“No Desire to Be the Elizabethan Virgil”

How do we tell the story of our nation? If our nation is founded on ideas and values that are good and true, where do we claim that these values came from? Where did we come from?

I just finished How the Classics Made Shakespeare, an astonishing book by Jonathan Bate, which raises these questions for me. The book is about all the different Greek and Roman authors who influenced Shakespeare. But what hit me hardest about this book was the way that Shakespeare used these ancient authors as they related to the national story that England was beginning to tell about itself. Shakespeare had the chance to be England’s national playwright, the one who created and enacted a set of myths about the founding and emerging of an English Empire. But from Bate’s perspective, Shakespeare turned down the offer. 

He details how the English of Shakespeare’s day were obsessed with ancient Rome. They devoured everything they could get their hands on by Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Horace, and others. But for Bate, the English were obsessed with the Romans because they were a young, scrappy and hungry country, hungry for legitimacy on the continent. As Bate says, “Shakespeare lived in a neo-Roman world… His own plays were part of a national project to invent a new cultural heritage on the model of ancient Rome, not least as a form of resistance to the Catholic authority of modern Rome.” (99) England had a lot to prove. And what did you do when you had a lot to prove? You reached back into the ancient world to prove your pedigree. And if you didn’t have the pedigree, you made it up. So the English made up this absurd legend that Brutaine (Britain) was named after a Roman named Brutus, who happened to be the grandson of Aeneas, and who sailed from Rome to Brutaine to start the dynasty of English kings, as a New Rome. Nifty!

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Virgil had pulled the exact same trick with the founding of Rome itself. Rome, another young, scrappy and hungry country, was in sorry need of a more illustrious pedigree. So Virgil made one up, writing a story-poem, a founding myth, the Aeneid, in which Rome is founded by Aeneas. Aeneas, who could say, “I was there!” at the Trojan War. The Trojan War, immortalized by Homer in his Iliad. By grafting the story of Rome onto Homer’s epic poems, the Romans could claim to be a part of the most noble heritage of Greek culture. There was only one problem: Virgil’s story was a lie, imperial propaganda. And now the English were doing the same thing, trying to construct a made-up classical heritage for their burgeoning empire. Historians, artists, and poets joined the project of Roman retrieval. As Spencer put it in the Faerie Queene, “noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold.” London was known as “Troia Nova,” New Troy. Bate: “A key dimension of the Elizabethan process of nation building was the theory of translatio imperii: the westward shift of imperial dominion from Troy to Greece to Rome to England.” (130)

In this environment there was pressure on Shakespare to join this project and become England’s national mythmaker, an English Virgil for the stage. But Shakespeare wasn’t having it. Throughout the book, Bate shows over and over again how in his plays, Shakespeare rejects the Virgil option of a noble founding lie and opts instead for a different Roman mode, the mode of Ovid.

Ovid was much more skeptical of the Roman imperial project. Unlike Virgil, who pontificated that Rome was built on virtue and piety and duty, Ovid was more of a sly realist. For him, Rome was driven by eros and the body’s baser desires masquerading as something more noble. (In this Ovid is perversely sympathetic to Augustine’s critique of Rome in City of God. Augustine mocks Virgil’s mythmaking, and like Ovid, he also sees Rome as built on desire, though for Augustine it is disordered love.)

Bate spells it out: “Shakespeare was almost always Ovidian [and] strikingly anti-Virgilian.” Like Ovid, Shakespeare saw through the facade of English mythmaking, that underneath all the high-minded talk of England as a New Rome built on virtus and pietas, there was nothing but a teeming mass of men and women jostling with a conflicting mess of desires. And, more often than not, these desires overwhelmed and overruled their rational or religious or political goals. 

As Bate says, “Shakespeare had no desire to be the Elizabethan Virgil.” (145) In fact he seemed to take the opposite stand, with “a counter-Virgilian, or at least an antiheroic, imagination.” (134)

There is an ethical payoff to this. By resisting the Virgilian mode, which saw war as an expression of virtus and a necessary component of nation-building, Shakespeare “draws the audience away from the image of the valiant hero and towards consciousness of the human cost of war.” Bate shows this most convincingly in Shakespeare’s rewriting of Thomas Nashe’s play Henry VI. Where Nashe’s play was full of nationalist rah-rah, meant to stir the audience into a patriotic frenzy, Shakespeare writes in a new scene where a father holds his dying son on the battlefield, crying, “My spirit can no longer bear these harms.” There is something perversely wrong about war, where sons die before their fathers, and no amount of English mythmaking can justify this horror. 

The irony, of course, is that Shakespeare did become England’s national playwright, and, if you can set aside Spencer and Milton, he became England’s Homer and Virgil, too. But the Ovidian seeds of the empire’s own subversion were sown in Shakespeare’s project, too, seeds which would continue to sprout and raise pesky questions. 

Shakespeare’s embrace of the Ovidian mode, with its insistence on the diversity and cacophony of human desire, is still with us, and it marks not only the story that England tells about itself, but the story that America tells about itself, too. It’s worth asking in what ways we are still negotiating between the “Virgilian” and “Ovidian” versions of our own story, the story of America.