The Sublime and the Rotten: Imperium and Empire in Shakespeare

Shakespeare refers to the Roman world not only in the classical plays, but also by opening visual perspectives on Roman imagery, with symbols, metaphors, visions, pictures, intertextual cross-references, and mise-en-abyme of historical episodes, with the effect of intensifying their symbolic density, and sublimity. His view of the Roman Empire implies the representation of the extremes or limits in the analysis of power, along with the strong tensions they create: on the one hand, moral greatness, justice and struggle for freedom, and, on the other, arbitrary power, violence and moral corruption, and vanity. As I will try to show in this paper, Shakespeare often uses the rhetorical forms of the sublime in order to emphasize this tension, providing a powerful tragic effect which has a strong visual impact as well; at the same time, the language and the forms of the sublime proves to be extremely effective in the solution of these tensions and in highlighting alternative forms of government, as shown in the romances (especially in "Cymbeline" and "The Tempest").