Shakespeare and the fall of the Roman republic: selfhood, stoicism and civil war

Abstract

The central claim of this study is that Shakespeare is deeply sceptical of neoclassical as well as classical glorification of the kind of personal autonomy Seneca describes as “constancy”. Shakespeare sees this pursuit of individual invulnerability, not only as a defining feature of Roman culture, but also as the most fundamental cause of the fall of the Roman Republic. The tragic protagonists of his Roman plays strive to transcend the limits of their own physical bodies, as well as their susceptibility to passions such as pity, grief and fear, and instead come crashing back to earth. The “frailty” that they hope to escape proves instead an intransigent given of the human condition. (1).