在那些意大利人和外国人的眼中，罗马相当于它的废墟，一具被肢解的尸体。他们在文艺复兴之前或文艺复兴时期的漫长岁月里访问过罗马。在“复兴”过去的人文主义努力中，考古学探索和创造性重建的双重运动让“废墟”在莎士比亚的《罗马》中被视为优先于“神话”。他们被赋予启发性模型的角色，并在莎士比亚的戏剧历史观和现代性谈判中发现了他们所有的认知关联。
这是同类书中第一本从考古学角度论述莎士比亚与罗马权威神话之间关系的书，以时间顺序颠倒为出发点，即将“永恒”之城视为一个毁灭性的场景，以及这样一个分层的“沉默”之城，《绝世预言》中的场景为莎士比亚的罗马作品提供了一种古解剖学的方法。
Shakespeare’s Ruins and Myth of Rome (Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies)
Rome was tantamount to its ruins, a dismembered body, to the eyes of those – Italians and foreigners – who visited the city in the years prior to or encompassing the lengthy span of the Renaissance. Drawing on the double movement of archaeological exploration and creative reconstruction entailed in the humanist endeavour to ‘resurrect’ the past, ‘ruins’ are seen as taking precedence over ‘myth’, in Shakespeare’s Rome. They are assigned the role of a heuristic model, and discovered in all their epistemic relevance in Shakespeare’s dramatic vision of history and his negotiation of modernity.
This is the first book of its kind to address Shakespeare’s relationship with Rome’s authoritative myth, archaeologically, by taking as a point of departure a chronological reversal, namely the vision of the ‘eternal’ city as a ruinous scenario and hence the ways in which such a layered, ‘silent’, and aporetic scenario allows for an archaeo-anatomical approach to Shakespeare’s Roman works.
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