John Heminges and Henry Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow actors and the compilers of the first collection of his plays in the First Folio (1623), would have been surprised at critical reaction to their organisation of the volume. Gathering plays about England under the rubric of History and plays about Rome under the rubric of Tragedy, they could have intended no serious generic distinction. In the parlance of the time the terms overlapped and interpenetrated. Both histories and tragedies related stories of past ‘contentions’ as well as the lives and deaths of famous figures. The 1594 Quarto of 2 Henry VI featured the ‘Contention’ between the houses of York and Lancaster as well as the ‘tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester’; similarly, the Quartos of Richard II (1597) and Richard III (1597) both offered ‘Tragedy’ to their readers on the title-pages. Titus Andronicus appeared in the Stationers’ Register, the official record book of the London company of Stationers (booksellers and printers), as ‘a Noble Roman History’; the 1594 Quarto, however, advertised the play as The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus.

Romans laughed at a rich variety of comic entertainments, some surviving today only in fragments: scurrilous Fescennine verse, coarse, improvisational farce (fabula Atellana), mime (fabula planipedia or riciniata), drama featuring Italian characters in Italian settings (fabula togata). They also enjoyed the fabula palliata (a play dressed in a Greek cloak), in other words, a play set in Greece featuring Greek characters in Greek costumes. Deriving from Menander (fourth century bc) and other Greek writers, this kind of play also became known as New Comedy, in contradistinction to Old Comedy, the satirical, political, fantastic, obscene, and profound romps of the earlier Aristophanes (fifth century bc). Both Greek and Roman New Comedy featured stock characters like the old man (senex), young girl (virgo), and clever slave (servus callidus); the action generally involved forbidden love affairs, misunderstandings, and confusions of identity.

The works of two playwrights – Plautus and Terence – largely constitute the extant corpus of Roman comedy. Inventive and exuberant, Plautus (c. 205–184 bc) emphasizes musical elements and verbal jokes. His twentyone surviving plays include a mythological travesty (Amphitruo), deceptions (Pseudolus, Epidicus), confusions of identity (Menaechmi, Casina), a revels (Stichus), and a moral fable (Captivi). The six surviving plays of Terence (c. 160 bc) thoughtfully adapt conventions to explore human relations.

CULTURAL DRIFT AND THE LOST ANIMA

Last year my Latin class and I were reading Ovid and came upon Pyramus’ suicide: demisit in ilia ferrum (Met. 4.119): ‘he plunged the ferrum (iron, sword, knife) into his ilia’. Where, among the multiple dictionary possibilities for ilia, does Pyramus stab himself? ‘Entrails’, said one student cheerfully. (Golding had ‘guts’ by the way.) ‘Chest’ and ‘breast’ received solid support. I was a little uncomfortable; ilia actually are lower. But it was supposed to be a suicide and our conventions of self-stabbing support that location. The heart beneath has some sentimental resonance. And what about poetic licence, anyway? The pectoral group found themselves in the good company of the most brilliant English translator, Ted Hughes, and the most inept, that of Peter Quince and Nick Bottom: ‘With bloody, blameful blade – / He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast’ (MND, 5.1.145–6). No one, thankfully, wanted ‘stomach’, ‘abdomen’, or ‘diaphragm’, anatomically the more correct equivalents. Finally, pointing to a dictionary entry, Katelyn, a sophomore, ended the discussion: ‘It’s the groin! He’s a lover, isn’t he?’

Conspicuous in my title, the term 'source' is today highly problematic. Critics now understand 'source' variously and employ as well many different terms in its place. These terms, each one rich in its own embedded metaphors and critical implications, embody conflicting notions about what a source is and about how it functions. Our tacit acceptance of these conflicts has resulted in radical redefinition of sources and a revaluation of their relations to texts. To illustrate such changes, this essay will examine the critical history of Julius Caesar, a play that bears a close and complex relationship to a long-established specific source, North's Plutarch. The issues raised in this discussion should be pertinent, however, to less established sources, the tragedies of Seneca, let us say, and, of course, to other plays.

'Source', from the Old French 'sors', derives from 'sourdre', 'to rise or spring'. A source is a 'support'; 'the act of rising on the wing'; 'the fountain-head or origin of a river or stream'; 'the chief or prime cause of something of a non-material or abstract character'. A work of art then may rise from a source and leave it behind or it may flow from a source, existing in poised and dynamic tension, ever dependent on the source for its being. We often speak of tracing things to their sources, assuming then that there are connecting lines always present and discernible.

Like the historical city, Shakespeare's Rome rises and falls. In The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus Shakespeare depicts the city by relying heavily on stock myths and legends. Romans here, for the most part, are stereotypes, stiff figures of cardboard and paste, constructed from materials lying in the Elizabethan treasure chests of classical learning. Few have ever wept for Lucrece; fewer for Titus Andronicus. Both the narrative poem and the early play are exercise pieces: They give the artist a chance to compose Roman music, to try difficult themes, to practice his technique. Only style – artificial, overbearing, and rudimentarily conceived – holds them together.

Shakespeare's early experimentation results in two assured masterpieces, wherein imaginative vision fuses various traditions and soars to challenge and enthrall. Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's portrait of Rome divided, skillfully and movingly depicts the city that entangles itself with its strength. The playwright achieves this depiction by balancing audience sympathies and by creating a web of political and moral paradoxes. Julius Caesar is Shakespeare's Roman fugue – a contrapuntal composition in which the Caesar theme receives exposition and development by various voices. Each recurrence of the theme reveals new facets and evokes a slightly different response. Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's study of Rome and the world, is his symphony. The play astonishes with its large scope, its sonorous majesty, its variety of mood and emotion. The contrasting Roman and Egyptian movements come to harmony and glorious resolution with the deaths of the lovers.

Descending from the heights, Shakespeare's imaginative vision of Rome concludes in Coriolanus and Cymbeline.

Shakespeare's conception of ancient Rome has long been a focal point in the larger debate concerning his classical learning. This debate began in earnest with Jonson's notorious aphorism imputing to Shakespeare “small Latine, and lesse Greeke” (1623), but hints of it appear earlier. The first printed allusion to Shakespeare, Robert Greene's attack on the “vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers” (1592), expressed the indignation of a university man at the pretensions of a less-educated rival. And in The Return from Parnassus, Part 2 (performed ca. 1600, pub. 1606), William Kemp humorously praised Shakespeare for outdoing those who “smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina & luppiter” The debate, ably documented elsewhere, continued throughout the centuries and attracted luminaries to both sides. In 1664, for example, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, admired the verisimilitude of the Roman plays, where fancy, it seemed, almost outworked nature:

Others, including John Dennis and Richard Farmer, noted inaccuracies, collected anachronisms, and scoffed. The controversy goes on in our century. In 1952 a classicist, J. A. K. Thomson, reviewed the evidence and concluded solemnly that Shakespeare was “no scholar.”