Rome in English Perspective

Here are some quotations from Clifford Ronan’s fascinating study of Roman plays in early modern England, Antike Rome (University of Georgia, 1995).

“We moderns often overlook the playfulness and garishness of Antiquity, thinking instead of weather-beaten bleached marble Doric columns, gleaming in the noonday Mediterranean sun. But to the Renaissance, Antiquity is also grotesquely comic, whether the morose and mordant humor of a Tacitus; the flamboyant sexual reportage of a Suetonius, Juvenal, or Catullus; the sniggling sadism of Lucan; or the mannerist wit of another Renaissance mainstream favorite, Ovid. The Metamorphoses , a modern classicist writes, reveals an author who ‘quite obviously delighted in the cruel, the macabre, and the gory’; the work is pervaded with ‘amused detachment, irony, parody, travesty, grotesque exaggeration, over-explicit visual detail, literary wit and allusiveness, incongruities jarring and subtle, bathos, and burlesque.’”

“For us, antic and antique are no longer what they were for Spenser . . . .and Shakespeare . . . : homonyms in search of a pun . . . .Editors of Hamlet must confront the question of the ‘anticke’ weapon of old Priam . . . .Is this sword, which impotently wags from his hand, antic or antique in the modern sense of those terms? And is it right to excise semantically significant ambiguity from original texts? Is there Antiquishness in Hamlet’s wish to put an ‘Anticke disposition’ on . . . ? Or does Hamlet see anticness in suicide when he condemns Horatio’s wish to play the ‘Antike Roman’?”

Citing the work of Gordon Braden on Senecan tragedy in the Renaissance, Ronan writes, “the life of the Stoic is conceived in terms of theater, statuary, or military and athletic struggle . . . Braden sketches how the self-mastery and APATHEIA of the Stoic relate to tempestuous Roman politics, with its paradoxically paired emphasis on clemency and self-destruction. The Stoic sage delineated in Seneca’s essays and the monomaniacal madmen in Seneca’s tragedies ‘can be seen as limiting versions of a single style of selfhood’ . . . : prideful, self-willed, and (despite linguistic anachronism) imperialistic ?Eready to conquer and lay waste kingdoms within and without.”