It is very important to bear in mind that Shakespeare was writing against the backdrop of his time. This was written late in the reign of Elizabeth I, of the Tudor dynasty. The public was acutely aware of thirty years of bloody civil war during the Wars of the Roses. The Tudor dynasty had brought relative peace. So, a theme that would resonate in his day was the dangers of regicide and civil war and the importance of smooth transition of power. Remember, Elizabeth did not have an heir, which caused considerable anxiety.
The English were very fond of the story of Rome and identified with the Romans. The fall of the Republic did not in the 16th Century trouble them in that they had always been governed by a monarch and Parliament that in their eyes roughly corresponded with the Senate. That view later changed, of course.
Beg to differ. Shakespeare had a lifelong love for Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and had familiarity with the then-current translations of various classical works. Using Renaissance Italy or classical Rome, or pre-Roman Britain to frame stories gave him a needed alibi when it came time to make commentary on the country.
The Tudors slaughtered people wholesale, and changed the acceptable religion of the country four times in a generation.
I’m not complaining exactly, the turmoil and oppression by Tudor and Jacobean dynasties led to the colonization of America and eventually the English Civil War. Some of my ancestors bailed when the gubmint marched into their small town and strung the local pastor from his own steeple.
Shakespeare lived and worked in the Tudor surveillance state, and had cousins tortured and executed. The master of the revels had to approve (or rewrite) every script before it was ever performed. His history plays were little more than Tudor propaganda in their conclusion, whatever he may have put into the script.
The ending of Richard III has the dream sequence where Henry VII is being told that he’s all good and Richard III is being told he’s all bad. Only after James I took the throne did Shakespeare let his hair down a little bit, finally getting around to Henry VIII’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon.
Other than their modern embrace of the quasi-mythical Boudicca, and the koranimals squatting in Britain, the British seem to look back fondly at Roman rule; there was even a commissioned epic poem that, analogous to the Aeneid, attributed the founding of Britain to a fictional Brutus, I think from Troy. Not unlike our own framers, they developed a love for the architecture as well.
http://www.victorianweb.org/art/architecture/homes/house1.jpg
