Dreams, Sleep, and Shakespeare's Genres by Claude Fretz (review)

Abstract

audience influences the self by either accepting, rejecting, or offering alternative identities. When unable to control others’ perception—when threatened with an image of oneself that is not sovereign or divinity, but vanquished enemy or prize—Antony and Cleopatra respond with anger, threats (in their reactions to messengers), and ultimately suicide. Cleopatra’s behavior thus demonstrates the hypocrisy and hysteria of Roman Stoicism, the impossibility and selfdestructiveness of the Stoic retreat from social relations. Gray’s study is dense with theoretical references to classical, modern, and postmodern authors, as one might expect from a book in the series “Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy.” Gray demonstrates that Shakespeare adopted the ideas presented in Magna moralia (once attributed to Aristotle), which he argues is the anachronistic text Ulysses reads in Troilus and Cressida. In doing so, Shakespeare predicts many modern philosophers’ concepts of relational self-determination, including those of Hegel, Sartre, Ricoeur, Bubar, Bakhtin, Arendt, Mattha Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, and Shadi Bartsch. However, Gray argues, Shakespeare saw God as the final audience or “privileged observer” for all individuals, and the numerous biblical references throughout Antony and Cleopatra, as well as the comedic similarities of Julius Caesar’s titular character to representations in medieval mystery plays, renders all of the classical heroes aligned with the Antichrist or supreme antagonist (259). Shakespeare and the Fall of the Roman Republic thus reads Shakespeare as deeply embedded in a Christian culture that evaluates classical figures and sources through this lens. Gray thinks that Shakespeare offers a provocative and accurate compromise between modern and postmodern ideas of the self, which makes this text useful for those who explore the intersections of literature and history with theory and theology, both ancient and contemporary. He also points out that the Romans’ participation in an all-or-nothing dynamic, the belief that power is a zero-sum game, could elucidate many twenty-first century political divisions, although he leaves the enlargement of this argument to subsequent projects.