Chapter 18 - Plutarch and Shakespeare

Summary

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.