Friendship, too, is very much a central part of the plays-most famous being the friendship turned animus of Brutus and Caesar. The political order known as Rome, both in its republican form and early imperial state, are center stage in the three plays. Politics, friendship, and death permeate the Roman plays. Thus, it isn’t surprising that in the classical humanist revival and milieu he offers some of his profound insights for us reading 400 years later. This wasn’t the case, however, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Others are all but forgotten, like Coriolanus (along with so many other great classical heroes who were hailed as among the greatest men ever to have lived like Epaminondas of Thebes but that’s neither here nor there). Some of those classical names still stand out with us in the twenty-first century: Julius Caesar, Octavius (Augustus), Antony, Cleopatra, Brutus. The classics were part and parcel of Shakespeare’s being and world the classics were also very much part of any educated person’s life and world during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. The arc of history eventually consummates itself in tyranny guised under the veils of universal empire and “universal peace,” but at what cost? What makes the Roman plays unique, much like the Henriad, is the sequential development of the themes that Shakespeare is playing with on the stage in those great dramas.
#On tyranny series#
No series of dramas are more important to us than Shakespeare’s Roman plays, for in the Roman plays we find a world not that dissimilar from ours: a republic of liberty teetering between foreign threats and domestic turmoil, the want to defend liberty and the ambitions of dictatorship.
Others are sweeping narratives connected by the vicissitudes of history that are intimately connected to politics: the Henriad and the Roman plays ( Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra).
Individual plays stand out: Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth. But he had much to say about politics Or, at least, his plays are often situated in the domain of the political.
#On tyranny pdf#
Print - PDF William Shakespeare, that great bard of Stratford-upon-Avon, was not a political theorist.
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