"This volume is the second in the Hackett series of editions of Shakespeare's Roman plays that provide extensive historical annotations and explanations. Other editions of the plays minimize or tacitly deny Shakespeare's interest in or understanding of ancient Rome. Shakespeare, in their view, borrowed materials--plots, characters, and subject matters--from ancient sources, particularly from Plutarch's Lives, but understood the source material in the light of the concerns and values of Elizabethan-Jacobean England. Although ...
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"This volume is the second in the Hackett series of editions of Shakespeare's Roman plays that provide extensive historical annotations and explanations. Other editions of the plays minimize or tacitly deny Shakespeare's interest in or understanding of ancient Rome. Shakespeare, in their view, borrowed materials--plots, characters, and subject matters--from ancient sources, particularly from Plutarch's Lives, but understood the source material in the light of the concerns and values of Elizabethan-Jacobean England. Although nominally about Rome, the plays reflect not Rome or the Roman world, but the moral attitudes, cultural values, social circumstances, intellectual environment, and political conditions of Shakespeare's own world. According to these editions, they are, in effect, Renaissance plays, not Roman, plays"--
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