The two classical authors who exerted the greatest influence on Shakespeare and his contemporaries were the Romans Ovid and Seneca. The first was admired for his wit and verbal skills, the second for his dramatic power and use of rhetoric. As Greek myth was experienced by Shakespeare through the prism of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, both in the original and in Arthur Golding’s famous translation (1567), so Greek drama was viewed through Seneca’s tragedies with their verbal brilliance and delight in the gruesome. But Seneca was primarily a philosopher who advocated the doctrine of Stoicism, and all his writings reflect this doctrine.
As well as Seneca, other classical authors such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius were studied in the Renaissance for their Stoic teaching, and a particularly important treatise by Shakespeare’s contemporary Lipsius, On Constancy, sought to recommend Stoicism to all educated men of Europe. This system of thought, invented by the Greeks, was adopted by the majority of Romans, who found in it the perfect complement for their view of the national character. As such, Stoicism is abundantly illustrated in the other main source for Shakespeare’s three major ‘Roman’ plays (Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra), The Parallel Lives by the Greek biographer Plutarch, which was translated into English by Sir Thomas North during Shakespeare’s lifetime.
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