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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2022

Challenging authority or the rhetoric of dissent in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Coriolanus

Résumé

Turning from the History of England to some emblematic moments of Roman history in two of his Roman tragedies, Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Shakespeare chooses to anatomize the performative power of words in the theatrical representation of national politics under crisis. Relying on Plutarch’s vision of Roman history as translated by Sir Thomas North in the Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, published in 1579, Shakespeare draws heavily on the language of North’s translation to stage the mechanisms of dissent through the rhetorical strategies that his leading political figures, namely Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, apply in their formal interactions with their people. Both national leaders stand as emblematic figures of legitimate power facing public hostility and contest of their supremacy over the people. Following Ciceronian principles about the art of rhetoric applied to the exercise of political power, Shakespeare provides through the highly rhetorical nature of the staged speeches a literary model of the art of fashioning political power on a subversive mode. Thereby the playwright uses very subtly the specular nature of his antique stage of power to highlight the workings of power and dissent in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. In this paper I will adopt a comparative approach of both plays centered on the notion that the subversive nature of some of the main characters’ discourses lies in the performative quality of their speeches and more broadly on the intricate rhetorical strategies they master.

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hal-04516571 , version 1 (26-03-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04516571 , version 1

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Marie-Christine Munoz-Lévi. Challenging authority or the rhetoric of dissent in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. 2022. ⟨hal-04516571⟩

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