Shakespeare and a Place Calling Itself Rome

This new examination of Shakespeare’s four Roman tragedies (Julius Caesar, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra) revisits Shakespeare’s dramatic recreations of ancient Rome in the light of considerations of place:

• the places from which Shakespeare initiated his imaginative reconstructions, where plays are written and performed
• the places he constructed within the plays, the places the plays imagine and recreate, together with the places from which he derived them
• the places within which we as readers and spectators experience those creations, where such plays are read, viewed and critically analysed.

Alongside this analysis the book explores contemporary critical debates and the uses of place and space in selected modern adaptations - the Taviani brothers’ Italian film Caesar Must Die, Julie Taylor’s film Titus, John Osborne’s play A Place Calling Itself Rome and Ahmed Shawqi’s Arabic Death of Cleopatra.

The book provides a descriptive, palimpsestic map of the places within which Shakespeare’s Roman plays operate, tracing the contours of Rome’s Republic and Empire, overlaid with the Europe of Shakespeare’s day, in which a Romanised London looked with fascination towards the East, towards Rome and Alexandria. Equipped with such a map we can attempt to do what Shakespeare did: to recreate ancient Rome in conjunction and rapprochement with its early modern and modern counterparts.

Graham Holderness is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hertfordshire.