Roman Lives

"This is a series of Greek and Roman lives. Plutarch ( c .AD 46–AD 120), a Greek, is writing this sequence of Greek and Roman lives for didactic and political purposes. He wants to talk about how great men serve their country, and he also wants to talk about how evil is punished. It has a didactic aim, and several books have argued that it even has a providential aim. You can see why this would carry nicely with Christian apologetics and historiography: that God is behind the workings of human history and you can see this in the rise and fall of kingdoms and the rise and fall of men and women. Usefully for a dramatist, it focuses on lives, rather than events, reigns, and chronology. It’s about people. Sometimes Plutarch is really quite shrewd: he talks about how Mark Antony’s ancestry mattered to him. He wanted to be a Hercules figure. He believed himself descended from Hercules. And Shakespeare looks at this. It’s not said specifically in the text, but two or three times in Antony and Cleopatra , there is an allusion to Hercules that is marvellously powerful and ironic about this middle-aged voluptuary Antony. The Lives is a big folio book with a lot of close type. I don’t know where Shakespeare got it, but he seems to have had it early in his career. Some people think that episodes in an early play like Titus Andronicus may borrow from it, but he uses Plutarch all the way through his Roman plays— Julius Caesar , Coriolanus , Antony and Cleopatra —through to Timon of Athens , which comes out of a small story in the Lives . So, Plutarch’s Lives was a great fund of Roman and Greek history for Elizabethan dramatists. Because of the exact replication in many places of phrases and lines. For a classic example, Enobarbus’ famous description of Cleopatra on the barge comes right out of North, marvellously transformed in details. This is also a great question because we know now that Sir Thomas North translated it not from the Greek, but from the French — from Jacques Amyot. Amyot gave his own Christian providential tilt to readings in Plutarch, and then North amplified this from the French. Here’s an example. Plutarch will use the word daimon , which is a Greek untranslatable word meaning something like god, guiding spirit, destiny, or fate, depending on how you look at it. Along comes Amyot and he translates it to ange —angel. North picks that up and he uses “angel” or sometimes “destiny”. Shakespeare then reads North and picks this up. He will talk in one point in Julius Caesar , for example, of “Caesar’s angel”. North’s Plutarch contextualised and transformed him for a later Christian audience. And later, Shakespeare will convert the daimon that appears to Brutus into a recognizable stage figure, Caesar’s ghost. That’s another great example. Enobarbus is a stand in for the audience in some ways, particularly when he sees how Antony is destroying himself and says that he’ll “seek some way to leave him.” And then, at the end, he uses him to direct the audience to a new understanding. Enobarbus dies of a broken heart—he dies intellectually disapproving of Antony, but feeling great loyalty, understanding, and love for him. It’s as if Shakespeare is saying, ‘This is where I want the audience to go. Follow this journey with Enobarbus, because I’m going to give you something in the fifth act that Plutarch couldn’t even have imagined.’ Plutarch describes Cleopatra as charming men “with her conversation.” Shakespeare creates this paradoxical queen, quicksilver in her temperament, who is constantly defying expectations. Plutarch describes her suicide rather quickly, saying she was withered and sunken from the poison, but then just moves on. Shakespeare says ‘Oh, no. I’m going to stage a suicide like nothing anybody has ever seen.’ He gives her “My desolation does begin to make /A better life” and the whole scene with the asp. He gives her absolute magic—like nothing he’s ever written before or after, in my view. He makes this scene almost an operatic aria. “Shakespeare gives Cleopatra absolute magic—like nothing he’s ever written before or after, in my view” Speaking of the way that he remembers unpredictably, it’s possible he’s thinking of Virgil’s Dido in Book IV of the Aeneid . She does wear her regal clothes and commit suicide in a display. But he has certainly left Plutarch far behind. That’s an example of going against and expanding beyond the source—with Enobarbus and Cleopatra herself. He almost always goes against the grain. Brutus in Julius Caesar becomes a much more complex character than the one you’ll find in Plutarch. Take the assassination of Caesar and its consequences: Plutarch moralises this as showing that the conspirators have been punished for destroying Caesar, but Shakespeare doesn’t leave it quite so simply. The actions of the gods in Julius Caesar are very hard to read. You have a series of ambivalent signals. What does the storm mean? You can read it as an incitement to the assassination or you could read it as portents against the killing of the ‘first man’ in Rome. Shakespeare is not going to content himself with an easy moral reading. Sometimes he puts them in the plays, but they’re always undercut and always placed in a context that renders them just suspicious or ironic. Yes. If you go to Julius Caesar , he leaves out the first three quarters of Plutarch’s life of Caesar. He has nothing about Caesar’s rise to power, nothing about the pirates, and nothing about the wars in Gaul. The central character of the play speaks about 150 lines and then reappears as a ghost. Everyone who came to this play was interested in this central figure—for Elizabethans, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great were towering figures of great men. But Shakespeare does what you wouldn’t expect: he puts him in a very small role. The whole play is obsessed with Caesar—every line of it—but the actual character is behind the curtain. Then, after Caesar is assassinated in the middle of the play, he becomes an even greater figure through the appearance of the ghost, and then in the references to him: as Brutus dies, he says “Caesar, now be still / I killed not thee with half / So good a will.” Caesar is still stalking the play, and many productions add scenes with the ghost. The strategy of giving the main character 150 lines actually amplifies his presence in a curious way. One final point on Plutarch. Shakespeare never uses or refers in Julius Caesar to that fascinating episode in Plutarch of Caesar and the pirates. But when he gets to Hamlet —which is soaked in Caesar references—he remembers it; he has Hamlet’s incident with the pirates which, in effect, mimics Caesar’s. He remembers this titbit in a wholly different play to a wholly new effect. When I say Shakespeare reads unpredictably, no one would imagine that he’d stick that little Plutarchan bit in Hamlet . So, Plutarch remains a fertile source, even where Shakespeare departs from him."