Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: a Roman thought
- 1 Roman historians and the myth of Rome
- 2 The wronged Lucretia and the early republic
- 3 Self-inflicted wounds
- 4 ‘Like a Colossus’: Julius Caesar
- 5 Ben Jonson's Rome
- 6 O'erflowing the measure: Antony and Cleopatra
- 7 The city and the battlefield: Coriolanus
- 8 Tyranny and empire
- 9 Ancient Britons and Romans
- Postscript: Shakespeare and the republican tradition
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Self-inflicted wounds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 March 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: a Roman thought
- 1 Roman historians and the myth of Rome
- 2 The wronged Lucretia and the early republic
- 3 Self-inflicted wounds
- 4 ‘Like a Colossus’: Julius Caesar
- 5 Ben Jonson's Rome
- 6 O'erflowing the measure: Antony and Cleopatra
- 7 The city and the battlefield: Coriolanus
- 8 Tyranny and empire
- 9 Ancient Britons and Romans
- Postscript: Shakespeare and the republican tradition
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
MORTALL MALICE
Thomas Lodge's The Wounds of Civil War, the first ‘Roman’ play of the Elizabethan theatre, was ‘publicly plaide in London, by the Right Honourable the Lord Admiral his Servants’, probably in 1588, by the same company that performed the two parts of Tamburlaine in 1587–8. Lodge's primary source was the Civil Wars of the Greek historian Appian, translated in 1578 as An Auncient Historie and exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes Warres, both Civile and Foren. The translator, W. Barker, summarizes the contents of Appian's history of Rome in highly tendentious terms on the title page:
Their greedy desire to conquere others.
Their mortall malice to destroy themselves.
Their seeking of matters to make warre abroade.
Their picking of quarels to fall out at home.
All the degrees of Sedition, and all the effects of Ambition.
A firme determination of Fate, thorow all the chaunges of Fortune.
And finally, an evident demonstration, That peoples rule must give place, and Princes power prevayle.
A prefatory epistle finds a similar moral in Appian's narrative: ‘How God plagueth them that conspire against theyr Prince, this Historie declareth at the full.’
Yet this ‘Tudor myth’ view, demonstrating the evils of sedition and the superiority of monarchical rule, is not borne out either by Appian's account of the wars of Marius and Sulla or by Lodge's play.
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- The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries , pp. 56 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011