[In the following essay, Miola explores the nature of Elizabethan classicism and advocates an organic approach "to the problem of coherence in Shakespeare's Rome," arguing that the city maintains a distinct identity in Shakepseare's poetry and drama despite the variety of ways in which it is portrayed.]

Shakespeare's conception of ancient Rome has long been a focal point in the larger debate concerning his classical learning. This debate began in earnest with Jonson's notorious aphorism imputing to Shakespeare "small Latine, and lesse Greeke" (1623), but hints of it appear earlier. The first printed allusion to Shakespeare, Robert Greene's attack on the "vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers" (1592), expressed the indignation of a university man at the pretensions of a less-educated rival. And in The Return from Parnassus, Part 2 (performed ca. 1600, pub. 1606), William Kemp humorously praised Shakespeare for outdoing those who "smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina & Iuppiter." The debate, ably documented elsewhere, continued throughout the centuries and attracted luminaries to both sides. In 1664, for example, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, admired the veri-similitude of the Roman plays, where fancy, it seemed, almost outworked nature:

& certainly Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, and Antonius, did never Really Act their parts Better, if so Well, as he hath Described them, and I believe that Antonius and Brutus did not Speak Better to the People, than he hath Feign'd them; nay, one would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman, for who could Describe Cleopatra Better than he hath done.

Others, including John Dennis and Richard Farmer, noted inaccuracies, collected anachronisms, and scoffed. The controversy goes on in our century. In 1952 a classicist, J. A. K. Thomson, reviewed the evidence and concluded solemnly that Shakespeare was "no scholar." [in his Shakespeare and the Classics] In 1976, however, Paul A. Cantor based his Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire on the assumption that the Roman plays provide "an opportunity to learn something about Rome as well as about Shakespeare."

Although the debate about Shakespeare's learning continues, "the ground of argument has shifted in the twentieth century," according to one chronicler, John W. Velz ["The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or Anachronism? A Retrospect," Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978)]. Since the time of M. W. MacCallum's Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background (1910), students of Shakespeare's classicism have paid increasing attention to the Elizabethan and Jacobean context of his work. Instead of imposing modern notions of the classical world on Shakespeare, an impressive group of scholars has sought to discover contemporary ideas about the ancients. Robert Kilburn Root and Douglas Bush have traced the highways and byways behind Shakespeare's use of classical mythology. T. W. Baldwin, with daunting thoroughness, has studied Elizabethan school curricula and their possible influence on Shakespeare. Virgil K. Whitaker has explored the connections between Shakespeare's learning and his development as a dramatist. T. J. B. Spencer has illuminated contemporary attitudes toward ancient Greeks and Romans. Kenneth Muir and Geoffrey Bullough have reclaimed source study as a legitimate and potentially valuable interest and constructed a solid foundation for future scholarship. Reuben A. Brower has perceptively analyzed the commingling of classical and Christian in Shakespeare's England and in his works. And Emrys Jones [in The Origins of Shakespeare (1977)] has contributed stimulating studies of Shakespeare's imaginative processes and origins.

In the intense light of these efforts it seems clear that some consideration of Elizabethan classicism should preface consideration of Shakespeare's Rome. Review of the standard sources and methods of classical learning in the period can illuminate the playwright's intentions and achievements. Surveying the substance and methods of English humanism will not, to be sure, guarantee understanding or appreciation of Shakespeare's art; it may, however, direct criticism by guarding against anachronistic misreading and by pointing out likely possibilities.

The roads to Rome in the Renaissance were many, winding, and various. Although they often ran concurrently, the major routes were well marked, and the most widely traveled one was probably that of the grammar schools. T. W. Baldwin has shown that elementary education included study of the Disticha Moralia, Terence, Plautus, Seneca, Cicero, Quintilian, Ad Herennium, Ovid, Vergil, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and possibly Lucan and Catullus. The texts were often colored by commentary—grammatical, moral, or both—and accompanied by collections, that is, anthologies of memorable snippets and shavings culled from various sources. A schoolboy learned to parse his Latin, for example, by working with Leonhardus Culmannus's Sententiae Pueriles or the Sententiae Ciceronis. He learned to speak the mother tongue by memorizing phrases and sentences from collections of conversations (colloquia) or from florilegia. Later on, he modeled the substance and style of his prose on a Latin translation of Aphthonius, with reference to the Adagia of Desiderius Erasmus or the Apothegms of Conrad Lycosthenes. For verse he imitated the examples of Octavian Mirandula's Flores Poetarum with assistance from Simon Pelegromius's Synonymorvm Sylva or Ravisius Textor's Epitheta. He probably supplemented his reading of Roman historians with a handbook on the order of Thomas Godwin's later Romanae Historiae Anthologia (1614); he sometimes resorted to Valerius Maximus, compiler of famous deeds and men, or to Florus, the epitomator. The study of moral philosophy, of course, was implicit in the whole enterprise, from the elementary sayings of Cato and Cicero on up, but there were numerous and hectic moral compendia available in Latin and English. William Baldwin's A Treatise of Morali Philosophy (1547, reprinted often with revisions and additions) was widely read, probably because it resembled neither a treatise of morals nor of philosophy.

Such a diversity of texts so variously presented could hardly have indoctrinated the student in the glories of Roman civilization or in the turpitude of the pagan ethos. Rome was much too vast and amorphous for simplistic reductions. The tendency to acquire classical learning by means of exuberantly miscellaneous collections characterized the age and worked against the development of any single political, theological, or historical perspective. Copia, not coherence, was the ideal that governed English humanism. And because rhetoric broadly defined, rather than history or philosophy, dominated the curricula, students learned to take a polemical approach to the classics, to watch for usable exempla, arguments, and rhetorical flourishes, and to record them in notebooks for future use. The reassessment and reconsideration of antiquity, as T. J. B. Spencer notes ["Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans," Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957)], was a common activity and a deeply ingrained habit of mind.

The ideal of copia is evident in the second major source of classical learning—the growing number of English translations. Shakespeare relied on Englished classics throughout his career and in his Roman works made use of Golding's Ovid, North's Plutarch, W. B.'s Appian, possibly Heywood's Thyestes (for Titus Andronicus), Holland's Livy (for Coriolanus), and Underdowne's Heliodorus (for Cymbeline). His preference for Ovid's mythological treasury, Plutarch's moral and anecdotal history, and Appian's lively and readable chronicle mark him as a man of his time. For Elizabethans demanded from their classics a generous supply of myth and an abundance of entertaining fact. In such a climate florilegia flourished; there appeared in translation bouquets from Ovid and Terence, as well as whole gardens of classical flowers: Richard Taverner's The Garden of Wysedome (1538), for example; Erasmus's Adagia in Taverner's translation (1539); his Apophthegmata in Nicholas Udall's translation (1542); Timothy Kendall's Flowers of Epigrammes (1577). The environment was also hospitable to excerpts, abridgments, and epitomes. Polybius, Lucan, Caesar, Plutarch, and Livy all appeared in partial English versions. To be sure, there were classical scholars of great learning—men such as Thomas Drant, Henry Savile, Thomas Wilson, and the prolific Philemon Holland. Yet, these men were exceptions in the age of the amateur translator, the age whose critical temper is best illustrated by William Painter's well-read Palace of Pleasure (1566-7). This anthology of Continental nouvelle and classical story satisfied in one serving the public appetite for ancient anecdote, romantic intrigue, and lurid adventure. The miscellany of sources behind Painter's forty-one classical stories reveals the gloriously slapdash character of Elizabethan classicism: "Herodotus (two stories); Aelian (three); Plutarch's Morals (one); Aulus Gellius (twelve); Livy (eight); Quintus Curtius (three); Xenophon (one); Pedro Mexia (two); Guevara's Letters (three); Bandello (six)" [quoted from Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (rev. ed., 1963)].

A third major source of classical learning, one that catered largely to the public demand for quick information, was the various reference books of the Renaissance. The popular mythographies of Giovanni Boccaccio, Lilius Giraldus, Natalis Comes, and Vincenzo Cartari begot English offspring: Stephan Batman, The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (1577); Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch (1592); and Richard Linche, The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction (1599). Related to these handbooks in content and influence were the dictionaries of Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Cooper, and the Stephani (Robert and Charles), works that apparently everyone used, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, and John Milton. The quintessential Renaissance reference book—the encyclopedia—borrowed from various traditions and gathered information into vast, sometimes accessible summaries of human learning. Such works as Pierre Charron's Of Wisdome (1606) and Pierre de La Primaudaye's The French Academie (1618) crammed classical lore, legend, fact, and fiction into essays that addressed an astonishingly diverse range of topics.

Living after the labors of Diderot in an age of computerized bibliography, many today may entertain misconceptions about the nature of Renaissance encyclopedias. Typically, such volumes gathered in one place essays on subjects as far apart as the Creation, the vices of Heliogabalus, and the unique properties of bulls' blood. Some, such as the works of Charron and La Primaudaye, were organized after a fashion and showed signs of a guiding intelligence and purpose; others were not. An instructive example of the disorganized type is Pedro Mexia's Spanish compilation, Silva de Varia Lecion (1542), which achieved translation and popularity on the Continent as well as in England. An abridged and Englished version of Mexla's work appeared as The Foreste (1571, 1576), translated by Thomas Fortescue from a French version. Much of The Foreste, along with much else of Mexia, reappeared in the first volume of Thomas Milles's The Treasvrie of Avncient and Moderne Times (1613), translated largely from French and Italian versions. This book clearly illustrates the motley abundance of Renaissance classicism as well as Elizabethan willingness to use intermediary translations. Here biographical sketches (e.g., Polybius 4:32; Tamberlaine 7:2) and stories about ancient lives and works (Plutarch 1:19; Diogenes 3:7) sit quite comfortably with unrelated chapters on history, both civil (Sparta 2:3; Athens 2:4) and ecclesiastical (Popes 1:27; Heresies 6:14). Travelogs describe such exotic lands as Persia (4:1), Fez (6:1), and Moscovia (7:34); moral essays strike closer to home, reminding the reader of his duties (Manhood 3:11; Prodigality 8:20). Essays in the sciences—natural (Honey 3:15; Crocodiles 5:31; Gold 8:30), medical (Melancholy 5:26; Dangerous Years 4:16), and political (Monarchy 8:33; Foreign Civil Wars 9:9)—do not dilute the effects of the abounding mirabilia (Man 3:8; Marvelous Things 9:30). An allegorical description of Charon (2:23), paradoxes (4:38; 7:43; 8:38), moral tales (8:15), and romantic tragedies (7:46) round out the collection. The range of purposes and historical methods here may be illustrated by comparison of the chapter on Ancient Rome (3:1), a detailed and objective description of civil institutions running thirty folio pages, with the brief account of the legendary maiden of Poictu (6:8), who reportedly lived for three years without food or drink.

At the turn of the century the Elizabethan who studied Latin sententiae in school, who browsed through translations as they appeared, or who came upon intriguing Roman examples in the pages of reference books could easily acquire further information from numerous chronicles and biographies. Livy and Tacitus told the story of Rome in the original language and in translation; Saint Augustine and Orosius offered a Christian reading of the history and achievements of the Earthly City. Polybius, Velleius Paterculus, Pomponius Mela, Lucan, Josephus, Pliny, Aulus Gellius, Solinus, Aelianus, Eutropius, and Ammianus Marcellinus also provided occasional commentary. Holinshed's Chronicles contained information on Roman-British relations in antiquity, as did other histories of Britain. Some English writers were more intent on boiling Roman history down to a tasteless porridge of platitudes on the horror of rebellion, the punishment of pride, the necessity of obedience or monarchy. William Fulbecke's An Historicall Collection of the Continvall Factions, Tvmvlts, and Massacres of the Romans and Italians (1601) is a clear example of the type. Biographical information was available in the histories themselves and in the works of Plutarch and Suetonius. A popular form of pseudobiography was the collecting of wise men's sayings. This subgenre of "dictes," according to D. T. Starnes ["Sir Thomas Elyot and 'Sayings of the Philosophers,'" Texas University Studies in English, 13 (1933)] began in England with Walter Burley's De Vita and William Caxton's Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (1477) and continued (sometimes indirectly) in similar compilations by Erasmus, Sir Thomas Elyot, William Baldwin, Nicholas Ling, Robert Allott, John Bodenham, Thomas Floyd, Henry Crosse, and Francis Bacon.

As every student knows, the literature of England rooted itself in classical examples and blossomed with classical allusions. Sometimes the imitatio is bold and blatant; sometimes it is subtle and implicit—ut intelligi simile queat potius quam dici, "so that the likeness can be sensed rather than defined." [I quote from a letter of Petrarch reprinted in Thomas M. Greene's "Petrarch and the Humanist Hermeneutic," in Italian Literature: Roots and Branches, Essays in Honor of Thomas Goddard Bergin, ed. Giose Rimanelli and Kenneth John Atchity (1976).] Whatever the form, imitation of classical models is pervasive and transformative. Prose writers such as Thomas Lodge, Philip Sidney, and Robert Greene, for example, breathed new life into Greek romances; William Painter and George Pettie diluted old wine and poured it into new bottles. Every poet, it seems, from the plodding under-graduate versifier to the brilliant and courtly Edmund Spenser, busied himself with imitations of Horace, Vergil, or Ovid. And some, more strictly meditating the thankless Muse, tried to fit their native English to classical meters. No form of literature was more steeped in classical example than the drama. The use of classical subjects and conventions in the plays of Nicholas Udall, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and George Chapman is well known, but the cumulative importance of classical elements to English drama defies tabulation. Harbage and Schoenbaum's Annals of English Drama, 975-1700 records, on the average, the appearance of at least one classical drama for every year of Shakespeare's life. And according to Clifford J. Ronan, no fewer than forty-three Roman plays survive from the period 1588-1651.

The ubiquity of the classical presence in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature should humble any surveyor of English humanism. The effort to chart the main courses of classical learning in the Renaissance must end by soberly acknowledging the magnitude of the source material and the incalculable variety of the conduits. The routes of classical learning were crisscrossed at every point by auxiliary roads and bypaths. Miscellaneous sources abounded, each with its own coloration and perspective. In addition to those noted above, there were medieval works by William Caxton, John Lydgate, John Gower, and Geoffrey Chaucer, as well as the Gesta Romanorum. Also pervasive and influential was the classical learning contained in various mirrors, emblem books, cosmographies, biblical commentaries, homilies, political treatises, theological debates, and works of art—paintings, tapestries, and statues. The figure of Hercules holding up the world at Shakespeare's Globe images the vital and supportive relationship of the classics to Elizabethan culture.

After even so brief a survey several observations seem reasonable. The prevailing attitude toward the classics in England was enthusiastically acquisitive and undiscriminating. The impulse to collect was so forceful as to overwhelm whatever reservations many had about context or accuracy. This impulse was, at bottom, utilitarian. For Elizabethans, ancient authors provided a treasury of practical information on everything from the raising of bees to the attaining of wisdom. Their advice and examples pointed the way to a better, richer, and fuller life. As a result, English classicism came to be ahistorical and eclectic in character, little concerned with understanding the past on its own terms. Shakespeare's anachronisms are to the point here, evidencing the age's disregard for historical accuracy, at least as we understand the concept. Also pertinent are the classical translations that directly aim at establishing instructive parallels between ancient history and contemporary politics.

What is more, English humanism was undogmatic and flexible in character. Writers continually appropriated the same classical figures and incidents to point different (sometimes contradictory) morals and to adorn a wide variety of tales. This flexibility bespeaks a deep fascination with classical culture and a serious (though not scholarly) engagement with it. Speaking of the Elizabethan view of ancient Rome, Emrys Jones describes succinctly the origins and nature of this engagement:

Those who had been through a grammar-school had been saturated in the literature of classical Rome. There was an immense amount of learning by rote. Boys who had spent the best part of six long days a week for perhaps as many as ten or eleven years reading, translating, analysing, and explicating Latin literature would have memorized hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lines or scraps of lines from the poets, as well as having innumerable phrases, constructions, and rhythms from the prose writers impressed on their minds. A classical colouring would be cast over everything they read or wrote.

Such early training, continued by innumerable other contacts and experiences, deserves notice and respect. It provided the material, means, and audience for Shakespeare's transmutation of diverse classical traditions into complex works of art.

In light of the above, it seems unlikely that any single and exclusive perspective could define the ubiquitous presence of Rome in Elizabethan culture. A place like Corinth might become known as a lustful, sin-filled city, and a people like the Parthians might be remembered largely for their tactic of shooting arrows behind them as they retreated. Neither Rome nor Romans, however, could be so easily fitted into categories or so summarily reduced. Conscious of the city's multifaceted diversity, Shakespeare did not insist on any exclusive, dogmatic interpretation, but drew upon various attitudes, stories, and traditions as he pleased.

Several important scenes from the Roman plays clearly illustrate the nature of Shakespeare's response to his cultural and intellectual environment. The account of the portents preceding the assassination in Julius Caesar, for example, probably derives from North's Plutarch, Ovid's Metamorphoses (XV), Lucan's Pharsalia in the original or in Marlowe's partial translation, Vergil's Georgics I and (I shall argue) the Aeneid. Similarly, Menenius's belly fable in Coriolanus is a composite of passages from Livy, North's Plutarch, William Averell's A Mervaillous Combat of Contrarieties (1588), William Camden's Remaines (1605), possibly Camerarius's Fabellae Aesopicae (1573), and Sidney's Apology (1595). In each instance we glimpse the playwright at work. From diverse and sometimes unrelated elements he forges speeches and scenes of striking power and resonance. The sovereign imagination invades, appropriates, combines, and transforms; the old elements become part of a new creation, something rich and strange.

Just as the examination of a cell reveals the biology of an entire organism, examination of the sources behind these speeches reveals Shakespeare's creative method in his Roman works. In a fine frenzy rolling, Shakespeare's eye ranged over a variety of classical texts, translations, and contemporary works, taking and leaving according to his fancy. In each Roman work, as in his other plays, he brought together different elements and struck a new balance. In the early works, for example, he relied on Ovid, Vergil, and Seneca; in the middle, on Plutarch; in the end, on Holinshed and possibly Heliodorus.

At this point, students of Shakespeare's Rome may naturally wonder about its unity and coherence. Yet, some of the most important studies of this century have subordinated this question to other concerns or ignored it entirely. M. W. MacCallum's seminal Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background (1910), for example, concentrates largely on Shakespeare's presentation of character and use of Plutarch in Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. He does not seek to analyze the ties that bind the plays together. In The Imperial Theme (1931), G. Wilson Knight discusses the imagery of the Plutarchan plays perceptively, but offers little insight into their relations to each other. Maurice Charney follows the Wilson Knight line of imagistic criticism in Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (1961), adding consideration of visual or "presentational" images on stage. He relegates to an appendix some of the arguments for regarding the Plutarchan plays as a group. At the outset of Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (1963), Derek Traversi declares that the Plutarchan plays combine the impersonal political process of Shakespeare's histories with the heroism of the tragedies. He devotes most of his energy thereafter to close reading and analysis, however, not to the support of this observation.

Other studies have found coherence in the Roman plays by interpreting them in the light of preexisting ideological frameworks. The tendency to read Shakespeare's Roman works in terms of Elizabethan political theory, illustrated in an extreme form by James Emerson Phillips, Jr., The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (1940; rpt. 1972), is evident in much criticism of the individual works. The tendency to view Shakespeare's Rome sub specie aeternitatis is also prevalent, appearing at the end of J. Leeds Barroll's learned "Shakespeare and Roman History" and throughout J. L. Simmons's Shakespeare's Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (1973). According to Simmons, the Roman plays are united by their common depiction of a pagan world, one in which the characters "must perforce operate with no reference beyond the Earthly City." "The antedating of Christian revelation," Simmons contends, "is the most significant historical factor in these historical tragedies" and Saint Augustine's De Civitate Dei provides the appropriate light by which to read them.

More recently, two critics have constructed their own politico-moral frameworks for the interpretation of Shakespeare's Rome. In Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (1976), Michael Platt traces the rise and fall of the Republic through Lucrece, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. In Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (1976), Paul A. Cantor distinguishes between Shakespeare's portrayal of the Republic in Coriolanus and the Empire in Antony and Cleopatra. He concludes that thumos, or "public spiritedness," characterizes Shakespeare's Republic and eros, or "desire," his Empire.

The political and moral frameworks advanced thus far fail to define the unity and coherence of Shakespeare's Rome for three reasons. First, they do not adequately take into account the diversity of Rome in the canon and the era, the undogmatic flexibility of English humanism, and the ambivalent nature of Shakespearean drama, where political and moral issues are complex and difficult. Second, whether the plays tend to justify monarchy, according to the political interpretation, or to portray the world before Christ, according to the moral one, the reign of Augustus is made to assume a climactic importance in Shakespeare's view. The "ass unpolici'd" of Cleopatra's conception becomes the prince of peace in the critical opinion, as he does in his own. Shakespeare nowhere portrays this miraculous transformation, and the coming apotheosis must be inferred from hints and half-guesses, all removed from their qualifying dramatic context. Third, incredibly, no interpretation to date treats all the works of Shakespeare's Roman canon: The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. Only Maurice Charney has offered a rationale for regarding the Plutarchan plays as a distinct group, citing three external criteria: "(1) the use of 'Roman' costume on the Elizabethan stage; (2) the Roman praise of suicide as an act of moral courage and nobility, an attitude very different from Christian belief; and (3) the common source in North's Plutarch." If, for the moment, one accepts these criteria, one wonders about the exclusion of Lucrece, which features pagan praise of suicide, and of Titus Andronicus, which derives in part from North's Plutarch and which, apparently, was played in Roman costume. But these criteria are simply inadequate. The little we know about Elizabethan costuming is insufficient for such conclusions; suicide is only one thematic motif that Shakespeare considered typically Roman; and North's Plutarch is only one source of Shakespeare's Roman vision.

Modern criticism of the Roman plays suggests an alternate approach to the problem of coherence: the organic one. In 1951 Roy Walker made a stimulating observation [in "The Northern Star: An Essay on the Roman Plays," SQ, 2 (1951)] "Shakespeare's idea of Rome was not built in a day, or built at all. Like other living things it was subject to growth and decay, and to trace the course of that organic development is not to impute to the poet a neat plan of construction, conscious from the outset." Walker went on to trace some imagistic and thematic patterns from Titus Andronicus through Cymbeline, nothing significant recurrences of idea, but also the different contexts. The inductive approach he outlined and attempted rests on the notion that the Roman works bear a family resemblance to each other and show signs of internal coherence; it allows, however, for the possibility of change, of "growth and decay." Some decades later John W. Velz called for study of Shakespeare's Rome along similar lines of approach [in "The Ancient World in Shakespeare," Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978)] He suggested that future critics might discuss Shakespeare's Rome as a world apart by focusing on its eloquentia, national character, institutions, or topography, as each motif manifests itself in all six Roman works.

The present study takes an organic approach to the problem of coherence in Shakespeare's Rome as the city appears in The Rape of Lucrece, Titus Andronicus, the Plutarchan tragedies, and Cymbeline. It attempts to identify internal similarities while recognizing differences, to reveal central themes while tracing their development or disappearance. Such an approach requires reconsideration of Shakespeare's sources, broadly defined as possible influences and analogs. This reconsideration seeks not to discover direct sources (although such discoveries are always welcome), but to penetrate into the deep sources lying below the surface of the text, to those various subterranean streams that give, enrich, and nourish its life.

Studying all of Shakespeare's Roman canon chronologically has clear advantages over other methods. Most obviously, it can reveal that Shakespeare viewed ancient Rome as a place apart and that his vision of the city and its people evolved dynamically throughout his career. Embryos of idea and image grow to maturity and die. The Vergilian virtue of pietas, for example, central to Shakespeare's first four Roman works, is only marginally important to Antony and Cleopatra, but central again, although strangely transformed, to Coriolanus and Cymbeline. The hint of a blood ritual at the end of Lucrece becomes a potent symbol in Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, only to be rejected finally in Cymbeline, wherein Roman severitas gives way to British mercy. A sequential examination, moreover, can show Shakespeare reworking dramatic situations and scenes in his Roman art. Lucrece's suicide, for example, is replayed variously by Brutus, Antony, Cleopatra, and Imogen, who, of course, stops at the crucial moment. The rape of Lavinia provides a model for Iachimo's unlawful invasion of Imogen's bedchamber. Brutus's death scene supplies important details for Antony's and Coriolanus's. Caesar's triumphant procession sweeps on, although to different effects and ends, in Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. The poem and the plays are connected by an intricate, yet largely unnoticed and unexplored, network of images, ideas, gestures, and scenes. Although the elements of this network appear elsewhere sporadically, here in the Roman canon, transfigured so together, they grow to something of great constancy, howsoever strange and admirable. Viewed in their entirety, they testify compellingly to the coherence of Shakespeare's Roman vision.

At the center of this vision stands the city of Rome. This "city," of course, Shakespeare defines variously: Rome is an extension of Collatine's household in Lucrece, a wilderness settlement in Titus Andronicus, a political arena in Julius Caesar, an Empire in Antony and Cleopatra, a sharply drawn urbs in Coriolanus, and a vaguely localized anomaly, part ancient, part modern, in Cymbeline. It is sometimes metaphor, sometimes myth, sometimes both, sometimes neither. Despite its metamorphoses, Rome maintains a distinct identity. Constructed of forums, walls, and Capitol, opposed to outlying battlefields, wild, primitive landscapes, and enemy cities, Rome is a palpable though ever-changing presence. The city serves not only as a setting for action, but also as central protagonist. Embodying the heroic traditions of the past, Rome shapes its inhabitants, who often live and die according to its dictates for the approval of its future generations. These Romans, capable of high courage and nobility, struggle with a city that demands them to be both more and less than human. Shakespeare tells their stories by combining various sources, by reworking the political motifs of invasion and rebellion, and by exploring the thematic implications of three Roman ideals: constancy, honor, and pietas (the loving respect owed to family, country, and gods). He makes continual reference to Troy, the city that gave birth to Rome and that, in many ways, foretells Rome's later tragedies. Increasingly critical of Rome, Shakespeare finally writes Cymbeline, a valediction to the Eternal City that so long and so deeply engaged his intelligence and imagination.