in practice the wickedness of their minds so oft as occasion shall serve.… It seemed that there was in Rome a perfect union of the people and the Senate when the Tarquins were banished, and that the nobility, having laid by their pride, were become of a popular disposition and supportable to every one, even of the meanest rank.… But no sooner were the Tarquins dead, and the nobility delivered of that fear, but they began to spit against the people the poison that all this while had lurked in their breasts, and in all sorts possible to vex and molest them: which thing confirms what I said before, that men never do good unless enforced thereto; but where choice is abundant and liberty at pleasure, confusion and disorder suddenly take place.

Discord such as this between the Roman plebeians and patricians mirrored the social and political unease that ran like a dark thread through so much of Elizabeth's reign, just as the power struggles between Lancaster and York, which paved the way for the Tudor dynasty, could be seen as a parallel to the civil wars of Caesar and Pompey, Octavius and Antony. Equally, the achievements and reborn splendours of England and her Virgin Queen were felt, by enthusiasts and by sycophants alike, to echo the greatness of Rome itself. Roman history seemed more than ever relevant: the courage and tenacity of the great military leaders of Classical times found equivalents in the feats of such contemporary heroes as Frobisher, Sidney, Grenville, Essex and Blount. Through resolve and endeavour, aspiration might be turned into achievement for, as Cicero affirmed, virtue was praiseworthy only in the doing. Men must, therefore, take responsibility for themselves and their own actions, thus acquiring the true moral freedom that is the essence of human dignity, an idea implicit in the word humanitas itself and one which can be traced back as far as Aristotle. An idealisation of 'manliness' along these lines is at the heart of the Latin term 'virtus ', the central value of the Roman moral system. Machiavelli called it 'virtù', by which he intended a combination of strength of character, resolution, intelligence, courage and—above all—decisiveness. The values derived from virtus had a particular appeal to the Elizabethans with their cult of individualism. If heroism lay in exploits, in deeds of nobility and valour, then its essence was to be sought in that blend of austerity, firmness, dignity and action that constituted 'the high Roman fashion'. It was this, above all, that caught the imagination of so many writers of the time.

Into his own Tudor milieu of flux and ambiguity Shakespeare brought, plucked from the pages of Plutarch and Livy, stern-minded, heroic figures, possessed of a mysterious, inward power that enabled them to face life's daunting complexities with an enviable equanimity. He shared Marlowe's burning faith in the possibility of man's triumph here on earth although, unlike his passionate contemporary, he survived long enough to reach more complex judgements, often sceptical, contradictory and inconclusive. For both men moral integrity was fundamental, as we see in plays like Tamburlaine and Titus Andronicus written, it seems, within a year or two of each other. Single-mindedness and unwavering constancy clearly fascinated Shakespeare, though he was well aware that these qualities might teeter on the edge of fanaticism. There is something terrible about Shylock's refusal to be deflected by so much as a 'scruple' from his ghastly purpose. We find in it a compelling blend of the awe-inspiring and the absurd. Irresolution, on the other hand, often earns contempt. Othello's words to Iago as he embarks on his sacred 'cause' contain the cold hardness of imagery which is characteristic of what might broadly be termed Shakespeare's 'Roman' attitude:

             Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont:
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up. Now by yond
marble heaven.…
                                 (Oth. III.iii.460)

'How terrible in constant resolution', as the French Constable says of Henry V. Brutus' inescapable conclusion: 'It must be by his death' contains the epitome of that uncompromising self-belief Shakespeare found so quint-essentially Roman.

It is significant that Shakespeare should have written no Roman comedy. The nearest he came to one was The Comedy of Errors, based closely on the Menaechmi of Plautus and set in Ephesus on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, an area for many years a part of the Empire. The play contains, nonetheless, not one reference to Rome or to Romans, and the presence of an abbess and a priory seems to place it in a later, Christianised world (although historical consistency was often a minor consideration, as we shall see when we turn to Cymbeline).

Shakespeare's six 'Roman' texts—five plays and a narrative poem—fall into three distinct pairs. There is a pattern of development in the thinking about Rome which, with one discrepancy, follows the chronology of composition now broadly agreed by scholarship. It is a process which evolved over two decades, spanning almost the whole of Shakespeare's career. The two earliest of these texts, Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, were both written, apparently, between 1590 and 1593 when Shakespeare was still in his twenties. Rome, here, is envisaged in relatively simplistic terms, and there is little attempt to question the values put forward by the protagonist despite the extremes of behaviour to which they give rise. Both Titus and Lucrece propel themselves towards the ends they have determined with a startling, unswerving, though scarcely admirable logic.

Unlike Mark Antony, Titus holds his 'visible shape' with little difficulty. He is 'steel to the very back', something Antony merely talks of becoming. Supremely untroubled by conscience and always clear as to where his duty lies, only once throughout the play does Titus waver. Having denied life to his disobedient son, he further determines to refuse him his traditional funeral rites, and it is with great reluctance that he eventually yields to the entreaties of his family, allowing him burial in the ancestral tomb. When, in the final act, he tells Tamora that 'what is written shall be executed the words sum up the linearity of his mind. Lucrece shares the same uncomplicated moral stance.

  Her honour is ta'en prisoner by the foe …
'Few words', quoth she, 'shall fit the trespass
   best
Where no excuse can give the fault amending'.
                                    (11. 1608-14)

Despite her promise, however, she is, like Richardson's Pamela, unremittingly verbose on the subject of chastity. Her lengthy and over-elaborate exposition of 'The story of sweet chastity's decay' (1.808) may at times try the patience of all but the most tolerant reader.

In both these early works Shakespeare's sense of the tragic is expressed in terms of bloody conflict between an evil that is uniformly dark and a virtue that is spotlessly pure, though there is a recognition that one world may be corrupted by the other.

In Julius Caesar this picture alters radically. Here, as later in Coriolanus, motive is complex, decision onerous, outcome equivocal, and Shakespeare enters the realm of Renaissance introspection and ambiguity so eloquently expounded by Montaigne:

Whosoever looketh narrowly about himselfe shall hardly see himself twise in one same state.… If I speake diversly of my selfe it is because I looke diversly upon my selfe. All contrarieties are found in her, according to some turne or removing … and whosoever shall heedfully survey and consider himselfe shall finde this volubility and discordance to be in himselfe, yea and in his very judgement. I have nothing to say entirely, simply and with soliditie of my selfe without confusion, disorder, blending, mingling.

Better, perhaps, than any other of Shakespeare's Romans, Brutus epitomises the late Tudor moral dilemma. In Julius Caesar characters are often confused and uncertain as to their proper course, a situation not encountered in Titus or Lucrece, where no one seems to have doubt about anything. Now Roman values are called into question, often by bringing a cogent irony to bear, as when the conspirators wash their hands in the blood of their fallen victim to accompanying shouts of 'peace, freedom and liberty!' The contrast between Brutus' remote idealism and its catastrophic consequences forms the play's ironic core. Clearly Shakespeare had begun to have misgivings about the characteristic Roman ability to separate mind from feelings, above all in its effect on the urgings of the sentient heart.

He returned to this problem with still greater uneasiness a few years later in Coriolanus, a play which has many affinities with Julius Caesar and, for the purposes of this study, will be paired with it, though Antony and Cleopatra (rather inconveniently from the critical viewpoint) stands between them in terms of its date of composition. Few Shakespearean characters arouse stronger, more conflicting feelings in an audience than Coriolanus. In this play we find, at its starkest, the confrontation between stern Roman virtus, built on long tradition, and the gentler, more instinctive claims of familial love and harmony. The concept of pietas, which in the end prevails over the harsh warrior code, again provides an opportunity for pagan Roman values to move into line with those of Christianity.

Coriolanus is often seen as a study of Roman politics, and in this it has more in common with Julius Caesar than with the four other texts. Increasingly, however, critics have focused on the play's intensely human and personal elements, particularly the hero's relationship with his mother, Volumnia. At the heart of Coriolanus there exists the same dilemma that Shakespeare encountered when he studied Plutarch's picture of Marcus Brutus: how may a man preserve that integrity and cold self-reliance so fundamental to romanitas and so clearly commanding respect while, at the same time, possessing that natural, spontaneous warmth and sympathy which expresses itself in the Christian virtues of humility and forgiveness? This quandary is well illustrated by Volumnia's bewilderment. Torn between admiration for her son's resolute consistency and irritation at his pig-headed intransigence, she produces a sentence which ties itself into an impressive semantic knot:

                 You are too absolute,
Though therein you can never be too noble,
But when extremities speak.
                                 (Cor. III.ii.39)

Roman values receive a very different treatment in Antony and Cleopatra. It is as though Shakespeare has burst out of the dark, claustrophobic tunnel of the earlier tragedies into a new world of vibrant colour and exhilaration. Now, for the first time, Roman values, as embodied in Octavius, seem to have become staid and dull, exemplifying a 'squareness' which Antony, by his own admission, has failed to keep. The play's central metaphor of fluidity and evanescence contrasts with a Rome that appears stolid, angular and marmoreal. The quality of gravitas—weighty, enduring, monumental in earlier works—is now diminished and deglamorised until it strikes us as rigid, sterile and tedious. The imagery here conveys Shakespeare's meaning to a degree unique among the Roman plays. We move, it is true, from the frivolity of Antony's 'dotage' in the opening line to the 'high order' and 'great solemnity' of the last, passing from the chaotic period of the Civil War to the beginning of the Augustan golden age, when Rome was to reach the pinnacle of its power and influence. This historical progression counts for little, however, when juxtaposed against the mercurial passion of the lovers and the music of their poetry. Antony looms larger than the Rome that bred him and which, in part, he still inhabits. As Cleopatra tells the bewildered Dolabella:

                           … his delights
Were dolphin-like, they show'd his back above
The element they lived in …
                                          (Ant. V.ii.88)

This is a new world of capriciousness, fluctuation and fantasy that is far distant from the solemn Rome of Titus Andronicus, consecrated to 'virtue … justice, continence and nobility.' The way is open for Cymbeline, perhaps the strangest of all Shakespeare's plays.

Historically, the events behind Cymbeline follow on from Antony and Cleopatra, with Augustus now firmly established on his throne. Although geographically remote from Celtic Britain where the action largely takes place, Rome is never out of sight for long. Again its values are severely questioned, though admittedly more by implication than direct discussion, since in Arviragus' words: 'Love's reason's beyond reason'—a line that would sit easily in Antony. In reading—or, better still, watching—Cymbeline we may be momentarily struck with the disturbing thought that when he embarked on Titus Shakespeare was unconsciously aiming towards this late romance. There is a weird, dream-like quality about it which is difficult to define. Time and again we hear half echoes of the earlier Roman texts as though Shakespeare had them, as he wrote, all jumbled in the forefront of his mind. The imagery has much in common with Antony, particularly in its insistence upon natural growth, fruition and renewal, and there is the same note of poignant lyricism in the verse. Aaron's attempt on Imogen's chastity sharply recalls both Titus and Lucrece. The chamber tapestry depicts Cleopatra in her barge on the River Cydnus, while there are implicit links between the typically Roman general, Lucius, and several earlier bearers of this resonant name. In the final act the two great peoples, Roman and British, come together in propitious harmony, as though Shakespeare had at last achieved a synthesis of the values each stood for, a synthesis towards which he had been moving—though he could hardly have realised it—ever since that opening speech of Saturninus two decades before.