The Lessons of Nostalgia in Julius Caesar and Sejanus

This chapter re-examines the relationship between Julius Caesar and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and shows how Shakespeare and Jonson employ nostalgia to different political ends. In Julius Caesar, nostalgia’s initial persuasive force exemplifies how language becomes the source of and means to political power. Sejanus—in many ways a response to Caesar—formulates nostalgia as a strictly radical discourse which becomes side-lined and impotent in the play’s politics. Shakespeare and Jonson re-create Roman histories at a time when Tacitus’s impact on history-writing was steadily rising, and this chapter first considers his influence on late-Elizabethan concerns with historiography and the intentions and purposes of writing history. Both playwrights illustrate Tacitus’s dramatic appeal as they stage his lament for a degenerate present and a longing for the republican past alongside his idea of the individual’s role in shaping history. In Julius Caesar the republican past appears tantalizingly close, and the chapter shows how nostalgic rhetoric once again seeds political action. Discussing Justus Lipsius, this chapter then shows how in Sejanus, Neostoicism is the only just response to imperial power and nostalgic longing. In both plays, the language that articulates a perfect past becomes evidence of the present’s fallen nature.