The United States and the Portuguese Atlantic

Due to treaties between the British and Portuguese empires, Portugal and its Atlantic islands had served as some of the most important trade destinations of British Americans prior to the American Revolution. After US independence, however, Portugal restricted North American access to Portuguese markets. As a result, North Americans anticipated a day when they could trade with independent, republican Brazilians. For their part, however, Brazilians followed a different trajectory toward independence. The Portuguese monarchy liberalized trade in the 1790s to avoid uncomfortable associations of free trade and republican revolution. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Portuguese court relocated from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro to save the empire, opening Brazil to foreign commerce in the process. As a result of such reforms, Brazilians rarely equated republicanism with free trade. After the court returned to Lisbon in 1821 and Brazilians declared independence in 1822, Brazil adopted a monarchy rather than a republic. Brazil disrupted North Americans’ tidy narrative of the Americas as a hemisphere of republics contrasted with European monarchies.

Livy’s Lucretia in English Poetry and Prose

Chapter 4 compares Painter’s re-politicizing of the Lucretia legend with Shakespeare’s adaptation of the same narrative in Lucrece. By returning to Livy, this chapter argues, Painter placed a renewed emphasis on the republican hero, Lucius Junius Brutus, whose presence in the narrative had been all but forgotten by the vernacular tradition. While Lucretia’s father and husband are dumbstruck by Lucretia’s suicide, it is Brutus who seizes the opportunity for action and takes their oath to avenge her death. Alerted to the dramatic force of Brutus’s intervention by Painter’s translation, Shakespeare harnessed Livy’s eloquent revolutionary not only in Lucrece, but also in Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Titus Andronicus. The significance of Brutus and his republican revolution to Shakespeare is thus traced across his plays and poetry, revealing Shakespeare’s consistent interest in this very specific politically charged moment in Roman history.