Shakespeare and the Constant Romans

Shakespeare's Romans are intensely concerned with "constancy." Geoffrey Miles traces the Stoic origins of this Roman principle of being "always the same" and explores the varying forms it takes in writers such as Cicero, Seneca, and Montaigne. Building on this genealogy of constancy, Miles reads Shakespeare's Roman plays as reworkings of three figures found in Plutarch: the constant Brutus, the inconstant Antony, and the obstinate Coriolanus. The tragedies of these characters act out the attractions, flaws, and self-contradictions of constancy, and the tragicomic failure of the Roman hope that"were man/ But constant, he were perfect."

Geoffrey Miles is Lecturer in English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.