Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire by Paul A. Cantor

Author:Paul A. Cantor [Cantor, Paul A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226468952
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

Antony and Cleopatra

Eventually . . . a day arrives when conditions become more fortunate and the tremendous tension decreases; perhaps there are no longer any enemies among one’s neighbors, and the means of life, even for the enjoyment of life, are superabundant. At one stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline are tom: it no longer seems necessary, a condition of existence. . . . At these turning points of history we behold beside one another, and often mutually involved and entangled, a splendid, manifold, junglelike growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the competition to grow, and a tremendous ruin and self-ruination, as the savage egoisms that have turned, almost exploded, against one another wrestle “for sun and light” and can no longer derive any limit, restraint, or consideration from their previous morality. It was this morality itself that dammed up such enormous strength and bent the bow in such a threatening manner; now it is “outlived.” The dangerous and uncanny point has been reached where the greater, more manifold, more comprehensive life transcends and lives beyond the old morality; the “individual” appears, obliged to give himself laws and to develop his own arts and wiles for self-preservation, self-enhancement, self-redemption. All sorts of new what-fors and wherewithals; no shared formulas any longer; misunderstanding allied with disrespect; decay, corruption, and the highest desires gruesomely entangled; . . . a calamitous simultaneity of spring and fall, full of new charms and veils.

—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 2621

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