ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s vision of Rome derives largely from the Greek historian, Plutarch, as he appears in Sir Thomas North’s translation (1579). Combining and transforming Plutarch, Livy, and many other sources, Shakespeare depicts a Rome characterized by treason, violence, bloodshed, mutilation, and murder. But he also represents the Eternal City as a world renowned for its civilized arts of language and for its codes of honour; Rome/Italy is imagined as the urbs that struggles with the world outside its walls/borders to conquer it and to establish its imperium over it. But this mythical and partially invented Rome appears also amazingly similar to the London/England of Shakespeare’s days. In Robert S. Miola’s words: ‘Roma is alia, “other”, but it is also eadem, “the same”, local and familiar, bearing resonant similarities to the world of Early Modern England. In Shakespeare’s ancient Rome original audiences could see strangers and themselves.’1 Like Coriolanus/Caius Martius, the audience is well aware that ‘there is a world elsewhere’ (3.3. 135);2 like Innogen/Imogen, the audience knows that ‘There’s livers out of Britain’ (3.4. 142).3 Significantly, though, both of them must leave Rome and Britain to return to their respective motherlands: but, while Coriolanus goes back to Rome as Caius Martius, its destroyer, and is killed, being thus expelled for ever from the body politic (5.3; 5.4; 5.5), Imogen returns to Britain as Fidele, its saviour and slave to Rome, to be incorporated again in it (5.5).
