The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or Anachronism? A Retrospect

Summary

In 1680 Nahum Tate was quite positive about verisimilitude in Shakespeare: ‘I am sure he never touches on a Roman Story, but the Persons, the Passages, the Manners, the Circumstances, the Ceremonies, all are Roman’. This was a substantial (though not necessarily substantiated) claim, because Tate had just asserted that ‘Nature will not do [a poet’s] Business, he must have the Addition of Arts and Learning’: acquaintance with ‘the Customs and Constitutions of Nations’, and with much else, ‘the Histories of all Ages’, even ‘the meanest Mysteries and Trades’, ‘because ’tis uncertain [whither] his subject will lead him’. Had Ben Jonson been alive to read Tate’s opinion of Shakespeare’s portraits of the Roman world, he would doubtless have said something memorably contemptuous. His own scholarly pretensions to exact local and temporal verisimilitude in Sejanus and ‘well-laboured’ Catiline are a commonplace of literary history; everyone knows also that Jonson once described Shakespeare’s portrayal of Gaius Julius Caesar in the moments before his assassination as ‘ridiculous’. The Tate school of thought has had some notable adherents, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson among the early ones, but the opposed assertion, that Shakespeare’s Romans are Elizabethans in togas, has always been with us.