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 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.

The 'genius' shakespeare has a unique position for brecht and continues to be one of his (few) life-long artistic companions. Of particular interest here is brecht's adaptation of shakespeare's coriolanus, including his translation, which shows remarkable poetic skills but also points to ways of overcoming the tragic impasse and traditonal tragedy's (unproductive) focus on the (disposable) individual by showing the transformational power of collectives.

In King Lear and Coriolanus Shakespeare shows how parents who shame their children motivate them to commit violence that ultimately consumes the parent and child. To call this a perversion of parental love is virtually an understatement. Lear shames Goneril and Regan by loving Cordelia more than he loves them – so they bring about the deaths of both Lear and Cordelia. And Gloucester shames Edmund, who has his father’s eyes gouged out – an atrocity committed by American murderers we have seen – since people feel shamed in the eyes of others. Coriolanus shows how a mother’s teaching her son to achieve honor through violence ultimately rebounds on her and the very community she meant him to protect.

No-one has yet quite agreed what to call it: livecast, live from, simulcast, alternative content, cinecast, cinemacast, streamed transmission, outside broadcast, digital broadcast cinema, ‘live’ theatre broadcast, captured live broadcast, event cinema, theatrofilm. But the phenomenon of cinema broadcasts, live, delayed and encore, is a new and striking area for the experience of Shakespeare theatre productions. Their various forms of transmission and consumption mark out crucial questions about the distribution and audiences for the event-object, whatever name we give it. The chapter looks at the techniques for filming live performance and the ways it makes meaning. It then examines examples from the National Theatre in London or from other theatres whose Shakespeare productions it distributes (under the label National Theatre Live), as well as Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

This chapter is a close reading of Julie Taymor’s 1999 Titus and Ralph Fiennes’s 2010 Coriolanus.Both films challenge the stock image of historical Rome in Taymor’s case by extensive allusion to other iconic films, costumes and settings; in Fiennes’s case by updating the film’s action to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.In these differing ways, both films insist on the omnipresence of violence. The chapter concludes that this apparent rejection of a stereotypical or immediately recognisable Roman setting is actually closer to the ambiguous sense of the classical seat of empire that Shakespeare’s first audiences may have harboured.Rome is less a physical place and more of an idea but it is an idea riddled with contradictions.Neither film attempts to erase these contradictions; indeed, their stress on anachrony causes both to recapitulate the uncertainties, regarding Rome, of the plays’ early audiences.

In this essay I consider how an early modern understanding of the passions might inform the practice and analysis of acting in the theatre today. Taking the idea of being ‘moved’ quite literally, I argue that early modern subjects were ‘moved’ when the humours moved through the body, and the body moved passionately about the world. ‘A woman moved is like a fountain troubled’, says Kate in her final, notorious speech of gendered conformity in The Taming of the Shrew, in which she describes men moving about in the world while women must stay, unmoved, at home. I argue that recent, inward, and static conceptions of the emotions tend to occlude the relationship between the emotional and the political in the theatre now. I suggest instead that rehearsal room consideration of early modern ideas about dynamic emotion/motion might recuperate the political agency and import of emotional life in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In making this argument, I move between analysis of a Shakespearean comedy and a tragedy (The Taming of the Shrew and Coriolanus), considering both plays in performance and making suggestions for rehearsal practices.

Opposing conceptions of specific emotions are often in circulation at the same moment in time. This is particularly true of a period of monumental upheaval, as was the case in the early modern era. This essay looks at the contradictory notions of pride that traversed the early modern age and the way Shakespeare explores various facets of this emotion in his late tragedy, Coriolanus. On the one hand, the classical ideal of the ‘magnanimous man’ became an enduring pillar of early modern aristocratic ideology, based as it was on the cult of honour. In Christian belief, on the other hand, pride was regarded as the most heinous of the seven deadly sins. Both strands of thought identified a sense of innate superiority and self-sufficiency as the bedrock of pride. In Coriolanus Shakespeare creates a protagonist who is regarded by others as the epitome of pride, and who sees himself as independent of all human bonds. What the play reveals, however, is that even an emotion that is thought to be largely self-determined is inextricably social. The ideal of autonomy on which pride is premised is revealed as a myth.

Shakespeare’s works continually interrogate shame’s capacity both to repress the individual by reinforcing conservative social norms and to engender an enriched understanding of the self and the world. This chapter engages with critical interventions on shame by Leo Bersani, Gail Kern Paster, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Dan Zahavi to examine its function in a wide range of Shakespearean texts, focusing in particular on Coriolanus (1608) and the anonymously-published A Lover’s Complaint (1609). For Coriolanus, shame sparks a moment of insight in which he accepts an externalised version of himself; it provides a phenomenological experience that runs counter to his usual sense of self and to broader Roman values. In contrast, the shame of the abandoned woman in A Lover's Complaint highlights the gap between early modern ethical discourses and her own sexual and emotional experiences. In both works, however, it is the movement outside of the self that follows shame which offers the most radical and illuminating reorientation of subjectivity; this shift in perspective – inspired by love, desire and sympathy – enables characters to experience an othering of the self that is expansive rather than narcissistic.