ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how a clear understanding of Shakespeare’s exploration and articulation of Roman values provides an invaluable means of gaining fresh critical insights into the Roman plays. Shakespeare’s interest in Rome encompassed the whole of his dramatic career. The chapter o analyses the values in the plays and their role in generating conflict, and to make a close examination of Shakespeare’s handling of his source material. The most perceptive comments on the relationship between Shakespeare’s Roman worlds and the sixteenth-century context are made by T. J. B. Spencer in his essay ‘Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans’. What Shakespeare does, in each of the Roman plays, is to give us a vision of a society which is so impregnated by its value system that characters do not merely interact with each other but with the history, goals and aspirations of Rome.
