SOURCE: "A Roman Thought: Renaissance Attitudes to History Exemplified in Shakespeare and Jonson," in An English Miscellany Presented to W. S. Machie, edited by Brian S. Lee, Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1977, pp. 93-118.

In the essay below, Hunter provides a detailed account of the Tudor conception of Roman history. The critic additionally shows how Shakespeare's portrayal of political events during the Republic and Empire is informed by values that differ from those of Ben Jonson in such plays as Sejanus and Catiline.

This paper will set out to discover what attitudes Tudor historians, translators of Roman history and some Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, held to the Roman past. One might suppose that these different groups had distinct aims, in that the latter were interested in Roman history mainly as a source of local colour or background to theatrical adventures where the former were in search of the...