“Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy is a marvelous and masterful work. Cantor is a widely followed critic and the justifiably preeminent American interpreter of Shakespeare’s plays. His capacious intellect and intense intellectual curiosity are decidedly on display in this compelling argument that Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra comprise a trilogy meant to document the decline and fall of the Roman republic, both in the lives of the individual heroes, and in the life of the Roman city or polis. Under Cantor’s guidance, the reader is introduced to a new, more profound and compelling Shakespeare.”

Pamela K. Jensen, Kenyon College

“Cantor has written another wonderful book. His profound interpretations of Shakespeare speak to the decline of the ancient world and the rise of our modern one. His penetrating chapter on Nietzsche, a substantial contribution in its own right, places Shakespeare and Nietzsche in dialogue about the history of the West. And Cantor’s comparisons between Shakespeare and Plutarch are a delight! This book will be widely read and discussed.”—Mary Nichols, Baylor University

Mary Nichols, Baylor University

"In his first book, Shakespeare's Rome, [Cantor] treated the three plays 'Coriolanus,' 'Julius Caesar,' and 'Antony and Cleopatra' as a chronicle of Rome from city to empire. Now, in Shakespeare's Roman Trilogy, he advances a more ambitious thesis: These plays constitute a thematically unified whole, a trilogy dramatizing, in the terms of his subtitle, 'The Twilight of the Ancient World.' . . . Shakespeare is indeed a philosophical poet, and nowhere more so, as the present book demonstrates, than in his Roman trilogy."
 

Wall Street Journal