Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.84 (605 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 022646251X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-06-25 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
More broadly, Cantor places Shakespeare’s plays in a long tradition of philosophical speculation about Rome, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two thinkers who provide important clues on how to read Shakespeare’s works. Paul A. . In a pathbreaking chapter, he undertakes the first systematic comparison of Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome, exploring their central point of contention: Did Christianity corrupt the Roman Empire or was the corruption of the Empire the precondition of the rise of Christianity? Bringing Shakespeare into dialogue with other major thinkers about Rome, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy reveals the true profundity of the Roman Plays. With Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an integrated trilogy that portrays the tragedy not simply of their protagonists but of an entire political community. Cantor analyzes the way Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. The transformation of the ancient city into a cosmopolitan empire marks the end of the era of civic virtue in antiquity, but it also opens up new spiritual possibilities that Shakespeare correlates with the rise of Christianity and thus the first stirrings of the medieval and the modern worlds. Cantor fi
His capacious intellect and intense intellectual curiosity are decidedly on display in this compelling argument that Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra comprise a trilogy meant to document the decline and fall of the Roman republic, both in the lives of the individual heroes, and in the life of the Roman city or polis. Cantor is a widely followed critic and the justifiably preeminent American interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays. Under Cantor’s guidance, the reader is introduced to a new, more profound and compelling Shakespeare.”. “Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy is a marvelous and masterful work