The vision of the Republic that emerges from Shakespeare’s plays is a tragic one: fought over and lost in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra; perhaps, in Coriolanus, just too hard to live with. At the end of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, he left all this behind, and he returned to a fanciful, allusive use of Plutarch – the Greek Lives, rather than the Roman. We find Plutarchan names cut loose from their histories: Pericles, Prince of Tyre (in the sources the character was called “Apollonius”); Cleomenes and Dion, courtiers in The Winter’s Tale. In the last play of all, the collaboratively written Two Noble Kinsmen, Duke Theseus returns, together with the Cretan labyrinth: the play suddenly, decisively echoes North’s wording from the Theseus. Plutarch has ceased to be a deep “source”; he is now, again, a fund to dip into, a resource; perhaps, by this time, an old friend.

Chapter 3 treats the staging of tiny props in both the Globe and Blackfriars theaters. In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Antony and Cleopatra as well as Massinger’s The Picture, minuscule objects are deployed as metonymic evidence purporting to offer privileged, indubitable knowledge about a woman’s inscrutable body. The chapter demonstrates that the objects’ epistemological limitations, as detailed in the playtexts, became a phenomenological impasse in the playhouse. The very conditions of the props’ theatrical display in the large outdoor amphitheater and the small indoor hall would have variously exacerbated their narrative failures, undermining spectators’ attempts to see the objects clearly. At an historical moment when new empiricist methodologies promised to mitigate uncertainty, if not eradicate it entirely, the theater involved spectators in the failures of forensic investigation only to posit itself as a site for the capacious fulsomeness of spectacular display. The chapter ultimately argues that the very ephemerality of theatrical spectacle becomes, in all three plays, the alternative to the permanence of partial knowledge.

Chapter 9 discusses the use of Plutarch in drama understood as a mode of political reflection. I provide a brief analysis of the political implications of Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) famous use of Plutarch in a series of plays devoted to key figures of the classical era. I explore how Shakespeare’s depiction of public life shifted between his first Roman play Titus Andronicus, deemed to have been written before his close study of North’s translations of Plutarch, and his latter plays focused on key Greek and Roman historical figures (Timon of Athens, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra) for which his use of North is heavily documented and discussed. I then explore political themes and argument stemming from Plutarch and as relayed through Pierre Corneille’s (1606–1684) Pompée and Jean Racine’s (1639–1699) Mithridate.

Chapter 4 on Antony and Cleopatra again investigates the dynamics of power, but this time in a dialectic with erotic pleasure as well as with nature. The play’s paradoxically triumphant suicides at the end contain strong utopian resonances affirmative of eros and its links with death and the aesthetic. This play represents the turning point in the development this book is charting, as Shakespeare’s works take on new forms and themes that emphasize the utopian overcoming power in plays that are tragicomic and synthetic of his career. The chapter also analyzes Egypt as containing, along with its political practices, a Shakespearean green world quality, linking the play to earlier green world comedies. Egypt is especially an erotic, feminized, and feminist utopian space housing the play’s counter-political values. Cleopatra emerges as both a political and a utopian character and one who becomes at the very end the play’s dominant figure. Her partner Antony, of course, is essential to the play as well and eventually develops his own utopian qualities after seeming at first a love-sick buffoon, then an instrumental, ruthless politician. The play is formally a tragedy but has a strong tragicomic feeling as well.

Antony and Cleopatra dramatizes the fact that there is room only for war, not love, in an extreme shame culture, such as the Roman Empire. Their suicides were motivated partly to avoid being shamed in Octavian’s “triumph” in Rome, but more importantly because it was only by dying together, and in response to each other, that they could avoid being separated from each other. Enobarbus illustrates the fact that guilt feelings also motivate suicide, so guilt is no solution to the problem of violence. Ironically, the main losers in this tragedy may have been the putative victor and his associates, who were incapable of love, and hence life, on the scale and intensity that Antony and Cleopatra achieved with each other.

This essay argues that Antony and Cleopatra questions both a binary vision of racialized sexuality and the colonial and imperial projects that such a binary legitimizes. Along with the seemingly whitest of men, Caesar, and the darkest of women, Cleopatra, this play includes a range of racialized sexual types. These include the virago Fulvia, the chaste wife Octavia, the eunuch Mardian, and the spectral figure of the “boy” catamite whom Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesar all fear becoming. These racialized sexual types converge in surprising ways in Antony and Cleopatra, and this convergence undermines any clear opposition between Roman virtus and its seductive and corrupting others. It also illuminates the contradictions and fissures within Roman ideals of self-mastery and self-determination that continue to shape modern ideals of respectability and responsibility. Antony and Cleopatra reveals empire to be a perverse enterprise indeed.

This essay begins from the premise that we can best locate Shakespeare’s historical relationship to racist and anti-racist projects not in speculation about authorial intention but in analysis of performances of his plays. I cover a selection of performances of Othello, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra to argue that whatever progressive potential Shakespeare’s plays have arises at the nexus where stage tradition, audience expectation, local racial politics, directorial concept, and performers' choices coincide. There is nothing in the text of the plays – or even in newer casting traditions – that can guarantee that a performance will aid in the redistribution of the property, protection, and pleasure that have accrued to those who claim whiteness. There is, however, the potential that calculated violation of law or custom in performance can make Shakespeare do such redistributive work.

The chapter seeks to demonstrate that Shakespeare had two rather different – though not completely unrelated – conceptions of happiness. One is the Aristotelian eudaimonistic conception, which Shakespeare understood well and to which (as with everything he touched) he gave memorable expression. He understood its relation to virtue, to ‘proper pride’, and to social status. The other conception of happiness is more distinctive, and is a conception for which, as far as I know, there is not a standard designation. It might be called (usefully, if anachronistically) the Blakean or Nietzschean conception. Yeats called it the property of being ‘self-delighting’. Eudaimonia includes this property, but in itself this property has nothing to do with any conception of moral virtue, and can – though it need not – stand in sharp contrast with such. It may, on the other hand, have some relation to Machiavellian virtù. Pleasure in performing the self is part of it. It is as strongly manifested in some outright villains as it is in some admirable characters, and it is manifested in some characters who are hard to locate on such a scale.

This chapter is concerned with Sulpicia’s female-authored elegies, Mary Sidney’s translations of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death, and of Robert Garnier’s Antonie, both texts which make prominent use of a female voice of desire, and Mary Wroth’s first sonnet from her Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. The argument here is not so much that Sulpicia is a model for Sidney and Wroth as an exploration, in each period, of what happens when a female author/narrator inserts herself into a discourse which is primarily gendered masculine. It analyses how previous instances of ventriloquised female voices in male authored elegy and Renaissance love poetry open up a space into which it is possible for a female author to insert herself. Of special interest is the question of what happens when the female beloved speaks up, speaks back, speaks for herself.