Shakespeare’s suppliants: the ‘rotten custom’ of ancient asylum seeking in Coriolanus

Looking back to the early modern period from the current immigration crisis, this article reads Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus as a tragedy of displacement and asylum seeking. It argues that just like theatrical productions today, Shakespeare might have harked back to ancient Greek tragedy as a cultural resource for coming to terms with the challenges of immigration. It traces the possible migrations between the ritual of asylum seeking that was reflected in a number of Greek tragedies including Aeschylus’s Hiketides, the earliest surviving play about refugees from the fifth century BC, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. In this respect, this article is part of the current critical re-evaluation of the relations between Shakespeare’s work and ancient Greek tragedy. It places Coriolanus into the intertextual and intermedial hiketeia rhizome, in which one transmission line from Greek tragedy via Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Amyot, and North to Shakespeare can be corroborated by evidence, while other lines are more uncertain. Asking whether hiketeia, the ancient verbal and gestural repertoire of a stranger pleading for protection and integration into the polis, is only present as ‘rotten custom’ in Shakespeare’s tragedy, as a trace of cultural history without any considerable force in the new context, the article explores the paradoxical negotiation of displacement in Coriolanus, where both the exiled and the exiler become suppliants. It proposes that Shakespeare’s transformative reactivation of hiketeia as a theatrically, affectively, and politically potent form created an opportunity to negotiate the immigration crisis in Jacobean England.

Cinematizing the epic gaze: Julius Caesar and Pompey in Lucan and in the HBO/BBC television series Rome1

In this article I argue that a gaze-oriented analysis of the representations of the protagonists Caesar and Pompey in Lucan’s epic The Civil War (written 62–65 ce) and in the recent television series Rome (broadcast by HBO, BBC Two and Rai 2 between 2005 and 2007) opens new opportunities both for interpreting Lucan’s text and for comprehending its reception in the television series. Lucan deliberately employs intensive vocabulary and narrative of vision and visuality when his protagonists appear. In Lucan, Caesar and Pompey are represented, zoomed in upon, and put into action in a cinematic way. The manner in which they see and are seen is crucial for their distinctiveness and determine their function in epic. In the television series, these patterns are taken over and reused within the new technical medium.