Chapter Two studies how Rome figures in shifting conceptions of the problem of the self. The chapter’semphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers and texts, ranging from Edmund Spenser and John Donne to Sir Thomas Wilson and John Milton. English perspectives on Rome, however, were mediated to a significant extent by continental writers such as Petrarch, Joachim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Writers trained within (and in Petrarch’s case, actively forging) the traditions of humanist inquiry celebrated their commitment to returning ad fontes. In practice, however, their engagements with a ‘text’ as complex and ramified as Rome risked leaving them endlessly navigating tributary brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers rather than reposing comfortably at the source. The chapter brings together scenes of schooling, staring, and travel in order to study tensions between understandings of the self as being an immured condition of metaphysical finitude, on the one hand, and as being formed via the absorption of capabilities that arrive from the outside, on the other.

One of the great Reformation debates during Shakespeare’s lifetime focused on the nature of “repentance” as represented in the Bible. The Biblical concept embraced the idea of a turn away from error and a return to righteousness (mostly as interpreted in later translations of the Hebrew Testament) and the idea of an interior change of mind or revision of one’s attitude toward patterns of behavior (mostly in the Christian Testament likewise as interpreted in later translations). Shakespeare dramatized these ideas in histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances throughout his career. This essay focuses on the dynamics of repentance in King Lear, where turning away and changes of mind engage with competing – but also sometimes complementing and mutually reinforcing – claims of ancient pagan Stoicism and Epicureanism in regard to fate, destiny, free will, and random change.