ABSTRACT
A pervasive image captures the baroque age’s view of man’s condition and its love of the theatrical: ‘All the world’s a stage’. To the English-speaker this image obviously sounds Shakespearian, and it would be ridiculous not to realize that Shakespeare’s creative imagination, the richest at work as the seventeenth century opened, contains elements and features that anticipate the baroque, and link it with the culture of the Elizabethan age in England. Wherever the baroque spirit manifested itself in stone, on canvas, or in words, Rome rose again. It did so not only by coming apparently to life again in the rhetorical tirades and debates of plays based on some episode or other from the history, often enough, of later imperial Rome: plays concerned with the fate of emperors or the tribulations of their often Christian victims.
