For Goethe, Shakespeare's Romans are ‘in reality nothing but incarnate Englishmen’ (‘Shakespeare and No End’ [1813]). Alexander Pope, by contrast, gives Shakespeare more credit: ‘We find him very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of Antiquity’, Pope observes. ‘In Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, not only the Spirit, but Manners of the Romans are exactly drawn; and a still nicer distinction is shown, between the manners of the Romans in the time of the former, and of the latter’ (‘Preface to Shakespeare’ [1725]). In keeping with Pope's defence of Shakespeare as a historian, in Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire, a revision of his doctoral thesis, first published more than 40 years ago and recently reissued in paperback (2017) by the University of Chicago Press, C. first set out a contrast between the ‘austere, disciplined’ sensibility of Shakespeare's Romans in Coriolanus and the ‘indulgence of the senses’, ‘liberation of eros’ and ‘spiritualized “immortal longings”’ characteristic of both Romans and Egyptians in Antony and Cleopatra (p. 15). At the time, under the influence of New Criticism, Shakespeareans were still writing about patterns of images in Shakespeare, as if his plays were lyric poems. C. broke new ground by presenting Shakespeare as a political thinker.

In Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy C. turns back to the same material, although now with less emphasis on Coriolanus and instead more on Shakespeare's earlier play about the fall of the Roman Republic, Julius Caesar. For C., Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra ‘retain a special and separate status among Shakespeare's works about Rome’ (p. 4). Their close ties to a shared source, Plutarch's Lives, keep these plays ‘more securely grounded in historical facts about Rome’ than other works such as Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece (p. 4). Taken together, these three plays, C. proposes, can be understood as ‘an integrated tragic trilogy’, ‘“The Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic”’ encompassing ‘not just individual heroes but an entire political community’ (p. 83).

How did Shakespeare make sense of that most notorious of all case studies, the decline and fall of ancient Rome? Taking Shakespeare as his cue, C. tells a riveting tale, juxtaposing Shakespeare with historians both ancient and modern. ‘I regard Shakespeare as one of the most profound thinkers on the subject of ancient Rome’, C. maintains. ‘I therefore judge him worthy of being studied in conjunction with other profound thinkers on Rome, including Nietzsche’ (p. 3). The account of Roman history that emerges, and which C. attributes to Shakespeare, is coherent, plausible and thorough: a compelling explanation of what C. calls ‘the twilight of the ancient world’.

Whether the story C. tells corresponds to Shakespeare's understanding of Roman history, however, or Nietzsche's, as opposed to his own, is another question. It is revealing, for instance, that among all the ‘profound thinkers’ C. considers, he dismisses St Augustine out of hand (p. 71). Like Marx, C. tends to represent ideology as a product of physical conditions. Over time, he argues, ‘Rome's great captains and even its ordinary people are corrupted by the wealth that flows into the city from conquered lands, and devotion to the common good gradually weakens until the city is ripped apart by private factions’ (p. 83). It is a venerable vision of history, one that C. shares with Ibn Khaldun as well as Livy and Montesquieu.

Shakespeare himself, however, does not see cultural history, as C. does, as a product of impersonal economic change. Instead, like St Augustine, Shakespeare tends to represent what Karl Marx would call the ‘base’ as a product of what Marx would call the ‘superstructure’. Beliefs are the engine of history, not material resources. As St Augustine argues, citing Sallust, Rome was torn apart in the end, not by riches or over-extension, but by the selfsame ethical paradigm that drove it to become an empire: ipsa ei dominandi libido dominatur (De civ. D. 1.1). The tragedy of ancient Rome, as Shakespeare shows, is that a society that embraces what Nietzsche calls ‘master morality’, although it may thrive upon external conquest for a time, contains no internal principle of solidarity sufficient to prevent its adherents from eventually turning upon each other.

With an eye towards C.’s other published work, it is difficult not to suspect that C. is led astray here by an extrinsic political and religious agenda. In addition to his work in Shakespeare studies, C. is an outspoken proponent of secularism, libertarianism and the Austrian School of economics, which he argues can and should serve in place of Marxist thought as the conceptual basis for a literary criticism grounded, like Marxist criticism, in material exchange. These somewhat idiosyncratic ideological commitments lead C. to adopt assumptions directly opposed to Shakespeare's own perspective.

C. wants to believe, first, that Shakespeare was sympathetic to classical republicanism. ‘Shakespeare appears to identify Rome as a distinctive form of community with the Republic and to pass a negative judgment on the Empire in specifically political terms’ (p. 24). More bluntly, ‘Shakespeare evidently admired the Roman Republic’ (p. 25). As M. Samely and I have argued elsewhere, I am not at all convinced that Shakespeare's political sympathies were so closely akin to our own (Textual Practice 33 [2019]). Throughout his English history plays, as well as his Roman plays, Shakespeare goes out of his way to portray hoi polloi as foolish and fickle. Aristocrats, too, prove untrustworthy on their own. Without a king or emperor in place, stability rapidly gives way to what, for Shakespeare, was the worst of all possible political evils: civil war.

The more substantial problem, however, with Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy is that C. is unwilling to accept that Nietzsche, much less Shakespeare, might not share his own sense of historical causation. C.’s juxtaposition of Shakespeare and Nietzsche is motivated by a fascinating question, the same question, in fact, that prompted St Augustine to write his City of God and that was later taken up by Machiavelli and Gibbon as well as Nietzsche. Did the rise of Christianity cause the fall of ancient Rome? According to C., Shakespeare and Nietzsche both believe that Christianity can be better understood as an effect: ‘the buried theme of Shakespeare's Roman plays is the way that the dissolution of the Roman republican regime prepared the way for the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire’ (p. 3).

Problems arise, however, when C. moves to align Nietzsche, as well as Shakespeare, with his own materialist vision of history as driven by geography and economics, rather than ideology. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche describes ‘the spread of Christianity’ as ‘the principal cause’ of ‘the decline of Roman culture’ (p. 107). In one of his last books Nietzsche strenuously denounces what is, in effect, C.’s thesis. ‘It is not, as is supposed, the corruption of antiquity itself, of noble antiquity, that made Christianity possible’ (p. 107). Unhappy with this answer, C. turns to Nietzsche's notebooks. ‘Why did Nietzsche not embrace the idea that Roman corruption prepared the way for Christianity?’ he asks (p. 106).

As C. shows, in various unpublished notes to himself, Nietzsche does provide a complex, incremental account of the rise of ‘slave morality’, tracing the emergence of, first, Greek moral philosophy, then Greek mystery religions, then Judaism, then Christianity. What remains missing, however, despite C.’s long excursus into Nietzsche's Nachlass, is any sense that Nietzsche does in fact see either geographic expansion or increasing wealth as a fundamental, first-order cause of ‘the slave revolt in morals’. For Nietzsche, as for Shakespeare, ideological conversion is not a reflection of a change in political regime (πολιτεία), but instead the engine that drives such political transformation.

This volume is well worth reading, not only for the questions that it introduces, but also for its detailed exposition of the fine distinctions Shakespeare draws between different periods of Roman history. C.’s masterful prose is hard-thinking, pellucid and a delight to read throughout. His propulsive storytelling is beguiling. His analysis is rich in local insights, almost despite itself; C. concedes that the plays in question sometimes seem, at least, to go against the grain of his overarching argument. Taken as a whole, however, the volume distorts what it purports to describe. The book, therefore, should be read warily, like a news report from a charming, self-assured, well-informed partisan.