Age in Love: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Court

Abstract

a wide series of topics united by the common thread of Shakespeare’s classical inheritance. A discussion of how Roman republican ideas entered into Elizabethan political thought leads to an eye-opening analysis of the (very) minor roles of Cicero and Ligarius in Julius Caesar. Reading the player’s speech on Pyrrhus and Hecuba in Hamlet, Bate argues for what he has earlier called the anti-Virgilian, anti-epic nature of “Shakespeare’s form of classical fabling [that] was profoundly antiheroic because it was constantly attuned to the force of sexual desire” (15). His Shakespeare is “more often than usually supposed Horatian,” attracted, like Montaigne, to the Roman poet’s picture of the epicurean, apolitical good life. Shakespeare defends poetic feigning, a kind of magic, against Platonic and Reformation critics, while he rationalizes the Senecan stage ghost into mental figment and projection. Bate’s strongest chapters (which make some of the book’s strongest claims) examine how Shakespeare both acknowledges and contests the classical view of eros as a debilitating and destructive force. Bate’s Shakespeare portrays love as heroic as well as antiheroic. Love brings down a Herculean character like Antony but also makes him fully human, as it does the would-be Hercules or Hector Don Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play to which Bate repeatedly returns. Shakespeare’s imagination pivots around this part of the classical legacy: his comedies, tragedies, and poems explore every side of erotic desire and romantic love. The classics, Bate argues, made Shakespeare sexy. As in his earlier, splendid The Genius of Shakespeare and Soul of an Age, Bate writes for a general public without condescension or simplification. Each chapter has fresh things to say to specialists as well, and the book’s generous footnotes map out a large and inclusive scholarly field. Shakespeareans of every kind will read this book with profit and pleasure. Its corrective argument may send some of them back to Ovid, Virgil, and the less usual classical suspects.