"Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare's Roman plays--Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra--in his landmark Shakespeare's Rome. With Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an integrated trilogy that portrays the tragedy not simply of their protagonists but of an entire political community. Cantor analyzes the way Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the emergence of the Roman Empire. The transformation of the ancient city into a cosmopolitan empire marks the end of the era of civic virtue in antiquity, but it also opens up new spiritual possibilities that Shakespeare correlates with the rise of Christianity and thus the first stirrings of the medieval and the modern worlds. More broadly, Cantor places Shakespeare's plays in a long tradition of philosophical speculation about Rome, with special emphasis on Machiavelli and Nietzsche, two thinkers who provide important clues on how to read Shakespeare's works. In a pathbreaking chapter, he undertakes the first systematic comparison of Shakespeare and Nietzsche on Rome, exploring their central point of contention: Did Christianity corrupt the Roman Empire or was the corruption of the Empire the precondition of the rise of Christianity? Bringing Shakespeare into dialogue with other major thinkers about Rome, Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy reveals the true profundity of the Roman plays."--

"William Shakespeare is inextricably linked with the law. Legal documents make up most of the records we have of his life; trials, lawsuits, and legal terms permeate his plays. Gathering an extraordinary team of literary and legal scholars, philosophers, and even sitting judges, Shakespeare and the Law demonstrates that Shakespeare's thinking about legal concepts and legal practice points to a deep and sometimes vexed engagement with the law's technical workings, its underlying premises, and its social effects. Shakespeare and the Law opens with three essays that provide useful frameworks for approaching the topic, offering perspectives on law and literature that emphasize both the continuities and the contrasts between the two fields. In its second section, the book considers Shakespeare's awareness of common-law thinking and practice through examinations of Measure for Measure and Othello. Building and expanding on this question, the third part inquires into Shakespeare's general attitudes toward legal systems. A judge and former solicitor general rule on Shylock's demand for enforcement of his odd contract; and two essays by literary scholars take contrasting views on whether Shakespeare could imagine a functioning legal system. The fourth section looks at how law enters into conversation with issues of politics and community, both in the plays and in our own world. The volume concludes with a freewheeling colloquy among Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Judge Richard A. Posner, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier that covers everything from the ghost in Hamlet to the nature of judicial discretion"--Jacket.

This book explores how recollections and traces of the reign of Richard III survived a century and more to influence the world and work of William Shakespeare. In Richard III, Shakespeare depicts an era that had only recently passed beyond the horizon of living memory. The years between Shakespeare's birth in 1564 and the composition of the play in the early 1590s would have seen the deaths of the last witnesses to Richard's reign. Yet even after the extinction of memory, traces of the Yorkist era abounded in Elizabethan England - traces in the forms of material artefacts and buildings, popular traditions, textual records, and administrative and religious institutions and practices. Other traces had notoriously disappeared, not least the bodies of the princes reputedly murdered in the Tower, and the King's own body, which remained lost until its apparent rediscovery in the summer of 2012. Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III charts the often complex careers of these pieces of the past over the course of a century framed on one side by the historical reign of Richard III (1483-85) and on the other by Shakespeare's play. Drawing on recent work in fields including archaeology, memory studies, and material biography, this book offers a fresh approach to the cultural history of the Tudor era, as well as a fundamentally new interpretation of the wellsprings and preoccupations of Richard III. The final emphasis is not only on what Shakespeare does with the traces of Richard's reign but also on what those traces do through Shakespeare - the play, in spite of its own pessimistic assumptions about history, has become the medium whereby certain fragments and remains of a long-lost world live on into the present day.