Rome and Rhetoric
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
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- US$10.99
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- US$10.99
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Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two classical Roman plays. Garry Wills, focusing his attention on Julius Caesar, here demonstrates how Shakespeare so wonderfully made these ancient devices vivid, giving his characters their own personal styles of Roman speech.
In four chapters, devoted to four of the play’s main characters, Wills shows how Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius each has his own take on the rhetorical ornaments that Elizabethans learned in school. Shakespeare also makes Rome present and animate by casting his troupe of experienced players to make their strengths shine through the historical facts that Plutarch supplied him with. The result is that the Rome English-speaking people carry about in their minds is the Rome that Shakespeare created for them. And that is even true, Wills affirms, for today’s classical scholars with access to the original Roman sources.
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Pulitzer Prize winner Wills, who penetrated Abraham Lincoln's rhetoric in Lincoln at Gettysburg, now shows how the four major characters in Julius Caesar reveal Shakespeare's uncanny, effortless, and intuitive mastery of Quintilian, Socrates, and other rhetorical stylists of the ancient world. Although Shakespeare draws from Plutarch at third hand, from a French translation that was itself translated into English his familiarity with the art of rhetoric gives playgoers a far more fleshed-out depiction of Roman life at its height than does his hypereducated rival, Ben Jonson. Along the way, Wills treats readers to many observations and speculations on the bread and butter of Shakespearean theatrical magic: for example, "the economy of Shakespeare's casting practice" suggests that both major women characters in Julius Caesar were almost certainly played by a single boy actor, and how Caesar's relatively few appearances in the play are in part explained by the same actor playing both Cicero and Caesar. Overall, this tour de force, based on a lecture series at Bard College, shows why our view of ancient Rome is very much Shakespeare's.
