What/which are the Roman Plays?

John Hemminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors who are usually assumed to have created the First Folio, organized the volume into three types of plays, as reflected in the title, William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. But they had no notion they wished to make visible that there was a particular grouping of plays set in and exploring Rome. Their concept of history was English history, arranged chronologically in the order of the kings’ reigns, not British history like King Lear or Scottish history like Macbeth. The Roman plays were therefore tragedies, again like Lear and Macbeth.

But at least by the end of the 19th century, the Roman histories were being given a kind of parity with their English counterparts. In 1883, for instance, Charles Wordsworth edited three volumes of Shakespeare’s Historical Plays, Roman and English, including the Roman plays because they ‘are certainly no less Historical than the English’ (vol. 1, p.[ix]). By 1910, M.W. MacCallum – or to give him his magnificent full name Sir Mungo William MacCallum – could publish his study of Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Background, extracts from which are in Coriolanus: The Critical Tradition (ed. David George, 2nd ed., 2022) and in Antony and Cleopatra: The Critical Tradition (ed. Marga Munkelt, 2024), both of which are in Drama Online, volumes that offer a rich trove of criticism across more than three centuries.

For Wordsworth and MacCallum, however, there were only three Roman plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Titus Andronicus did not figure in their editions and studies, nor was it given much attention elsewhere, a play ignored, rejected and, when noticed, usually despised. It is not only its extreme violence nor its being a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Peele nor its being early in Shakespeare’s career that mark it out as different. It is also, as the Arden 4 editors of the play, Curtis Perry and Ayanna Thompson, put it,

[u]nlike Shakespeare’s later Roman plays, which take up well-known incidents from actual Roman history, and use the scaffolding provided by Plutarch’s Lives to help render characters and places semi-realistic, Titus Andronicus tells a story that appears to be entirely made up. (p.5)

There are few Shakespeare plays that lack a source for their basic narrative. For his later explorations of Rome, Shakespeare relied heavily on Sir Thomas North’s translation of Amyot’s French translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, Compared (1579) often clearly writing with a copy of North open on his table.

Whatever makes Titus different does not make it less of a Roman play, a narrative about Rome at a particular moment of its history, not a precise moment like that of Julius Caesar, for, of course, we know not only the day and month of Caesar’s assassination, the Ides of March, March 15th, but also its year, 44 BCE. There is a similar exactness about the historical trajectory of Antony and Cleopatra with, say, the date of the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BCE. And while we now doubt whether Caius Martius Coriolanus ever existed, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries Plutarch’s writing his life proved that he had lived.

How, then, have these plays been performed and how might they be played now? They are not documentaries, any more than Shakespeare’s English histories are. Instead they open up fascinating histories of response, whether by theatre-makers or theatre audiences, making new meanings at each moment of production.

Performing the Roman Plays

Julius Caesar

The historical accuracy and indeed finding evidence of Shakespeare’s historical inaccuracies were once vital scholarly concerns. So too was the tracking down of his sources. But increasingly, and especially in the exploration of the plays in performance, historicity gave way to a fiercely political concern with the ways Shakespeare traced the rise and fall of forms of the Roman state and, even more emphatically, the ways his accounts could be used to speak of our politics, our states, our placings of individuals in relation to power in our nations.

Take, for instance, two of the productions which Andrew James Hartley focuses on in his introduction to Julius Caesar in the Arden Fourth series. The first is the New York Public Theater’s in 2017 which gave Caesar a red tie and had him ‘familiarly coiffed’, as well as accompanying him with a ‘blond, Slavic wife’ (Hartley, p.1). The result was death threats to Shakespeare companies across the US, none of which had anything to do with the production. Nor did those who believed the production was advocating the assassination of President Trump grasp that the result of the conspirators’ action was to end the very system of state, the Republic, which they were acting to protect.

The second, which Hartley rightly describes as being ‘probably the most important single production of the play since 1599’ was directed by Orson Welles in 1937. ‘Rather than seeking grandeur and dignity in the past (Roman or Elizabethan), Welles sought contemporaneity, and found it in the global rise of Fascism’ (p.84). With lighting effects that echoed the Nuremburg rallies, the uniforms took on a menacing tone, especially in the terrifying mob murder of Cinna the poet.

Neither production is available in more than stills and description. But Drama Online provides film of two recent productions that speak powerfully of the play as a contemporary document. Nicholas Hytner’s at the Bridge in 2018, available to watch in the National Theatre Collection, showed a scholarly Brutus (Ben Whishaw), most at ease among mountains of books in his study, unfitted for the brutal political world he wanted to engage with. Most striking is the audience, promenading with the action around them, manipulated by cast members but also by Mark Antony. They are, as it were, extensions of the play’s crowds.

At the Donmar Warehouse in 2012 Phyllida Lloyd directed Julius Caesar with an all-female cast and a concept of the play being performed by incarcerated women. Each actor had to create both the prisoner and the character. For Lloyd, speaking in her intro to the play on Drama Online,

Julius Caesar's Rome really did feel like a prison to the conspirators because Caesar had sort of cut off their freedom of movement, freedom of speech. And so it seemed like a good kind of parallel universe.

Harriet Walter, playing Brutus, spoke of the regimented world of prison life and that many female prisoners’ experience of violence, made them ‘much closer to the experience of Brutus within Rome, for instance, than I am. So that lent me another stepping stone, another bridge towards playing a character who might be prepared to fight violence with violence.’ Elizabeth Schafer and David Bullen’s book on Phyllida Lloyd in the series Shakespeare in the Theatre was published in May and has exciting analysis of this production and the other two plays in the Donmar trilogy.

And Drama Online also provides powerful resources to explore the play in performances in US and UK prisons, in Amy Scott-Douglass’s Shakespeare Inside (2007), in ‘Act 2’ on Sammie Byron as Brutus and ‘Act 4’ on the Shakespeare Behind Bars Company’s performance at a Correctional Institute for Women, and in Rowan Mackenzie’s chapter on the Gallowfield Players’ production in a British prison in Global Shakespeare and Social Injustice, edited by Chris Thurman and Sandra Young (2023, pp. 166–84).

Antony and Cleopatra

It is no surprise that Julius Caesar has the richest recent performance history of the Roman plays. With Antony and Cleopatra the problem has always been finding two middle-aged actors right for the roles and able to generate chemistry between them. Too often one star outshines the other. But the play also offers far better female roles than Caesar: Portia and Calpurnia are simply no match for Cleopatra, Iras and Charmian, though they are the equals of Octavia. More recently, the role of Cleopatra has been a site for the rethinking of race in the play, in Shakespeare’s time and in our casting practices. When in 1.1 Philo speaks of Antony’s eyes that ‘now turn / The office and devotion of their views / Upon a tawny front’ (4–6), that adjective, ‘tawny’, used not to be heard as raced – thankfully, Cleopatra was never a role for a white actor in blackface, just as Lysander’s line to Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘Out, tawny Tartar, out!’ (3.2.263), was not to require an actor of colour in the role, though the insult was certainly raced. But two of the productions on Drama Online made strong decisions in the casting of Cleopatra: Sophie Okonedo opposite Ralph Fiennes in Simon Godwin’s Antony and Cleopatra for the National Theatre in 2018 and Josette Simon opposite Antony Byrne in Iqbal Khan’s Antony and Cleopatra for the RSC in 2017. The play, long regarded rather narrowly as a narrative of love and empire, now stands as a crucial part of our rediscovery of early modern race theory and an equally crucial part of our understanding of race in our own cultures.

Titus Andronicus

It is no surprise, then, but instead an exhilarating feature of its contemporaneity that the introduction to the Arden 4 Titus should focus so strongly on Aaron, often defined in speech-headings and stage directions in the quarto printing as ‘AARON the Moor’ (1.1.69.4). The stage-history of Titus in Shakespeare’s version rather than the adaptation by Edward Ravenscroft (first published in 1687) shows actors making Aaron the star role, particularly the Black American actor Ira Aldridge in the mid-19th century.

When Peter Brook directed Titus at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955, it seems to have been the first-ever performance of the play in the town’s long history of Shakespeare production. With Laurence Olivier as Titus, Vivien Leigh as Lavinia and Antony Quayle in blackface as Aaron (see the photo of him on p.80 of the new edition), it was a major production. Leigh’s entrance as the raped and mutilated Lavinia, with red cloth at the ends of her long sleeves and in her mouth but not a drop of stage-blood, caused audience members to faint and necessitated paramedics being stationed in the auditorium every night. Julie Taymor’s brilliant 1999 film, starring Antony Hopkins as Titus and Harry Lennix, Jr., as Aaron, was an extraordinarily bold choice for her first film, the outcome of her 1994 stage production for Theatre for a New Audience in New York. From first to last, Taymor confronts and even relishes the play’s murders, rape, torture and seemingly endless violence. For Titus is determinedly transgressive as a theatre piece, as Ralph Alan Cohen explores in his chapter in Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, ed. Farah Karim-Cooper (2019).

Coriolanus

Titus’s brutal depiction of Rome as an empire on the verge of collapse stands at the opposite end both of Roman history and of Shakespeare’s career from Coriolanus, his last tragedy. This is early Rome, a republic ruled by elected consuls, still at war with its neighbours, the Volsces, whose capital, Antium, is only 35 miles from Rome. There is no Roman empire here, only a city, somewhere that is, in a sense, not yet Rome. No wonder John Osborne cleverly titled his 1973 adaptation (which has still never been produced) A Place Calling Itself Rome.

If we inevitably tend to think of Shakespeare plays in terms of their eponymous hero, then Coriolanus may be an exception, for in many ways the principal character is/are the people of Rome, those ‘mutinous Citizens’ who enter at its opening. What does it mean to be a citizen of this Rome, a member of a class of people so despised by Caius Martius? Productions that can bring on many citizens – over 50 in Tim Supple’s Chichester Festival Theatre production in 1992 – can make a huge impact, defining the rest of the play. Robert Ormsby’s account of the play’s performance history (in Coriolanus: A Critical Reader, ed. Liam E. Semler [2021], pp.45–70) shows how the central conflict between a patrician who loathes the people and the people themselves – as well as the latter’s manipulation by their tribunes – is explored across the performance tradition and of adaptation, between Nahum Tate’s The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth (1682) and John Dennis’s The Invader of His Country (1720). Even more than Julius Caesar, Coriolanus is a relentlessly political play, posing questions that productions will answer differently.

In 1972 the Royal Shakespeare Company performed all four plays grouped as ‘The Romans’, directed by Trevor Nunn with Buzz Goodbody and Euan Smith. Do the plays make up a coherent group? Do they share more than their historical subject-matter? The rich performance histories and the wide range of materials on Drama Online will help you decide.

Image: Julius Caesar, Donmar Warehouse, 2012 (Photo by Helen Maybanks).