Paul Cantor's new book, Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy, elaborates the argument he originally made in Shakespeare's Rome. The central argument of both books is that Shakespeare's Roman plays present contrasting portraits of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, which encapsulate the contrast between the pagan and the approaching Christian world. Where the earlier book focuses on Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, the new book discusses Julius Caesar as well, as the lynchpin uniting the Roman plays.

Shakespeare's Rome holds up rather well after forty years. Treating Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra as companion pieces, the book describes how both plays revolve around the issue of what it means to be bound by or to be free of the city. By showing how spiritedness is generally connected with the republic and eros with the empire, and what naturally happens when one of these contrasting sides of human nature dominates the other, the two plays demonstrate what binds man to the city but at the same time urges him to live without it.

Cantor's earlier book is generally careful and thoughtful, written with clarity, focus, and freshness. Its two parts, however, are uneven. The book is at its best when it treats the political, and so its discussion of Coriolanus is much stronger than that of Antony and Cleopatra. Rather than explaining key passages, the latter sometimes relies on quoting similar passages from other plays or other authors.

Cantor's new book has two major parts. Part 1, “Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and the Revaluation of Roman Values,” contains two chapters. Chapter 1, which forms the heart of the book, argues that Shakespeare's Roman trilogy portrays the tragedy of Rome as a political community as well as the tragedies of its individual heroes. While the first chapter uses Nietzsche's concept of master and slave moralities to help analyze the transformation of the republic into the empire, chapter 2 deals with the question of how Nietzsche understands those moralities. Part 2 is a collection of four earlier miscellaneous writings related (more or less) to the earlier chapters.

The book has many strengths, but is not without problems. Although Cantor stresses how long he has studied and how much he has learned about Rome, throughout chapter 1 he avoids the help of Roman historians (except Plutarch's lives of Shakespeare's heroes) and relies instead on secondary sources. (Full disclosure: he quotes several of my books.) To make key points on the contrast between paganism and Christianity, Cantor often cites and sometimes quotes at length familiar passages in Machiavelli's Discourses. Seeking to show that the contrast is a stark antithesis, he tends to absolutize Machiavelli's insights and then apply them to Shakespeare's plays in a formulaic way, often with overstated or misleading results.

For example, while he argues that the Romans in Coriolanus, fully trusting their virtue, are confident that their fate lies wholly in their own hands, Cantor contends that the early Romans “rarely speak of fortune” and “do not waste time wondering what … [the gods] might have in store for Rome” (56). In fact, however, characters in Coriolanus speak of fortune more than twice as often as those in Julius Caesar, even though, as Cantor stresses, the latter no longer enjoy such self-confidence. Nor are the early Romans unconcerned about the gods’ favor. In direct contrast to Cantor's dismissal of their concern, Shakespeare portrays them as thinking of the gods in everything they do. Far from “assum[ing] automatically that the gods will always be on their side … [and will] simply back up any decision they make” (56), the Romans in Coriolanus (as well as many still in Julius Caesar) believe that the gods’ support for them is indispensable and depends on their punctilious piety. The consul Cominius, for example, invokes “the Roman gods” to guide (“lead”) the Roman armies’ “successes,” promising “thankful sacrifice” for their support (Cor., 1.6.6–9). Shakespeare shows, as Cicero states, that the Roman “empire was won by commanders who scrupulously obeyed religion” (On the Nature of the Gods 2.8).

Cantor makes a related error in viewing the characters’ attention in Julius Caesar to heavenly phenomena as an indication of late-republican decay. According to Cantor, the early Republicans, whose “horizons are narrow,” “do not take their bearings from heavenly phenomena or speculate about what they might mean or portend” (39). However, as students of Rome know, from the city's founding Romans took their political bearings from what appeared in the sky. Jupiter and the sky were thought to be one and the same. Cantor's separation of observing heavenly phenomena from conducting politics is foreign to the early republicans. Their horizons were indeed narrow, but they did not consider the heavenly signs as “influences from beyond the borders of the city” (56). In their view, the gods were part of the city they protected, above or “beyond” it only in their authority, not in their presence. “Jupiter, as he surveys the world from his citadel, sees nothing that is not Roman” (Ovid, Fasti 1.85–86). What Cantor describes as Shakespeare's sign of the late republic's decline is, instead, a continuation of Rome's oldest tradition.

Cantor correctly underscores the strong presence of philosophy—of Stoicism and Epicureanism, in particular—in Julius Caesar. But he seems to misunderstand those Hellenistic teachings and how they differ in nature and intent from classical philosophy. For instance, he faults Cassius for speaking of “‘Epicurus … and his opinion,’ as if philosophy were a matter of opinion, not knowledge” (47). However, “opinion,” not “knowledge,” is Epicurus's own word. Like Stoicism, Epicureanism is not a theoretical inquiry for knowledge, but a rigid therapeutic doctrine promising peaceful refuge of the mind from the intractable pains and hardships of life. As Cassius (or Shakespeare) points up, Epicurus entitles his crowning work Key Opinions (Kuriai Doxai).

Cantor argues that Shakespeare's three Roman plays constitute a Hegelian tragedy. Now, one could show (as some critics have) that there is something tragic about a city brought down by its own greatness—that the republic's fulfillment and destruction are tragically the same. But that is not a Hegelian tragedy. A Hegelian tragedy, as Cantor emphasizes, centers on a situation in which someone is forced to choose between two legitimate but incompatible goods. Hegel's prime example is Antigone's forced choice between her brother and her city. Having depicted the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire as representing “fundamental alternatives” of human life (85), Cantor goes on to contend that the major characters in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are forced to choose between those alternatives. No character in the Roman plays, however, makes such a choice. Volumnia chooses between her son and her country, Octavia between her brother and her husband, and Brutus between Caesar and Rome, but no one chooses between republic and empire or master and slave moralities. However fundamental the change, a centuries-long historical transformation does not coalesce into a Hegelian tragic choice.

Chapter 2 seems peculiar. It is not clear why Cantor devotes a lengthy chapter to a detailed discussion of Nietzsche here. Cantor says that Nietzsche and the Roman plays illuminate each other. Where the first chapter uses the master and slave moralities to cast light on the plays, the second chapter uses the plays to answer the question of how weak slaves could conquer their powerful masters and overturn fundamental values. The answer, Cantor argues, can be found in the corruption of Rome and the nobles, and the consequent transformation of Roman citizens into Roman subjects. Cantor's answer may help clarify Nietzsche's understanding, but, with unintended irony, it also renders Shakespeare superfluous for the clarification, for one can find the source of Shakespeare's answer in the ancient authors whom Nietzsche (as well as Shakespeare) read, but Cantor ignores. As his introduction tacitly acknowledges, what brings Shakespeare and Nietzsche together is simply Cantor's personal interest in both.

Notwithstanding its shortcomings, Cantor's new book is welcome for adding to the number of studies that treat Shakespeare as a political thinker and take his Romans seriously as Romans, not as Englishmen in Roman garb. Cantor says that in his earlier book he tried to keep his claims “modest and manageable” (2). His recent book, though helpful in many ways, would have been stronger had he continued his self-restraint.