William Shakespeare's Ancient Rome

Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:42 Shakespeare's classical education 1:45 Shakespeare's sources 3:13 Anachronisms 4:26 The character of Caesar 5:38 The character of Brutus 7:46 Political messages 8:52 Timeless language

0:10 Julius Caesar was the first Shakespeare play that I read. It’s still one of my 0:15 favorites. Along with some of the most stirring speeches ever written, it presents what might be 0:22 the first attempt in English literature to really recreate the world of ancient Rome. 0:28 In today’s video, we’ll explore the historical accuracy of Shakespeare’s 0:34 best-known Roman play – and consider how the greatest English playwright used antiquity.

[Ovid's Metamorphoses was probably Shakespeare's favorite book]

BBC documentary. Michael Wood explores the life, works and influence of one of the world's greatest storytellers who died 2,000 years ago. When an Elizabethan literary critic said that the witty soul of Ovid lived on in 'honey tongued Shakespeare', they were just stating the obvious. Ovid, everyone knew, was simply the most clever, sexy and funny poet in the western tradition. His Metamorphoses, it has often been said, is the most influential secular book in European literature.

Using Ovid's own words, brought to life by one of Britain's leading actors, Simon Russell Beale, the film tells the story of the poet's fame, and his fateful falling out with the most powerful man in the world, the Roman emperor Augustus.

Following in Ovid's footsteps, Michael Wood travels from the poet's birthplace in the beautiful town of Sulmona, to the bright lights of the capital, Rome. Here we visit the Houses of Augustus and Livia, recently opened after 25 years of excavation and conservation. Inside the emperor's private rooms glow with the colour of their newly restored frescoes. Wood then follows Ovid into exile in Constanta in today's Romania, and on to the Danube delta, where dramatic footage shows the Danube and the Black Sea frozen over in winter just as Ovid described in his letters.

Throughout the film Ovid's own words reveal an engaging personality: a voice of startling modernity. 'He is funny, irreverent, focused on pleasure and obsessed with sex' says Prof Roy Gibson. But, says Greg Doran, he is also a poet of cruelty and violence, which especially fascinated Shakespeare. Ovid raises very modern questions about the fluidity of identity and gender, and the mutability of nature. He also explores the relationship between writers and power and the experience of exile, themes especially relevant in our time when, as Lisa Dwan observes, exile has become part of the human condition. But above all, says Michael Wood, Ovid is the Poet of Love, and 2,000 years after his death he is back in focus as one of the world's greatest poets: ironical, profound, and relevant.
Ovid - The Poet and the Emperor (BBC) | 59:00
Culture Vulture Rises | 7.5K subscribers | 15,973 views | September 26, 2023

Thanks for the link. Sent on to my Shakespeare expert academic friend.

>>”But Brutus is an honorable man!”

I do remember we sat on that line in high school. Wow, over half a century ago.

I’m also remembering a dear friend, now gone with the decades. She taught English at an inner city Aviation school in NYC. Loved teaching them Shakespeare and, from her, they learned to think. I’d visit as she’d grade their papers and it was disappointing how she was made to gloss over the mistakes as the years progressed. The class was in her hand and she was protected every time she went into the neighborhood. She loved her classes with the same intensity they loved her. Good teachers are great teachers no matter where they’re teaching.

I didn’t watch the video.

If one wants to study Shakespeare in depth, I’d recommend Issac Asimov’s guide to Shakespeare.

I have a copy, but in my old age I just reference the book on internet archive for free.

In the play Portia commits suicide by swallowing hot coals which Shakespeare may have gotten from earlier writers.

Asimov poses it may have been figurative and that she cut off ventilation to her bedroom and died from carbon monoxide poisoning.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Shakespeare was a playwright and a dramatist, not a historian. There is no evidence he ever went to Italy and he probably never left England ((not even to write “the Scottish play”), and he was more concerned with dramatic effect than historical accuracy. He was spinning yarns entirely to put butts in the bleachers. And no self-respecting capitalist would ever let the facts stand in the way of a good story.

Speaking of Shakespeare’s anachronisms (or inaccuracies), Caesar wasn’t murdered in the Roman Senate. It was closed for renovations and proceedings were temporarily being held in Curia of Pompey, part of the complex of Pompey’s Theater.

Shakespeare had a particular fondness for words starting with the letter “V” (he used 485 different “V” words in his plays) and that included names of places; Venus, Vienna, Venice, Venetia, Verona. And “fans” still get very attached to his words despite the complete lack of historicity.

The story of Romeo and Juliet was a complete fiction but today in modern Verona, at the end of a cul-de-sac alleyway, there is a balcony known as “Juliet’s Balcony” that was purpose-built in the early 20th Century to fleece British sophisticates making what then was called, “the grand tour” of classic Italy. And several times each day, a young woman steps out onto that balcony and delivers Juliet’s “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” to a gullible crowd charged €12 a head to enter.

Such is the obsession for the works of Shakespeare, particularly his romantic pieces.

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