Julius Caesar: New Critical Essays

JULIUS CAESAR

Shakespeare Criticism Philip C. Kolin, General Editor Romeo and Juliet Critical Essays Edited by John F. Andrews

Shakespeare’s Sonnets Critical Essays Edited by James Schiffer

Coriolanus Critical Essays Edited by David Wheeler

Pericles Critical Essays Edited by David Skeele

Titus Andronicus Critical Essays Edited by Philip C. Kolin

Henry VI Critical Essays Edited by Thomas A. Pendleton

Love’s Labour’s Lost Critical Essays Edited by Felicia Hardison Londre

The Tempest Critical Essays Edited by Patrick M. Murphy

The Winter’s Tale Critical Essays Edited by Maurice Hunt

The Taming of the Shrew Critical Essays Edited by Dana Aspinall

Two Gentlemen of Verona Critical Essays Edited by June Schlueter Venus and Adonis Critical Essays Edited by Philip C. Kolin

Othello New Critical Essays Edited by Philip C. Kolin Hamlet New Critical Essays Edited by Arthur F. Kinney

As You Like It from 1600 to the Present Critical Essays Edited by Edward Tomarken

The Merchant of Venice New Critical Essays Edited by John W. Mahon and Ellen Macleod Mahon

The Comedy of Errors Critical Essays Edited by Robert S. Miola

Julius Caesar New Critical Essays Edited by Horst Zander

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Critical Essays Edited by Dorothea Kehler

Antony and Cleopatra New Critical Essays Edited by Sara Deats

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JULIUS CAESAR New Critical Essays

edited by

Horst Zander

Routledge New York • London

Published in 2005 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN U.K. www.routledge.co.uk Copyright © 2005 by Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Julius Caesar : new critical essays / edited by Horst Zander. p. cm. — (Shakespeare criticism ; v. 29) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8153-3507-5 (hbk. : acid-free paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Julius Caesar. 2. Caesar, Julius—In literature. 3. Assassination in literature. 4. Conspiracies in literature. 5. Assassins in literature. 6. Rome—In literature. 7. Tragedy. I. Zander, Horst. II. Series. PR2808.J853 2004 822.3'3—dc22 2004014421 ISBN 0-203-99701-8 Master e-book ISBN

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For my beloved parents

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Acknowledgments

Of the many people who in various ways have assisted me in compiling this book, I would like to single out and warmly thank a few in particular: my colleague Dr. Ingeborg Boltz and her staff of the Shakespeare Library at Munich University, who especially helped me when I was having difficulty tracing remote material or information; my colleague Dr. Andreas Mahler, who gave me valuable advice in outlining the work at hand and who, time and again, had the appropriate approach for solving various problems that occurred during the completion of the book; my colleague Kathleen Rabl, who—as usual—polished my English phrasing and translated the article by Martin Jehne with me; Professor John W. Velz, who at several stages supported me with his unmatched knowledge of the drama and assisted me in contacting some of the contributors to this volume; and Professor Wolfgang Weiß, who was a great help during the planning phase of the project.

Note All quotations of and references to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in this anthology are from the Arden Edition of the play, Third Series, edited by David Daniell (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998). References to other works by Shakespeare also follow the latest available Arden Edition.

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Contents General Editor’s Introduction

ix

Part I: Introduction Julius Caesar and the Critical Legacy

3

HORST ZANDER

Part II: Central Aspects 1 History’s Alternative Caesars: Julius Caesar and Current Historiography

59

MARTIN JEHNE

2 Caesar On and Off the Renaissance English Stage

71

CLIFFORD RONAN

3 Shakespeare’s Sources: Translations, Transformations, and Intertextuality in Julius Caesar

91

VIVIAN THOMAS

4 From Monarchy to Tyranny: Julius Caesar Among Shakespeare’s Roman Works

111

BARBARA L. PARKER

5 “Time . . . Come Round”: Plot Construction in Julius Caesar

127

JOSEPH CANDIDO

6 “That every like is not the same”: The Vicissitudes of Language in Julius Caesar

139

BARBARA J. BAINES

7 From Theatre to Globe: The Construction of Character in Julius Caesar

155

J. L. SIMMONS

8 Buying and Selling So(u)les: Marketing Strategies and the Politics of Performance in Julius Caesar

165

NAOMI CONN LIEBLER

vii

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viii • Contents

9 “There is Restitution, no End of Restitution, only not for us”: Experimental Tragedy and the Early Modern Subject in Julius Caesar

181

ANDREAS MAHLER

Part III: Current Debates 10 Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Marxist and Post-Marxist Approaches

199

DAVID HAWKES

11 Constructing Caesar: A Psychoanalytic Reading

213

DAVID WILLBERN

12 “It’s an actor, boss. Unarmed”: The Rhetoric of Julius Caesar

227

SIMON BARKER

13 Julius Caesar’s Analogue Clock and the Accents of History

241

DENNIS KEZAR

14 Major Among the Minors: A Cultural Materialist Reading of Julius Caesar

257

GRAHAM HOLDERNESS and MARCUS NEVITT

15 “Passion of some difference”: Friendship and Emulation in Julius Caesar

271

COPPÉLIA KAHN

Part IV: Julius Caesar on Stage 16 Stage Worlds of Julius Caesar: Theatrical Features and Their History

287

JAMES RIGNEY

17 Orson Welles and After: Julius Caesar and Twentieth Century Totalitarianism

295

MICHAEL ANDEREGG

18 Royal Caesar

307

TOM MATHESON

19 Multicultural and Regendered Romans: Julius Caesar in North America, 1969–2000

319

MICHAEL L. GREENWALD

20 Political Caesar: Julius Caesar on the Italian Stage

333

MARIANGELA TEMPERA

Index

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General Editor’s Introduction The continuing goal of the Shakespeare Criticism Series is to provide the most significant and original contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare’s works. Each volume in the series is devoted to a Shakespearean play or poem (e.g., the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, Othello) and contains eighteen to twentyfive new essays exploring the text from a variety of critical perspectives. A major feature of each volume in the series is the editor’s introduction. Each volume editor provides a substantial essay identifying the main critical issues and problems the play (or poem) has raised, charting the critical trends in looking at the work over the centuries, and assessing the critical discourse that has linked the play or poem to various ideological concerns. In addition to examining the critical commentary in light of important historical and theatrical events, each introduction functions as a discursive bibliographic essay citing and evaluating significant critical works—books, journal articles, theater documents, reviews, and interviews—giving readers a guide to the vast amount of research on a particular play or poem. Each volume showcases the work of leading Shakespeare scholars who participate in and extend the critical discourse on the text. Reflecting the most recent approaches in Shakespeare studies, these essays approach the play from a host of critical positions, including but not limited to feminist, Marxist, new historical, semiotic, mythic, performance/staging, cultural, and/or a combination of these and other methodologies. Some volumes in the series include bibliographic analyses of a Shakespearean text to shed light on its critical history and interpretation. Interviews with directors and/ or actors are also part of some volumes in the series. At least one, sometimes as many as two or three, of the essays in each volume is devoted to the play in performance, beginning with the earliest and most significant productions and proceeding to the most recent. These essays, which ultimately provide a theater history of the play, should not be ix

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x • General Editor’s Introduction

regarded as different from or rigidly isolated from the critical work on the script. Shakespeare criticism has often been informed by or has significantly influenced productions. Over the last thirty years or so, Shakespeare criticism has understandably been labeled “the Age of Performance.” Readers will find information in these essays on non-English speaking productions of Shakespeare’s plays as well as landmark performances in English. Editors and contributors also include photographs from productions around the world to help readers see and further appreciate the way a Shakespearean play has taken shape in the theater. Ultimately, each volume in the Shakespeare Criticism Series strives to give readers a balanced, representative collection of the most engaging and thoroughly researched criticism on the given Shakespearean text. In essence, each volume provides a careful survey of essential materials in the history of criticism of a Shakespearean play or poem, as well as cutting edge essays that extend and enliven our understanding of the work in its critical context. In offering readers innovative and fulfilling new essays, volume editors have made invaluable contributions to the literary and theatrical criticism of Shakespeare’s greatest legacy, his work. Philip C. Kolin

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PART

I

Introduction

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INTRODUCTION

Julius Caesar and the Critical Legacy HORST ZANDER

On 13 May 1999, the Globe Theatre Company, London, mounted Julius Caesar in the recently reconstructed Globe in order to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of the play as well as that of the original Globe, which—as many scholars nowadays believe—opened with this very drama.1 Directed by Mark Rylance, the production used recreated costumes of the Shakespearean era, explored original playing practices with an all-male cast, and was accompanied by live music played on Elizabethan instruments. As one critic claimed, “Caesar takes the Globe by storm” and he rated it as “the most satisfying production at the Globe to date.”2 The final performance was given on 21 September, the date of the first recorded production of the play at Shakespeare’s Globe.3 Julius Caesar is not usually considered one of Shakespeare’s greatest dramas—the first of which, Hamlet, was to appear only a year later. Neither does it rank as his foremost Roman play: although it is superior to Titus Andronicus, the outstanding example of this genre is Antony and Cleopatra, which was probably first staged in 1606. Nevertheless, Julius Caesar is in various respects a most exceptional and most important work. The drama certainly represents the decisive turning point in the whole Shakespearean canon. With Henry V Shakespeare had completed his English history plays, and then with Julius Caesar his interest began to shift from history to basic issues of human existence. According to Steve Sohmer: The play is the fulcrum on which the dramatist’s career turns. From Julius Caesar we look backward at Titus, The Taming of the Shrew, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Richard II and III 3

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and the Henry IV–V–VI plays—work which is largely developmental, historiographical or pure entertainment. Looking forward in the playwright’s career, one finds the ruthless middle comedies, profound tragedies and, at a breathing distance, the romances. Before creating Caesar, Shakespeare created Falstaff; afterwards, he created Lear. Before creating Brutus, Shakespeare created Bolingbroke; afterwards, he created Hamlet. Before creating Cassius, Shakespeare created Beaufort; afterwards, he created Ulysses. And before creating Antony, Shakespeare created Juliet; afterwards, he created Cleopatra.4 Some decades earlier, J. A. K. Thomson maintained that Plutarch, Shakespeare’s main source for Julius Caesar, and his exploration of Plutarch in Julius Caesar had initiated Shakespeare’s tragic works as a whole.5 In addition to holding this pivotal dramatic position, Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s most popular, familiar, and frequently studied plays, not least because it has become part of the school syllabus in numerous countries.6 To quote Sohmer once more: Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy has run through more editions, and more copies, than any play in any language. [ . . . It] has introduced generations of school children to Shakespeare. Unique in the canon, Julius Caesar has never been out of vogue. It has been continually recalled to the stage for four hundred years—a play for all times and all audiences.7 Sohmer is also right when he states that—as a consequence of this enormous popularity—the image of Caesar created by Shakespeare is quite dominant in the public view, and that one has to remind oneself that Shakespeare, not Caesar, gasped “Et tu, Brute?” (3.1.77).8 Although the case is not as bad as that of Richard III, where generations of historians have struggled in vain to revise the portrait dramatized by the playwright, attempts by historians to present a “faithful” picture of Caesar often seem to be marred by the one popularized in Shakespeare’s drama. Undoubtedly, the attractiveness of the play is also a result of the importance of the historical figure and the historic dimension of the assassination. Julius Caesar was virtually the ruler of the whole known world; and George L. Craik, in the very first monograph on Julius Caesar, points out that Shakespeare made more allusions to Caesar in his works than to any other historical man.9 Some one and a half centuries later, David Daniell called the murder “the most famous historical event in the West outside the Bible.”10 Scholars have, however, quite frequently outlined the parallels between J. C. and J. C.—Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ—and have demonstrated that Shakespeare, too, seems to have had those parallels in mind,

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such as when he changed Caesar’s recorded twenty-three wounds into thirtythree in an allusion to the age of Christ when he was crucified.11 Furthermore, Julius Caesar has—more than any other Shakespearean play—polarized generations of critics into sympathizing either with the protagonist Caesar or with his antagonist Brutus. More often than not, taking sides in this way implies political overtones: Caesar represents either a tyrant or a martyr, Brutus either a liberator or a vile murderer. This traditional antagonism can be clearly observed during the last decades in two of the most widely distributed editions of the play. Whereas in The New Shakespeare series John Dover Wilson, to whom “Julius Caesar is the greatest of political plays,” regards Caesar as a monstrous tyrant and Brutus as a noble hero,12 in the Arden Edition T. S. Dorsch emphasizes Caesar’s greatness and dismisses Brutus as a naïve and arrogant idealist.13 Due in part to such contradictory assessments, Ernest Schanzer classified the play in the 1950s as a “problem play” and described it in the following manner: There is a widespread disagreement among critics about who is the play’s principal character or whether it has a principal character, on whether it is a tragedy and if so whose, on whether Shakespeare wants us to consider the assassination as damnable or praiseworthy, while of all the chief characters in the play violently contradictory interpretations have been offered.14 In a similar vein, Honor Matthews contends that Julius Caesar “is perhaps the most ambiguous of all Shakespeare’s plays,”15 and Rene E. Fortin has characterized it as “an experiment in point of view.”16 According to these interpretations, the drama thus appears even more obscure and unfathomable than other Shakespearean works, which also abound in ambivalences and ambiguities. On the other hand, in a seminal paper Mildred E. Hartsock has claimed: It is more convincing to say that Julius Caesar is not a problem play, but a play about a problem: the difficulty—perhaps the impossibility— of knowing the truth of men and of history.17 And this—as the following considerations will illustrate—is what the play, to a great extent, is about.

1. Some Central Features of Julius Caesar Although the question of the protagonist has indeed been the subject of a long debate, as Schanzer posits, in more recent research there seems to be an agreement that the protagonist of the play is Caesar and hence that the

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title of the piece is justified.18 It is no wonder critics have been irritated by the fact that the titular character appears in only three scenes out of a total of eighteen; and if we look at the number of lines that the main characters speak, the concordance tells us that altogether Brutus utters 720 (which represent 27.8 percent of the drama), Cassius 505 (19.5 percent), and Antony 328 (12.6 percent)—whereas Caesar’s portion is limited to only 150 lines, in fact, to no more than 5.8 percent of the text.19 On the other hand, the concordance informs us that Caesar’s name occurs 219 times in the play, whereas Brutus’s is mentioned only 134.20 Statistical data such as this already indicates that the play is not so much about the “man” Caesar as about the myth or the much-quoted “spirit” of Caesar. Before, and perhaps even more so after his death, all the characters constantly think about Caesar, talk about Caesar, refer to Caesar, and are haunted and spellbound by Caesar. “Caesar, thou art revenged/Even with the sword that killed thee” (5.3.45–46) are Cassius’s last words, and Brutus’s final thoughts also concern Caesar: “Caesar, now be still./I killed not thee with half so good a will” (5.5.50–51). Originally, Brutus had intended and contended: Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers, Caius. We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar, And in the spirit of men there is no blood. O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit And not dismember Caesar! . . . (2.1.165–69) Of course, what actually happens is the very opposite. Brutus merely kills the man, whereas the spirit of Caesar ironically derives more power than ever before from this very murder. The disembodied Caesar is mightier than the living one; in fact, even his corpse—to which Antony gives a voice— is more eloquent than the living Caesar ever was. As is perhaps the case with the historical Caesar as well, the Julius Caesar in the play attains his “immortal” (1.2.60) greatness as a result of his physical death. With respect to this central irony of the drama, the text does not therefore display any of the structural deficiencies critics have often bemoaned, namely, that it is divided into two different parts, with both a Caesar and a Brutus plot. In actuality, the piece exhibits a linear movement that dramatizes the rise of Caesar, first in a physical, then in a spiritual and mythical sense. It has frequently been demonstrated how effectively Shakespeare manages to condense an action that stretches over a considerable time and takes place at various sites into a tight temporal and spatial textual web. Historically, the events of the play cover a period of about two and a half years (the festival of the Lupercal, where Caesar was offered the crown, was on 13

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February 44 BC, the murder took place on 15 March; the proscriptions by the triumvirs were arranged in November 43, whereas the battle at Philippi was fought in autumn of the following year). Shakespeare conflates this extended period of time into a plot in which the assassination seems to follow the Lupercal immediately, and the Forum speeches, immediately, the murder. Even after the third act, the play does not render the impression that much time elapses. The proscription scene, the tent scene, and the battle scenes occur with breathtaking rapidity. Something similar holds true for the spatial structure of the work. The various historical sites are reduced to extremely few (Rome, Sardis, Philippi), which create a dense and intense atmosphere, both in the open spaces and in the interior scenes. Yet the main strategy for achieving a structural unity is the device mentioned earlier, namely that time and space are always the time and space over which Caesar (“for always I am Caesar”; 1.2.211), either physically or in spirit, is a determining presence. It has become a convention in scholarship to discuss the two Caesars in the play, the private man and the political, public institution of “Caesar.” Julius Caesar’s very first utterance is a strikingly private one: “Calphurnia” (1.2.1). And it is this private Caesar who here is allowed to be superstitious and who believes that the ceremony may end the sterility of his wife. By contrast, the official Caesar, who as a rule refers to himself in the third person, does not display such a weakness and defies the warnings of the Soothsayer. Moreover, Shakespeare attributes to this mighty public Caesar, whose name is not “liable to fear” (1.2.198) and who believes that “Danger knows full well/That Caesar is more dangerous than he” (2.2.44–45), physical weaknesses that indicate his human frailty. The scene at Caesar’s home (2.2) is then a neat demonstration of his being torn between being a private man and the institution of Caesar; whereas immediately before his death he elevates the public image of his official role as Caesar to an extreme: But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fixed and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament. ... So in the world: ’tis furnished well with men, And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive. Yet in the number I do know but one That unassailable holds on his rank Unshaken of motion. And that I am he . . . (3.1.60–70) As so often in Shakespeare’s works, it is clear that someone who raises himself so far above other human beings and who thinks he does not consist of

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flesh and blood, must immediately afterward realize how much of he himself really does consist of flesh and blood. Moreover, it is ironic that the imperator here does not refer to himself as Caesar, but uses the private “I,” thus indicating his human vulnerability. And it is especially by limiting his appearance in the play that Shakespeare points out the drama is not actually concerned with Caesar the man, but rather with the nimbus this name has acquired. Another indicator that Shakespeare had good reasons for choosing his title is evident in how the tragedy of Brutus depends totally on Caesar. Just as in Caesar’s case, Brutus’s crucial flaw is his lack of appropriate selfknowledge. Nevertheless, Brutus is indeed “the noblest Roman of them all,” and the rest of Antony’s epitaph certainly holds true as well: All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar. He only, in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’ (5.5.68–75) Brutus actually had no private grudges against Caesar and acted for what he conceived of as the welfare of the state. The high esteem that others hold for him is emphasized in his death scene, when no one wants to kill him; and it was because of his indisputable reputation that the conspirators needed him right from the start to ennoble their cause. Critics have also repeatedly referred to the way he receives the news of Portia’s death, in order to demonstrate his superior Stoic qualities. On the other hand, this honorable and noble Brutus is trapped in his nobleness; he is an idealist blind to the actualities of life. This naïveté is neatly foregrounded in the lines quoted above, in which he wishes to kill the spirit of Caesar without killing the man and where he stylizes murderers into sacrificers. Moreover, he has serious difficulties justifying the assassination: his monologue in the orchard (2.1.10–34) is an exercise in tautological arguing. In addition, it is not least because of his insistence on his honor and his honesty and because of his endeavor to attribute a religious touch to the murder that he makes a series of blunders which lead to the destruction of the conspirators: his refusal to take an oath, to include Cicero in the conspiracy, and to kill Antony together with Caesar (2.1), as well as his permitting Antony to hold Caesar’s funeral speech (3.1), and finally making military misjudgments about the battle of Philippi (4.3). In the quarrel scene, too, he does not actually appear in a favorable light, since he needs the money for his army but thinks it is beneath his dignity to

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employ the common ways of raising it. And his arrogance here is not unlike that of Caesar himself: “There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats:/For I am armed so strong in honesty/That they pass by me as the idle wind” (4.3.66–68). In the farewell scene with Cassius (5.1), Brutus’s nobility is nevertheless emphasized once more, and the same holds true, as mentioned initially, for the circumstances of his death. In contrast to Brutus, Cassius certainly does have personal grudges against Caesar, and when he discloses them and his envy for Caesar at his very first appearance in act 1, scene 2, he is presented from his most unfavorable side. Subsequently, however, more and more of his qualities are revealed. In the next scene, the thunder scene (1.3), his braveness is already contrasted with Caska’s fear, and afterward we witness an intelligent, far-sighted, and pragmatic Roman. Contrary to the blind Brutus, Cassius has a clear view of the decisions required in specific situations; and in every instance of Brutus’s blunders Cassius is of a different opinion. His tragedy is that he cannot stand up against the authority of Brutus and that he has to follow him knowingly to inevitable destruction. In the quarrel scene, he seems to be wronged by Brutus, and just like Brutus, he evokes sympathy in the farewell scene with his fellow general and in the scene of his suicide, which has—because of his probable first misconception—a particularly tragic touch. As is the case with the other characters, Antony has at least two rather contradictory sides. On the one hand, he is certainly a true and loyal friend of Caesar, and his grief in view of Caesar’s corpse (3.1.148–63) is obviously genuine. His love of games and music also tends to make him likable. On the other hand, in the Forum scene he turns into a cunning demagogue who manipulates and stirs up the citizens in a most insidious way, ending his task with the malicious comment: “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot:/Take thou what course thou wilt” (3.2.251–52). Even worse, in the proscription scene (4.1) he is revealed as a cold and ruthless murderer, willing to bargain with the lives of his relatives. And in the parallel configuration of Brutus/Cassius and Antony/Octavius before the final battle, the latter pair definitely appears in a less favorable light: instead of true friendship, there are signs of growing rivalry. In the restricted female roles of the play, we again find a parallel and contrasting arrangement. Although Portia kneels down to Brutus when asking him to share his secrets with her, thus assuming the conventional female role, her actual attitude is different. “I grant I am a woman” (2.1.291; 293), she concedes and complains “how weak a thing/The heart of woman is” (2.4.40–41), but then contends: “I have a man’s mind” (2.4.8). In fact, as several critics have noted, she defines herself in male terms (by virtue of her father Cato and her husband Brutus: “Being so fathered and so husbanded”; 2.1.296) and strives to be part of the male Roman world. The

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act of inflicting on herself a wound and her suicide are forceful demonstrations of this stance.21 By contrast, Calphurnia is confined to a traditional woman’s role. During her first appearance in act 1, scene 2, the issue is an exclusively female one and she displays only obedience to her lord. Later on she is presented as an unselfish wife who primarily cares about her husband: “Call it my fear/ That keeps you in the house, and not your own” (2.2.50–51). At least temporarily, however, she manages to make Caesar comply with her wishes, but this victory is then destroyed by Decius. As regards the other characters, only a brief comment on the citizens seems necessary, for some contemporary critics maintain that they may be the true protagonists of the play.22 In fact, Caesar (when being offered the crown), Brutus, and Antony are all dependent on the opinion and support of the people, and the conspirators fail principally because Antony manages to win the populace over to his side. The traditional negative view of the crowd as fickle and violent has been radically reformulated in more recent times by René Girard who claims: “Julius Caesar is centered neither on Caesar nor on his murderers; it is not even about Roman history but about collective violence itself. . . . Julius Caesar is the play in which the violent essence of the theater and of human culture itself are revealed.”23 At the other end of the interpretive scale, the populace is conceived of as a democratic element24 and the political cleverness, not the fickleness, of the people is stressed.25 This populace is, of course, an important element in the specific Roman world that Shakespeare creates (although scholars have justly pointed out that the citizens display obvious Elizabethan features). It has been suggested that the very structural organization of the play, its restraint and lucidity, reflects Roman values.26 Something similar holds true for the language and the style of the piece. The imagery, with blood being the dominating one, is neither very rich nor elaborated; instead, the characters—perhaps with the exception of Antony—tend to articulate themselves in a rather plain and efficient “Roman” style. Most speeches assume a strong declamatory and public quality, even in private scenes such as the conversation between Brutus and Portia. Moreover, in this drama in particular, language is designed to make things happen, to influence, to persuade, to seduce, or to manipulate others.27 Additional specific Roman features surface in the characters’ emphasis on Roman values such as virtue and honor. In more recent criticism, the aspect of emulation, especially, has received increased attention; in this world the aristocrats try to rival with, or to outdo, their equals with regard to crucial Roman—and that is male—qualities. This seems to be the basis on which Caesar rises to autocracy, Cassius manages to win over Brutus for

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the conspiracy, and Cassius cannot tolerate Caesar’s superior position. Time and again critics have drawn parallels between this aspect of the Roman and the Elizabethan worlds.28 Of vital importance are also the Roman rituals in the play, either those practiced or merely those invoked. The piece opens with the festival of the Lupercal and thus embeds the ensuing events in this religious framework. Subsequently, Brutus, in stylizing the conspirators as “sacrificers” and “purgers” (2.1.161–82), ritualizes both Caesar’s body and the assassination itself; and this is reinforced when after the murder the conspirators stoop to bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood (3.1.105–10). In a similar ritualistic way, Antony then shakes the bloody hands of the murderers (3.1.183–89), and his presentation of Caesar’s corpse to the crowds may mark the highlight of these features of the drama. Once more, such ceremonies and rituals are assumed to resonate Elizabethan festivals and rites.29 Another central feature of Julius Caesar is the fact that all the major characters seem to stage their own plays within the play; they are self-conscious actors fully aware of their historical roles.30 To a fair extent, this is tantamount to acting the role the respective name stands for: not only does Caesar strive to play Caesar, but Brutus, too, endeavors to live up to the role of Brutus and Portia to that of Portia. This opens a perspective on numerous parallels between the theater and politics and provides insights into the political nature of theater and the theatrical nature of politics. “Let not our looks put on our purposes,/But bear it as our Roman actors do” (2.1.224– 25), Brutus instructs the other conspirators before the murder. And after the assassination Cassius holds: Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown? (3.1.111–13) This remark refers both to the political event and the theatrical event or, rather, it discloses a consciousness of the fact that the political event is, at the same time, a theatrical one. Hence, these meta-theatrical aspects also thematize the relation of historical reality and theatrical reconstruction and illustrate that these are not separate spheres, but that they are interrelated. Moreover, this means that what is being shown (characters endeavoring to play their social and political roles) is simultaneously happening in the very act of showing, namely in the actors’ endeavor to play their parts. Such epistemological and ontological issues actually pervade the whole play. Cicero contends, “But men may construe things after their fashion/ Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (1.3.34–35), and indeed the various characters constantly “construe” (1.2.45; 2.1.306) or “fashion” (2.1.30; 2.1.219) their conception of the world, of others, or of themselves.

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Cassius constructs his very own portrait of Caesar, Brutus fashions another Caesar, Antony yet another, and Caesar himself a still different one. More often than not, however, such constructions are simultaneously misconstructions. “This dream is all amiss interpreted” (2.2.83), Decius avers after having heard Calphurnia’s version of her dream and then presents an altogether different interpretation. When Cassius commits suicide because he thinks that Titinius was killed, Titinius moans afterward, “Alas, thou hast misconstrued everything” (5.3.84). As in the case of the dream, the play contains a rich layer of supernatural agencies and events: there are the Soothsayer, the prodigious thunderstorm at night with its various portents, the augurers, Caesar’s ghost, and several other elements of this kind. And all of them are open to interpretation or misinterpretation. Hence this play is not only highly self-reflexive, but is, moreover, a play about the very process of interpretation, about the unstable reality, about the conception or misconception, the construction or misconstruction of the world. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the last two features of the play discussed, the meta-dramatic and the epistemological/ontological facets, are among the most appealing aspects of this drama in our time. In fact, a look at the latest studies on Julius Caesar collected in this volume indicates that the lines referred to above are the most frequently quoted ones. For here again there is a coincidence of what the play demonstrates and what— in this case we, as recipients—are doing when reading or watching the play: trying to construct a meaning of it or, in more banal terms, trying to cope with it or simply to understand it. And this is, of course, what commentators on Julius Caesar have been attempting for the past four hundred years.

2. The Reception and Reputation of Julius Caesar up to the Twentieth Century Most scholars agree that in Shakespeare’s own time Julius Caesar was obviously quite a popular play,31 though information about this period is extremely scarce. Evidence for this popularity is mainly deduced from allusions to the drama in contemporary works, most notably in the writing of Ben Jonson. Thus he satirized Antony’s lines “O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts/And men have lost their reason” (3.2.105–6) in Every Man Out of His Humour (3.4.28–29),32 and in The Staple of News (Prologue, 36–37) he makes fun of Caesar’s utterance “Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause/Will he be satisfied” (3.1.47–48).33 In spite of his admiration for Shakespeare, Jonson regarded this statement simply as “ridiculous,” and it is among those lines he had in mind when he stated:

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I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing . . . hee never blotted out line. My answer hath beene, would he had blotted a thousand.34 Nevertheless, allusions like these demonstrate that audiences must have been fairly familiar with Shakespeare’s Roman play—something which also holds true for the ensuing years during the reigns of James I and Charles I. Various scattered comments on and references to the play—such as the muchquoted verses by Leonard Digges—are evidence that authors, readers, and theater-goers knew the drama quite well.35 With the advent of the Restoration, our flow of information improves considerably; and we can observe how Shakespeare’s works moved into the center of the poetological disputes of the age. During those decades, Julius Caesar became a stock play with the companies (it was included in the group of dramas with which William Davenant opened the Drury Lane Theatre in April 1663),36 and it was commented on in various prologues, epilogues, and treatises on dramatic art. Thus John Dryden in his preface to Troilus and Cressida refuted the reproach that he had modeled his last scene of the play on the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius and maintained, “They who think to do me an injury” by calling it an imitation “do me an honour, by supposing I could imitate the incomparable Shakespear.”37 In the same vein, both Nahum Tate and Charles Gildon praised Julius Caesar expressly for the character portraits which they took to be very close to those furnished by the historians Shakespeare relied on.38 On the other hand, the Restoration witnessed an increasing orientation toward neoclassical poetics, and Julius Caesar was, of course, among the many plays by Shakespeare which failed to cope with the much-praised “rules” of those poetics. Therefore, Thomas Rymer launched a massive attack on the play. Shakespeare, he decided, might be familiar with Othello and Iago, as his own natural acquaintance: but Caesar and Brutus were above his conversation. To put them in Fools Coats, and make them Jack-puddens in the Shakespeare dress, is a Sacriledge . . . The Truth is, this authors head was full of villainous, unnatural images, and history has only furnish’d him with great names thereby to recommend them to the World . . . In discussing Shakespeare’s ambivalent characters, Rymer claims that “never any Poet so boldly, and so barefac’d, flounced along from contradiction to contradiction,” and in referring to the popular quarrel scene, he goes on to describe a serious breach of “decorum”: “Two Philosophers, two generals (imperatores was their title), the ultimi Romanorum, are to play the Bullies

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and Buffoon.”39 Dryden, Gildon, and John Dennis all criticized such a view and defended Shakespeare, but at the same time conceded that some of Rymer’s verdicts were justified.40 When in the Augustan Age—notably not called the Caesarean Age— criticism along the lines of neoclassical poetics (with its insistence on the unities, on “decorum”—which included consistent characters—on verisimilitude, poetical justice, and “didacticism”) gained even more importance, there were again voices that eulogized Shakespeare’s dramatic art in general and Julius Caesar in particular. Just as an anonymous writer in A Defence of Dramatick Poetry in 1698 had maintained that “our best English Tragedies,” among which he listed Julius Caesar, “are so far from pent up in Corneille’s narrower Unity Rules . . . that nothing is so ridiculous as to pretend to it,”41 Leonard Welsted, poet and friend of Richard Steele and Lewis Theobald, bluntly asked an acquaintance in a letter: “[W]ould you not rather be Author of the Two wonderful scenes in Julius Caesar, than all Dryden’s Plays put together [?]”42 On the whole, however, because of Shakespeare’s disregard of the “rules,” negative verdicts on Julius Caesar dominated the discussions of the play. Gildon, notwithstanding his repudiation of Rymer’s view, assailed the missing unity of time (and place) in the drama: Thus in the Julius Caesar of Shakespeare there is not only the Action of Caesar’s Death, where the play ought to have ended, but many other Subsequent Actions of Antony and Brutus even to the Overthrow and Death of Brutus and Cassius. And the Poet might as well have carried it down to the Settling of the Empire in Augustus, or indeed to the fall of the Roman Empire in Augustulus . . . 43 In a different context, Gildon mainly criticized Shakespeare’s error as regards the unity of action, and, as a consequence of this, his wrong choice of a title for the play: This Play or History is call’d Julius Caesar, tho’ it ought rather to be call’d Marcus Brutus. Caesar is the shortest and most inconsiderable Part in it, and he is kill’d in the beginning of the third Act. . . . If it had been properly call’d Julius Caesar it ought to have ended at his Death, and then it had been much more regular, natural and beautiful. But then the Moral must naturally have been the Punishment or ill Success of Tyranny.44 Whereas Gildon here also deplores that Shakespeare failed to provide a clear “message,” which was regarded as essential in neo-classical poetics, Dennis quarrelled with Shakespeare’s missing sense of “poetical justice”: The killing of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare is either a Murder or a Lawful Action; if the killing Caesar is a Lawful Action, then the killing

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of Brutus and Cassius is downright Murder; and the Poet has been guilty of polluting the Scene with the blood of the very best and last of the Romans. But if the killing of Caesar is Murder, and Brutus and Cassius are very justly punish’d for it, then Shakespeare is on the other side answerable for introducing so many Noble Romans committing in the open face of an Audience a very horrible Murder, and only punishing two of them . . . 45 When, during the Augustan Age, the first editions of Shakespeare’s complete works after the Folios appeared, the comments of the editors (Nicholas Rowe, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, and, somewhat later, Thomas Hanmer and William Warburton) followed more or less the same line. On the one hand, they praised and defended Shakespeare, and Theobald even maintained that “[o]f all the Plays, either Ancient or Modern, the Tragedy of Julius Caesar . . . has been held in the fairest Esteem and Admiration.”46 On the other hand, Shakespeare was still regarded as the “unpolished gem” which had to be refined. What happened here, however, is that particular conceptions of dramatic art were introduced into the texts themselves, notably by Pope. One diligent scholar has counted altogether 9,258 changes that Pope has made in comparison with his main source, namely Rowe’s second edition of 1714; most of them affected Richard III (581), but Julius Caesar was also subjected to 116 alterations.47 A quite striking example of the way Shakespeare is adapted to Pope’s artistic taste (and perhaps to that of his age) is Pope’s assigning of Brutus’s lines “Stoop, Romans, stoop,/And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood/Up to the elbows and besmear our swords” (3.1.105–7) to Caska because he thinks that “nothing is more inconsistent with [ . . . Brutus’s] mild and philosophical character” than such an utterance.48 Pope’s opponent Theobald subsequently re-assigned the speech to Brutus,49 and he certainly had good reasons for announcing his own edition of the works as Shakespeare Restored (1726). In a way, the attitude of this epoch toward Shakespeare and Julius Caesar is highlighted by John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham. Because of Shakespeare’s violation of the “rules,” Buckingham transformed the drama into two plays: The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, comprising acts 1 to 3, and The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus, comprising acts 4 and 5 (1722). The first play opens a day before Caesar’s assassination and ends an hour after his death; the second drama begins a day before the battle at Philippi and ends with the victory of the conspirators’ enemies. Buckingham removed all comic scenes from the text (the few that there actually are) and equipped it with pseudo-Greek choruses, written by Pope. Another well-known alternative version of Julius Caesar was presented by Voltaire. During his exile in England he had started, again from the critical angle of the “rules,” his massive assaults on “cet abominable Shakespeare

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qui n’est, en vérité, qu’un Gilles de village, et qui n’a pas écrit deux lignes honnêtes” [“that abominable Shakespeare who is, in fact, but a William from some village and who has not managed to write two decent lines”].50 Yet in spite of his long battle against Shakespeare, Voltaire contributed a lot to making Shakespeare known in France; and he not only translated Julius Caesar into French, but composed his own Caesar tragedy La Mort de César (Paris, 1733) that relied heavily on Shakespeare’s model (in which, however, Brutus is Caesar’s own son and in which there is not a single female role). When in about the middle of the century the idolatry of Shakespeare began to become evident (David Garrick called Shakespeare “the greatest dramatic poet in the world”),51 commentators attempted to find more and more ways of excusing Shakespeare’s disregard of the “rules”; or those “rules” were—perhaps to some extent as a result of Voltaire’s invectives against Shakespeare—denounced as “French rules,” whereas Shakespeare was now appreciated as an English, national, dramatist. Such tendencies paved the way for Samuel Johnson’s famous “Preface” and his edition of the canon in 1765. Johnson, occasionally praised for having opened new avenues in Shakespearean criticism, in fact attempted rather to mediate between traditional conceptions and new ones. He recurred to many assessments by Rymer, Dennis, and Gildon, and yet he relativized and dismissed the “rules” as merely an instrument for making a drama credible, whereas he maintained that every theater-goer was aware of being faced with only an illusion of reality. With respect to Julius Caesar, Johnson did not provide any really new insights either: Of this tragedy many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated; but I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting compared with some other of Shakespeare’s plays; his adherence to the real story, and to Roman manners, seems to have impeded the natural vigour of his genius.52 In a similar way, Elizabeth Montagu defended Shakespeare against Voltaire’s attacks, and like so many commentators before her, she in particular extolled the quarrel scene and lauded Shakespeare’s portrait of Brutus, whom she regarded as the true hero of the play.53 Horace Walpole, comparing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with Joseph Addison’s play Cato, dismissed the latter as a schoolboy’s piece and contended: The other [play] was written by a master of human nature, and by a genius so quick and so intuitive, so penetrating, that Shakespeare from the dregs and obstacles of vile translations has drawn finer portraits

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of Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony and Casca than Cicero himself has done, who lived with and knew the men. Why? because Cicero thought of what he should say of them; Shakespeare of what they would have said themselves.54 These last decades of the eighteenth century also witnessed Shakespeare’s growing international reputation. Just as earlier Voltaire—contrary to his intentions—had contributed to making Shakespeare popular in France, in this phase Shakespeare came to be widely appreciated in Germany as well. Once again, the main obstacle here had been the French dramatists who had observed the “rules” and who had been preferred by German commentators; but after Shakespeare’s superiority was acknowledged, he was adopted as a “national” poet in that country. At about the same stage, the Shakespeare reception gained impact in America; and the very first recorded Julius Caesar production, in Philadelphia in 1770, seemed to draw on the increasing liberation spirit during those years, for it was advertised as presenting the “noble struggles for Liberty by that renowned patriot Marcus Brutus.”55 In the same city, the first American edition of the complete works was published in 1795. After Johnson, the central vantage point of criticism provided by the “rules” was supplanted by the concept of depicting or reflecting “human nature.” It “is the great excellence of SHAKESPEARE that he drew his scenes from nature, and from life,”56 Johnson had held, and this insistence on the play as a “mirror of life” as a critical criterion surfaces in Walpole’s comments quoted above as well. Such conceptions were voiced even more articulately in the Romantic period, in which Shakespeare himself became the standard of evaluating literature. According to Romantic conceptions, the norms for assessing a literary work should not be derived from external standards (as was the case with the “rules”), but should be deduced from the work itself. Furthermore, every constituent of a work (characters, plot, language) was regarded as a functional element contributing to a universal or organic whole—as the product of the imagination. And the most important element in that literary universe, created in analogy to the actual one (with the poet in the role of God), was without doubt character. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s criticism of Shakespeare was especially influenced by Maurice Morgann, who earlier had written quite an extraordinary treatise on the fullness of Shakespeare’s characters, which opened them up for both a psychological and moral analysis.57 Of perhaps even greater importance was the influence of August Wilhelm von Schlegel, who had championed Shakespeare as a model for Romantic drama and who had asserted that the various contradictory and heterogeneous elements in

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Shakespeare’s plays (and the “inconsistencies” of his characters) form, in the last instance, an organic unity.58 In the same vein, Coleridge transformed Shakespeare into an ideal Romantic poet and illuminated the underlying harmonies and the organic unity of the plays, exploring with particular scrutiny the psychological and moral aspects of the characters. His exuberant admiration for Shakespeare made him claim: “Shakespeare knew the human mind, and its most minute and intimate workings, and he never introduces a word, or a thought, in vain or out of place: if we do not understand him, it is our own fault . . . ” The last part of this statement is neatly underscored when in his notes on Julius Caesar, Coleridge comments on Brutus’s soliloquy “It must be by his death . . . ” (2.1.10ff.): This is singular—at least I do not at present see into Shakespeare’s motive, the rationale—or in what point he meant Brutus’s character to appear. For surely . . . nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus . . . than the tenets here attributed to him . . . viz., that he would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be . . . What character does Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be? Referring to the quarrel scene, Coleridge even contended: I know no part of Shakespeare that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman than this scene. In the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create previously to his function of representing.59 William Hazlitt, himself not a profound theorist nor a real innovator in dramatic criticism, nevertheless expressed many of the prevailing conceptions of Shakespeare during that epoch in a striking way. In his preface to Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, he quotes Schlegel at length and, quarrelling with Johnson, assures us that “our admiration [for Shakespeare] cannot easily surpass his genius.” Julius Caesar he takes to be inferior to Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra; and notwithstanding the play’s considerable qualities, Hazlitt has his problems with the titular hero: It however abounds in admirable and affecting passages, and is remarkable for the profound knowledge of character, in which Shakespear could scarcely fail. If there is any exception to this remark, it is in the hero of the piece himself. We do not much admire the representation here given of Julius Caesar, nor do we think it answers

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to the portrait given of him in his Commentaries. He makes several vapouring and rather pedantic speeches, and does nothing. Indeed, he has nothing to do. So far, the fault of the character is the fault of the plot. Hazlitt, however, not only celebrated Shakespeare’s portrayal of characters in general, but especially his “penetration into political character.” He averred that “the whole design of the conspirators to liberate their country fails from the generous temper and overweening confidence of Brutus in the goodness of their cause and the assistance of others” and then added: “Thus it has always been.”60 Mention should be made here also of Goethe’s criticism of Shakespeare. He himself declined Napoleon’s suggestion to write a drama on Caesar although he admitted that Napoleon’s appearance had made an understanding of Caesar easier. Like his contemporaries, Goethe emphasized the harmony and unity of the plays and, moreover, conceived of each play as being governed by a unity of ideas. In the case of Julius Caesar, “everything hinges on the idea that the upper classes are not willing to see the highest place in the State occupied, since they wrongly imagine that they are able to act together.”61 Hazlitt dedicated his book to his friend Charles Lamb, who, as is well known, was very much opposed to the increasingly “realistic” staging practices of his time; and perhaps John Philip Kemble’s spectacular Julius Caesar production of 181262 had contributed to Lamb’s contempt for the primarily social attractions of the stage business and his wish to have Shakespeare performed only in a “theater of the mind.” In his sceptical attitude towards the stage, Lamb was an important representative during this period of a movement that focused on reading Shakespeare or on a “closet Shakespeare.”63 Proceeding to the Victorian Age, we find in Thomas Carlyle an eminent example of a commentator who intensified the eulogies on Shakespeare. This is evident when he states that “Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto”; when he praises Shakespeare’s characters which he refers to as “Portraitpainting”; when he claims that Shakespeare has become part of Nature herself; and especially when he calls the playwright a “Prophet,” “a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light” who has made England speak. In addition, Carlyle displays tendencies of a biographical approach in surmising: “[H]ow could a man delineate . . . so many suffering heroic hearts, if his own heroic heart had never suffered?”64 Carlyle is also an example of the close mutual influence of English and German criticism since the Romantic period; and indeed, the most interesting contributions to Shakespearean scholarship in the middle of the century

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were—again—to come from Germany. In their studies dedicated to Shakespeare’s complete dramatic canon, both Hermann Ulrici and G. G. Gervinus continued the emphasis on character, whereas the focus on the unity of a work in a Romantic sense decreased. Under the obvious influence of Hegel, Ulrici conceived of history itself as the unifying factor in Julius Caesar and, in fact, as the true protagonist. History, Ulrici affirmed, tends to move from a Republic through an interim phase of oligarchy to monarchy, and this is disregarded by Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius; therefore they have to perish, whereas Antony and Octavius prevail. Caesar’s ghost is, so to speak, the insulted, menacing spirit of history itself.65 Gervinus, on the other hand, concentrated on Shakespeare’s thought, on the ethical, aesthetic, and, in particular, psychological aspects; and he also attempted to understand the texts in relation to Shakespeare’s biographical background. His chapter on Julius Caesar, a drama which he classified as one of the most effective plays one can see, consists mainly of thorough psychological analyses of the chief characters, especially of Brutus, whom Gervinus compares with Hamlet and Macbeth. And Brutus’s conflict between moral and political obligations is, for Gervinus, the core or “soul” of the drama.66 The critical approach initiated here is a tendency to view the characters independent of the context of the plays. During the same period, Victor Hugo published an influential monograph in France on Shakespeare’s life and works (William Shakespeare, 1864; which, however, refrains from comments on Julius Caesar), and a similar work dedicated to Shakespeare’s whole life and oeuvre was presented in the United States as H. N. Hudson’s lectures Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters. Hudson maintains that the title of Julius Caesar is justified “inasmuch as Caesar is not only the subject but also the governing power of [ . . . the play] throughout,” who “proves indeed far mightier in death than in life.” When contrasting the historical figures (as delineated in Shakespeare’s sources) with Shakespeare’s characters, Hudson is particularly perplexed by the dramatist’s depiction of Caesar, which hardly corresponds with the common conception of this greatest man in history. He then concludes that the historical Caesar was “too great for the hero of a drama” and that Shakespeare, therefore, chose to present him as the conspirators saw him.67 Nineteenth-century America especially witnessed the debate on Shakespeare’s authorship. It had been started by J. C. Cowell, and the prolonged discussions affected Julius Caesar as well. For example, F. G. Fleay claimed in 1878 that the drama “as we have it is an abridgment of Shakespeare’s play, made by Ben Jonson.”68 Similar considerations continued well into the twentieth century. J. M. Robertson constructed a complicated theory about a Caesar trilogy written originally by Marlowe (possibly

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together with Kyd), later revised by others such as Drayton, Chapman, and Munday, and finally condensed by Shakespeare. 69 For William Wells Shakespeare’s work in Julius Caesar only “comprises lines 1 to 57 . . . of the first scene of the first act,” again as a revision of an older text; the rest was revised by Beaumont.70 In late Victorian England, it was Edward Dowden who emphasized the biographical approach and even attempted to synchronize the whole canon with aspects of Shakespeare’s life. An instance of this biographical focus can be found in Dowden’s comment on the dramatist: Shakspere’s admiration of the great men of action [such as Henry V] is immense, because he himself was primarily not a man of action. He is stern to all idealists, because he was aware that he might too easily yield himself to the tendencies of an idealist. . . . But with his sternness to idealists there is mingled a passionate tenderness. He shows us remorselessly their failure, but while they fail we love them. One such idealist is, of course, Brutus, who has “a soul of incorruptible virtue” and whose admirable traits are underscored by his relationship to the “perfect woman” Portia. Dowden even claims that no “relation of man and woman in the plays of Shakspere is altogether so noble as that of Portia and Brutus.” Nevertheless, he is blind to the actual world and makes one wrong decision after another. As regards the question of the protagonist of the play, Dowden criticizes both Gervinus and Hudson, concluding: It is the spirit of Caesar which is the dominant power of the tragedy; against this—the spirit of Caesar—Brutus fought; but Brutus, who for ever errs in practical politics, succeeded only in striking down Caesar’s body; he who had been weak now rises as pure spirit, strong and terrible, and avenges himself upon the conspirators.71 This interpretation is subsequently quoted by Hudson in the fourth revised edition of his work,72 and to a certain extent, such a view has prevailed to date. In 1885 Richard G. Moulton provided his study on some of Shakespeare’s major plays with the subtitle A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism, and in accord with the spirit of the time, he indeed conceived of his analyses as verifiable assessments. In a first chapter on Julius Caesar, Moulton discusses the four major characters of the drama with respect to the antithesis of outer (practical) and inner life, which is for him the central idea underlying the play. In addition to the characters, Moulton is also concerned with the plot of the play and especially with what he calls “Passion and Movement as elements of dramatic effect,” to

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which his second chapter on the drama is dedicated. Here he concentrates mainly on “the justification of the conspirators’ cause in the minds of the audience” and delineates a movement that rises to peak at the center of the play and subsequently declines.73 Hence this study is simultaneously an early instance of what later was to be termed “reception theory.” At the end of the nineteenth century, or rather in the transition from it to the next, there were again two famous authors who repeated the harshest attacks on Shakespeare known ever since the Restoration: namely Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw. Tolstoy’s furious assault was originally intended only as a preface to Ernest Crosby’s brief study Shakespeare’s Attitude Toward the Working Classes, where the author attempted—with inappropriate means—to illustrate Shakespeare’s contempt for ordinary people.74 Tolstoy’s “preface” turned out, however, to be more than twice as long as Crosby’s investigation; and in it he holds that Shakespeare cannot even be regarded as an average author, that the stories in his sources are superior to what he made of them, that Shakespeare lacks the capacity of portraying characters, and that all his characters speak the same, unnatural language. The culprits who created Shakespeare’s undeserved fame are the Classicist and Romantic Germans, such as Lessing, Schlegel, Schiller, and Goethe, who endeavored to fill a gap with him in their own dramatic tradition.75 Attached to this book is a sympathetic letter by Shaw in which he voices his support for Tolstoy’s critical views and contends that he has striven hard to open English eyes to the emptiness of Shakespeare’s philosophy, to the superficiality and secondhandedness of his morality, to his weakness and incoherence as a thinker, to his snobbery, his vulgar prejudices, his ignorance, and his disqualifications of all sorts for the philosophic eminence acclaimed him.76 And in the preface to his Caesar and Cleopatra, entitled “Better than Shakespear?,” Shaw avers: Caesar was not in Shakespear, nor in the epoch, now fast waning, which he inaugurated. It cost Shakespear no pang to write Caesar down for the merely technical purpose of writing Brutus up. And what a Brutus! A perfect Girondin . . . 77 It is true that Shaw’s attacks in this preface aim mainly at what he regarded as a misguided reception of Shakespeare, and it is also true that he is writing Shakespeare’s Caesar drama down for the purpose of writing his own Caesar drama up. Nevertheless, Shaw thus brought one strain of three hundred years of Julius Caesar criticism full circle.

3. Critical Approaches to Julius Caesar in the Twentieth Century The twentieth century opened with the publication of A. C. Bradley’s monumental Shakespearean Tragedy, which in a way summarized the character-

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oriented studies of the previous century and brought them to a climax. Bradley actually transformed literary figures into human beings, for instance, in considering Hamlet’s mental constitution prior to the events presented in the play.78 Since the study concentrates on the four “mature” tragedies, Julius Caesar is mentioned only in passing: Bradley draws attention to the parallels between Julius Caesar and Hamlet, between Brutus and Hamlet, and to some exceptional features of the earlier play.79 As research in this century is characterized by an enormous diversification and a vast amount of material, my comments in this section will be considerably more selective than in the previous one, and I will also, by and large, only refer to academic analyses (and disregard statements, for example, by creative writers such as T. S. Eliot). However, in the first half of the twentieth century, the Bradleyan tradition of character analysis was primarily continued by literary amateurs, namely by psychoanalytic critics who were usually medical doctors and who published their articles in their own psychoanalytic outlets. Sigmund Freud himself had included brief remarks on Julius Caesar in his first major work,80 and his disciples Otto Rank and Ernest Jones expanded on these conceptions. Rank explained the relationship between Caesar and Brutus as a father-son relationship and thus conceived of the assassination as an Oedipal and parricidal motive.81 Jones later regarded Brutus, Cassius, and Antony as representing a son’s different attitudes toward a father: rebelliousness in the case of Brutus, alleged remorsefulness in the case of Cassius, and natural piety in the case of Antony. And whereas Caesar symbolizes the father, Rome is a symbol for the mother (“not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more”; 3.2.21–22).82 Many similar interpretations were to follow.83 Mainstream Shakespearean criticism nevertheless also continued to pay attention to character analyses, and an important instance of this from the early part of the century is Levin L. Schücking’s study Character Problems in Shakespeare’s Plays. Schücking quarrels to some extent with Georg Brandes, who had characterized the figure of Caesar as a braggart, a bombastic and pompous “person,” who makes the impression of an invalid and who thus subverts the poetical quality of the work.84 While Schücking refutes the reproach of Caesar’s being presented as a braggart by referring to the specific dramatic tradition of the play, he also attempts to demonstrate that the imperator is in fact a superior character and that “the vastness of his figure is tacitly or openly presupposed in all the happenings of the play.”85 Despite L. C. Knights’s famous attack on character studies in the Bradleyan tradition, which he furnished in his seminal article “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?,”86 investigations of this type continued in monographs such as those by Blanche Coles87 and John Palmer.88 J. I. M. Stewart in Character and Motive in Shakespeare elaborated particularly on

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the two different Caesars in the play: the private, weak Caesar and the public figure, or rather the idea of Caesar.89 A notable landmark was the publication of M. W. MacCallum’s Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and their Background in 1910. MacCallum treated the Roman plays as a separate group and discussed many aspects that are of special interest for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus: characterization (again), the relation to Plutarch and to other historiographic sources and other plays on Julius Caesar, and the creation of a distinct Roman world. Addressing the inevitable question of the hero and the title of the piece, MacCallum refers to Dowden’s findings and concludes: Not only then is Julius Caesar the right name for the play, in so far as his imperialist idea dominates the whole, but a very subtle interpretation of his character is given when, as this implies, he is viewed as the exponent of Imperialism. None the less Brutus is the leading personage, if we grant precedence in accordance with the interest aroused.90 Various other studies on Shakespeare’s indebtedness to his sources or possible sources followed. In the same year in which MacCallum published his book, Harry Morgan Ayres dealt with “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the Light of Some Other Versions,”91 and soon afterward Alexander Boecker dedicated a monograph to A Probable Italian Source of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” 92 This field of research was later continued especially by T. W. Baldwin in his massive William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, who endeavored primarily to shed light on Shakespeare’s formal education.93 A somewhat new orientation in Shakespearean criticism can be observed about 1930, when Harley Granville-Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare were published and G. Wilson Knight produced his works The Wheel of Fire and The Imperial Theme, thus subjecting Shakespearean scholarship to the conceptions of New Criticism. Although Granville-Barker’s prefaces were written mainly from the view of a producer and actor, they display considerable scholarly qualities and consequently had quite an impact on academic research. Granville-Barker posits that Shakespeare, when composing Julius Caesar, was searching for a new sort of hero and that Brutus is a precursor of Hamlet: From no other play, probably, does [ . . . Shakespeare] learn so much in the writing. Collaborating with Plutarch he can be interpreter and creator too. He finds what is to him a new world of men, which he tests for dramatic worth by setting it on this stage of his. Julius Caesar is an occasion to which he rises, his greatest so far; it is a point of advance, from which he never falls back.

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Whereas Granville-Barker very much appreciates the figure of Brutus, he has his doubts about Shakespeare’s depiction of Caesar: He never gets to grips with Caesar himself; whether from shrewd judgment that he could not maneuver such greatness in the space he had to spare, or, as looks more likely, from a sort of superstitious respect for it. In which case—well, idols, as we know, are apt to be wooden. In the same vein, Granville-Barker contends: “Let us admit that, even while he [Caesar] lives and speaks, it is more shadow than substance. Is it too harsh a comment that Caesar is in the play merely to be assassinated?”94 By contrast, the adherents of New Criticism focused on aspects of the plays that were of little relevance for the theater: on the imagery and the linguistic organization of the texts which had to be explored in terms of irony, ambivalences, and paradoxes. It is from this angle of approach that Knights, in his previously mentioned article, attacks character analyses because he regards the plays as “dramatic poems,”95 where characters are of no interest whatsoever. Similarly, G. Wilson Knight conceives of characters merely as an expression of a poetic vision.96 In his two volumes of essays, Knight presented a total of three articles on Julius Caesar. In the first one, “Brutus and Macbeth,” he emphasizes, as so many critics had done before him, the similarities between the two protagonists, here, however, in respect of the imagery, the metaphoric expressions, and the poetic symbolism.97 The second piece, “The Torch of Life,” is an example of imagery analysis at its best. Knight scrutinizes the various clusters of images and demonstrates, for instance, how on the level of body references (references to countenance, eyes, ears) life forces (such as eating, drinking, sleeping) are opposed to disorder forces such as disease, infirmity, and weakness (almost everyone in the play—including the state itself—is ill, and there is the recurrent idea of sleeplessness). Moreover, Knight analyzes the opposition of a weak, ailing body and a mighty spirit, which is especially reflected in the figure of Caesar, but again echoes the situation of Rome as such. And just as Caesar’s spirit is severed from his physical body, the spirit of Rome is severed from its body politic by the disorder of insurrection. Finally, Knight claims that the text “is a play of love and fire,” the “love-theme” being, in the last instance, “one with the fire-theme”: “Love conquers the disintegration and disorder of the central acts. . . . All the persons are ‘lovers’, with a soft eroticism not quite ‘passion’, but powerful, itself fiery.”98 This conception—and the demonstration that Julius Caesar is not all that sparse a play in terms of imagery—is extended in Knight’s third essay on the drama, “The Eroticism of Julius Caesar,” where he again shows how all the relationships in the play are governed by “love.” (He thus strongly

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implies—but refrains from explicitly stating—the prevailing homoerotic atmosphere in Shakespeare’s Rome.) It is only Brutus who sacrifices “love” for “honour” and hence desecrates “love,” but in the end the life-force of “love” heals all wounds.99 In her famous book Shakespeare’s Imagery, Caroline Spurgeon had not much to add to the analysis of similes in Julius Caesar,100 nor had Wolfgang Clemen, who mentions the play only in passing.101 At about the same stage, other scholars increasingly addressed political aspects of Shakespeare’s dramas which surface primarily in the histories and the Roman plays. Mark Hunter turned against the traditional idealization of Brutus and questioned, moreover, the central position which critics usually had conceded him in the play.102 James Emerson Phillips, on the other hand, emphasized—as E. M. W. Tillyard subsequently was to do with regard to the histories—Shakespeare’s adherence to orthodox political doctrines of his time. Recurring to earlier studies such as MacCallum’s, Phillips asserts that “the central political thesis in Julius Caesar is the practical and theoretical necessity for monarchy.” Consequently, he contends that “Shakespeare makes it clear that such autocracy [as Caesar’s] was a blessing to the state” and that Caesar was regarded, in orthodox Tudor terms, as “the divinely appointed lieutenant of God on earth.”103 To a certain extent, John Dover Wilson, too, refers to political conceptions of the Renaissance but comes to the very opposite conclusion. According to him, the play’s theme “is the single one, Liberty versus Tyranny,” and Caesar is a “Roman Tamburlaine of illimitable ambition and ruthless irresistible genius; a monstrous tyrant who destroyed his country and ruined ‘the mightiest and most flourishing commonwealth that the world will ever see.’”104 Political aspects of Julius Caesar are also highlighted in Palmer’s study mentioned earlier, and they become a focal point in Brents Stirling’s investigation The Populace in Shakespeare. Not surprisingly, studies dedicated to political issues often pay particular attention to the depiction of “the common people” in Julius Caesar, and this aspect is, of course, also of major interest for Marxist criticism. We have come across an early example of such an approach in Crosby’s brief study Shakespeare’s Attitude Toward the Working Classes. Subsequent Marxist works agree that Shakespeare often presents the populace in an unfavorable light, but defend him by claiming that in Shakespeare’s age the middle classes were the revolutionary force, whereas “the people” rather tended to be reactionary.105 Stirling, who discusses such studies, also concedes that Shakespeare depicts the plebeians merely as a mob. On the other hand, he clearly conceives of Antony as a demagogue and a manipulator and more or less excuses Shakespeare’s portrait of the citizens with reference to the playwright’s

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sources and to dramatic reasons: showing, in the Forum scene, a populace swayed first one way and then the other, is simply more effective in theatrical terms.106 H. B. Charlton in his Shakespearian Tragedy, finally, treats Julius Caesar as an historical account rather than a piece of literature. For Charlton, in Julius Caesar Shakespeare “had found a way of giving dramatic validity to the political material of chronicle-history without constraining it to the patterns of either tragedy or comedy.”107 After the middle of the century, all these strands of research continued and new ones were introduced.108 Thus in the wake of a growing orientation to structuralism, the construction of the play became a central issue, and in 1958 Adrien Bonjour presented his slim study The Structure of “Julius Caesar.” Bonjour claims that Shakespeare condensed the tragedies of two characters into a single one and thus produced a “drama of divided sympathies.” In general, Bonjour places strong emphasis on the ambivalence of the play: In short it is a drama with opposing elements so mixed in it that its antithetical theme and its antithetical motives form its very texture. The balance is highly structural, and the inner structure is so highly balanced that it reaches in its very ambivalence a grand simplicity. And such simplicity has—to transpose a Huxleyan phrase—the rigor, and the beauty, of a syllogism carved in porphyry. Bonjour then extends his conception of “structure” to the “structural role of motives” and to “structural imagery” and again stresses the antithetical and ambivalent nature of these elements.109 To some degree, such a focus on “structure” and especially on the ambivalent responses the play evokes also governs the study by Schanzer, whom I have quoted above and whose classification of the drama as a “problem play” is actually based on such divided responses. On the other hand, Schanzer is much concerned with the question of how Shakespeare derived his character portraits from his sources.110 In his book Shakespeare: The Roman Plays, Derek Traversi applies quite a different approach in that he treats the drama scene by scene and sometimes line by line. Nevertheless, he also partially concentrates on the structure of the play and conceives of Caesar and Brutus as being depicted in their ambiguity.111 An example of a later and shorter contribution to this line of research is John W. Velz’s essay “Undular Structure in Julius Caesar.”112 In this second half of the century, and in particular from the 1960s onward, the Shakespeare industry began to flourish, pouring a huge mass of publications onto the market. As regards the relation of Julius Caesar to Shakespeare’s sources, I have already mentioned J. A. K. Thomson’s hypothesis that Plutarch—through the intermediary of Julius Caesar—shaped

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Shakespeare’s conception of tragedy as a whole. Thomson’s study was soon followed by Virgil K. Whitaker’s Shakespeare’s Use of Learning,113 and somewhat later, Kenneth Muir published his book Shakespeare’s Sources.114 Subsequent studies in this field elaborated on Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Plutarch and drew attention to previously neglected classical texts such as Seneca’s De Clementia,115 Virgil’s Aeneid,116 and Plato’s Republic.117 Robert S. Miola, finally, with particular regard to Julius Caesar,118 broadened the conception of “source” and “influence” to include “deep source, resource, influence, confluence, tradition, heritage, origin, antecedent, precursor, background, milieu, subtext, context, intertext, affinity, and analogue.”119 Related to approaches of this type are those investigations that concentrate on the interpretations of Roman history or of Caesar in the Elizabethan age. An important contribution to these studies in the MacCallum tradition was T. J. B. Spencer’s “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,”120 and another seminal article was published by J. Leeds Barroll.121 J. L. Simmons presented a book-length study in this line of research with his Shakespeare’s Pagan World, where he emphasizes the Romanness of the plays. In contrast to the protagonists of the “mature” tragedies, Simmons maintains, the Roman heroes have no access to a metaphysical world but are restricted to the Earthly City Rome, which thus becomes a kind of protagonist of the plays. This “pagan world” is, however, rendered by Shakespeare in a Christian perspective and has to be viewed in such terms.122 Subsequently, monographs with a similar focus on a “distinct” Roman world were produced by Paul A. Cantor, Michael Platt, Robert S. Miola, Vivian Thomas, Charles Wells, and Geoffrey Miles. Cantor’s emphasis is on the distinction between Shakespeare’s depiction of the Roman Republic in Coriolanus and the empire in Antony and Cleopatra, whereas the discussion of Julius Caesar is integrated into the chapters on these two tragedies.123 Platt displays a similar interest when he describes the rise and fall of the Republic through Shakespeare’s Roman works (starting with Lucrece).124 Miola extends the canon of the Roman works by including Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline and applies an “organic view” in order to show how all these texts are interrelated through similar Roman themes, values (such as piety, constancy, honor), images, ideas, and gestures.125 Thomas examines the nature of the Roman worlds with specific reference to the narrative sources.126 Wells concentrates, as the title of his study indicates, in particular on Roman values,127 and finally Miles singles out the philosophical ideal of Stoicism, which he illustrates especially in the character of Brutus.128 When in his “Antike Roman” Clifford Ronan not only focuses on the double meaning of the word “antike” and on “power symbology,” but scrutinizes dozens of other Roman plays written in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,129 his study also resembles those on Shakespeare’s

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sources, in this case, however, with a stress not on antique and Renaissance historiographers, but on other dramatized versions of Roman history. Some of these works are simultaneously examples of criticism which explores the political aspects of Julius Caesar or situates the drama in the context of Elizabethan political conceptions. In the latter half of the twentieth century, this research tradition was initially continued in an article like Irving Ribner’s “Political Issues in Julius Caesar,”130 but afterward these themes were elaborated on in various of the monographs listed above. For if, as both Simmons and Miola claim, the true protagonist of Julius Caesar is Rome,131 then it is clear that the play is regarded as profoundly political in spite of all the private issues that may be involved. Political aspects are even more foregrounded in works such as H. M. Richmond’s Shakespeare’s Political Plays132 and Alexander Leggatt’s Shakespeare’s Political Drama. Leggatt contends that the play gives little sense of the republican constitution and that power is a function of individuals, not offices.133 Hence, much depends on the individual characters. Subsequently, political aspects were to gain particular importance in the wake of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. Image and language studies during this period were resumed, for instance, by R. A. Foakes who postulated, however, that Shakespeare’s plays should no longer be treated as “dramatic poems,” but that even in this line of research one has to take into account their nature as plays.134 In 1961, Maurice Charney recurred to this suggestion in his book Shakespeare’s Roman Plays. Charney hence discusses both verbal images and the nonverbal, “presentational” imagery of the play and lists the storm and its portents, blood and fire, as the chief image themes of the text. For Charney, the “central issue about the meaning of Julius Caesar is raised most forcefully and vividly by the imagery of blood.”135 Charney then extends his study to the aspect of “style” in general, and this type of interest in style or “dramatic language” surfaces in numerous subsequent studies. Monographs that comment on these issues in Julius Caesar include John Russell Brown’s Shakespeare’s Dramatic Style;136 important articles are John W. Velz’s “Orator and Imperator in Julius Caesar” and especially “‘The Power of Speech’” by Gayle Greene, who points out that in “the Rome of Julius Caesar, language is power and characters rise or fall on the basis of their ability to wield words.” In Greene’s view, “rhetoric . . . is integral to characterization, culture, and to the central political and epistemological concerns.”137 As this citation indicates, some of these works pay particular attention to the rhetoric of the play, and here of course, more often than not, Antony’s Forum speech becomes central. In recent investigations, the emphasis is repeatedly on the demagogical orator who not only indoctrinates his

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audience by verbal means, but who makes Caesar’s body speak with a persuasion the living autocrat had no command of.138 In the area of character studies in the second half of the century, Gordon Ross Smith’s article “Brutus, Virtue, and Will”139 contributed much to the widespread disenchantment with the figure at this stage: using psychoanalytic methods, Smith diagnosed Brutus as a neurotic. Whereas previously psychoanalytic criticism and “mainstream” Shakespearean scholarship had formed more or less two separate camps, there has been a change since the middle of the century. From about the 1960s onward, psychoanalytic concepts have invaded almost all currently relevant theories in connection with Shakespeare and Julius Caesar. At about the same time, more and more Shakespeareans, weary of the exhaustive image studies and of treating Shakespeare’s plays as “expanded metaphor[s],”140 began to look for new approaches, and some of them felt attracted to psychoanalytic conceptions. Thus while some character studies were still published along the traditional Bradleyan lines,141 this field was now dominated by psychoanalytic analyses, applied, however, in most instances, by Shakespearean scholars.142 Of course, Shakespearean criticism in general of the last three decades has been increasingly shaped by various critical approaches. As is the case with psychoanalysis, many of the theories such as Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, and post-colonialism originated in non-literary fields of exploration but were then adopted by Shakespearean experts. And as a rule, such critical approaches were explicitly thematized and inscribed into the texts. On the other hand, Richard Wilson claims that Julius Caesar “had become one of the most quoted texts in debates about critical theory” “because it was itself so virtually theorised.”143 Although this type of theorization marked a change of paradigm in Shakespearean scholarship and undoubtedly represents the most interesting movement in current research (which might be receding by now), I will confine myself here to very few comments. For one thing, this movement is—in historical perspective—but a brief phase. Moreover, some of the contributions in this anthology reflect the latest stage in these debates. As far as Julius Caesar is concerned, feminist readings of the play are somewhat related to psychoanalytic stances. It is obvious that this drama places severe limitations on a feminist or gender approach, and therefore Coppélia Kahn in her study Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women concentrates on the construction of masculinity instead of on femininity in the play. And it is to a certain degree by recurrence to psychoanalytic conceptions that she manages to foreground an opposition between the masculine and the feminine, between the “mettle” of men and the “melting spirits” of women, and to demonstrate how in certain instances both Caesar and Brutus are feminized.144 Earlier on, Gail Kern Paster had inter-

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preted the image of blood in Julius Caesar as a trope of gender and associated the open, bleeding body of Caesar’s corpse with feminine blood.145 In the latter part of the century, Marxism has undergone a transformation from the conventional Marxist studies mentioned earlier to “new” or “post”-Marxist approaches, and they tend to lead or to partially overlap with what has been termed “new economic criticism.”146 Recent studies on Julius Caesar, however, such as those by Paul N. Siegel or Victor Kiernan, still adhere to traditional Marxist conceptions. Thus Siegel, in line with older interpretations, pays considerable attention to the plebeians and claims that Shakespeare portrays them—in contrast to “upper-class characters”— as common people of his own age.147 Kiernan, too, attempts to highlight parallels between Shakespeare’s Rome and Shakespeare’s England, for instance in illustrating that Englishmen of that age learned to band together against the government just as the conspirators did against Caesar’s rule.148 The latest and more elaborated trends in Marxist approaches are to be found in the studies of some Cultural Materialists. Deconstructive conceptions pervade some of the works referred to above, and as indicated in connection with psychoanalysis, several of these current approaches often interlock, even in the case of apparently opposite approaches such as Marxism and deconstruction. A rather clear example of a deconstructive stance is Richard Burt’s article “‘A Dangerous Rome,’” in which he tries to show that the play demonstrates the power of fiction over fact and that what is presented in the text is but a series of interpretations.149 Recurring to Barbara Freedman’s study Staging the Gaze,150 Richard Wilson suggests that Brutus’s remark “the eye sees not itself/But by reflection” (1.2.52–53) may be regarded as an anticipation of Derrida’s famous dictum “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”151 Another current methodology that should be mentioned at least in passing is semiotics, a favorite of Italian or Italy-based scholars. Applying this approach, which is closely related to enduring structuralist conceptions, Alessandro Serpieri holds that Julius Caesar reflects “the great structural and epistemological crisis that occurred between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a crisis that can be summarized as the conflict between a symbolic model of the world (a classical-medieval-Renaissance heritage) and a syntagmatic model of the world, inaugurating the relativism of the modern age.” Whereas Caesar and Antony represent the old order, Brutus and Cassius stand for the new one. Shakespeare’s drama then “encodes the crumbling of the symbolic model, with its centripetal ideology and its stabilizing rhetoric, but rarely permits a positive perception of the syntagmatic model that erodes it through its centrifugal ideology and its destabilizing rhetoric.”152 Of particular importance among the current critical approaches are then, of course, American New Historicism and its British counterpart, Cultural

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Materialism. These attempts to radically contextualize Shakespeare’s works and to focus, in line with Michel Foucault, on the power structure in the texts and in the Elizabethan-Jacobean society—conceptions which were primarily established by Stephen Greenblatt’s famous book Renaissance SelfFashioning153—are echoed by several scholars with special regard to Julius Caesar. Thus Jonathan Goldberg claims that Julius Caesar reflects the style of King James I and “James’s sense of himself as royal actor,” and draws parallels between the language of power in Julius Caesar and the language of power during James’s rule.154 Mark Rose, too, closely reads the play in its contemporary political and social context and endeavors to demonstrate how it epitomizes a conflict of Protestant and Catholic conceptions during that age.155 In the same vein, Wayne A. Rebhorn constructs analogies—or suggests that Shakespeare has consciously constructed analogies—between the conspirators and the oppositional forces during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.156 On the other side of the Atlantic, Catherine Belsey also situates Julius Caesar in the context of political discussions of early modern times and contends that the play confronts two different orders of sovereignty without, however, giving preference to one of them.157 Another influential work in this line of research is John Drakakis’s essay “‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the Politics of Theatrical Representation.” Against the background of the so-called subversion and containment debate, Drakakis elucidates the subversive potential of the Elizabethan theater and maintains that the play— with its constant focus on theatrical representation—“is not so much a celebration of theatre as an unmasking of the politics of representation per se” and that “Julius Caesar enacts the precarious position of the Globe itself.”158 In addition, Alan Sinfield furnished what he called an “anti-reading” and “creative vandalism” of the play. In an effort “to check the tendency of Julius Caesar to add Shakespearean authority to reactionary discourses,” he presents a version in which all the minor characters (the tribunes, the plebeians, the women, the two poets) move from the margin to the center. For Sinfield, the play and its reception is “a theatre of [cultural and social] war.”159 Finally, mention should be made of Richard Wilson’s much-quoted article “‘Is this a Holiday?’: Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival.” Wilson follows the conceptions and methods of the New Historicists, but puts, as the title indicates, much more emphasis on the aspect of carnival in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin. Thus he shows how the play (and especially its first scene) represents popular liberating tendencies in Shakespeare’s own age, which then, however, are—in contradistinction to Bakhtin’s view of the subversive force of carnival—silenced or contained by the ruling classes.160

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Of course, there are other important critical approaches such as dialogism and post-colonialism, which, however, did not have a real impact on the interpretation of Julius Caesar. And there is many a tradition-oriented scholar who abhors such critical approaches and regards them as an abuse of Shakespeare for the critics’ very own, egocentric ends.161 Nevertheless, theories like these—and the so-called “appropriation” of Shakespeare162— currently dominate the field of research on Shakespeare and Julius Caesar, and they have undoubtedly widened our conceptions, unearthed many aspects which formerly were undiscovered, and thus contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the text. Moreover, such an “appropriation” of Shakespeare has continuously taken place over the centuries,163 especially in the theater.

4. Julius Caesar in Performance As John Ripley’s “Julius Caesar” on Stage describes the most interesting productions of the work in England and America up to the early 1970s, and since all important recent editions contain a section on the performance of the play,164 I will comment only briefly here and present a very selective survey of Julius Caesar stage performances. Despite the distinct features of theatricality mentioned earlier within the text, the drama displays obvious dramatic deficiencies. A major problem is the climax of the play, which occurs in the third act, so that acts 4 and 5 appear rather anti-climactic. Time and again, therefore, producers have cut the last two acts considerably and thus distorted the precarious balance even more. In addition, the play has an almost all-male cast. In Shakespeare’s own time, this may have been an advantage, but companies in subsequent epochs regarded this rather as a drawback. It is not only that the piece is therefore lacking in female interest; many theater companies refrained from mounting the drama also because they did not know how to employ their actresses (or they had to stage a play with an all-female cast simultaneously). Another aspect that deterred companies or actors is the fact that there are four major roles—without, however, a dominating one as in Hamlet or Lear. Consequently, perhaps, famous actors like David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Henry Irving, and Laurence Olivier never acted in the play; and a critic has rightly asked: “[W]hen did you last hear of an actor noted for his Brutus? It is not a part I have known actors to want to play twice.”165 With the exception of Orson Welles’s rendition in New York in 1937, the twentieth century has also witnessed no spectacular, historic productions to compare with Harley Granville-Barker’s Twelfth Night (1912), Barry

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Jackson’s Hamlet (1925), John Barton and Peter Hall’s The Wars of the Roses (1963), or Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970). Even Jan Kott refrained from rendering the play—in contrast to Antony and Cleopatra—as a contemporary reading. Nevertheless, as indicated earlier, Julius Caesar was obviously a fairly popular play on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, but we still do not know (and will perhaps never know) in how far the actors attempted to create a specific “Roman” atmosphere by using Roman costumes and accessories and whether Richard Burbage played a leading role in the drama. The play’s popularity seems to have continued up to the closing of the theaters. During the Restoration period, Julius Caesar was apparently staged regularly both at court and in the London theaters. Although we have little information about the scenic realization of the productions, especially of the early years, cast lists show that some of the most well-known actors of the time played the major roles. In a production first mounted at the Theatre Royal about 1671, Charles Hart acted Brutus; Michael Mohun, Cassius; and Edward Kynaston, Antony. From 1684 onward, Thomas Betterton was featured as Brutus for a period of over twenty years until 1707, and he, in fact, established the character as the protagonist of the play—and as the hero of liberation. Such a conception of Brutus prevailed in most renditions in the first half of the eighteenth century. Betterton was initially succeeded by Barton Booth, and then by James Quin; and according to Ripley, until the last appearance of Quin as Brutus in 1751, there were only five years without at least one Julius Caesar revival.166 It is clear that the Augustan Age had a particular interest in representations of its cultural model, and at the same time audiences seem to have felt parallels between the English struggle against absolutism and Brutus’s fight against Caesar’s autocracy. Whereas Brutus’s part was therefore often enhanced (e.g., by emphasizing his dignity and Stoicism), the role of Caesar was occasionally the subject of caricature. Conforming to the taste of the period, the performances reduced or eliminated the ambivalences of the characters, and the scenery was usually minimal. With the end of the Augustan Age, the popularity of the play decreased. In contrast to the one hundred and fifty London productions during the first five decades, between 1750 and 1780 there were only twenty-three, and from 1780 to 1810 none at all.167 Instead, the interest in the play and in Brutus as a liberating hero developed in revolutionary America, where this interpretation was again in accordance with the spirit of the time. But although Ripley quotes a contemporary American critic who characterized the play as “unrivalled in the dramatic world,” the country witnessed only

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six productions up to the turn of the century—much fewer than of Richard III or Romeo and Juliet. Most probably, this was due to the lack of a starring role, as indicated above.168 Julius Caesar was then revived in London’s Covent Garden in 1812 by John Philip Kemble, who continued to present the play until 1817. Kemble cut the text more intensively than previously was the case (by more than a quarter), and instead of concentrating on the text, he paid attention to specific theatrical elements: to the scenery (which, with its columns and arches, appeared “authentic”); to costumes (designed in line with antiquarian conceptions); to choreography (the actors were grouped according to the classical principles of Kemble’s friend Sir Joshua Reynolds); to music (except for one, all of Kemble’s entries were accompanied by music or noise); and a large number of extras (at Caesar’s first entry more than seventy actors crowded the stage) added to the visual impression. Whereas Brutus, played by Kemble himself, remained the sympathetic hero, Caesar (played by Daniel Egerton) was much upgraded in contrast to the eighteenth century; Charles Mayne Young appeared as Cassius, Kemble’s brother Charles as Antony, and his sister Sarah Siddons as Portia. This production was to have a considerable influence on subsequent ones. It was Young who acted Brutus in the next major rendition in 1819, with William Charles Macready as Cassius; similarly, Samuel Phelps first appeared as Cassius to Macready’s Brutus in 1838, before he himself was featured as Brutus at Sadler’s Wells in 1846. Thus it seems that here an actor had to qualify himself for playing Brutus by first playing Cassius, although both roles represent quite different character types. And all three actor-managers appeared in or produced Julius Caesar for a considerable span of time: Young for about two decades, both Macready and Phelps for almost three decades. All three attempted to render the characters in a more subtle way than had been the case with Kemble, and Macready in particular strove to put more life into the crowds. In addition, the murder scene was less stylized and ritualized and was staged as quite a bloody affair instead. All these efforts resulted in furnishing a more “realistic” picture of the events. The last of these notable productions was given with Phelps’s final performance as Brutus at Drury Lane in 1865 (“the last great English Brutus of the nineteenth century”);169 in the following years, interest in Julius Caesar obviously dwindled completely. Macready had not only toured the provinces, but America (1820–30) as well, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, some of the most remarkable versions were mounted on this continent. During the earlier decades, London influence, dating back to Kemble, had considerably shaped the scenic appearance of American Julius Caesar productions, despite the fact

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that some theaters lacked the means for the great spectacle. As in England, Brutus had figured as the grand republican hero, played by actors such as William Augustus Conway, Thomas Hamblin, Edward Loomis Davenport, and Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, although the latter preferred to play Antony. It was then Davenport who—already in his mid-fifties—was featured as Brutus (together with Lawrence Barrett as Cassius and Walter Montgomery as Antony) in a much-acclaimed landmark production at Niblo’s Garden in New York in 1870; and this was to initiate a period of twenty years during which “Julius Caesar enjoyed a degree of popular favour unmatched in its history,” with thousands of performances.170 The two most significant versions were Edwin Booth’s production in 1871 (with himself as Brutus, Barrett as Cassius, and Frank Bangs as Antony),171 then Henry C. Jarrett’s/Henry D. Palmer’s production in 1875, which was in fact a revival of the 1870 version and thus again presented Davenport as Brutus, Barrett as Cassius, and now Bangs as Antony. In Booth’s Julius Caesar, Brutus assumed more psychological complexity than had been previously the case, and yet, at the same time, because of the impressive co-actors, Brutus lost some of his former domination. The stagecraft owed much to the Kemble tradition, and like his precursor, Booth preferred majestic settings of the imperial rather than the republican era. By contrast, the 1875 revival presented Brutus in his classical dignity and was commercially even more successful: it was the first Julius Caesar production to run for over a hundred nights.172 During those years Londoners saw the tour of the company of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen which mounted Julius Caesar at Drury Lane in 1881. Since the play was given in German, the main emphasis was not on the spoken text, but on scenery, costumes (both of which appeared meticulously “authentic”), choreography, and acting which were of an exceptionally high standard. Particularly remarkable were the crowd scenes in which hundreds of extras crammed the stage, and in fact, the Forum scene functioned as the climax of the drama. This also meant that the focus shifted from Brutus to Antony, played by Ludwig Barnay, as the new hero of the piece.173 Whereas the Meiningen version was influenced by the “archeological” scenery of Charles Kean (who, however, had refrained from mounting Julius Caesar), they in turn had a major impact on Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s sensational production at Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1898. In fact, Tree’s Julius Caesar summarized the central developments of the nineteenth century and simultaneously opened the twentieth century. Here too, the Roman scenery and Roman costumes were as “realistic” as possible; here too, the crowd scenes were rendered with a specific impact; and here again, Antony, played by Tree himself, was the actual protagonist of the drama. In order to

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enhance this role, Tree rearranged the text, and the three highlights on the stage were Antony’s speech over Caesar’s body, Antony’s funeral oration, and Antony’s final victory: in each case, there was an impressive tableau with Antony at its center. In the twentieth century, the picture of Julius Caesar on stage becomes, naturally, much more complex and diversified, and one main reason is that London productions were now rivaled by those at Stratford’s Shakespeare Festivals. Frank Benson, who also had witnessed the tour of the Meiningen company and who first had staged a Julius Caesar in evening dress in 1890, mounted a version at the Festival in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1892, which he later revived and varied on many occasions and at various places up to 1933. Due to the rather restricted means of his touring group, he had to forfeit the bombastic settings and returned to comparatively simple scenery. On the whole, despite his admiration for the Meiningers, he tended rather to the Kemble tradition: Brutus was restored as a dignified Stoic, whereas Antony appeared as a noble young athlete. Benson’s successor at Stratford, William Bridges-Adams, was nicknamed “Unabridges-Adams,” and in 1919, he in fact presented more or less the full text for the first time since the Restoration (important revivals followed in subsequent years). Retaining the complete text resulted in the delivering of fast speeches and also in the absence of a “star” role. It was especially with the restitution of the proscription scene (which had not been played for centuries) that Antony lost his newly acquired hero status. Instead, in the 1934 production in particular, Caesar moved into the center of the tragedy. As was the case with Benson, Bridges-Adams abandoned the full archeological setting, but arches, columns, and steps created a Roman atmosphere. Meanwhile in London, Tree continued to revive his spectacular Julius Caesar up to 1913 with remarkable success (and his version was echoed in such productions as Stanley Bell’s in 1920 and Oscar Asche’s in 1932). Quite a contrast to Tree’s spectacle was Ben Greet’s version of the play at the Old Vic in 1915. Greet was no adherent of William Poel’s endeavors (which had begun in the late nineteenth century) to present Shakespeare’s plays under Elizabethan conditions on a more or less bare stage with Elizabethan costumes; nor did he follow Gordon Craig’s and Harley Granville-Barker’s conceptions of non-illusory, abstract settings with their various curtains. It was the poor condition of the theater—and the difficult situation during the First World War—which forced him to mount a fairly plain Julius Caesar on a fairly plain stage. In a 1916 revival, Robert Atkins figured as Cassius and subsequently returned to the Old Vic as stage director. In his 1921 production, his methods resembled those of Bridges-Adams: within a spare setting, an almost complete text was delivered with great swiftness. Whereas Atkins to some extent

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followed Poel, his successor Harcourt Williams sought advice from GranvilleBarker for his 1930 Julius Caesar. This production was also influenced by Barker’s “Preface” which had just been published. Williams more or less took over the stage from Atkins, presented again an almost full text, but paid much more attention to the psychological dimensions of the main characters: he himself acted Brutus, Donald Wolfit as Cassius, Brember Wills as Caesar, with John Gielgud as Antony. (In a revival two years later, Williams played Caesar, Ralph Richardson played Brutus, with Robert Speaight as Cassius, and Robert Harris as Antony.) Henry Cass’s version in 1935 was, for the time being, to complete this series of remarkable productions at the Old Vic. In 1939 the same director mounted a modern-dress Julius Caesar at the Embassy Theatre and subsequently at His Majesty’s in London. On a bare stage with some steps and platforms, Caesar appeared with a Franco cap, Brutus—during the fighting scenes—in a British naval uniform, and Antony in an SS uniform, whereas the crowd was clad in mackintoshes. With the premiere three months after Hilter’s invasion of Poland, Cass thus linked the play with urgent contemporary issues. This production was, of course, inspired by Orson Welles’s famous “Fascist” version at the Mercury Theatre in New York in 1937. The first twentieth-century Julius Caesar in America had been produced by Richard Mansfield in Chicago in 1902. Indebted to Tree’s historic rendition, Mansfield presented an impressive, majestic setting with hundreds of supers. He himself played a Hamlet-like Brutus who turned the tragedy rather into a melodrama. By contrast, Robert Bruce Mantell’s Brutus, first staged in New York in 1906, revived the tradition of Booth, and it was successfully repeated at various locations until the late 1920s. Among some other notable American performances in the second and third decades of the century, Ripley also refers to two colossal enterprises: the one was given in an amphitheater near Los Angeles in 1916, where five thousand actors crowded various stages, with three thousand soldiers engaged in the battle scenes. The other gigantic spectacle took place “at the Hollywood Bowl in 1926, using costumes and settings borrowed from the MGM film Ben-Hur. Caesar arrived for the Lupercal in Ben-Hur’s chariot, drawn by four white horses” on a stage “the size of a city block.”174 Welles’s historic Julius Caesar then, subtitled Death of a Dictator, rendered the play in a radically modern and topical manner. Caesar (Joseph Holland), here the central figure of the tragedy, wore a Mussolini-like military uniform; the Forum speech by Antony (George Colouris), an opportunist and hypocrite, recalled Nazi rallies; Cassius (Martin Gabel) was an ardent agitator; and Brutus, played by Welles himself, appeared as a lost philosopher and intellectual. Although the text was extremely shortened,

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the production nevertheless re-introduced the lynching of Cinna the Poet (Norman Lloyd), highlighting mob violence. The scenes were staged on a bare platform with three levels and a blood-red brick-wall behind them. Their arrangement followed rather cinematic principles, which were much enforced by menacing light (“Nuremberg lighting”) and sound effects.175 Welles’s enterprise did not encourage other American directors to mount the play, but seemed to deter them, as they were not “willing to challenge Welles on his own ground.”176 The first major rendition after Welles’s was a version for a high-school tour in 1949, and for the 1950s Ripley mentions only six productions of note. At New York’s Arena Theatre in 1950, Julius Caesar was staged in-the-round, so that the audience could participate in the action. In a similar fashion, at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario (1955), in a version of particular visual excellence, the audience was seated on three sides of a platform in imitation of Elizabethan conventions. In the same year, Julius Caesar opened the new theater at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, and it was again on stage in Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival in 1959. The 1960s witnessed even fewer significant performances. One was certainly Douglas Campbell’s Julius Caesar produced in Stratford, Ontario, in 1965, with an expressly traditional setting. In sharp contrast, Edward Payson Call’s Julius Caesar in Minneapolis in 1969 preferred a radical modernization. Set in an unnamed Latin American country, it included contemporary military uniforms and guns, but also a Caesar as an Aztec-like sun-god. Thus although it did not concentrate on a particular period, the version nevertheless emphasized parallels between Caesar and modern dictators. The years from 1969 to 2000 are covered in more detail by Michael Greenwald’s chapter 19 of this volume. Greenwald has scrutinized some ninety professional productions of this era, most of them mounted at the various Shakespeare festivals, and he demonstrates that a setting such as Call’s has become rather the rule than the exception. In fact, some critics even regarded it as a risk to render Julius Caesar in a Roman context. In addition to numerous Latin American settings (perhaps the most interesting one of which was given at the 1986 Florida Shakespeare Festival),177 there were African, corporate American, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern ones. Simultaneously, numerous cross-gender versions were produced, in which women played the male roles and vice versa. Among the most important productions of this stage is Vanessa and Corin Redgrave’s Julius Caesar of 1996, which was linked with Antony and Cleopatra. In post-war Britain, the Julius Caesar directed by Michael Langham and Antony Quayle at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1950 again used traditional Roman togas and tunics, and here the main interest centered on Cassius. This was due in part to John Gielgud’s excellent performance; for

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the first time this conspirator was not overshadowed by Brutus (Harry Andrews). Instead, Cassius was portrayed as a complex figure who combined nobility, energy, and intellectual powers, but was forced to succumb to Brutus’s stubborn idealism. This newly discovered importance of Cassius re-appeared at the Old Vic in 1953, where an appealing Cassius acted alongside an incompetent Brutus, an opportunistic Antony, and a rather dull Caesar. Whereas the first acts were dominated by the crowds, the fifth act offered mainly battle scenes. Two years later, in 1955, the same venue witnessed a Julius Caesar in which, by contrast, the military skirmishes took place off-stage, and Cassius was restored to his conventional role. The most notable aspect of Glen Byam Shaw’s Julius Caesar at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1957 was that the titular hero (as was the case earlier with Bridges-Adams’s 1934 production and Welles’s and Cass’s “Fascist” versions) became the pivotal figure of the drama, whether alive or dead.178 At the opening of the play, a huge statue of the imperator could be seen standing in the background; then a majestic world-ruler, clad in a goldembroidered toga, governed the stage; and after his assassination, his presence was constantly enforced symbolically in the form of a blazing northern star. In a similar way, Caesar was the central character in John Blatchley’s production in 1963, in John Barton’s in 1968, and in John Schlesinger’s Julius Caesar at London’s National Theatre in 1977. The crucial event in Shakespearean stage history in the twentieth century was the formation of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the beginning of the 1960s; since then it has dominated most of the productions of Shakespeare’s plays. While there were other innovative Caesars as well, such as Michael Croft’s modern-dress version (1960), Minos Volanakis’s “politicometaphysical” Caesar (1962) and Jonathan Miller’s “dream” Caesar (1972),179 the RSC in particular became a laboratory for theatrical experiments. Its eminent directors—Peter Hall, John Barton, Peter Brook, Clifford Williams, and others—studied Artaud’s “Cruel Theater,” Brecht’s “Epic Theater,” and Jan Kott’s re-readings of Shakespeare in terms of Kafka, Beckett, and Camus and adopted these conceptions for the Shakespearean stage. Julius Caesar was to have its due share of this new approach in the above-mentioned productions by Blatchley and Barton, and subsequently in versions by Trevor Nunn (1972), Ron Daniels (1983), Terry Hands (1987), Steven Pimlott (1991), David Thacker (1993), Peter Hall (1995), and his son Edward Hall (2001). This development is discussed by Tom Matheson in chapter 18. Matheson shows how these directors explore and experiment with the full range of opportunities the play has to offer. Settings vary from a colossal construction (Peter Hall) to a bare stage (Hands), costumes range from traditional

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Roman ones (Daniels) to modern dress (Thacker; or occasionally a mixture of both: Blatchley); and the emphasis may be either on personal, private aspects (Hands) or on political ones, sometimes, but rarely, evoking parallels to the collapse of the Communist systems in Eastern Europe (Thacker). These tendencies continue unabatedly.

5. Julius Caesar in Film, on Television, and in Other Media Film versions of Shakespeare’s plays were remarkably successful, and, of course, attracted a much larger audience than theater productions—with Julius Caesar forming a vital part of this history. In the beginning, however, Shakespeare on film was often tantamount to recording a scene, or a section of a scene, of a theater performance. Brief sequences from Beerbohm Tree’s King John in 1899 obviously represent the very first instance. The first film in connection with Julius Caesar did not show a scene from the play; instead, the short piece by the film pioneer Georges Méliès entitled Shakespeare écrivant “La mort de Jules César” (France, 1907) depicted the dramatist inspiring himself to compose the tragedy by stabbing a loaf of bread. In the following year, however, a thirteen-minute reel was produced in the United States that presented various sequences regarded as highlights in the drama: the assassination, the Forum orations, the quarrel, and the battle. Yet among the total of fifteen scenes, there were again two Shakespeare had refrained from furnishing: Antony’s offering the crown to Caesar and Brutus’s funeral pyre at the end. The subsequent years witnessed inter alia an eight-minute Bruto (Italy, 1910) with some of the central events; a brief recording of Benson’s production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford (U.K., 1911); and a sound version of the quarrel scene (U.S., 1913). In 1914, Enrico Guazzoni directed a Giulio Cesare which “was reported as being eighteen months in production and as having a cast of 20,000.”180 But this spectacular sixty-minute venture again had a limited relation to Shakespeare’s play: it more or less delineated Caesar’s whole life and was based on Shakespeare only as regards the conspiracy, the assassination, and the events that immediately follow. Almost a quarter of a century elapsed before Julius Caesar was revived for the screen, this time for the television screen. In 1938, the BBC released a Julius Caesar, directed and produced by Dallas Bower, which was profoundly influenced by Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre production of the previous year.181 Caesar (Ernest Milton) and the conspirators wore Italian— or perhaps Spanish—military uniforms, and the crowds walked around in civilian dress. Portia was seen smoking cigarettes, and the quarrel scene took place in a café. The battles were fought with planes, tanks, machine guns,

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and shells; in the assassination scene, however, the conspirators used oldfashioned daggers. The first U.S. television version (CBS), broadcast in 1949, was considerably shorter than the British film (60 minutes compared to 141), but it applied similar strategies reminiscent of Welles’s production. Director Paul Nickell also clad his actors in military uniforms (and in business suits of the era) and had them greeted with Fascist salutes. Notably, Charlton Heston, who was soon to become one of the major Shakespearean screen actors, played Cinna. In the following year, there was a rather amateur, student rendition of Julius Caesar in the United States. Although the director David Bradley had only a tiny budget of $15,000, he used a Roman setting and had his friend Heston feature as Antony, together with himself as Brutus.182 In 1953, however, MGM released its famous film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Through John Houseman, a long-time collaborator of Orson Welles and the producer of this movie, the work was linked with the Mercury Theatre project, but it was altogether different from the Welles production. Not as spectacular as Cecil B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments a few years later (1956), and shot in black and white (in order to evoke parallels with modern dictators on newsreels),183 it nevertheless had a considerable budget ($2,000,000). It was crowded with former leading or rising actors (Louis Calhern as Caesar, James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, Marlon Brando as Antony, and Deborah Kerr as Portia); and it presented an impressive Roman setting, not only of the Capitol and the Forum, but of the city’s streets, alleys, and taverns. The busts which appeared quite frequently, strikingly resembled the actors. The text was left relatively uncut and spoken in blank verse. Despite some genuinely cinematic effects (for example, Antony’s malicious smile into the camera after his oration), this Julius Caesar nevertheless displayed a strong indebtedness to theater performances. In 1959 the BBC produced a Julius Caesar directed by Stuart Burge, and other versions by the same company were to follow (such as the Julius Caesar as part of the Roman cycle The Spread of the Eagle in 1963);184 but the next really notable film was the one released in 1970, once more directed by Burge. It was the first Technicolor Julius Caesar, and again fairly prominent actors had been attracted for the roles: Gielgud now as Caesar, Jason Robards as Brutus, Richard Johnson as Cassius, Charlton Heston as Antony, and Diana Rigg as Portia. Although much criticized, the film certainly has its highlights: in the Forum scene, where Heston is much more the seducer and demagogue than Brando was; in the proscription scene, where the triumvirs enjoy a Roman bath attended by slaves while discussing the death lists; and in the clearly developed parallels between the Brutus/Cassius relationship and the Antony/Octavius (played by Richard Chamberlain)

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relationship before the battle, contrasting true friendship with incipient rivalry. Julius Caesar was then among the first dramas in the BBC’s mammoth project of producing all of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays over a six-year period, perhaps not least because this series was also aimed at a classroom audience. Released in 1979, this three-hour production, directed by Herbert Wise, presented virtually the complete text (only about ten odd lines were omitted), and in general it strove to retain as much of Shakespeare as possible, the ambivalences of the characters (Richard Pasco was featured as Brutus, Charles Gray as Caesar, David Collings as Cassius, and Keith Michell as Antony), as well as the ambivalence of the play as a whole. Using a stagelike Roman setting, this scholarly endeavor (the literary consultant was John Wilders) was much more linked to recorded theater than to cinematic Shakespeare, so that, in a way, it brought the history of Shakespeare in this medium full circle. Or, to assess this work in a more favorable way: it perhaps established a genre of its own, a television Shakespeare as distinct both from a Shakespeare on the stage and a Shakespeare in the cinema. In subsequent years, there were no new attempts to revive Julius Caesar in this medium. In contrast to plays such as Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, the career of Julius Caesar in music is not very impressive. Of course, several pieces were written to introduce or to accompany a particular theater production, such as Ignaz Fränzl’s composition for a performance in Mannheim (1785) or, in the last century, Marc Blitzstein’s trumpet, horn, percussion, and Hammond organ score for Welles’s Julius Caesar, music intended to evoke the marches of Nazi soldiers. It also goes without saying that virtually all of the films mentioned above contain music, such as Mankiewicz’s movie with accompaniment by Miklos Rozsa. There are in addition overtures produced for the concert hall, for instance Robert Schumann’s eightminute overture Opus 128, composed in 1851, then first performed in 1857, and the concert overture by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1935), who has written music for almost all of the Shakespearean songs. The overall number of these works is, however, fairly limited, and some pieces, such as Schumann’s, are regarded as rather disappointing.185 The same holds true for the opera. Julius Caesar has attracted none of the great composers in this field, and most operas about Julius Caesar (such as Georg Friedrich Händel’s Giulio Cesare [1724]) are not based on Shakespeare’s play. The few that actually recur to the Shakespearean version are, on the other hand, confined to extracts from the drama. Thus the libretto of Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Caesar opera (1936) heavily cuts the parts of Brutus and Cassius (act 1, scene 2 is condensed, act 1, scene 3 omitted, and acts 4 and 5 are transformed into a single scene on the battlefield) and concentrates on Caesar. His baritone and instrumental motif dominate

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the opera from the prelude onward. Giselher Klebe’s forty-minute opera Die Ermordung Cäsars (1959) focuses, moreover, only on what the title announces, namely on the assassination in act 3. An orchestra of woodwinds, saxophones, brass, and percussion and much spoken dialogue are intended to convey the uproar and chaos resulting from the murder. In the arts, too, Julius Caesar is not among the plays considered particularly attractive, and there are no such famous visual realizations as John Runciman’s rendition of King Lear, William Blake’s of Macbeth, or John Everett Millais’s and Eugène Delacroix’s works on Hamlet. Nevertheless, scenes of this drama have been regularly depicted over the centuries. As is the case with early Shakespearean film, early Shakespearean illustrations, published in editions of Shakespeare’s complete works such as Rowe’s (1709 and 1714) or Theobald’s (1740), were closely oriented to the theater and often presented scenes of contemporary stage versions. This tradition was continued in the popular Bell’s editions (first 1773–1778). The first Julius Caesar (1774) contained an engraving showing Brutus in his tent, visited by Caesar’s ghost, and the motif remained the most important one in this play’s history in the fine arts. Later editions depicted Thomas Sheridan as Brutus and Sarah Ward as Portia and thus formed part of the British eighteenth-century production of so-called “conversation pieces,” namely portraying popular actors in important roles.186 Julius Caesar also appeared in the famous Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery of 1789 with works by the book illustrator and watercolorist Richard Westall. The first and probably best of his three paintings dedicated to this play again showed Caesar’s ghost towering over Brutus.187 Subsequently, the Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Füssli produced drawings of Julius Caesar (one of them a copperplate of the same motif; 1804), and William Blake, too, composed a water-colored pen-and-ink drawing of “Brutus and Caesar’s Ghost” (1806).188 But the most widely known illustrations of Julius Caesar in the nineteenth century are probably the sketches of Antony’s funeral speech in the performance of the Saxe-Meiningers, one by Charles Kean (1881), the other created by Duke George II himself (1867). Occasionally, a representation of Julius Caesar was included in one of the various so-called Shakespeare galleries especially popular in Germany, for example Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s drawing of the assassination scene (1857). In the twentieth century, artists often used Shakespeare’s dramas for rather free associations or inspirations, which is almost programmatically documented by a collection of wood engravings, lithographs, and etchings entitled Shakespeare Visionen (1918), produced by such painters as Lovis Corinth, Oskar Kokoschka, Wilhelm Jaeckel, and Alfred Kubin. Perhaps the most remarkable illustrations of Julius Caesar also appeared in the early part of the century, namely those which Ernst Stern created for an illustrated

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edition of the play in 1920. Noteworthy are, in addition, some drawings by Josef Hegenbarth and a colored etching of Caesar’s head by Salvador Dalí (1968). We can also enjoy Julius Caesar as a comic strip189 and as a half-hour, animated version on the television screen (1994), which succeeds in presenting a particularly unstable world: here the stones of Rome actually come to life (see Antony’s menace at 3.2.219–23), and an eagle takes off from Brutus’s and Cassius’s army to attack a flock of crows (translating into pictures Cassius’s report at 5.1.79–88).190 All we are waiting for now is Julius Caesar as an interactive computer game, where we may at last have a chance to participate in Caesar’s murder and thus act over the “lofty scene” (3.1.112) ourselves.

6. The Concept of the Present Anthology In accordance with the tradition of the Garland Shakespeare Criticism series, this introduction has sought to elucidate some central issues of the drama and to map out its reception history both in research and in the theater. In contrast to previous volumes in this series, the following sections refrain from reprints and consist only of specially commissioned contributions. The second part of the book at hand is dedicated to important aspects of the play, all of which have been treated in various forms previously, but which are here reconsidered in new ways. In the opening chapter, Martin Jehne illuminates the different conceptions of the historical Caesar among present-day historians, interpretations that range from an ingenious statesman to someone guilty of high treason and the destruction of the Roman Republic. Despite profound differences between the reconstruction of Caesar in current historiography and in Shakespeare’s play, there are nevertheless similarities: just as literary critics may view Shakespeare’s titular hero from various different angles, historians furnish many alternative images of the imperator. Clifford Ronan’s contribution (chapter 2) further elaborates on this aspect and focuses especially on the image of Caesar in the English Renaissance, as conveyed by antique and post-antique historiographers, by non-dramatic writers of the sixteenth century, and finally by dramatists of that period who produced numerous plays on Caesar either before or after Shakespeare. Once again, we are made to realize that Caesar is a chimera rather than a stable entity of reference. Obviously, it is quite difficult to provide fresh insights into Julius Caesar’s relation to its sources; this field is almost exhaustively covered by the works referred to earlier. Therefore, in chapter 3 Vivian Thomas, who has contributed much to this kind of research himself, discusses the issue from the

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angle of intertextuality and attempts not only to demonstrate why Shakespeare altered his pretexts, but that the whole play is a densely knit world of unstable texts, all open to different interpretations, so that this drama, in the last instance, celebrates intertextuality itself. Barbara Parker’s chapter 4, on the other hand, elucidates the position of Julius Caesar among Shakespeare’s Roman works. From the vantage point of Plato’s Republic, she illustrates how the historical sequence from Lucrece through Coriolanus and Julius Caesar to Antony and Cleopatra clearly delineates the political decline analyzed by Plato: from the abolition of monarchy Rome lapses into oligarchy, and then into democracy which subsequently passes into tyranny. After having established the context of the play, there follow three contributions which focus on what happens in “the play itself ” and which furnish functional analyses of plot construction, language construction and character construction. In chapter 5, Joseph Candido discusses how Shakespeare managed to intertwine his scenes into one straightforward action that may reflect “precisely those Roman values its characters seek to represent—spareness, lucidity, decisiveness, and restraint.” Barbara Baines then shows in chapter 6 that Julius Caesar is perhaps the one play by Shakespeare where “nothing is but speaking makes it so” and which discloses with particular intensity both the power and the failure of words. The contribution by J. L. Simmons in chapter 7 explains how the major characters in Julius Caesar have no fixed identities or centeredness; they abound rather with ambivalences, contradictions, juxtaposed inconstancies, and “eccentricities of complexity.” Subsequently, Naomi Conn Liebler argues in chapter 8 that the Elizabethan theater was more like a market than a pulpit or political podium; and that the principal contestation presented in Julius Caesar “is for the allegiances—the So(u)les—of the plebs.” For her, “it is specifically through the rhetoric of the marketplace that Antony offers a precise demonstration model of the purchase-power of language as the catalyst to action.” In chapter 9, Andreas Mahler contends that Julius Caesar is Shakespeare’s first play which explores “a hitherto largely unquestioned ideology of restitution.” Moreover, he points out that the two restitutional heroes (Brutus and Antony) form an opposition of medieval versus modern subject, with Brutus representing a novel type of tragic hero, being the precursor of Shakespeare’s subsequent major protagonists. What has been consciously excluded in this section is, for example, yet another study on the imagery of the play. As has become evident above, this aspect previously constituted the mainstream of scholarly interest; but it has received less consideration over the last decades, and perhaps almost everything has been said on this issue. With “structure” we have a similar

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case, and to some extent at least, this topic is covered both by Candido’s and Mahler’s contributions. As regards part III of the anthology, which—in contradistinction to part II—contains chapters in which the various approaches to Julius Caesar are explicitly inscribed into the text, I believe that the six methodologies selected here are the relevant ones in respect of this particular play. The chapters are more or less arranged in an historical order, starting with the earliest approach. David Hawkes’s chapter 10 illustrates how Marxists and post-Marxists would conceive of the drama and on which issues they would concentrate. David Willbern not only furnishes a survey of diverse psychoanalytic readings over a century in chapter 11, but in addition provides his own psychoanalytic interpretation. Simon Barker’s contribution is an exercise in a deconstructive approach to the play and focuses specifically on the rhetoric of the drama in chapter 12. In chapter 13, Dennis Kezar recurs to various New Historicist readings of Shakespeare and simultaneously introduces a new one into this field of study. The same holds true for chapter 14 by Graham Holderness and Marcus Nevitt in connection with Cultural Materialism in Great Britain: they clearly demonstrate how Julius Caesar is used for present-day ideological ends. The last chapter in this section would have been, with regard to a different Shakespearean play, a feminist reading. But since Julius Caesar severely limits such an approach, Coppélia Kahn concentrates instead on the construction of masculinity in the drama and hence presents an article which falls under the rubric “gender theory.” What a reader may miss in this section is an essay on “carnival,” but again I think that this aspect is more or less exhausted with respect to this particular drama (and there are certainly more important scenes in the text than the very first one). Another currently crucial approach is, of course, “post-colonialism,” but in contrast to Antony and Cleopatra, for example, where such a view would prove to be quite instructive, with Julius Caesar it is bound to end up in discussing comparatively generalizing issues of hegemony. Perhaps it is symptomatic that neither the anthology on Shakespeare and carnival edited by Ronald Knowles191 nor the one on Shakespeare and post-colonialism edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin192 contain any contributions on Julius Caesar. Concerning the fourth part of the book at hand, I have already mentioned that Julius Caesar displays obvious theatrical deficiencies and that, except for Orson Welles’s Julius Caesar, there have been no landmark performances of the drama in the twentieth century. For this reason, I have refrained from including any articles on individual renditions apart from Welles’s adaptation—and this version, too, is treated by Michael Anderegg in chapter 17 within the context of productions that link the play to Fascism. In addition

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to James Rigney’s introductory chapter 16 which elucidates central theatrical features of the text and depicts the rich performative potential in the major roles of the drama, the contributions in this section thus view and compare various stage versions in a specific context, and they also reflect the changing attitudes towards and conceptions of the play. As already stated, Tom Matheson (chapter 18) analyzes the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Julius Caesar renditions of the last four decades, whereas Michael Greenwald (chapter 19) furnishes a review of what may be perceived as American and Canadian counterparts to these productions, mounted mainly at the various Shakespeare festivals during roughly the same period. In chapter 20, Mariangela Tempera elaborates on the particular, and on the particularly difficult, status of Julius Caesar on the Italian stage, and thus, in a way, leads Caesar, after more than two thousand years, back to Rome.

Notes 1. See esp. Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Consulting various calendrical, astronomical and religious data, Sohmer takes 12 June for the most likely date for the premiere of Julius Caesar and the Globe (15). 2. Charles Spencer, “Caesar takes the Globe by storm,” The Daily Telegraph, 28 May 1999, 25. 3. This is the date mentioned by Thomas Platter in his journal (repr. in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage [1923; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961], 2: 364–65). 4. Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, 17–18. 5. J. A. K. Thomson, Shakespeare and the Classics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952), 242ff. 6. For this reason, there has been a real flood of study aids and teachers’ guides to this drama. 7. Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, xi. 8. Ibid., 183–84. 9. George L. Craik, The English of Shakespeare Illustrated in a Philological Commentary on His “Julius Caesar,” 4th rev. ed. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1869), 49. 10. David Daniell, “Introduction” to the Arden Edition of Julius Caesar, 1. 11. See the contribution by Clifford Ronan below. 12. John Dover Wilson, “Introduction” to Julius Caesar, ed. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), xiii, xxi–xxii, xxv. 13. T. S. Dorsch, “Introduction” to Julius Caesar, ed. Dorsch (London: Methuen, 1955), xxvii– xliv. 14. Ernest Schanzer, “The Problem of Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 297. Subsequently, Schanzer extended this view in his book The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of “Julius Caesar,” “Measure for Measure,” “Antony and Cleopatra” (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 10–70. 15. Honor Matthews, Character & Symbol in Shakespeare’s Plays: A Study of Certain Christian and Pre-Christian Elements in their Structure and Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 39. 16. Rene E. Fortin, “Julius Caesar: An Experiment in Point of View,” Shakespeare Quarterly 19 (1968), 341–47. 17. Mildred E. Hartsock, “The Complexity of Julius Caesar,” PMLA 81 (1966): 61. 18. However, as recently as 1998, Harold Bloom claimed that Shakespeare simply named his play after the character with the highest rank (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human [New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998], 104). 19. Marvin Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance of the Works of Shakespeare (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968–1980), 3: 614, 633, 607, 626.

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Julius Caesar and the Critical Legacy • 49 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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Ibid., 3: 573, 572. Jan H. Blits goes so far as to call Portia a misogynist (The End of the Ancient Republic: Essays on “Julius Caesar” [Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1982], 4). See the contribution by Barbara L. Parker below. René Girard, “Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Salmagundi 88–89 (1990/1991): 416. See Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 11 and passim. See the contribution by Graham Holderness and Marcus Nevitt further down. See the essay by Joseph Candido below. On these aspects, see esp. Gayle Greene, “‘The Power of Speech / To Stir Men’s Blood’: The Language of Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 11 (1980): 67–93; John W. Velz, “Orator and Imperator in Julius Caesar : Style and the Process of Roman History,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 55–75; and the article by Barbara J. Baines below. See Wayne A. Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 77–111, and the contribution by Coppélia Kahn further down. For these features, see in particular Brents Stirling, “‘Or else were this a savage spectacle,’” in Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The Interplay of Theme and Character (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 40–54, and Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (London: Routledge, 1995), 88–111. See e.g. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), 156–58; John W. Velz, “‘If I were Brutus Now . . .’: Role-playing in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 149–59; and Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 225–28. See John Munro’s “Introduction” to The Shakspere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakspere from 1591 to 1700, ed. Munro, rev. ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909), 1: xxiv. Ben Jonson, Every Man Out of His Humour (1599) in The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1: 341. Jonson, The Staple of News (1626), repr. in Shakspere Allusion-Book, ed. Munro, 1: 332. For convenience’s sake, the following references will be made only to the extracts reprinted in Munro’s Shakspere Allusion-Book and, subsequently, in Brian Vickers’s Critical Heritage. Jonson, Timber: or, Discoveries (1640), repr. in Shakspere Allusion-Book, ed. Munro, 1: 348. See ibid., 1: 94, 112, 241, 321, 408, 456; 2: 49, 58, 59, and John Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 14–15. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, or an Historical Review of the Stage (1708), repr. in Shakspere Allusion-Book, ed. Munro, 2: 434–35. John Dryden, Troilus and Cressida (1679), repr. ibid., 2: 245. Nahum Tate, The Loyal General (1680) and Charles Gildon, The Lives And Characters Of The English Dramatick Poets (1698), both repr. ibid., 2: 266, 417. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693), repr. in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974–1981), 2: 55–58. See the respective extracts repr. ibid., 2: 60–86. Anon., A Defence of Dramatick Poetry (1698), repr. ibid., 2: 90–91. Leonard Welsted, “Remarks on Longinus” (1712), repr. ibid., 2: 299. Charles Gildon, “An Essay on the Art, Rise and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England” (1710), repr. ibid., 2: 222. Gildon, “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespeare,” repr. ibid., 2: 256. John Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), repr. ibid., 2: 147. The Censor, 70 (2 April 1717), repr. ibid., 2: 308. See Wolfgang Kowalk, Pope’s Shakespeare-Ausgabe als Spiegel seiner Kunstauffassung (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975), 39, 43–44.

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50 • Horst Zander 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Alexander Pope, ed., The Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols. (1725), repr. in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Vickers, 2: 417. See Theobald’s remarks on this issue in The Works of Shakespeare, 7 vols. (1733), repr. ibid., 2: 515–16. Theodore Besterman, ed., Voltaire on Shakespeare (Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1967), 212. David Garrick, “An Ode upon Dedicating a Building and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford Upon Avon” (1769), repr. in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Vickers, 5: 344. Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare, 8 vols. (1765), repr. ibid., 5: 146. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769), repr. ibid., 5: 342–43. Horace Walpole, “Book of Materials” (1773), repr. ibid., 5: 485–86. Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 100. Samuel Johnson, “Proposals For Printing, by Subscription, The Dramatick Works of William Shakespeare” (1756), repr. in Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Vickers, 4: 270. Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777; repr., London: Wheatley and Adlard, 1825). See the brief summary of Schlegel’s Shakespearean criticism in Arthur M. Eastman’s A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism (New York: Random House, 1968), 37–51. As for Julius Caesar , Schlegel claimed that the last two acts are weaker than the first three, although here Caesar’s shadow proves mightier in revenging his fall than he himself had been able to prevent it. For Schlegel, too, Brutus is the true hero of the play (August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, ed. Giovanni Vittorio Amoretti [Bonn: Kurt Schröder, 1923], 2: 187–88). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism , ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2d ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1960), 2: 109; 1: 14, 16. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1817) in The Round Table / Characters of Shakespear’s Plays (1906; repr., London: J. M. Dent, 1951), 174, 195, 198. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Shakespeare Ad Infinitum” (1813–1816), trans. Randolph S. Bourne, in Theatre and Drama in the Making, ed. John Gassner and Ralph G. Allen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 2: 487. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), in Sartor Resartus / On Heroes and Hero Worship (1908; repr., London: J. M. Dent, 1959), 35. However, both Thomas Bowdler’s Family Shakespeare (1807; for reading aloud in the family) and Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (also 1807) for children, which formed part of this movement, did not include Julius Caesar. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 335, 336, 340, 342, 343, 345–46. Hermann Ulrici, Shakspeare’s dramatische Kunst: Geschichte und Charakteristik des Shakspeareschen Dramas, 2d rev. ed. (Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1847), 632–35. G. G. Gervinus, Shakespeare, 3d ed. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1862), 2: 286, 288–90, passim, 291. H. N. Hudson, Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters, 4th rev. ed. (Boston: Ginn, 1895), 2: 234, 236, 236–37. F. G. Fleay, Shakespeare Manual (London: Macmillan, 1878), 262–70. J. M. Robertson, The Shakespeare Canon (London: G. Routledge, 1922), 1: 66–154. William Wells, The Authorship of “Julius Caesar” (London: G. Routledge, 1923), 25. Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875; repr., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 281–82, 296, 297, 296, 306, 287. Hudson, Shakespeare, 2: 240. Richard G. Moulton, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism, 3d rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 169, 185, 187. Crosby simply identifies Caska’s description of and attitude toward the reaction of the people when Caesar was offered the crown (1.2.242–49) with Shakespeare’s own (Leo N. Tolstoi, Shakespeare: Eine kritische Studie , trans. M. Enckhausen [Hannover: Adolf Sponholtz, 1906], 119).

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Julius Caesar and the Critical Legacy • 51 75. Ibid., 4, 46, 55, 43–44, 88ff. 76. Ibid., 145. 77. Bernard Shaw, “Preface” (“Better than Shakespear?”) to Caesar and Cleopatra (London: Longmans, Green, 1960), 3. 78. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1906), 108–9. 79. Ibid., 81–82, 85–86, 33–34. 80. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), vol. 5 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 424. 81. Otto Rank, The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend: Fundamentals of a Psychology of Literary Creation (1912), trans. Gregory C. Richter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 165–68. 82. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949), 123f. 83. A survey of early psychoanalytic readings of Julius Caesar is provided by Norman N. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1964; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1976), 212– 14, passim. See also the contribution by David Willbern in this volume. 84. Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare, 2d rev. ed. (Leipzig: Albert Langen, 1898), 431–32. In the preface to the New Variorum Edition of Julius Caesar, Horace Howard Furness, Jr., also characterizes Caesar as a “braggart, inflated with the idea of his own importance” (Philadelphia, Pa.: J. B. Lippincott, 1913), viii. 85. Levin L. Schücking, Character Problems in Shakespeare’s Plays: A Guide to the Better Understanding of the Dramatist (London: George G. Harrap, 1922), 46–52, 44. 86. L. C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (1933), in “Hamlet” and Other Shakespearean Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 270–308. 87. Blanche Coles, Shakespeare Studies: “Julius Caesar” (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1940). This is a voluminous teacher’s guide. 88. John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (1945; repr., London: Macmillan, 1957). This study contains a long chapter on Brutus (1–64). 89. J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined (1949; repr., London: Longmans, 1965), 52–54. 90. M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and their Background (London: Macmillan, 1910), 214, 232. 91. Harry Morgan Ayres, “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the Light of Some Other Versions,” PMLA 25 (1910): 183–227. 92. Alexander Boecker, A Probable Italian Source of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (New York: New Era Printing, 1913). 93. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944). 94. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (1930; repr., London: B. T. Batsford, 1961), 2: 351, 352, 373. 95. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?,” 273, passim. 96. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy With Three New Essays (1930; repr., London: Methuen, 1959), 9–13. 97. Ibid., 120–39. 98. Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (1931; repr., London: Methuen, 1961), 36–42, 51–55, 60, 61. 99. Ibid., 71, 81, 95, passim. 100. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (1935; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). Spurgeon primarily comments on the animal imagery (346–47), to which Knight had previously drawn attention (“The Torch of Life,” 33–34). 101. Wolfgang H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery (1951; repr., London: Methuen, 1963). 102. Mark Hunter, “Politics and Character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Essays by Divers Hands 10 (1931): 109–40. 103. James Emerson Phillips, Jr., The State in Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 174, 177, 179. Some decades earlier, Wolfgang Keller

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104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111.

112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

had explained Shakespeare’s choice of the titular hero with reference to the monarchical orientation of the Tudor age when a revolutionary such as Brutus could hardly figure as a hero (“Zwei Bemerkungen zu Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 45 [1909]: 228). Wilson, “Introduction” to Julius Caesar, ed. Wilson, xxi–xxii, xxv. These statements seem to be markedly influenced by Wilson’s abhorrence of Hitler’s dictatorship. See A. A. Smirnov, Shakespeare: A Marxist Interpretation (New York: The Liberal Press, 1936), 59–60, and Donald Morrow, Where Shakespeare Stood (Milwaukee: Casanova Press, 1935), esp. 70, 77, 81. Brents Stirling, The Populace in Shakespeare (1949; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1965), 31–33. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 70. A research review for the first half of the century is provided by J. C. Maxwell, “Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: 1900–1956,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 1–11. John W. Velz furnished one for the second half with “Julius Caesar 1937–1997: Where we are; How we got there,” The Shakespearean International Yearbook 1 (1999): 257–65. Adrien Bonjour, The Structure of “Julius Caesar” (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958), 2, 24, chap. 2 and 3. Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare, 12–23. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (London: Hollis & Carter, 1963), 19–75. See also Norman Rabkin’s article “Structure, Convention, and Meaning in Julius Caesar,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 63 (1964): 240–54, which was subsequently incorporated into his book Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967). A close reading of the play similar to that of Traversi was later provided by David Daiches in his brief monograph Shakespeare: “Julius Caesar” (London: Edward Arnold, 1976). John W. Velz, “Undular Structure in Julius Caesar,” Modern Language Review 66 (1971): 21–30. See also, for example, Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 76–78, and Mark Rose, Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1972), 151–53. Virgil K. Whitaker, Shakespeare’s Use of Learning: An Inquiry into the Growth of his Mind & Art (1953; repr., San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1964). Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare’s Sources (London: Methuen, 1957). John W. Velz, “Clemency, Will, and Just Cause in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 109–18. Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 82– 86, passim. On these issues, see also the contributions by Clifford Ronan and Vivian Thomas in this anthology. Barbara L. Parker, “‘A Thing Unfirm’: Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 30–43. Robert S. Miola, “Shakespeare and his Sources: Observations on the Critical History of Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Survey 40 (1987): 69–76. Miola, “Othello Furens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990): 49. T. J. B. Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 27–38. J. Leeds Barroll, “Shakespeare and Roman History,” Modern Language Review 53 (1958): 327–43. An encompassing bibliographical guide to works on Shakespeare’s relation to antiquity is furnished by John W. Velz’s Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition: A Critical Guide to Commentary, 1660–1960 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968). J. L. Simmons, Shakespeare’s Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1974), 8–10, 16. Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1976). As mentioned above, he also pays much attention to Shakespeare’s sources. Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare’s Roman Worlds (London: Routledge, 1989). See also Thomas’s Julius Caesar (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), which, however, addresses advanced

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Julius Caesar and the Critical Legacy • 53 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138.

139. 140. 141. 142.

143. 144. 145.

146.

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students. Charles Wells, The Wide Arch: Roman Values in Shakespeare (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993). Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). See also Gary B. Miles, “How Roman Are Shakespeare’s ‘Romans?,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 257–83. Clifford Ronan, “Antike Roman”: Power Symbology and the Roman Play in Early Modern England, 1585–1635 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). Irving Ribner, “Political Issues in Julius Caesar,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 56 (1957): 10–22. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome, 17. H. M. Richmond, Shakespeare’s Political Plays (New York: Random House, 1967), 203–17. See also John Wilders’ anti-Tillyardian view furnished in The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays (London: Macmilllan, 1978), 38–42, passim. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London: Routledge, 1988), 140, 141. R. A. Foakes, “Suggestions for a New Approach to Shakespeare’s Imagery,” Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952): 81–92. See also his “An Approach to Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954): 259–70, where Foakes explains the use of names in Julius Caesar. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 42, 48. John Russell Brown, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Style (London: Heineman, 1970), 104–31. Greene, “‘The Power of Speech,’” 68, 69. See Jean Fuzier, “Rhetoric versus Rhetoric: A Study of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar , Act III, Scene 2,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 5 (1974): 25–65; Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London: Routledge, 1990), 156–58; and Hampton, Writing from History, 220–26. On Caesar’s body, see esp. James Ronald Mulryne, “Speak Hands for Me: Image and Action in Julius Caesar,” in Shakespeare et le Corps à la Renaissance, ed. Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991), 101–12. Gordon Ross Smith, “Brutus, Virtue, and Will,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 367–79. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 15. For a work that treats Julius Caesar in terms of reader response concepts, see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies. The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response (London: Macmillan, 1976), 30–53. Important examples of such studies with regard to Julius Caesar are Andrew M. Wilkinson, “A Psychological Approach to Julius Caesar,” Review of English Literature 7 (1966): 65–78; Lynn de Gerenday, “Play, Ritualization, and Ambivalence in Julius Caesar,” Literature and Psychology 24 (1974): 24–33; Cynthia Marshall, “Totem, Taboo, and Julius Caesar,” Literature and Psychology 37 (1991): 11–33; Bernard J. Paris, Character as a Subversive Force in Shakespeare: The History and Roman Plays (London: Associated University Presses, 1991), 110–32. Richard Wilson, “Introduction” to Julius Caesar: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Wilson, New Casebooks (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 1, 2. This volume contains some of the most important contributions to Julius Caesar in line with current debates. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 77–109. Gail Kern Paster, “‘In the spirit of men there is no blood’: Blood as a Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 284–86. Such a link between a feminist reading and psychoanalytical concepts surfaces in Mary Hamer’s book as well (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar , Writers and Their Work [Plymouth: Northcote House, 1998]). See also studies of queer theory such as Bruce R. Smith’s Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Alan Bray’s “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 40– 61. See Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, ed., The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (New York: Routledge, 1999). There is, how-

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54 • Horst Zander ever, no essay on Shakespeare in this volume. 147. Paul N. Siegel, Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays: A Marxist Approach (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), 124. 148. Victor Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare: A Marxist Study (London: Verso, 1996), 61–62. 149. Richard A. Burt, “‘A Dangerous Rome’: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Discursive Determinism of Cultural Politics,” in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. MarieRose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 109–27. See also John Drakakis’ article “‘Fashion it thus’” and Richard Wilson’s essay “‘Is this a Holiday?’” referred to below. 150. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 66. 151. Wilson, “Introduction” to Julius Caesar , ed. Wilson, 1–2. 152. Alessandro Serpieri, “Reading the Signs: Towards a Semiotics of Shakespearean Drama,” trans. Keir Elam, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis, New Accents (London: Routledge, 1988), 125, 126. This anthology and its successor (Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2, ed. Terence Hawkes, New Accents [London: Routledge, 1996]) offer a representative selection of current critical approaches to Shakespeare. 153. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 154. Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 165, 171, passim. 155. Marc Rose, “Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599,” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 291–304. 156. Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy.” 157. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 101–3. 158. John Drakakis, “‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the Politics of Theatrical Representation,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 65–73, the quotes 72. 159. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1–28, the quotes 24, 21, 26. 160. Richard Wilson, “‘Is this a Holiday?’: Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival,” Journal of English Literary History 54 (1987): 31–44. For such an approach in general, see Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985). Subsequently, Wilson treated the drama in terms of his conception of a “Newer Historicism” (William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar” [London: Penguin, 1992]). 161. See esp. Brian Vickers’ survey of and massive attack against the dominating critical approaches in Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Vickers holds that each “of the groups involved in this struggle for attention is attempting to appropriate Shakespeare for its own ideology or critical theory” and that “Shakespeare’s plays, for so long the primary focus of the critic’s and scholar’s attention, are now secondary, subordinated to the imperialism and self-advancement of the particular group” (x, xii). 162. For this term see ibid., x, and Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 2ff. 163. See e.g. the contributions in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). 164. In addition to Daniell’s “Introduction,” 99–119, see e.g. Arthur Humphreys, “Introduction” to Julius Caesar, ed. Humphreys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 48–72. Inevitably, my survey is indebted to Ripley’s study. 165. Stephen Booth, “The Shakespearean Actor As Kamikaze Pilot,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 568. 166. Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 23. 167. Daniell, “Introduction,” 102–3.

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172. 173.

174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186.

187. 188.

189. 190. 191. 192.

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Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 100–101. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 115. Earlier on, in 1864, Booth had acted together with his brothers Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., and John Wilkes Booth in a Julius Caesar production in New York. Albert Furtwangler endeavors to demonstrate that the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is intrinsically linked with the assassination in Shakespeare’s play (Assassin on Stage: Brutus, Hamlet, and the Death of Lincoln [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991]). Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 115. In altogether sixteen years of touring (1874–1890), the Meiningen company played Julius Caesar 330 times in thirty-six European metropolises (such as Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Kiev, Prague, Moscow, Odessa, Stockholm, Vienna, and Warsaw). Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 221. For further details, see Michael Anderegg’s contribution to this volume. Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 232. See Peggy Goodman Edel, “Julio Cesar , et al.: The 1986 Florida Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 214–17. On this “rehabilitation” of Caesar, see Roy Walker, “Unto Caesar: A Review of Recent Productions,” Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958): 128–35. In 1993, the Barons Court Theatre in London presented a female Caesar with an obvious allusion to Margaret Thatcher. See also Mark Rylance’s Julius Caesar at the Globe (1999) referred to above. Robert Hamilton Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), 209. Also in 1938, Welles presented a radio abridgement of his Julius Caesar on his Mercury Theatre on the Air. See the contribution by Michael Anderegg below. See Kenneth S. Rothwell, A History of Shakespeare on Screen: A Century of Film and Television (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161. See Douglas Brode, Shakespeare in the Movies: From the Silent Era to “Shakespeare in Love” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104. For a filmography of Julius Caesar , see Eddie Sammons, Shakespeare: A Hundred Years on Film (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2000), 47–53. See Roger Fiske, “Shakespeare in the Concert Hall,” in Shakespeare in Music, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll (London: Macmillan, 1964), 181. See e.g. Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highfill, Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture: A Catalog of the Theatrical Portraits in His Edition of “Bell’s Shakespeare” and “Bell’s British Theatre” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 72–73, 78–79. See Winifred H. Friedman, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (New York: Garland, 1976), plates 145, 157, 158. In addition to W. Moelwyn Merchant’s standard work Shakespeare and the Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 77–86, passim, see now Hildegard HammerschmidtHummel’s voluminous work on Shakespearean illustrations: Die Shakespeare-Illustration (1594–2000): Bildkünstlerische Darstellungen zu den Dramen William Shakespeares. Katalog, Geschichte, Funktion und Deutung , ed. Hammerschmidt-Hummel (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003), 3: 1153–58; plates 1995–2051. A version with drawings by Henry C. Kiefer was published as early as 1950 in New York by Gilberton. See the description of this production in H. R. Coursen’s Shakespeare in Space: Recent Shakespeare Productions on Screen (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 118–20. Ronald Knowles, ed., Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). Bristol’s study Carnival and Theater referred to above also refrains from treating Julius Caesar. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, ed., Post-Colonial Shakespeares, New Accents (London, 1998).

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PART

II

Central Aspects

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CHAPTER

1

History’s Alternative Caesars

Julius Caesar and Current Historiography MARTIN JEHNE

In current studies of ancient history, a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar may function as a title1 or a motto;2 the play may perhaps also serve as a foil for a scholar’s own historical construction3 or ornament the introduction of a work.4 But the preoccupation of Caesar historians with Shakespeare rarely transcends such illustrative decorations.5 Instead, they strive primarily to emancipate themselves from the heroes in their very own field of research, especially from Theodor Mommsen, whose idealized image of Caesar—as created in his Noble Prize winning Römische Geschichte—has remained a central reference point from which scholars have to distinguish themselves even nowadays;6 or they prefer to turn for inspiration to Bertolt Brecht’s Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Caesar.7 Of course, Shakespeare has an established position in studies dedicated to the change of Caesar’s image over the centuries, as in Friedrich Gundolf ’s classic8 and in Karl Christ’s solid survey of a few years ago.9 But in this line of research, too, the focus is not on the Renaissance and on early modern times, but on post-Caesarean antiquity10 and, in the context of the debate on Caesarism, on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.11 Although historians only seldom refer directly to Shakespeare’s drama, with regard to the historical figure and its deeds they nevertheless regularly treat perspectives and approaches that have also been thematized by Shakespeare. This holds true mainly because the essential questions of Caesar’s last years—namely the legitimacy of his rule, the ways and the extent to which the Roman ruling class claimed political participation, the admissibility of politically motivated violence—are also at the center of 59

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Shakespeare’s drama. But the importance of such questions undoubtedly extends beyond particular epochs; they have been answered differently in different times and different cultures, and the Caesar story comprises the extreme complexity of these issues in a particularly dramatic way.12 In this chapter I will therefore try to present a summary of current research on the historical Caesar13 in its essential outlines with special regard to those problems which surface in Shakespeare’s text as well.14 Hence my principal questions are: Did Caesar endeavor to suspend the traditional Roman Republic? Would his regime, which he had established after the civil war, have had a chance to solve the crisis of the Republic for a considerable time, or was it historically a dead-end street? Would it have been possible for Caesar—by applying a clever strategy—to win over leading men like the conspirators, and were the conspirators primarily motivated by worries about the welfare of the Republic or by feelings of revenge because of personal insults? The fact that my brief survey is dominated by German scholars is—as I at least want to affirm—not a result of the author’s provincial orientation, but a reflection of current research preferences: during the last decades, the question of Caesar’s role and the assessment of his role in the transformation from the Republic to monarchy have been investigated mainly by Germanspeaking historians. The rather euphoric image of Caesar created by Mommsen and his successors is based, on the one hand, on the admiration of Caesar’s outstanding talents as a politician, a military leader, and a man of letters; on the other hand, it results from the belief that the traditional political system was in obvious decline and that Caesar had recognized, with the infallible eye of a statesman, that his rule should replace the Republic for the welfare of the whole. The underlying assumption that eminent individuals are entitled to establish an authoritative rule for the alleged benefit of everyone has been profoundly shattered by Fascism and World War II. Nevertheless, it was almost a sensation when Hermann Strasburger published his essay “Caesar im Urteil seiner Zeitgenossen” [“Caesar as Judged by his Contemporaries”] in 1953.15 Strasburger’s thorough analysis of all available sources made him claim that Caesar’s act of starting the civil war in 49 BC—which modern Caesar admirers like to belittle with reference to the inevitable collapse of the Republic and to the arrogant provocations of a crowd of mediocre adversaries—was unanimously repudiated by all of Caesar’s contemporaries, even by his followers, and was regarded almost as a sacrilege. Simultaneously, Strasburger pointed out that Caesar did not seem to have had any comprehensive program for reforming or providing a substitute for the republican system—the only basis on which such a colossal endeavor could have been legitimized. In 1938 Strasburger had already demonstrated his independence from, and his sceptical attitude toward, the ex-

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cessive estimation of Caesar and his deeds in a little work dealing with Caesar’s beginnings where he proved that the early importance of Caesar— which is claimed in late sources and as a result of this also in research—is merely a subsequent projection: up to the year 63 BC, there is no indication at all that Caesar differed basically from other junior politicians, and not before 59 BC, with Caesar’s first Consulate, did he move in an exceptional direction.16 After the end of the Hitler regime under which he suffered greatly, Strasburger was even less prepared to renounce moral principles because of the alleged greatness of politically eminent persons: “wer einmal bei den ‘Spänen’ war, als ‘Männer, die Geschichte machen,’ ‘hobelten’” [“someone who was once among the ‘chips’ when ‘the men who make history’ were ‘planning’”],17 views history in a different way. Strasburger’s disturbing contributions to the research on Caesar were faintly echoed in the biography by his academic teacher Matthias Gelzer, a work that is still the unmatched starting point for every scholarly consideration on Caesar.18 Gelzer’s detached, critical depiction of Caesar’s youth and early career moderately reflects Strasburger’s results of 1938,19 which by now are generally accepted.20 By contrast, in 1954, in a lecture presented to irritated teachers, Gelzer had already endeavored to save at least the image of Caesar as a far-sighted statesman who also pursued transpersonal interests;21 and he clung to this stance in the last edition of his biography. But after a couple of years, Strasburger’s critical view of Caesar’s achievements as a statesman elicited an increasingly positive response.22 Zwi Yavetz recurred to an earlier suggestion to reconstruct Caesar’s history solely from a contemporary perspective. He distinguished between Caesar’s possible intentions, which had occupied research for such a long time, and the way in which Caesar was perceived, rightly emphasizing the fact that this image was crucial for the reactions of Caesar’s contemporaries. He then conceived of the assassination as a logical consequence of a loss of image that Caesar could not prevent.23 At a later point, Yavetz extended his endeavor to free himself from the suggestive influence of plans and targets which had never materialized and which were hence not verifiable; and he examined all of Caesar’s laws that have been preserved in an effort to find out by means of the actual changes in how far Caesar had striven to secure his power, and to establish an efficient administration and to what extent he had intended to introduce basic reforms.24 The fact that everything may be explicable even without great visions does, however, not exclude the existence of a conscious plan to transform the traditional Republic. Hence such an approach is also inappropriate for answering the question of whether Caesar was merely a clever politician or a statesman who—according to Strasburger’s requirements—“nach römischen Begriffen dem Staatswohl diente oder zu dienen gedachte . . . durch Festigung der alten Staatsform

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oder durch den Aufbau beziehungsweise die planvolle Vorbereitung einer neuen” [“in Roman terms served the welfare of the state or intended to do so . . . by stabilizing the old form of government or by constructing or systematically preparing a new one”].25 Strasburger’s observation of Caesar’s egomaniac honor orientation has been alluded to and elaborated on by Christian Meier and Kurt Raaflaub, and they have extended it by analyzing the narrow-minded behavior of his opponents.26 In the last instance, the outbreak of the civil war in 49 BC appears to be a result of a series of untoward circumstances: Caesar overdid the conventional Roman aspiration to glory and honor, but drifted into the civil war in the course of inner-Roman quarrels rather than by purposeful manipulations, and at the end of the war he was the sole ruler without ever having planned it. In his biography, Christian Meier has transformed these approaches into a fascinating picture of Caesar as a grandiose outsider who, in an excellent manner, surpasses the traditional Roman ethos of performance and who, eventually, is left standing alone at the top without anything to offer except his own predominant ego for solving or at least alleviating the most detrimental deficiencies of the system. Meier casts his interpretation into a catching phrase: in the end Caesar had gained power within the situation but was not able to gain power over the situation and therefore—in all his might—was facing the crisis of the Republic rather helplessly.27 The consequence of such an interpretation is to view Caesar, at the end of his life, as a predominantly perplexed dictator who avoided the insurmountable problem of getting consent for his position in Rome among the important circles and who therefore turned to foreign policy and planned a campaign against the Parthians.28 Meier’s differentiated, ambivalent image of Caesar, which he derived from his superior analysis of the socio-political developments of the late Roman Republic and which he presented in a formidable style,29 has become the new challenge for all historians who are interested in Caesar. Criticism of Meier’s theses is leveled from two opposing directions: on the one hand, historians doubt that the end of the Republic was soon to come, so that Caesar had crushed a system which was widely accepted among his contemporaries; on the other hand, scholars deny that Caesar’s monarchy was historically a dead-end street and maintain instead that his order did not basically differ from the rule of Augustus which was successful some fifteen years later. In his voluminous book The Last Generation of the Roman Republic,30 Erich Gruen vigorously contradicts the established opinion that the Roman Republic displayed symptoms of crisis and fall and that the end was imminent. As the title of the book indicates, Gruen is less concerned with an abstract analysis of the system and more with an explanation of the

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persons and their relationships: with meticulous prosopography he examines the activities of the members of the ruling class in the various political fields as well as their changing alliances, and he comes to the conclusion that it was, after all, just business as usual. In the summary at the end of his massive book he therefore observes that very exceptional conditions had led to the civil war and hence to the abolition of the Republic which otherwise could have continued to exist successfully for a long time.31 Primarily Klaus Girardet continues to argue along this line and emphasizes the reformatory potential of the Republic—and especially in Cicero’s programmatic texts De re publica and De legibus he finds indicators for his opinion that the Republic could have managed to solve the prevailing problems.32 For Gruen and Girardet, there were only crises of adaptation in the late Republic, but there was no process that inevitably led to a radical change and that had gained a certain autonomy; hence the transition to monarchy was merely an accident. Against this background it is only a small step to viewing Caesar as the great destroyer who—with virtually breathtaking unscrupulousness— sacrificed the generally accepted and actually fairly well-functioning political order in favor of his personal ambitions.33 Recently, Girardet has also scrutinized in detail Caesar’s position of negotiation before the outbreak of the civil war and he has come to the conclusion that on this occasion a Roman governor wanted to blackmail the state; when he did not obtain his privileges, he decided to commit high treason.34 The assessment of the perspectives of the Republic necessarily also affects the evaluation of Caesar’s role in this process. The more one is convinced that the republican order functioned to some extent, the more monstrous Caesar’s civil war appears. Yet on the whole, important reasons support the claim that the Republic was not destroyed by Caesar, but that its collapse was imminent even without him. The enormous imperial cliencies of a Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the increasing autonomy of the mighty generals, the readiness of the citizens to mobilize, and the escalation of violence in Rome—all these are important factors in a complex process leading to monarchy that cannot be played down.35 This is not to deny that the moment when this transition from Republic to monarchy happened and the mode of this autocracy was dependent on the person of Caesar and that his military invasion in order to defend his claims was a monstrous act; but to posit that this individual destroyed a well-functioning political system means to neglect evident indicators of dissolution in the traditional order. Even if one cannot deny that Caesar possessed charismatic features, he did not display a charismatic rule in the sense of Max Weber in which people succumb to a leading personality in blind admiration because he incarnates the fulfilment of their longings; consequently, Caesar was not able within his person to overcome the antagonisms of groups and interests.36 But I

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doubt that Caesar—according to Meier’s thesis—having once attained a ruling position, did not really know how to consolidate the state, that he was helpless in view of the fact that people did not accept his omnipotent position, and that he therefore wanted to avoid this situation by waging a war against the Parthians.37 A careful analysis of Caesar’s state reveals that there was a functioning organization, which was able to cope with the urgent problems more efficiently than the Republic.38 Moreover, the problem of accepting Caesar’s position was not an issue among the population as a whole or among all the relevant groups, but was restricted to the old ruling class. Since this was the most influential and important group in the Roman state, one cannot dismiss this weak point as secondary; but on the other hand, one must take into account that Caesar was faced here with a problem that is inevitable in the course of a change of systems: the elite of the old system which is due to lose power and influence will not easily be convinced of the advantages of the new order. Augustus, too, had to cope with this problem, and a long process of familiarization and several adaptation incentives were necessary to compensate this structural deficiency of the new empire. But Caesar had virtually insulted many of the members of the old elite. This rude treatment of Senators is also thematized by Shakespeare who makes Caesar announce, immediately before the assassination, that he will not disregard the laws out of personal obligation (3.1.35–48). Undoubtedly, such an attitude was unknown to the Romans and Caesar himself, but Caesar’s pronounced arrogance toward his equals, which is also dramatized by Shakespeare (1.2.115–18; 125–26; 2.2.71–72; 3.1.35–75), has been interpreted by scholars as an indication of a change in personality that Caesar had undergone since 47 BC, possibly under the influence of Cleopatra.39 Although this is only a psychologizing guess, which contradicts Shakespeare’s depiction of Caesar,40 it is nevertheless evident that Caesar often lacked the appropriate sensitivity and in this respect was far inferior to his adopted son Augustus, who even as a ruler was a master of jovial social intercourse. Thus at the end of 45 BC, Caesar remained ostentatiously seated when the whole Senate, led by the Consuls, awarded him great decrees of honor; he kept respected Senators waiting in his antechamber; and again at the end of 45 BC, he had a Consul elected for only six hours—which was conceived of by the old republicans as merely a sad farce.41 The question is whether such behavior actually produced an opposition or at least induced his opponents to act, whether, in fact, Caesar provoked his assassination by insulting his equals. In antiquity the motives of the conspirators were already denounced as selfish. According to Plutarch, Antony conceded only Brutus a disinterested motivation,42 and this is also quoted by Shakespeare (5.5.69–72). In addition,

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there exist several notes concerning personal offenses that are said to have provoked many of the murderers against the dictator, and time and again research has attributed great importance to these documents.43 But since there were more than sixty conspirators, not all of whom had been obstinate enemies of Caesar, but rather his followers for years who then turned against him,44 it is hardly imaginable that all of them had a grievance against him just for personal reasons, and, nevertheless, united in common action. The conspiracy was predominantly based on the realization that Caesar did not want to restore the old Republic but to rule as an autocrat for good—in the very way that Shakespeare’s Brutus and Cassius conceive of the situation (1.2.82–176; 2.1.10–34; 52–58; 3.2.20–39; 4.3.18–21).45 Recent research has often criticized the assassination. Andreas Alföldi condemns the conspirators as a narrow-minded and restorative clique that prevented the brilliant plan to solve the Roman problems.46 But even if one is not inclined to share such an excessive confidence in Caesar and in a quick solution of socio-political problems, Cicero’s estimation of the assassination as a courageous but rather poorly planned act deserves consideration:47 the conspirators had no real plans for the time after the assassination but simply assumed that by Caesar’s liquidation the Republic would rise again automatically.48 They had to pay dearly for this naïveté. Caesar’s state had consisted of much more than his own person, not least because he had attracted so many loyalities, which after his death rapidly shifted to those who wanted to revenge the great patron. The civil wars following Caesar’s murder actually brought to light the changes that Caesar’s rule had introduced to the Roman state. “O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet,” exclaims Shakespeare’s Brutus when he learns of the precipitate suicide of Cassius (5.3.94). Caesar’s Ghost who appears in Shakespeare’s drama in person (4.3.273–86; see also 5.5.17–19) indeed dominated the subsequent civil wars. Caesar’s murderers and their followers, such as Cicero, transgressed traditional norms and codes of behavior in several ways in order to have a chance in these fights for power and survival.49 Thus not only the pretenders for Caesar’s succession such as Antonius and Octavius, but the advocates of the old Republic, too, turned more and more Caesarean. That these fights eventually gave rise to another autocracy is therefore not surprising at all. But that is another story. The image of an admired Caesar has not perished. In most representations there are partially positive assessments, which are certainly justified because Caesar’s great talents and efficiency cannot be denied and because his winning and generous manner impress a modern observer as well. After having rejected genius worship, we have become accustomed to accepting a mixture of positive and negative personality characteristics and to finding them presented simultaneously in biographies; thus we have also gained

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the freedom to appreciate political instinct and administrative performances without having to cover up the merciless sacrificing of hundreds of thousands of people.50 But there are still approaches that lack qualifying commentary.51 Of course, there is no consent among researchers as regards the central questions in this context. Although the common opinion is still—and, as I believe, for good reasons—that the Republic was more or less on the decline, recently contradictory views have emerged. It has been ascertained that Caesar’s fixation on his honor and his demand for recognition were deeply rooted in the Roman value system, but this does not mean that starting the civil war was a mere consequence of this and just a banality. Nowadays no one really believes that Caesar actually had planned from the beginning to strive for autocracy, which he then held from 46 BC on. Yet that he did not regard this position of power as a temporary one, but was determined to keep it, is clearly demonstrated by his introduction of life-long dictatorship. Probably Caesar was not able to solve the problem that the old elite, whose room to maneuver had been reduced by the existence of the ruler, viewed the new system sceptically. In my opinion this does not mean that Caesar therefore had to fail or that his state offered no alternative to the insufficient republican order, but it nevertheless was a burden. Yet Caesar did not try hard, by demonstrations of equality and a restricted use of his own power, to give the Senators the impression of a merely moderate change in the old system. He also did not manage to make them believe that his monarchy was to last only a brief interim which was necessary for the consolidation of the state after the civil war. Undoubtedly, all this increased resistance. It is not really clear why Caesar did not act more cleverly. But Shakespeare’s depiction is psychologically very impressive. His Caesar is deeply convinced that the Romans are sheep who can be led more or less passively, and who are unable to rouse themselves for any courageous and risky action.52 This is exactly what Cassius is reluctant to accept, all the more so since he had witnessed that Caesar’s feeling of superiority could not always stand the test, indeed that Caesar’s strength could not match his own. It is true that the competition to which Caesar had challenged Cassius is merely invented (1.2.100–15), and in a similar way, the hints at Caesar’s frailty are extended by several details (1.2.127–28; 246–70).53 But as regards Caesar’s conviction that the group of Senators were more or less unable to act, and did not have the courage and energy for a liberating act, Shakespeare may well have been right. Of course, it is not possible to prove this or to make it plausible with the methods applied by historians. But this is exactly what makes literature fascinating: it can create connections even where the historian has to helplessly face loose ends.

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Notes This chapter was translated from German into English by Kathleen Rabl and Horst Zander. 1. See M. Gwyn Morgan, “O Julius Caesar, Thou Are Mighty Yet!,” Helios 11 (1984): 151–65 (critical review of Zwi Yavetz, Julius Caesar and his Public Image, trans. by author [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983]). See also the title of M. L. Clarke’s biography of Brutus, The Noblest Roman: Marcus Brutus and His Reputation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), which quotes Antony’s epitaph on Brutus at 5.5.68: “This was the noblest Roman of them all.” 2. See Willem den Boer, “Caesar zweitausend Jahre nach seinem Tode” (Dutch 1957), trans. Jan van Nimwegen, in Caesar, ed. Detlef Rasmussen, Wege der Forschung, vol. 43 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), 413 (“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”; 3.2.75); David Sedley, “The Ethics of Brutus and Cassius,” Journal of Roman Studies 87 (1997): 41 (the essay is preceded by a quotation from 4.3.142–44). 3. See Ronald Syme, “Caesar: Drama, Legend, History” (1985), in id., Roman Papers, vol. 5, ed. Anthony R. Birley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 702–7. Syme starts with Shakespeare’s image of Caesar in order to show that the actual image was different. 4. See John H. Collins, “Caesar and the Corruption of Power,” Historia 4 (1955): 445–46; Werner Dahlheim, Julius Cäsar: Die Ehre des Kriegers und der Untergang der römischen Republik (München: Piper, 1987), 26. 5. Luciano Canfora, too, in chapter 40 “Where’s Antony?” (3.1.96), only illustrates with Shakespeare’s—invented—scene his conjecture that immediately after the assassination Antony was ready for a permanent arrangement with the murderers ( Caesar: Der demokratische Diktator. Eine Biographie, trans. Rita Seuß [Italian version 1999; München: C. H. Beck, 2001], 325). 6. As regards Theodor Mommsen’s view of Caesar, see inter alia Christian Meier, “Das Begreifen des Notwendigen: Zu Theodor Mommsens Römischer Geschichte ,” in Formen der Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Reinhart Koselleck, Heinrich Lutz and Jörn Rüsen, Theorie der Geschichte: Beiträge zur Historik, vol. 4 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1982), 201–44; Karl Christ, Caesar: Annäherungen an einen Diktator (München: C. H. Beck, 1994), 134–54. 7. This is the case in Wolfgang Will, Julius Caesar: Eine Bilanz (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1992); cf. also Canfora’s chapter 5: “Die ‘Geschäfte’ des Herrn Julius Caesar und anderer” (Caesar, 39–44). 8. Friedrich Gundolf, Caesar: Geschichte seines Ruhms (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1924), 174-86 (on Shakespeare). 9. Christ, Caesar, 117–20 (on Shakespeare). 10. See esp. Peter Donié, Untersuchungen zum Caesarbild in der römischen Kaiserzeit (Hamburg: Kovač, 1996). 11. See e.g. Peter Baehr, Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World: A Study in Republicanism and Caesarism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998) (cf. also the review by Stefan Rebenich, Classical Review 50 [2000]: 375–76); see, moreover, Alfred Heuß, “Der Caesarismus und sein antikes Urbild” (1980), in Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995), 5: 1803–30; Michael Erbe, “Der Caesarmythos im Spiegel der Herrschaftsideologie Napoleons I. und Napoleons III.,” in Lebendige Antike: Rezeption der Antike in Politik, Kunst und Wissenschaft der Neuzeit. Kolloquium für Wolfgang Schiering, ed. Reinhard Stupperich (Mannheim: Palatium, 1995), 135–42. 12. In Shakespeare’s drama, however, Brutus and not Caesar is faced with a dramatic conflict. 13. Of course, the differentiation between an “historical Caesar” and Shakespeare’s character does not imply that there is any way of rendering an “objective” portrait in contrast to Shakespeare’s subjective depiction. That there are limits to objectifying historical analyses was evident even before the debate on the narrativity of historiography and on the shaping force of narrative strategies for the argumentation, and thus for what is commonly regarded as an explanation. But, of course, this does not mean that the work of an historian and that of a poet are not basically different. Thus the historian is faced with strict limitations in constructing correlations—for instance, he may not deny the effects of natural laws and

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14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

may not postulate God’s influence on history—both of which are permissible in fictional texts. To some extent, an historical drama may have to adhere to such a framework, but Shakespeare did not hesitate to present Caesar’s Ghost on the stage (4.3.273–83). In addition, the scope of an historian is even narrower than described above. He has to accept the transmissions of the time or of a period not very far from the time he is concerned with insofar as he draws from them a framework of elementary facts to which he can add nothing. For instance, antique sources do not contain any hints of a swimming competition between Caesar and Cassius, hence an historical construction may not posit that such an event has happened. Shakespeare, on the other hand, chose to mention such a swimming competition in his play (1.2.100–116). Besides, neither the methodological obligation of an historian not to assume the existence of a swimming competition, nor Shakespeare’s invention of such a competition, provide any indication of whether such a swimming event had ever taken place in the 40s of the first century BC. These differentiations are more trivial than the claim—in connection with the “linguistic turn”—to treat history as a text or to conceive of it merely as a construction determined by tropes of description. But these approaches neglect social practice as a universal element of reality, which is indeed socially constructed, but not arbitrarily so. Thus, in the last instance, the importance of framing, which limits the scope of interpretation, is again minimized. For an instructive and entertaining critique see Egon Flaig, “Kinderkrankheiten der Neuen Kulturgeschichte,” Rechtshistorisches Journal 18 (1999): 458–76. Besides, Hayden White, too, has now admitted, with reference to the Holocaust, that not everything can be arbitrarily presented in different basic narrative forms and hence can be constructed in constantly different ways (“Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, ed. Saul Friedlander [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992], 37–53). Flaig rightly regards this as a disavowal (“Kinderkrankheiten,” 465–66). Here I will concentrate on research of the past thirty years and occasionally refer to an older work. For older studies, see esp. Helga Gesche’s research review Caesar, Erträge der Forschung, vol. 51 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), which lists 1907 titles! See also Zwi Yavetz, “Caesar, Caesarism, and the Historians,” Journal of Contemporary History 6 (1971): 184–201, and Public Image, 10–57; Giuseppe Zecchini, “L’immagine di Cesare nella storiografia moderne,” Aevum Antiquum 4 (1991): 227–54; Christ, Caesar, 134–320. Historische Zeitschrift 175 (1953): 225–64; valid now is the 2d, revised and supplemented edition, extended by an afterword, in the series Libelli, vol. 158 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968). Hermann Strasburger, “Caesars Eintritt in die Geschichte” (1938), in id., Studien zur Alten Geschichte, ed. Walter Schmitthenner and Renate Zoepffel (Hildesheim: Olms, 1982), 1: 181–327. Strasburger, Zeitgenossen, 81 (in the afterword of 1967 which is attached to the revised edition). Matthias Gelzer, Caesar: der Politiker und Staatsmann, 6th ed. (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1960). There is an English translation by P. Needham (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968) that seems to have induced the English-speaking world not to produce a new scholarly biography. Still recommendable is the brief depiction for the general reader by J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Julius Caesar and Rome (London: English Universities Press, 1967). The most productive author of popularized works on antiquity in English, Michael Grant, has provided a cleverly crafted Julius Caesar (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969). A work by an amateur in the best sense, albeit with some central deficiencies of understanding, is Arthur D. Kahn’s The Education of Julius Caesar: A Biography, a Reconstruction (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). See also the review by Arthur E. Eckstein, “Review-Discussion: Two Interpretations of Caesar,” American Journal of Ancient History 9 (1984) [1990]: 135–52. Gelzer, Caesar , e.g. 34. Recently, however, Canfora, in his Caesar, has relapsed into the inclination of all biographers to model the youth of the “hero” on his subsequent greatness. Matthias Gelzer, “War Caesar ein Staatsmann?,” in Kleine Schriften (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1963), 2: 286–306. For a discussion on the shock of this debate among German Latin teachers, see Yavetz, “Caesarism,” 184–86.

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23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

See also Barbara Scardigli, “Ein Beitrag zur Nachwirkung des Strasburgerschen Caesarbildes,” in Römische Geschichte und Zeitgeschichte in der deutschen und italienischen Altertumswissenschaft während des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1, Caesar und Augustus, ed. Karl Christ and Emilio Gabba, Biblioteca di Athenaeum, vol. 12 (Como: Edizioni New Press, 1989), 183–202. Zwi Yavetz, “Existimatio, fama, and the Ides of March,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 78 (1974): 35–65. See Yavetz, Public Image, 58–160. Strasburger, Zeitgenossen, 70. See Christian Meier, “Caesars Bürgerkrieg,” in Entstehung des Begriffs ‘Demokratie’: Vier Prolegomena zu einer historischen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 70–150; Kurt Raaflaub, Dignitatis contentio: Studien zur Motivation und politischen Taktik im Bürgerkrieg zwischen Caesar und Pompeius, Vestigia, vol. 20 (München: C. H. Beck, 1974). Christian Meier, Caesar (Berlin: Severin & Siedler, 1982); see also his earlier work Die Ohnmacht des allmächtigen Dictators Caesar (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 17– 100. See Meier, Caesar , 529–33, 538–40. For reflections on the genre, see Christian Meier, “Von der Schwierigkeit, ein Leben zu erzählen: Zum Projekt einer Caesar-Biographie,” in Theorie und Erzählung in der Geschichte, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Thomas Nipperdey, Theorie der Geschichte: Beiträge zur Historik, vol. 3 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1979), 229–58. Erich S. Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Ibid., 494–505, esp. 504f. See also Helga Botermann, “Cato und die sogenannte Schwertübergabe im Dezember 50 v. Christus: Ein übersehenes Zeugnis für die Vorgeschichte des Bürgerkrieges (Sen. ep.mor. 14,12 f.; 95,69 f.; 104,29–33),” Hermes 117 (1989): 62-85, and Botermann, “Denkmodelle am Vorabend des Bürgerkrieges (Cic. Att. 7,9): Handlungsspielraum oder unausweichliche Notwendigkeit?,” Historia 38 (1989): 410–30. See Klaus M. Girardet, Die Ordnung der Welt: Ein Beitrag zur philosophischen und politischen Interpretation von Ciceros Schrift de legibus, Historia Einzelschriften, vol. 42 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1983), 227–35. See Girardet, “Politische Verantwortung im Ernstfall: Cicero, die Diktatur und der Diktator Caesar,” in Lenaika: Festschrift für Carl Werner Müller zum 65. Geburtstag am 28. Januar 1996, ed. Christian Mueller-Goldingen and Kurt Sier, Beiträge zur Altertumskunde, vol. 89 (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1996), 217–51. See also Helga Botermann, “Rechtsstaat oder Diktatur: Cicero und Caesar 46–44 v. Chr.,” Klio 74 (1992): 179–92, and Karl-Wilhelm Welwei, “Caesars Diktatur, der Prinzipat des Augustus und die Fiktion der historischen Notwendigkeit,” Gymnasium 103 (1996): 477–97. Klaus M. Girardet, “Caesars Konsulatsplan für das Jahr 49: Gründe und Scheitern,” Chiron 20 (2000): 679–710. For a position against the claim that the Roman Republic did not display signs of decline, see now esp. Jürgen Deininger, “Zur Kontroverse über die Lebensfähigkeit der Republik in Rom,” in Imperium Romanum: Studien zu Geschichte und Rezeption. Festschrift für Karl Christ zum 75. Geburtstag, ed. Peter Kneissl and Volker Losemann (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998), 123–36. See the clarification by Hinnerk Bruhns, “Caesar, ‘der wahre Gebieter,’” in Virtuosen der Macht: Herrschaft und Charisma von Perikles bis Mao, ed. Wilfried Nippel (München: C. H. Beck, 2000), 55–71, 292–95. That the plan for a war against the Parthians was an escape from inner-political problems into foreign policy is a common opinion in research. In addition to Meier, Caesar , 538–40 and passim, see Strasburger, Zeitgenossen, 17, 60; Will, Caesar, 216–17; Girardet, “Politische Verantwortung,” 242; Jochen Bleicken, Augustus: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Alexander Fest, 1998), 35. By contrast, see Martin Jehne, Der Staat des Dictators Caesar , Passauer Historische Forschungen, vol. 3 (Köln: Böhlau, 1987), 447–61; see also Botermann, “Rechtsstaat oder Diktatur,” 195. Jehne, Staat des Dictators. See also Yavetz, Public Image, 58–160. Collins, “Caesar and the Corruption of Power,” 445–65.

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70 • Martin Jehne 40. Shakespeare’s Caesar rather insists on his constancy and stability (3.1.58–73). 41. For these events, see Gelzer, Caesar, 288, 294, 300 (with his references to the sources). 42. Plutarch, Brutus, 29.7. 43. For recent studies on this issue, see David F. Epstein, “Caesar’s Personal Enemies on the Ides of March,” Latomus 46 (1987): 566–70, and Rudolph H. Storch, “Relative Deprivation and the Ides of March: motive for murder,” Ancient History Bulletin 9 (1995): 45–52. 44. The most prominent among these were Decimus Brutus and Gaius Trebonius, who both had acted as assistant generals during the Gallic War and who had supported Caesar in the same function in the civil war. 45. See Martin Jehne, “Die Ermordung des Dictators Caesar und das Ende der römischen Republik,” in Große Verschwörungen: Staatsstreich und Tyrannensturz von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Uwe Schultz (München: C. H. Beck, 1998), 33–47, 256–61. 46. Andreas Alföldi, Caesar in 44 v. Chr., vol. 1, Studien zu Caesars Monarchie und ihren Wurzeln, Antiquitas, 1st ser., vol. 16 (Bonn: Habelt, 1985), 317–86. 47. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 14.2.1. 48. Jehne, “Ermordung des Dictators,” 45–46; see also Dahlheim, Cäsar, 194–96. Neither does Shakespeare’s Brutus organize the seizure of power; instead, he ignores the risk that the mood may turn against the conspirators to such an extent that he allows Antony to deliver Caesar’s funeral speech (3.1.227–53). 49. On the radicalization of the means, by which the republicans tried to gain their ends, see now esp. the intelligent investigation by Ulrich Gotter, Der Diktator ist tot!: Politik in Rom zwischen den Iden des März und der Begründung des Zweiten Triumvirats, Historia Einzelschriften, vol. 110 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996). 50. I have endeavoured to present such a depiction in my little biography of Caesar: see Jehne, Caesar (München: C. H. Beck, 1997). An ambivalent view also governs the works of Meier, Caesar; Dahlheim, Cäsar; and, in a different way, of Gerhard Dobesch, who has published numerous scholarly studies on the history of Caesar: see e.g., “Caesar und das ‘Unmögliche,’” in Imperium Romanum, ed. Kneissl and Losemann, 158–83, and “Caesars monarchische Ideologie,” in L’ultimo Cesare: Scritti riforme progetti poteri congiure, Atti del convegno internazionale, Cividale di Fiuli, 16–18 settembre 1999, ed. Gianpaolo Urso (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2000), 89–123. See also Canfora, Caesar. 51. In addition to Kahn, Education of Caesar , see the recent study by Robert Étienne, Jules César (Paris: Fayard, 1997). 52. See Cassius at 1.3.103–6: “And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?/Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf/But that he sees the Romans are but sheep./He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.” 53. This holds true of the observation that Caesar was deaf in one ear (1.2.212), for which there is no evidence in the sources. Obviously, Shakespeare invented this detail.

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CHAPTER

2

Caesar On and Off the Renaissance English Stage CLIFFORD RONAN

“J. C.”—initials for two individuals continually discussed in medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Bible associates the two, when Jesus urges that “we render unto Caesar . . .” (Matt. 22.21). In some quarters, Gaius Julius Caesar was almost as highly praised as Jesus. Their betrayers are practically equated in Dante (Inferno, 34.58–63). In Shakespeare, the Dictator drinks wine with his followers at a Last Breakfast, before suffering from thirtythree wounds—the same number as the traditional age of the crucified Christ rather than the twenty-three wounds that history ascribes to the assassins.1 Both Christ and Caesar were reputed altruists, and yet radical destroyers. At their demise, they left bloody sacred relics2 and precipitated cosmic disorders. And after their deaths, both were seen again and frequently accounted as divine. Since medieval times, Caesar had been famous among all classes. Emperors in Germany, tsars in Russia, and heirs of the emperors in Constantinople were named after him. Even the young prince in Richard III has heard that Caesar built the Tower of London (3.1.67–71). Even lower class or illiterate persons could be expected to know the man—and his famed opponent Pompey—through religious and civic pageants,3 folk plays, and tavern signs. Why else would Shakespeare keep making his frequently comic references to Pompey and to the veni-vidi-vici of haughty Caesar? Caesar’s name surfaced repeatedly in discussions of tyranny, national imperial expansion, and the suppression of traditional privileges and aristocratic power. Caesar’s conquests and political and scientific feats were 71

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retailed in countless histories, commentaries, poems, and conduct books. “Caesar” was an ambivalent code word for power. The political tract Vindiciae contra tyrannos uses Brutus’ assassination of Caesar as precedence for early modern tyrannicide.4 In the Shakespeare play most closely preceding Caesar, the Chorus expects Essex to return from Ireland a conqueror, the “Caesar” “of our empress” (Henry V, 5.0.28–30)—a rather ambivalent locution since Caesar himself was often ranked as first emperor of the Romans. More than any other Roman, Caesar was continually dramatized in early modern plays, on many occasions by distinguished English authors. Such works survive from not just Shakespeare but Kyd, Jonson, Chapman, and Fletcher and Massinger as well.5 Among the plays regrettably lost are a Caesar by Thomas May and a Caesar’s Fall, the latter engaging the talents of no fewer than five additional familiar playwrights: John Webster, Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, Anthony Munday, and Richard Hathway. It is difficult to place numbers on plays that are lost. Titles of a single lost play, like that of an extant one, may be collapsed under the title of its sequel, or conversely, may appear in two separate guises. In addition, titles of many lost plays are hard to decipher. For instance, if the Fletcher-Massinger False One had not survived, who would have surmised that it dealt with Caesar’s invasion of Egypt and his affair with Cleopatra? An educated guess is that there were two dozen Caesar plays in the century preceding the closing of the theaters. In England, Caesar’s own works were read in early modern schools,6 and for centuries comment on Caesar had been unusually full throughout Western literature.7 Ancient references to and discussions of him are found in Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, Sallust, Livy, Lucan, Appian, Pliny, Suetonius, Plutarch, Dio Cassius, Florus, Eutropius, Valerius Maximus, and Velleius Paterculus—all of whom served as authorities on Caesar’s life in the Renaissance as they do even now. There are also numerous medieval comments on Caesar, many of which would be familiar in early modern times. Finally there is the host of Renaissance allusions and dramatic renditions. Caesar is discussed by such early modern non-dramatic writers as Jean Carion, 1550; Thomas Lanquet, 1565; John Sleidan, 1563; Richard Reynoldes, 1571; Lodowick Lloyd, 1590; William Covell, 1595; “E. L.,” 1596; Robert Allott, 1599; William Fulbecke, 1601—not to mention greater figures such as Petrarch, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Sir Walter Ralegh,8 and Sir Francis Bacon.9 The direst and most one-sided picture of Caesar is probably that of the poet Lucan. Books 1 and 7 of Lucan’s incomplete (and often inconsistent) Pharsalia demonize Caesar as an enemy to freedom, a haunted but fully conscious parricide, who attacks the motherland and his own relatives with

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barbarian or barbarized soldiers—an army whose mercenary appetites and animalistic bloodlust he encourages and shares. Appian, too, is no close friend of Caesar’s, finding in his removal of two tribunes a piece of clear evidence that Caesar “coueted thys title” of king, “and that he bente all his practise to that ende, and was vtterly become a Tyrante.”10 More frequent, however, in both ancient and early modern times are the many deeply mixed, complex, and paradoxical versions of Caesar. So, too, it has been since the time of his contemporary Cicero, who deplored Caesar’s politics and personal vices but praised his many literary and military talents.11 New discoveries about the life of Caesar are far fewer than new perspectives. Most of what we now know about the man is based on texts that have been read, translated, and commented on since the early Renaissance. As heirs to medieval perspectives, early modern authors were particularly interested in Caesar’s fall from power. This they took to be a lesson in the implacable strength of mysterious Fate or of fickle Dame Fortune rather than any evil or miscalculation in Caesar himself. Yet with the coming of the Renaissance, Caesar’s troubles were increasingly ascribed to poor human judgment, to the nemesis inherent in pride, or to a Providence facilitating the advent of the Prince of Peace. Sir Thomas Elyot, in his early Tudor guide to aspiring governmental servants, eschews the more mystical explanations for Caesar’s fall. Instead, he stresses that this man’s good qualities were submerged in a compulsive pushiness, not to mention an affectation of greatness that every clerk in the civil service should avoid. Though Caesar was a “moste noble [ . . . man], unto whom in eloquence, doctrine, martiall prowesse, and gentilnesse, no prince may be comparid,”12 he unfortunately became too full of ambition and success: “dronke with ouer moche welth” and good “fortune,” and given to “enuienge his own felicitie.”13 This made him a pretentious striver whom everyone could dislike—a Malvolio, impolite to his equals, and ostentatiously idiosyncratic in appearance and manner: [He] abandoned his naturall disposition, and . . . sought newe wayes howe to be aduanced aboue the astate of mortall princes. . . . [H]e withdrewe from men his accustomed gentilnesse, becomyng more sturdy in langage, and straunge in countenance, than ever before had ben his usage.14 Elyot’s vision of Caesar is a mixed one, as is that in Elyot’s likely main source, Plutarch. This ancient Greek praises Caesar but also bemoans his “insatiable desire to raigne, with a senseles couetousnes to be the best man in the world” (“Life of Antony”).15 Plutarch’s over-intense Caesar is said to have wept over what he had not yet done and to have made prodigious plans in several

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areas. At the thought of the conquests of Alexander, “being no older than my selfe is now,” Caesar burst into tears, and exclaimed, “I hitherunto have done nothing worthy of my selfe.” When he passed by a tiny impoverished Alpine village, he asserted, “I had rather be the chiefest man here, then the second person in Rome.”16 . . . the prosperous good sucesse he had of his former conquestes bred no desire in him quietly to enjoy the frutes of his labours, but rather gave him hope of thinges to come . . . greater enterprises, and desire of new glory, as if that which he had present, were stale and nothing worth. This humor of his was no other but an emulation with him selfe as with an other man . . .17 The key word is “emulation”—the noble Romans’ virtue of aemulatio, fierce competitiveness in which one is ever measuring one’s own record and image against those of one’s rivals.18 The emulative enterprises included not only surpassing Alexander’s clemency and imperial conquests but also cutting canals through the Balkans and eventually joining the Indian Ocean to the North Sea. Though Plutarch regarded Caesar as a victim of his own compulsive ambition, he also admits that when Caesar seized power like a tyrant “at his first entrie,” he soon proved to be a tyrant only in “name and opinion.” For he acted like “a mercifull Phisition, whom God had ordeyned . . . to set all thinges againe at quiet stay” (“Dion/Brutus Comparison”).19 The assassination of Caesar was not approved by Heaven, Plutarch maintains, because Caesar’s ghost was allowed to appear on earth and wreak vengeance on Brutus.20 A parallel example from pre-Shakespearean England is the epilogue to Richard E(e)des’ lost academic Latin play of 1582. Here Caesar is said to have acted wrong in overpowering the Republic and becoming a tyrant, but done right in proceeding without slaughter and blood. The gods slay tyrants, Eedes says, but to good tyrants like Caesar they give warnings, though in the nature of things the warnings go unheeded. To Eedes, Caesar deserved death as a tyrant, but not as a moral governor.21 In 1583, Sir Thomas Smith states that though Caesar “by force cometh to the Monarchy,” nevertheless “one may be a tyrant by his entrie and getting of the gouernement, & a king in the administration thereof.”22 In 1601, shortly after the date of Shakespeare’s treatment of Caesar, William Fulbecke explains that though Caesar was a “vsurper” with a “rebellious humor,” he nevertheless legitimized himself through “industrie and victorious exploit” just as much as if he had been royalized by descent, inheritance, or election. Fulbecke’s Caesar was both forgiving and efficient, and he “neither depresse[d] the Noble man by slauder, nor aduance[d] them of obscure

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condition by flatterie and bribes”23—behavior that Fulbecke’s English readers would not always have discerned in the rulers of their own land. An important issue in most Renaissance commentary is the nature and motivation of Caesar: did he consciously seek to destroy the republican constitution and re-institute monarchy tyrannically for his own benefit, his blackguard assistants’ pockets, and/or his own personal egotistical fulfillment? In trying to understand him, playwrights and other commentators sometimes ascribe his behavior to megalomania, bloodthirstiness, or a simple larcenous attraction to other people’s property. Most writers touch briefly on Caesar’s courage, clemency, affection for his followers, active love life, and military and political skill—in all of which he rivaled or surpassed Alexander. But most English dramatists take relatively little notice of the extent of his adulterous loves, his collection of Gallic whores, or his rumored homosexual affair with an Eastern king. Also escaping attention are the many sides of Caesar, though emphasized in Plutarch as well as his French admirer Montaigne. Caesar was a physical man in more than an amorous sense. In his haste to meet and defeat his enemies, he launched his ship in a tempest, he repeatedly swam rivers rather than wait for other conveyance, and he walked bareheaded in front of his men on the march through forests and even into battle. Dramatists make almost no mention, too, of his literary and scientific talents: his military and engineering inventions, his mapping of the stars and of northern Europe, his reform of the calendar, or his custom of dictating his memoirs in perfectly lapidary Latin as he rode horseback on campaign. If today we were to sketch Caesar from the details available to writers in the early modern period, we might end up with a complex portrait of a man of great energy, drive, and daring. These qualities helped him meet all challenges, including the familial and genetic ones to which he was heir. Physically, he was an epileptic, migraine-prone person. Culturally, he was born into an obscure patrician family with almost no history of political distinction or power, though his aunt had married the populist leader Marius (whose faction was outlawed, however, in Caesar’s youth). In response to the inner and outer forces that seemed to dictate who he should be, Caesar chose to cultivate in himself at least six clusters of personal traits: 1. Arrogant complacency, coupled with selective political tact and humane sensitivity to fellow males 2. Wit and a literary and scientific genius 3. Physical assertiveness and vitality, along with courage and Stoical restraint 4. Disregard for the lives of foreigners and, in general, their or anyone else’s religious values

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5. Personal and political extravagance on borrowed or stolen money 6. Other “outlaw” qualities, such as graft, compulsive heterosexual promiscuity, and an intense bonding to loyal but unprincipled followers In short, there is nothing here that is not to be discovered to some extent in major politicians of every nation and century. Nor is it far from the portrait to be drawn by one of the wisest of Renaissance commentators, Montaigne. Montaigne himself announces that he reverences Plutarch, and indeed he gives us Plutarchan complexity. In the marvelous Essays 2.33, Montaigne wrestles to praise the immoral but energetic Caesar while strongly condemning his politics: . . . never was man more given to amorous delights [ . . . yet his] pleasures could never make him . . . turne one step from . . . his advancement. . . . Truely I am grieved, when in other things I consider this mans greatnesse, and the wondrous parts that were in him; so great sufficiencie in all maner of knowledge and learning, as there is almost no science wherein he hath not written. Hee was so good an Orator, that diverse have preferred his eloquence before Ciceroes [ . . . No one had] ever minde so vigilant, so active, and so patient of labour . . . He was exceeding sober, and . . . homely in his feeding . . . The examples of his mildenes and clemencie, toward such as had offended him, are infinite . . . But if any shall say, those examples are not of validitie to witnes his genuine and natural affabilitie, we may lawfully answere, that at least they shew us a wonderfull confidence, and greatnes of courage . . . His enemies, he feared lesse than he hated them . . . respect he ever bare unto his friendes . . . Never was man, that shewed more moderation in his victorie, or more resolution in his adverse fortune. But all these noble inclinations, rich gifts, worthy qualities, were altered, smothered and eclipsed by this furious passion of ambition . . . Of a liberall man, [ . . . ambition] made him a common theefe, that so he might the better supply his profusion and prodigalitie; and made him utter that vile and most injurious speech; that if the wickedst and most pernicious men of the world, had for his service and furtherance beene faithfull unto him, he would to the utmost of his power have cherished and preferred them, as well as if they had beene the honestest [ . . . Out of ambition, he made] his Sentences . . . Lawes [ . . . sat down to be worshipped by] the whole . . . Senate [ . . . and witnessed] divine honours to be done him. [ . . . Ambition,] this only vice (in mine opinion) lost, and overthrew in him the fairest naturall and richest ingenuitie that ever was[.]24

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Montaigne’s essays were accessible sources for Caesar plays, even those written before Montaigne was published in English. Many educated persons understood French. In Henry V the author engages in French/English punning, a natural development in a man who boarded with French speakers as he did. And even if he might not have read French easily, he could conceivably have glanced at a translation of Montaigne as it awaited publication by the secretary to Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron. Thus if Shakespeare’s Caesar is less vivid and complex than Montaigne’s, the reason is likely to have been a conscious decision on the playwright’s part. Perhaps he was contemplating his next (or near contemporary) tragedy, Hamlet, and becoming more interested in pensive heroes than in politician-soldiers like Hal and Caesar. Out of at least a half dozen Caesar plays composed, translated, or mounted in England before Shakespeare’s treatment of the subject, only two survive in entirety: the anonymous Caesar and Pompey: The Tragedy of Caesar’s Revenge (c. 1596) and Thomas Kyd’s 1595 translation of Robert Garnier’s Cornélie. The Garnier-Kyd Cornelia concentrates on the Pompeians’ defeat. As in much literature, ancient as well as early modern, Roman imperialism and proclivity for civil war are alike traced to wolf-bred Romulus, the fratricide who established the national gene bank through the rape of Sabine women.25 The Garnier-Kyd Caesar is often a bombastic Marlovian conqueror, tyrannical, bullying, and unrepentant. He publicly brags of his brave, gloryseeking “hart,” which presumably makes him superior to Pompey and worthier of power and a civic triumph: . . . but even in one assault, My hand, my hap, my hart exceeded [ . . . Pompey’s], When the Thessalian fields were purpled ore With eyther Armies murdred souldiers gore . . . ... Now therefore let vs tryumph, Anthony; And rendring thanks to heauen, as we goe, For brideling those that dyd maligne our glory[.] (4.2.61–75)26 This is a Senecan and Lucanian Caesar: politically effective but lacking in wit, tact, compassion, and intellectual curiosity. Behind him lurks the vaunting Caesar created in a Latin drama by Montaigne’s tutor, Marc Antoine Muret. Muret’s Caesar boasts that he drenched Pharsalus in Pompeian blood27 and that the very name “Caesar” scares kings.28 Another of Muret’s pupils, Jacques Grévin, puts the Dictator into a French play, giving him a bit of vulnerability to fear, but retaining the tyrannical vaporing.29

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The very idea of imperial glory is called into question in the GarnierKyd Cornelia: Are we not thieues and robbers of those Realmes ... Whose mournfull cryes and shreekes to heauen ascend, Importuning both vengeance and defence Against this Citty, ritch of violence? (1.139–46) As might be expected of a Frenchman, living in a land that was once brutally raped by Caesar, Garnier is alert to the mad underside of the Roman imperial conquest. The academic Caesar’s Revenge awkwardly echoes works in print by 1596 and no later. Though not published until 1607, Caesar’s Revenge almost certainly predates Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. That Caesar’s Revenge influenced Julius Caesar is unlikely (though I have elsewhere argued the impact on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra).30 Caesar’s Revenge is an encyclopedic omnibus, covering Pompey, Cato, Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and the rest in their military, political, and even amatory fortunes. The Revenge Caesar is alternately a braggart, penitent, Stoic, sentimentalist, wanton lover, patriot, materialistic conqueror, and intellectual. When he discovers Pompey’s assassination, Caesar sheds genuine tears, lamenting that “ambition should such mischiefe worke/Or meane Men die for great mens proud desire” (1.2.230–31).31 Thereupon, Antony reminds him that Pompey was “proud” and that it is “womanish compassion” (1.3.283; 269) to bemoan him and his losses, which are so many fewer than the “Millions of Soules” that Caesar slew in Gaul without any apologies (1.3.272–73). Caesar, putting into his own mouth words that Lucan would use of him, says that he regrets having had to triumph over his own countrymen, a victory sadder than the one that brought tears to Scipio Africanus, when he conquered Carthage (1.3.288–99). When this Caesar is less sentimental, he exhibits “Conquerors insolence” (2.5.1139). He brags that his “fame” will be trumpeted and reverberate to “the worlds end,” and that his “Pompeous glory” will exceed Jove’s, calling down all the stars to “leaue Heauen blind, my greatnes to admire:”

Cassiopea leaue thy starry chayre, And on my Sun-bright Chariot wheels attend, Which in triumphing pompe doth Caesar beare. To Earths astonishment, and amaze of Heauen: Now looke proude Rome from thy seven-fould seate, And see the world thy subiect, at thy feete, And Caesar ruling ouer all the world. (3.2.1202–26)

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The ugliness of this bombast may excuse a critic from displaying each of the Caesar’s many facets. But it would be a pity to ignore two of his identities. One occurs when dead Caesar turns into a literal snarling fury from hell. Another odd identity is evoked when Caesar becomes more entranced with intellectual discussions or with appropriating Egypt’s wealth than with deflowering her queen. The “smiling” teenage Cleopatra invites him to view her country’s “Monuments that speake the workemens prayse,” her goldroofed palace with a gate of “pure bullion” and “Carued Iuory,” her “Royall goulden bowre” for trysts, and so forth (2.3.839–54). But as in Lucan, Caesar would rather steal treasures than chase Pompey or make love. Perceiving this, she offers him “Academick” discussions about Egyptian philosophy, theology, and astronomy (2.3.855–58). Subsequent to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) and prior to the Commonwealth period, there were at least seven other Caesar plays. They consist of the aforementioned False One (c. 1620) and lost Caesar’s Fall (c. 1602), a lost Caesar by Thomas May,32 an academic drama by Jasper Fisher on the Roman conquest of Britain (Fuimus Troes, c. 1625), Sir William Alexander’s closet drama Julius Caesar (1605), and two from the commercial stage— George Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey (c. 1605) and Ben Jonson’s Catiline (1611). These seven, though written too late to have been an influence on Shakespeare’s Brutus-centered Caesar, shed a suggestive light on what the more eminent dramatists chose to include, omit, imply, or emphasize. For most of Sir William Alexander’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar, the protagonist is talked about rather than portrayed. The play’s Argument, the choruses, and the dialogue of Caesar’s enemies emphasize the illegitimacy of his power and overall unrepublican behavior toward the Senate and people. Nevertheless, in over two hundred lines of conversation with his confidant Antonius, Alexander’s Caesar describes himself as unmotivated by bloodthirstiness or rank selfishness. He has sought fame and achievement, yes, but also morality, true honor, and the good of his country. His “sweetest comfort,” he asserts, is to “do to many good” and “save” “some Romanes life:” . . . prompt to pardon when I had prevail’d. Not covetous of bloud, of spoyls, nor harmes, ... “Of clemency I like the praise, more then “Of force . . . (2.1.479–92)33 It simply makes him weep when fellow Romans die. For, he abhors “violence” and knows that these men died for honor. He still wishes to “serve the State” and fulfill the Sibylline prophecy. This specifies that only a king

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will defeat the Parthians, avenging the death of Caesar’s fellow triumvir at the Parthians’ hand. Otherwise, he tells Antony, he would not want Antony to manipulate the crowd and make the people beg him to be king. For, I have all honour that can be requir’d: And now (as that which wants) would onely crave To taste the pleasures of a life retyr’d: But (save to serve the State) for nought I strive, For, O! (neglecting th’ecchoes of renowne) I could content my selfe unknowne to live A private man, with a Plebeian gowne: Since (Anthonie) thus for the state I care, And all delights which Nature loves disdaine, Go, and in time the peoples mindes prepare, That as the rest, I may the title gaine[.] (2.1.620–30) It is, of course, impossible to determine the extent to which this politiciansoldier is telling the truth, even to himself and his closest friend. Not surprisingly, the play’s final chorus also calls into question the colonial policy of this man, who has told Antony that he attacks foreigners only to teach them lessons and avenge indignities that they or their ancestors have visited on the Empire. The chorus notes that Caesar died when his “minde . . . swell’d most high” after having despoiled his homeland as well as “strange Nations” (5 Chorus, 3191; 3188). This picture of colonial adventure is like that which starts to emerge in Cornelia and Caesar’s Revenge and which earlier appeared in the prose of Thomas Lanquet. In 1565 Lanquet vilified imperial conquest, explaining that capturing Gaul cost not only “the bloud of .lx.M. [40,000 Roman] citizens” but also of “1192000,” or almost 1.2 million, “enemies.”34 Yet no one in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar disabuses the London audience of the innocence of Caesar’s foreign conquests. Antony in fact makes it all sound like some patriotic welfare system, in which nobody dies; Antony’s dead mentor appears to have been a Robin Hood, engaged in a patriotic, altruistic kidnapping project: [Caesar] hath brought many captives home to Rome, Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill. Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept[.] (3.2.89–92) The same acceptance of Renaissance England’s colonialism, which at the time was rampant in Ireland and the New World, seems to inform Jasper Fisher’s Fuimus Troes. There we hear that Caesar was motivated to invade Britain out of, in part, ethnographic curiosity and the advancement of Provi-

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dential peace. He has a “long[ing] to view/This unknown land and all their fabulous [Druid] rites” (475).35 True enough, Fisher’s Caesar once threatens like a tyrant that he will fill British fields with “Bones, marrow, human limbs/ . . . putrifying [and] reek[ing with] vapour’d slime” (517). But generally, this Caesar has almost none of the bluster, acuity, or daring of any of his counterparts, dramatic or non-dramatic. He is just a quiet and likable fellow, who, though resenting British support of Belgic rebels, sends the British “Parent[like]” “wise embassadors” (524). Only after he suffers sudden military and personal losses (including the death of his daughter) does he wonder whether he has been an over-reacher. Thereupon, he piously asks the “deities” to “Pardon, then, my fault” as he establishes “universal peace” in conformity with the will of “Olympus’ king, [who]/Will have the Romans his viceroys on earth” (493, 534–36). Most of the time, this Caesar is just as donnish as his creator, and no better at rhetoric. King James would have liked this pacific and pedantic Roman. A less imperialistic contemporary of Fisher’s academic play is a piece for the London stage, Fletcher and Massinger’s The False One. This collaborative piece of entertainment is sophisticated, with interesting plot developments, attractive verse, and rhetorical nuggets but very little in the way of message, except that practically everyone is in some way a “false one.” The play eschews the Cato story in dealing with the assassination of Pompey and with Caesar’s affair with the virgin queen of Egypt. This work does engage the colonial theme, though arguably more for sensationalism than moral fervor. The chief villain explains that ever since Romulus’ murder of Remus it has been evident that the “glebe” or soil “of Empire must be . . . manur’d” with “bloody” deeds (5.2.11; 9).36 But the protagonist feels he has only Roman blood on his conscience—dead barbarians do not count, though Rome’s allies in Marseilles (“Massilia”) might. In a moment of melancholy at his perfidy on the homefront, he nostalgically reminisces about “my” “happy” “lawful warrs/ in Germany, and Gaul, and Britany” before he turned his “wanton anger” on his countrymen, and sought to be “Crown’d an honourable Rebell:” What have I done [since], that speaks an ancient Roman? A good, great Man? I have enterd Rome by force, And on her tender wombe, (that gave me life) Let my insulting Souldiers rudely trample; The deare vaines of my Country, I have opend And saild upon the torrents that flowd from her, The bloody streames, that in their confluence Carried before ‘em thousand desolations; ... I raz’d Massilia, in my wanton anger[.] (2.3.30–59)

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In Caesar’s mind, it is no sin or crime to trample, pillage, and slay Germans and Celts. Are Fletcher and Massinger leading the London audience to any moral verdict regarding conquering Caesar? Or the westward course of the British empire? It is hard to tell, and that may indicate a lack of concerned authorial commitment regarding the serious issues that the work summons up. As in Caesar’s Revenge (and Lucan, Bk. 10) Caesar is unheroically mercenary, a trait that commences (as in history) well before his arrival in Cleopatra’s Egypt. Violating sacred Roman ground, larcenous Caesar admits: I rob’d the treasury, and at one gripe Snatch’d all the wealth, so many worthy triumphs, Placed there as sacred to the peace of Rome. (2.3.44–46) After bedding the virgin queen, Caesar is suddenly dazzled by a display assembled by her brother’s men: I am asham’d I warr’d at home, (my friends) When such wealth may be got abroad? . . . ... The wonder of this wealth, so troubles me, I am not well: good-night. (3.4.77–78; 100–101) Cleopatra thereupon concludes that he is no warrior-lover but “a meere wandring Merchant,/Servile to gaine” and (like Moses’ Israelites?) ready to “worshi[p]” and “f[a]ll before the Images of treasure” (4.2.22–23; 116). He responds positively to her criticism and removes threats to her safety. Finally, however, both lovers separate calmly and amicably at the play’s end. No one could mistake this Caesar for the colossus that haunts the many Romans’ imaginations in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Ben Jonson’s Caesar does not have a major speaking role in Catiline, though it is clear that he is a looming power broker there—a sort of Hitler in a documentary on the crises in von Hindenburg’s political career. Jonson takes no occasion to show us Caesar the weeper, the epileptic, the art collector, the alleged one-time gay, the expert engineer, astronomer, and geographer. Despite all the political slyness and chicanery that Jonson’s Caesar uses, the play gives no explicit sense of his political philosophy, though of course Cicero and Cato suspect that Caesar intends to become another of Rome’s unconstitutional strongmen. Jonson illuminates a Caesar who is not simply a public politician. Master of both oratory and political maneuvering, this Caesar is also in every way a double agent with an active social life. He is shown to be a womanizer, pearl collector, catty kibitzer, and advisor to criminal elements, without endangering his own career. He covertly keeps in contact with the Catilinarians.

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But when Catiline and the rest do not follow Caesar’s prudential advice and instead lose control of themselves, all Caesar is willing to do is to keep them from being executed. After all, these thugs may come in handy for him at some future time. This Caesar is intelligent, but not particularly pleasant. During Senate debate in act 3, scene 1 and act 4, scene 2, Caesar disruptively chats with Crassus, laughing at Cato and Cicero. He openly takes a sly male-chauvinist jab at Cicero, accusing him of getting all his tactics from his wife at home (4.2.46; Terentia, whom Cicero eventually divorced). Besides insulting Cicero directly, Caesar apparently manipulates Cato into embarrassment in act 5, scene 6. When a message is delivered to Caesar in the Senate, Cato argues that the communication be publicly opened to determine if Catiline is conspiring therein with Caesar. When Caesar urges Cato to protect himself and keep the contents confidential, stern Cato, of course, objects. But when the correspondence is opened, it turns out to be adulterous love letters from Caesar’s mistress of the moment—Cato’s own promiscuous sister. A sense of Caesar’s private life is yet again introduced with the “stateswomen,” who discuss how well Caesar pays for “love” (2.38; 177–79).37 Interestingly his largess seems to include pearls, which history tells us was one of the few things that Caesar enjoyed buying, whether he could afford it or not. He could heft a pearl in his hand and decide its weight like a jeweler. And, historically, he cemented the long-term affair with Brutus’s mother with a very expensive pearl. All in all, Jonson’s Caesar is a humanly realized figure. Yet his political philosophy is left only implicit. Though Montaigne disapproved of Caesar’s politics more than Chapman seems to do, Montaigne might well have felt that Chapman grasped the quality of this ancient Roman better than any other dramatist did. Chapman’s editor Thomas Marc Parrott argues that his author, far more than Shakespeare, reflects the complexity and greatness of Plutarch’s Caesar: “Shakespeare’s portrait of Caesar as an elderly, pompous, and valetudinarian tyrant is singularly unconvincing. Chapman’s [ . . . is] eloquent, energetic, generous, loth to spill blood, quick to repair an error, and supremely confident in his destiny . . .”38 Shakespeare’s uxorious and rather superstitious Caesar is deprived of the dash, naturalness, and self-confidence that allowed the man to apologize and weep as needed. Few signs survive of the “royal” aquiline Caesar that Shakespeare’s Antony recalls (Julius Caesar, 3.1.128), and none at all of the historical collector of pearls and art, the reformer of the calendar, the planner of colossal engineering projects, or the man of letters. A mere three months before the Shakespearean account of Caesar opens on the Lupercal, the historical Caesar paid an intimidating country visit to Cicero, who describes it

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in a well-known collection of letters.39 Caesar arrived at Cicero’s villa with a bodyguard of 2,000, who kept the kitchens busy, though Caesar himself ate nothing (because he was on a course of emetics for his epilepsy). Instead, like a Mafia capo on best behavior, he chatted with his nervous host amiably about literature. By contrast, Shakespeare’s Caesar is afraid of being afraid. He does not stop to listen to warnings of his assassination, for the sake of proving that he is above fear and immune to the power of omens, dreams, auguries, and premonitions. He is pompous, not eloquent. Deaf, epileptic, and overtrusting of ostensible friends, he is a man unable to father a child by his wife and, when suffering from fever, given to whining like a “sick girl” (Julius Caesar, 1.2.128). The most historical touch in the portrait is his readiness to die suddenly rather than have to worry about assassination. The qualities of Caesar that most upset the real ancient Romans were, of course, none of the above, but (1) “supporting robbers” (Julius Caesar, 4.3.23), (2) not rising when the Senate filed past, and (3) ordering that the heads of Caesar’s statues in the city of Rome be decked with the white fillets traditionally used to decorate statues of the gods. Shakespeare avoids referring to the second and subordinates the third to mention of scarves on the statues and the offer of a diadem to Caesar himself. The monarchical politics of the Shakespearean Caesar are thus left fairly vague, but not so vague as his very real genius. The authorial rationale seems to have been to afford the proto-Hamlet Brutus to reach toward the status of tragic hero. Chapman’s Caesar, by contrast, is truly brave, swaggering, and unconventional. One literary scholar has in fact suggested that Chapman intended his Caesar as a model for King James’ son Henry, encouraging him to become far more aggressive than his peace-making father.40 According to this reading of the play, the work was withdrawn from production when Chapman realized how dangerous his message could prove to the playwright, a man who was in trouble with the authorities over his hand in Eastward Ho! Though Chapman’s play praises aspects of Cato and Pompey, it is unlikely that Chapman would reject Caesar for being over-assertive. After all, Chapman was an attendant of the martial-spirited Prince Henry, and, earlier, had dedicated the Englished Iliad to the arrogant Essex, the supposed modern-day image of Homeric heroism. The daring of Chapman’s Caesar is, however, impressively bracketed with humility, tolerance, and altruism. Caesar utterly believes that his divine destiny is to serve his fellow citizens, teaching them the highest in selfdiscipline and aspiration. He speaks his heart out in soliloquy on the bank of a river during a prodigious thunderstorm—weather that the creating gods designed as the “noblest” of “Beauties and glories” (2.5.7–8). Caesar

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thereupon prays that he may escape drowning and reach a partially selfless yet blasphemous goal: I, that have ransack’d all the world for worth To form in man the image of the gods, Must like them have the power to check the worst Of all things under their celestial empire, ... . . . till the crown be set On all my actions, that the hand of Nature, In all her worst works aiming at an end, May in a master-piece of hers be serv’d With tops and state fit for his virtuous crown; Not lift arts thus far up in glorious frame To let them vanish thus in smoke and shame. (2.5.12–23; italics supplied) Caesar implores Heaven to let him be a god, still the storm, and re-create, royalize, and deify human beings. His resulting victory will let him bring to “man,” who is Nature’s “master-piece,” the “virtuous crown” of being “tops” in “arts.” The notion is one that imperialists from Ralegh to Shaw’s Andrew Undershaft would have no trouble understanding. In a return to his political goals a few scenes later, Caesar describes his Pompeian enemies as blots on the nation, timid “fearful fowls” (3.2.117). Instead, his own plans are To make [ . . . “Rome”] happy, to confirm the brightness That yet she shines in over all the world, In empire, riches, strife of all the arts, ... . . . in every grace That shores, and seas, floods, islands, continents, Groves, fields, hills, mines, and metals can produce: All which I, victor, will increase, I vow, By all my good, acknowledg’d given by you. (3.2.130–38; italics supplied) Underlying the discussion in these two sets of speeches is the Renaissance’s dual goal of Mars and Ars—the fostering of the arts necessary both to a peaceful society and to one prudently prepared for war. The phrase “strife of arts” clarifies the intention of Chapman’s Caesar to stimulate peaceful emulation, competition in an age of cultural and technological progress. This Caesar is obviously far from being the blustering tyrant of the old tradition. His thoughts are at least as generous and daring as any that Montaigne ever imagined.

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Other episodes show that Chapman’s Caesar is humble enough to insist on taking blame for a tactical mistake on the battlefield (2.3.5–20), and to be magnanimously tolerant of his opponents’ political difference. The latter is illustrated, for instance, by his reception of Brutus when he leaves the side of Cato, Pompey, and the consuls:

Brutus:

I submit to Caesar My life and fortunes. Caesar: A more welcome fortune Is Brutus than my conquest. Brutus: Sir, I fought Against your conquest and yourself, and merit (I must acknowledge) a much sterner welcome. Caesar: You fought with me, sir, for I know your arms Were taken for your country, not for Pompey. And for my country I fought, nothing less Than he, or both the mighty-stomach’d Consuls; Both whom, I hear, have slain themselves before They would enjoy life in the good of Caesar. But I am nothing worse . . . (4.4.21–32; italics supplied) All his opponents, Caesar thinks, have been as honorable and patriotic as he and have reasons for accepting or rejecting “the good of Caesar[’s regime].” His reaction goes well beyond his historically famous clemency to a humble respect for ideological diversity. But why then in the final scene does Caesar say that Cato’s suicide has “blasted” the dignity of his own triumph: All my late conquest, and my life’s whole acts, Most crown’d, most beautified, are b[l]asted all With thy grave life’s expiring in their scorn. (5.2.180–82) “O Cato, I envy thy death,” he goes on to say, “since thou/Envied’st my glory to preserve thy life” (5.2.213–14). Yet despite this humble gesture to the dead Cato, and despite the pro-Cato Argument that precedes the printed play, there is good reason to believe that Caesar is not defeated morally, nor even in the great Publicity Race of historical reputations. Surely he senses what we too know: that most of his fama will forever survive intact. The lines quoted immediately above, where Caesar “env[ies Cato’s] death” just as Cato “Envie[d] my glory to preserve thy life” make it clear that he and such opponents as Cato and the consuls have been playing the familiar national game of competition—aemulatio. As Caesar remarked an act earlier, when he heard of the consuls’ suicides:

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. . . Did ever men before Envy their own lives since another liv’d Whom they would wilfully conceive their foe, And forge a tyrant merely in their fears To justify their slaughters? . . . (4.4.3–7; italics supplied) The historical counterparts of these consuls did not apparently kill themselves. The episode is entirely Chapman’s invention. What this plot device does is help highlight the verbal emphasis on envy in the denouement. Chapman takes great pains to project a Rome whose competitive system is based on envy, the desire to opt for oneself any advantage another may have gained—militarily and otherwise. Surely Chapman’s Caesar can afford to graciously acknowledge that Cato has won a round in their competition; but Caesar is far enough above mere envy-based motivation to know that his setback is temporary, and therefore relatively unimportant. In the final lines of the play, Caesar, like Octavius in Antony and Cleopatra, generously orders a sumptuous tomb for his late enemy. He also vows to have Pompey’s murderers tortured. He will not rejoice over Pompey’s death: rightly or wrongly Rome herself “choos’d [Pompey] to fight for her.” Pompey’s assassins will suffer not just for vengeance and the dignity of Rome but also for Caesar’s own fama—to counteract anyone who would lodge against Caesar the “false brand of . . . tyranny” (5.2.205–24). These final words are not, as some critics have implied, sentiments of arrogant rage, or, according to others, craven and heart-broken penitence. Instead, they are those of a noble Roman, who wanted to live fully, survive in history’s hall of fame, and help his countrymen to do the same.

Notes 1. See David Daniell’s gloss in the Arden Edition of Julius Caesar at 5.1.52. 2. In Julius Caesar, 3.2.134, Roman commoners are imagined as “dip[ping] their napkins in [Caesar’s] sacred blood.” 3. Even in the fifteenth century, Caesar was a figure in English public pageantry. See Clifford Ronan, “Antike Roman”: Power Symbology and the Roman Play in Early Modern England, 1585–1635 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 47. 4. Ibid., 146. 5. My ultimate statistical source is Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. S. Schoenbaum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). A comparative study of the frequency of plays on Caesar and other Romans is more easily done from the annotated lists in my “Antike Roman,” Tables 2 and 4, 177–85. The “distinguished” Roman plays to which I refer in the text above are Thomas Kyd, Pompey the Great His Faire Corneliaes Tragedie; Ben Jonson, Catiline; George Chapman, Caesar and Pompey; John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The False One. See also Kyd’s source: Robert Garnier, Cornélie, ed. Jean-Claude Ternaux, vol. 3 of Théâtre complet, ed. Jean-Dominique Beaudin (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002). For authors and plays of less certain distinction, see Alexander’s Caesar, Fisher’s Fuimus Troes, and the anonymous Caesar’s Revenge, all cited and discussed below.

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 1: 102 and passim. For summaries of ancient, medieval and early modern views of Caesar, I am indebted to M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and Their Background (1910; repr., London: Macmillan, 1967); Friedrich Gundolf, Caesar: Geschichte seines Ruhms (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1924); Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–1975); and Daniell’s “Introduction” to Julius Caesar, 1–95. I have also found useful the surveys of authors, non-dramatic and dramatic, in J. Leeds Barroll, III, Shakespeare and Roman History (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1956); Remington Edward Rose, II, Julius Caesar and the Late Roman Republic in the Literature of the Late 16th Century, with Especial Reference to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1964). For continental Renaissance traditions of plays on Caesar, I have also consulted Harry Morgan Ayres, “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the Light of Some Other Versions,” PMLA 25 (1910): 183–227, and L. E. Kastner and H. B. Charlton’s “Introductory Essay on the Growth of the Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy,” appended to their edition of The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, Earl of Sterling (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1921), 1: 17–200. For my sense of what Caesar was really like and what the Renaissance could have read about him, I am indebted not only to the authorities mentioned above but also to Michael Grant, Great Lives: Caesar (London: George Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1974); Kathryn Welch and Anton Powell, ed., Julius Caesar as Artful Reporter: The War Commentaries as Political Instruments (London: Duckworth, 1998); Zwi Yavetz, Julius Caesar and His Public Image, trans. by author (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), and to Gilbert Highet’s history of the transmission, translation, and publication of classical texts: The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (New York: Oxford-Galaxy, 1957). Early modern collectors and booksellers had many works that touch on Caesar’s career. Almost every extant classical text that is currently available to the biographer of Caesar was available in the Renaissance as well. Or so I gather from a comparison of the findings of cultural historian Highet with those of biographers like Grant and Yavetz, and the essayists anthologized by Welch and Powell. Each of the foregoing thirteen authors is mentioned in Barroll, Roman History or Rose, Julius Caesar or both. Lynn Harold Harris quotes Bacon as saying that Caesar “secretly favored the madnesses of Catiline”; see Harris’ edition of Ben Jonson’s Catiline His Conspiracy , Yale Studies in English, vol. 53 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1916), 153. Rose, Julius Caesar, 59. Yavetz, Public Image, 182–83. Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 167. Ayres, “Caesar Versions,” 199. Ibid. Rose, Julius Caesar, 79. Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 63. Ibid., 5: 79. Cf. Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), passim. Rose, Julius Caesar, 86. Ibid., 90. Ibid., “Appendix,” i–ii. Ibid., 182–83. Ibid., 127–29. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London: Dent, 1965), 2: chap. 33. A stereotype anatomized in my “Antike Roman,” 140–50. Pompey the Great His Faire Corneliaes Tragedie, in The Works of Thomas Kyd, ed. Frederick S. Boas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901). L. 19–20, cited in Ayres, “Caesar Versions,” 205. L. 8, cited ibid., 204.

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Ibid., 214. Quite properly, David Daniell reminds us that these French plays can be read as ambivalent, giving us “polarized opinion violently for or against Julius Caesar,” sometimes successively and sometimes alternately (“Introduction,” 34). 30. “Caesar’s Revenge and the Roman Thoughts in Antony and Cleopatra,” Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 171–82. 31. The Tragedy of Caesar’s Revenge, ed. F. S. Boas and W. W. Greg (Oxford: Malone, 1911). 32. Deemed lost by Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–1968), 4: 838–39. 33. William Alexander, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, in The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, ed. Kastner and Charlton. 34. Rose, Julius Caesar, 121. 35. Jasper Fisher, Fuimus Troes: The True Trojans, in A Select Collection of Old English Plays, ed. Robert Dodsley and W. Carew Hazlitt, 4th ed. (1874–1876; repr., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1964), vol. 12. 36. John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The False One, ed. Robert Kean Turner, The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–1996), vol. 8. 37. Ben Jonson, Catiline, ed. W. F. Bolton and Jane F. Gardner, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973). 38. George Chapman, Caesar and Pompey, in The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, ed. Thomas Marc Parrott (1910; repr., New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 2: 659. 39. Letters to Atticus, 13.52. 40. Rolf Soellner, “Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey and the Fortunes of Prince Henry,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 2 (1985): 135–51.

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CHAPTER

3

Shakespeare’s Sources Translations, Transformations, and Intertextuality in Julius Caesar VIVIAN THOMAS

Many features have been ascribed to Julius Caesar in distinguishing its special status in the Shakespearean canon, but central to such analyses is the controversial nature of the event: the enormous stature of the historic figure, his merits and demerits, and the verdict to be passed on the key figure in the conspiracy, Brutus, the man whose name was synonymous with gentleness and integrity, who was the beneficiary of Caesar’s magnanimity and largess— and who may even have been the great man’s illegitimate son.1 Whatever else the “sources” of this play did for the dramatist in his attempt to interpret and dramatize the circumstances surrounding the events of 15 March 44 BC, they steeped him in a whirlpool of disputation: analyzing an event which has been described as “the single best-known story from the pagan ancient world” involved an exploration of a literature that was both “massive and complex.”2 Here was not merely a powerful story, an enormously significant historical event with all the ingredients necessary for dramatic expression, but a volcanic eruption of energy. When Shakespeare brought Julius Caesar to the stage he was collaborating with historians and engaging in a dynamic discourse with all those spectators who were endowed with copious or fragmentary knowledge of the doings of Julius Caesar and the events of March 44 BC. Made up from diverse materials and voices, the play itself incorporates many retellings of events, representations in the form of letters and messages, symbolic representations like Caesar’s images, the trophies and the crown, 91

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and a multiplicity of stage props in the political theater which lies at the center of the play—such as Mark Antony’s appropriation of “Caesar’s vesture wounded” (3.2.194)—and the transformative power of words themselves, especially when molded and gilded as they are in Antony’s funeral oration.3 Just as important is silencing, depriving of words or ignoring messages—something experienced in varying ways by Flavius and Murellus, Artemidorus, the Cynic poet, the Soothsayer, Cassius in his disputes with Brutus, or most dramatically the assassination of Caesar, which is followed by the appalling murder of Cinna the poet and the diabolical proscriptions of Antony and Octavius. Caesar who “bade the Romans/Mark him, and write his speeches in their books” (1.2.125–26) speaks thereafter through the mouth of Antony, through his legacies, including the Julian calendar, anachronistically still operative in England at the time the play was being presented, and through his ghostly reincarnation. The most devastating reduction of language takes place with Caska’s cry in commencing the assassination, “Speak hands for me!” (3.1.76). As Shakespeare departs from a decade of writing English history plays and turns in 1599 to the start of his towering tragedies, he explores more intensely than ever before the process of the making, shaping, and reshaping of history—something that begins while the events are taking place. No play of Shakespeare’s shows characters so self-consciously making history, shaping the world about them, and attempting to project meanings into the future. Cassius and Brutus, while engaging in the ritual of washing in Caesar’s blood, visualize the event being validated in the future—and Brutus is doing the same thing with his dying breath. Shakespeare goes to enormous lengths to alert the audience to the nature of refashioning events and the self-fashioning by individuals. Sometimes when departing from his sources he leaves a shadow hovering which involves “two truths”—to employ that equivocal phrase from the equivocal Macbeth. Some critics go so far as to indict Shakespeare’s characters, Antony and Cassius, for telling lies in relation to the facts recorded in Plutarch.4 Those in the audience familiar with Plutarch might be doing the same thing, which raises a question about what is authentic data—that supplied by the dramatist or the related material and wellknown historical accounts? Shakespeare’s well-trained audience were accomplished in responding to a wide range of aural suggestions, allusions, and symbolic tableaux; in sifting arguments and observing the slippery mental activity of rationalization. The sources, then, are not merely the stuff, the materials, the dramatist draws on to create his play, but active constituents that the audience is required to keep in mind. Here is a play about uncertainty. No accurate rendition of any set of events seems possible—everything depends on who is telling the story. Part of the transformative, transmutative power of the

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play lies in this awareness of reshaping events.5 History is never merely recording or retelling; it involves reshaping, not only by the dramatist or historian/narrator, but by participants in the event. “Fashion” is a key word in Julius Caesar—and Shakespeare’s characters display a heightened awareness of themselves as fashioners of events and history and the refashioning of the past by means of their reinterpretations.6 Cassius disparages Romans for accepting the god-like image of Caesar (“we petty men/Walk under his huge legs”; 1.2.135–36) and seeks to substitute himself and his fellows as true Romans who reposition, rectify, and reshape Rome—something for which they believe they will be honored by future generations. Shakespeare’s “translation” consists of a discourse with Plutarch, all the other historical texts that had come his way, and the debates which he had encountered through plays, disputes, arguments, and private discussions. Heir to a multiplicity of views, Shakespeare was highly conscious of the role of his play in engaging with them. For his audiences this is the version of events that would dominate their imagination. While there is no way of recapturing even the ghosts of the diverse contributions to a debate that had continued from the moment of the assassination to the time when Shakespeare put pen to paper, it is possible to chart in great detail the dramatist’s response to Plutarch and to clarify the implications of his transformations. However many tributaries flowed into Shakespeare’s consciousness, the overriding significance of Plutarch is beyond question. Here is a historian relatively close to the characters and events, displaying masterly control in delineating the personalities, actions, and relationships of the major actors on the stage of history, and narrating stories and anecdotes that highlight traits to reveal such paradoxical attributes as Caesar’s arrogance and courtesy.7 In addition to these character studies Plutarch imparts to Shakespeare the odor of Rome: a place with a genuine physical presence, a sacred city with its walls, its famous buildings, and the river Tiber running through it; a distinctive social structure resting on an unstable, volatile plebeian base; political and religious offices are clearly demarcated—consuls, tribunes, aediles, augurs, or soothsayers; rivalries abound (with the concept of emulation lying at the heart of the culture), but family connections are pervasive— Cassius married Brutus’s sister, Brutus married his cousin Portia, daughter to the famous Marcus Cato. The tragic mesh that entangles families is highlighted by Shakespeare when young Cato dies at Philippi—loudly proclaiming his identity (5.4.4). For the first time in his career Shakespeare encounters a clearly articulated social universe in which individuals possess a powerful awareness of corporate life, of being participants in a culture animated by strongly held values, conscious of belonging to a society with a revered history and a sense of

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mission.8 Not only do these famous characters, enveloped in a richly textured culture, come to Shakespeare directly from the pages of Plutarch, but the historian also supplies precise details of the events leading up to Caesar’s assassination and the subsequent maneuvers that culminate in the triumph of Antony and Octavius at Philippi. All this material is then animated and overlaid by centuries of subsequent commentary, discussion, and debate. Even when it came to providing an idiolect for individual characters, Shakespeare had valuable information at hand. For instance, Plutarch comments on Antony’s Asiatic rhetorical style, elaborate and colorful, in contrast to Brutus’s manner, characterized by a terse, analytical, syllogistic method— a contrast most strikingly evident in their Forum speeches. While not Shakespeare’s first venture into Roman history, the material that he worked on here was infinitely richer than that used for the creation of Titus Andronicus. Moreover, Julius Caesar still strode the stage of world history like a colossus—one of the Nine Worthies and a name familiar to the common ear; a hero with passionate advocates and ferocious critics, he was at the center of public debate—as were the principles with which he was associated, monarchial rule and the cult of personality, and that which he was perceived to threaten, republicanism.9 Likewise, the man who bore the ultimate responsibility for bringing him down, Brutus, was honored as republican hero or reviled as a parricide. Never before had Shakespeare been so well furnished with the ingredients for a great play and a box office smash hit. Finally, he had a brand new theater, the Globe on Bankside, in which to open the play. In the light of Steve Sohmer’s detailed study it seems almost certain that Julius Caesar was the first play to be performed in the new theater.10 Ambivalence is the keynote of the play: emotions and intellectual commitments are pulled first one way then another. Moreover, something that is powerfully manifested in Plutarch’s account is the central characters’ awareness that Rome is an arena of political theater: the events recounted by Plutarch are full of performances. Antony’s Forum speech following on the heels of Caesar’s assassination is merely the most striking example—albeit one which changes the course of history. There are such notable performances as the crown offering (which Shakespeare complicates and amplifies by filtering it through Caska’s performance), Decius Brutus’s beguiling of Caesar, and the carefully choreographed assassination culminating in a tragic spectacle of flashing steel and flowing blood. Equally important are the performances behind the scenes such as Cassius’s seduction of Brutus and the proscription scene in which lives are bought and sold. For all its compactness the play generates a feeling of the spaces and tensions in life and the spaces between “texts.” Shakespeare’s sources are not merely the stuff out of

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which he creates his play: the stuff and the process of transformation is a central concern of the play. Studies of intertextuality are characterized by an awareness that any text is “a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text.”11 What they emphasize is the inherent volatility of texts, their polyphonic quality in which diverse, contradictory voices compete, ricochet, and transmute. This perspective is particularly relevant to a play like Julius Caesar where voices and versions are in constant opposition, and where the metadramatic nature of the play continually reminds the audience of its peculiar status. Whereas in the past, examination of sources has taken the form of close textual analysis to reveal the dramatist’s response to key materials, the whole process is now viewed as something more elusive.12 The best that can be done here is to indicate some of the connections between the dominant sources and the play’s narrative and conceptual strategies and structures, and to heighten awareness of the play’s provocative exploitation of its own intertextuality. Julius Caesar’s intertextuality involves a discourse about power, values, political systems, ideologies, mythologies, modes of articulation—speech, documents, gestures, ceremonies—and perceptions of the self. Few of the numerous “sources” or “texts” can be traced with any confidence: they simply echo and reverberate throughout the play. Shakespeare continually invites his audience to appreciate the play as a simulacrum or palimpsest. Given that most of the sources are now almost invisible, it is difficult to exaggerate the significance of North’s translation of Plutarch where so many intricate interconnections can be clearly detected, and where the freshness and vigor of both the French and English translations impart their own coloration to the original. A succinct summary of Shakespeare’s probable sources is furnished by Kenneth Muir in The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays,13 whereas the most accessible provider of Shakespeare’s source material is Geoffrey Bullough in volume 5 of his eight-volume Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Of considerable significance in shaping perceptions of the great man, Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), were his two military memoirs: The Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Gallic Wars) and the Commentarii de Bello Civili. Both were carefully crafted apologias that laid out his achievements, the second justifying his war with Pompey—something that casts a strong shadow over Shakespeare’s play. Bullough expresses the opinion that “Insofar as Tudor England had any sense of Roman values it was owing largely to Cicero” (106–43 BC), adding, “Shakespeare may have read something of him in Latin.”14 A staunch republican and antagonist of both Caesar and Antony, his Philippics and Familiar Epistles, popular in the schools, were

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widely available in Latin. Moreover, his Brutus or De Claris Oratoribus provided an account of the types of oratory which may have influenced Shakespeare’s shaping of the funeral orations, contrasting Brutus’s plain style with the more expansive, dramatic quality of an earlier Marcus Antonius (whose technique seems at one with Shakespeare’s Mark Antony). An antirepublican perspective was provided by Velleius Paterculus (c. 19 BC–after AD 30), whose Compendium of Roman History devoted a great deal of space and ardent support to Julius Caesar. Not translated into English until 1632 it seems unlikely that he had any direct influence on Shakespeare. Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (AD 39–65) acted as a counterbalance to Caesar enthusiasts with his epic Pharsalia. Lucan’s influence on poets and dramatists was significant. Marlowe’s translation of the first book of the Pharsalia, though not printed until 1600, may have been known to Shakespeare. Tacitus’s (c. AD 55–120) Annals were translated into English by Grenewey in 1598 and were likely to have been known by Shakespeare. If so he “may have learned to depict Augustus as a cold and calculating man governed by self-interest.”15 Catullus (c. 84–54 BC) was noted for his satiric epigrams directed against Caesar. The work of Sallust (86–35 BC), an admirer of Caesar, was well-known in the Renaissance. His Jugurthine War was translated into English as early as 1520, though Heywood’s translations (which included the Catiline Conspiracy) were not published until 1608–1609. The writings of Livy (59 BC–AD 17) were particularly significant. The Epitome of Livy by Lucius Florus (AD, second century) was a popular school book. Anne Barton maintains: As an author, Livy is likely to have impinged upon Shakespeare’s consciousness at a relatively early age. Selections from his work were often read in the upper forms of Elizabethan grammar schools, ranking in popularity only behind Sallust and Caesar. As a young man, Shakespeare drew material from Book I in composing his ‘graver labour’, The Rape of Lucrece, published in 1594, six years before Philemon Holland’s translation made the whole of Livy available in English. . . . Livy was the acknowledged, great repository of information about this republic, as well as its fervent champion.16 Another major History of Rome was provided by Cassius Dio Cocceianus (c. AD 155–235) who “expatiated on the wavering nature of the Roman people” (something which permeates Shakespeare’s Roman plays). He was unequivocal in his support of the Emperors and in his condemnation of the conspirators. “There is no proof that Shakespeare knew the History but it helped form the climate of opinion in which Cicero, Plutarch, Appian and others were read in Tudor days.”17 An impartial survey was provided by Eutropius (AD, fourth century) with his Breviarium ab Urbe Condita. This

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account, which expressed admiration for Octavian’s government, was available to Shakespeare in English, having been translated by Nicolas Haward in 1564. Suetonius (c. AD 70–138) was not available in English until Philemon Holland’s translation, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, in 1606, but Shakespeare was probably acquainted with his writing. More easily available was what survived of Appian’s (c. AD 95–165) accounts of the Greek and Roman wars in The Civil Wars, translated into English by “W. B.” in 1578. A striking feature of this work is the historian’s representation of Antony’s deviousness and the account of his funeral oration which almost certainly exerted a major influence on Shakespeare. In Plutarch and other known versions, the description of Antony’s oration is instructive but minimal. For some of the portents associated with the assassination it seems certain that Shakespeare drew on Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Book 1 of Virgil’s Georgics. It has been suggested that the Quarrel scene in Julius Caesar was inspired by a quarrel in Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis—for which it has been claimed: “There is no other scene like it in classical drama, Greek or Roman.”18 Other literary reference points would include Dante (who confined Brutus and Cassius, along with Judas, to the lowest circle of hell) and Petrarch who wrote an admiring biography of Caesar. Here then is a sample of the fragments that contribute to the mosaic that is Julius Caesar. The bedrock on which Shakespeare’s play rests is Plutarch’s (c. AD 45– 120) The Parallel Lives of the Most Noble Greeks and Romans which makes comparisons of pairs of Greek and Roman heroes. These biographical portraits are delivered with telling, intimate detail, containing a “behind the scenes” feel. The tone is captured by Plutarch’s often quoted comment that “The noblest deeds do not always show men’s virtues and vices, but often times a light occasion, a word, or some sport makes men’s natural dispositions and manners appear more plain, than the famous battles won.”19 Translated into Latin his work received widespread currency, “and so circulated throughout the Roman world, and in Europe in the Middle Ages.”20 The popularity of his work continued through the Renaissance, finding expression in such well-known books as Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor (1531) and William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1566). Whatever tangential contact Shakespeare had with Plutarch’s work, its full impact occurred after Thomas North’s embassy to France where he encountered the French translation of Jacques Amyot (1559). This translation was made from the original Greek but Amyot was able to make use of Latin and earlier French versions. Evidently enthralled by the work, North produced the first English translation in 1579. Although Shakespeare could have had access to Plutarch through Latin and French versions, there seems little doubt that it was North’s translation that kindled his imagination.

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The intriguing question of the role and significance of Roman plays on Shakespeare, and on the general atmosphere of Elizabethan England, is dealt with elsewhere in this volume (see chapter 2). Most notable of these dramas was The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, or Caesar’s Revenge (c. 1596) which draws primarily on Appian’s Bella Civilia. Although not published until 1607, Schanzer has expressed the view that this play is second only to Plutarch as a source for Shakespeare’s play.21 Bullough concludes: There is no evidence that Roman themes found any popularity on the public stage before Shakespeare, although the Revels Accounts mention several pieces performed at court by child-actors between 1574 and 1581. Roman plays came next from members of the court circle revolving round Sidney’s sister, Mary Countess of Pembroke, and their attempts to naturalize French Senecanism in closet drama. In writing Julius Caesar Shakespeare may well have been the initiator of a fashion in the popular theatre.22 More recently, however, it has been argued that “When he began writing about Rome in the early 1590s, a tradition of plays drawing on Roman history and legend was already well established” even though “The public theatre, both as an art form and as a social milieu, allowed Shakespeare wide latitude in refashioning Romanness.”23 Granted that Clifford Ronan is able to provide a list of forty-three extant vernacular Roman plays for the period 1585–1635, there can be little doubt that the cultural density articulated in Julius Caesar would have been unique and startling.24 Here was a representation of a Roman world the like of which had never previously been seen. Finally reference has to be made to Steve Sohmer’s recent study. No summary can do justice to Sohmer’s fascinating analysis of the play’s vigorous subtext, but in essence he claims that Shakespeare was exploring a contemporary debate arising from the ten-day discrepancy between the English Protestant Julian calendar and the Catholic Gregorian calendar: Literate English men and women were aware of Elizabeth’s rejection of the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582. They knew they were being compelled to live and worship according to an antiquated and scientifically discredited calendar. As he created Julius Caesar, Shakespeare harnessed the energy of the bubbling calendar controversy. He seized upon the public’s awareness of the bizarre discordances of holy days in 1599 as a means of creating a new mode of discourse with an audience. By staging a Julius Caesar rife with calendrical markers and Scriptural allusions, Shakespeare and Company put their London public on notice that their playhouse would be not only a place of entertain-

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ment but a venue where simmering issues of the day would be interrogated. . . . An Elizabethan audience’s capacity to digest Julius Caesar’s hieratic diction of words and tableaux depended on a shared body of knowledge: knowledge of Scripture, of the Elizabethan church calendar and of a common typological vocabulary of sacred persons, events and rituals.25 What is so illuminating about Sohmer’s study is not merely its revelation of an intricate subtext, but the way in which that subtext articulates a critical scepticism: In the era when Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar the Renaissance mind was struggling to digest the new vernacular Bible as literal history. . . . Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar represents a blunt rejection of Christian historiography. According to Augustine it was God’s will which brought Augustus to the empery of Rome. According to Shakespeare, it was Mark Antony’s guile.26 Another reason why this subtext is so intriguing is that Julius Caesar, whose newly reformed calendar was introduced on 1 January 45 BC, literally changes the time in which his fellow citizens live. The numerous time markers in the play, of which the dispute over the location of the sunrise is merely the most spectacular example (2.1.100–110), underline Caesar’s transformative power. The interconnections between the significance of Caesar’s action and the events in contemporary England are numerous. Take, for example, the conflation of time in the play, the creation of a “double time,” a phenomenon more usually associated with Othello: In performance, one of the curiosities of Julius Caesar is that the night of the Lupercal appears to become the eve of the Ides of March. Commentators have noted how Shakespeare manipulates dialogue and action in 1.3 so that two nights which fell four weeks apart (14/15 February–14/15 March) coalesce into one. . . . The effect of this relentless series of precedents and succedents is to leave the indelible impression that the morning of the Ides follows the unruly night of the Lupercal without interval. No one has been able to say why Shakespeare created this effect. But Pope Gregory’s calendar reform achieved the same effect when he declared the night of 4 October the eve of 15 October 1582.27 As Sohmer indicates, the most notable feature of Shakespeare’s use of his source material in Julius Caesar is the way in which he conflates events. This process begins in the opening scene where the dramatist combines Caesar’s triumph over Pompey’s sons (October, 45 BC) with the Feast of

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Lupercal (15 February, 44 BC). Among other things this conjunction points out the incongruity between a celebration of the founding of Rome and the triumph of one great Roman general over the sons of an equally revered Roman. In the midst of these celebrations comes the warning from a Soothsayer—an event which, according to Plutarch, occurred much earlier. Again there is a passage of a month between Cassius’s initial suggestion to Brutus that he join the conspiracy and the evening preceding the assassination. In the play there is a feeling of headlong pace. Even more significant is the way in which the dramatist conflates the events following the assassination. A series of maneuvers, speeches, and meetings spread over two days are concentrated into the meeting between Antony and the assassins immediately after Caesar’s death and the Forum scene. The dramatist totally omits the historical breach between Antony and Octavius which began with antagonistic maneuvering and culminated in battle which Antony lost (referred to by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra where Octavius describes Antony’s retreat over the Alps; 1.4.56– 72). When Antony gained the support of Lepidus, Octavius found it expedient to join forces with them in order to retain political ascendancy. Historically, the proscription scene occurred several months after the assassination. This brief but chilling scene encapsulates a negotiation which lasted two days.28 Finally, the three weeks which separated the battles at Philippi are conflated into a single day. Hence Plutarch’s description of events which are spread over a period of three years between October, 45 BC and November, 42 BC are powerfully concentrated by Shakespeare into a brief but indefinite time scheme. The feeling is one of a continuous and rapid unfolding of events taking place in a matter of days, except for a time lapse between the fleeing of Brutus and Cassius from Rome and their meeting at Sardis. Within the compass of a few pages, Plutarch gives Shakespeare a great deal of valuable material for the first two scenes of the play. First, Plutarch points to the main reason for the antagonism which Caesar attracted: “the chiefest cause that made him mortally hated, was the covetous desire he had to be called king: which first gave the people just cause, and next his secret enemies, honest colour to beare him ill will.”29 He goes on to narrate events that suggest Caesar was desirous of the title of king, but determined to test public reaction before revealing his ambition. Caesar, on his return to Rome, rebuked those who called him king as soon as he discerned that the vast majority were offended by the title. Again, at the Feast of Lupercal Antony presented Caesar a “Diadeame wreathed about with laurel” which brought forth a cry of approval and rejoicing but “not very great” and “done onely by a few, appointed for the purpose.” When Caesar rejected the crown (twice as opposed to Shakespeare’s thrice), “then all the people together

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made an outcrie of joy.”30 The historian makes it clear, therefore, that this is no whim of Antony’s but a rehearsed device to set up another test of popular feeling. While the historian provides Shakespeare with the framework of a dramatic structure and a deft and penetrating exploration of the chief actors, he leaves spaces that the dramatist infuses with energy and pressure. The very opening scene plunges the audience into a debate, foregrounding the plebeians who evade the outraged chastisement of Flavius and Murellus by means of a verbal quibble on “cobbler” and the exercise of witty repartee.31 Although they “vanish tongue-tied” (1.1.63) they have been instrumental in opening up the key issue of ingratitude (which Antony will later exploit with explosive and decisive consequences), ventilating the question of ceremony (their holiday being aborted to be replaced by prayer—“fall upon your knees,/Pray to the gods”; 1.1.54–55), highlighting the slippery nature of language and giving expression to the prehistory of the play in the form of Pompey’s grandeur along with his ghostly presence as former hero and victim of Caesar. The compression of Plutarch’s historical account of the relationship between these great rivals and former associates is remarkable in that narrative detail is translated into gritty, allusive exchanges that convey a feeling of the present infused by the past. Moreover, the very fabric of Rome is animated—“chariot wheels” and “shouts” are heard, “chimney-tops” are seen, the Tiber which “trembled underneath her banks” (1.1.35–46) is felt as a former time is recreated. The plebeians, who are central to the pulsating animation of this scene, provide the material energy on which Antony will work in the Forum scene. Into the spaces of Plutarch’s account Shakespeare pours contention, physicality, and ceremony (“Disrobe the images”; 1.1.65) and initiates consciousness of a river of events which finds its source in “Pompey’s blood” (1.1.52) and engulfs the Capitol before carrying away countless victims right through to Philippi. From Plutarch’s retrospect Shakespeare generates an enormously powerful precursive pressure. Whereas Plutarch provides copious detail in describing the events of the Feast of Lupercal, his narration is straightforward. Shakespeare textures Caesar’s public presentation with Caska’s marvelously partial account of the crown offering, Cassius’s intimate colloquy with Brutus, and the impending dialogue in which Antony will tell Caesar “truly” (1.2.213) what he thinks of Cassius. Moreover, we learn that Murellus and Flavius “are put to silence” (1.2.285)—Shakespeare employing an ambiguously sinister phrase in place of Plutarch’s prosaic comment that they were deprived of their tribuneships. It is the significance of speech, interpretation, and representation which constitutes the conceptual nucleus of the scene. Cassius’s intimation that he intends to forge pleas to Brutus purporting to come from diverse citizens constitutes a dramatic inversion: Plutarch makes it clear that they

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were authentic. Shakespeare seems intent on filling the play with “texts,” all of which are of questionable veracity or subject to manipulation. The enigmatic nature of the gentle assassin is apparent from the opening lines of Plutarch’s Life of Brutus. Marcus Brutus was a descendant of Junius Brutus, whose statue was set up in Rome because of the courage he displayed in driving out the Tarquins, the last kings of Rome. The historian, however, promptly contrasts the two personalities: Junius was so severe that he ordered the execution of his own sons; Marcus Brutus, on the other hand, “framed his manners of life by the rules of vertue and studie of Philosophie, and having employed his wit, which was gentle and constant, in attempting of great things: me thinkes he was rightly made and framed unto vertue.”32 Brutus’s mentor was his uncle Marcus Cato, whose daughter Portia he married. It is apparent that Brutus is caught in a web of historical circumstances which imbues him with a belief in his appointed role as preserver of republican purity. Plutarch goes on to describe Brutus’s mastery of Latin and his qualities as an orator, illustrating his favored style of Greek oratory—a style which Shakespeare adopts for Brutus’s Forum speech: But for the Graeke tongue, they do note in some of his Epistells, that he counterfeated that briefe compendious maner of speach of the Lacedaemonians. As when the warre was begonne, he wrote unto the Pargamenians in this sorte: I understand you have geven Dolobella money: if you have done it willingly, you confesse you have offended me: if against your wills, shewe it then by geving me willinglie.33 During the battle of Pharsalia, Caesar instructed his men to take Brutus alive or to let him go if he would not surrender. Plutarch gives the following explanation for this act of extreme magnanimity: Some saye he did this for Serviliaes sake, Brutus mother. For when he was a young man, he had bene acquainted with Servilia, who was extreamelie in love with him. And bicause Brutus was borne in that time when their love was hottest, he perswaded him selfe that he begat him.34 Brutus did escape from the battle and wrote to Caesar who “did not onelie pardon him, but also kept him alwayes about him, and did as muche honor and esteeme him, as any man he had in his companie.” Plutarch writes at length on their relationship, interrogating it from several angles. Both Brutus and Cassius are included in Caesar’s censure of “leane and whitely faced fellows” whereas in the play his suspicion of “a lean and hungry look” (1.2.193) is confined to Cassius.35 Nevertheless, Shakespeare maintains or even augments the ambiguities surrounding the Caesar-Brutus relationship.

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Although the pyrotechnics dominate the stage in act 1, scene 3, absorbing Plutarch’s detailed description, it is the pressure of the past bearing down on the future which is most significant, embodied in the three references to Pompey’s “Porch” or “Theatre” and in the allusion to the statue of Brutus’s ancestor (1.3.126; 146–47; 152). The next scene reveals Brutus responding to the forces. Under the influence of Cassius’s incitements and contemplation of the deeds of his great ancestor he promises Rome “redress” (2.1.57). Plutarch suggests that Brutus was anxious about the likelihood of the success of the assassination; in the play his concern is exclusively with its justification. Brutus’s argument/rationalization has been the subject of much critical commentary.36 The interweaving of text, symbol, and reason is embodied also in Brutus’s rejection of the proposed assassination of Antony. Plutarch comments on the folly of the decision but Shakespeare’s Brutus produces the specious argument that by sparing Antony, Caesar’s assassins will be viewed as “sacrificers” rather than “butchers” (2.1.165). The dramatist goes behind the historian’s reasons to show Brutus caught up in the mesh of his own metaphors. Similarly Plutarch’s colorful picture of the strange events that preceded Caesar’s assassination, and Decius Brutus’s role in enticing Caesar to the Capitol, is transformed by Shakespeare by means of symbolic interpretation: This dream is all amiss interpreted. It was a vision, fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes In which so many smiling Romans bathed Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck Reviving blood, and that great men shall press For tinctures, stains, relics and cognizance. This by Calphurnia’s dream is signified. (2.2.83–90) Caesar’s life blood is transmuted to a life force. Whereas Plutarch describes how Caesar received Artemidorus’s warning “but coulde never reade it, though he many times attempted it, for the number of people that did salute him,” Shakespeare’s Caesar takes advantage of the occasion to display his commitment to the primacy of public duty over private interest: “What touches us ourself shall be last served” (3.1.8).37 At this point Plutarch makes an interesting interpolation, writing for once as a fatalist: For these things, they may seeme to come by chaunce: but the place where the murther was prepared, and where the Senate were assembled, and where also there stoode up an image of Pompey dedicated by him selfe amongest other ornamentes which he gave unto the Theater: all these were manifest proofes that it was the ordinaunce

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of some god, that made this treason to be executed, specially in that verie place. It is also reported, that Cassius (though otherwise he did favour the doctrine of Epicurus) beholding the image of Pompey, before they entred into the action of their traiterous enterprise: he did softely call upon it, to aide him.38 For Plutarch the critical intervention is supernatural; for Shakespeare it is the expression of emulation on the stage of political theater. The picture of the assassination created by Plutarch is vivid, revealing Caesar’s courage, the ensuing chaos, and the way in which the assassins unintentionally wounded one another: At the beginning of this sturre, they that were present, not knowing of the conspiracie were so amazed with the horrible sight they sawe . . . They on thother side that had conspired his death, compassed him in on everie side with their swordes drawen in their handes, that Caesar . . . was hacked and mangeled amonge them, as a wilde beaste taken of hunters. . . . Men reporte also, that Caesar did still defende him selfe against the rest, running everie waye with his bodie: but when he sawe Brutus with his sworde drawen in his hande, then he pulled his gowne over his heade, and made no more resistaunce, and was driven either casually, or purposedly, by the counsell of the conspirators, against the base whereupon Pompeys image stoode, which ranne all of a goare bloude, till he was slaine. Thus it seemed, that the image tooke just revenge of Pompeys enemie, being throwen downe on the ground at his feete, and yelding up his ghost there . . .39 Shakespeare’s insertion of Caesar’s brief but poignant comment, “Et tu Brute?—Then fall, Caesar” (3.1.77), is transformative in its power. It may have been inspired by Suetonius, who attributes to Caesar the phrase “And thou my sonne?”40 The assassination effected, Brutus rejected the pleas of his associates to kill Antony, leading them to the Capitol where he successfully defended their action. He had a more difficult time in the marketplace when confronted by a rougher audience, but succeeded in establishing a temporary, if unstable, equilibrium. The following day the Senate commended Antony for his behavior and granted offices to Brutus and his associates. Just when everything seemed to have been resolved Antony moved that Caesar’s will be “red openly” and that he be buried honorably. “Cassius stowtly spake against it. But Brutus went with the motion, and agreed unto it,” and this, Plutarch states, was Brutus’s “second fault” (the first being his opposition to the killing of Antony). When the people learned that they were the recipients of seventy-five drachmas each and had been bequeathed gardens and

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arbors they “loved him, and were marvelous sory for him.” As in the play, Brutus sets the stage and Antony walks onto it: Afterwards when Caesars body was brought into the market place, Antonius making his funerall oration in praise of the dead, according to the auncient custom of Rome, and perceiving that his wordes moved the common people to compassion: he framed his eloquence to make their harts yerne the more, and taking Caesars gowne all bloudy in his hand, he layed it open to the sight of them all, shewing what a number of cuts and holes it had upon it. Therewithall the people fell presently into such a rage and mutinie, that there was no more order kept amongest the common people.41 By contrast Appian’s section dealing with Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral may have offered numerous suggestions for Shakespeare. In addition to containing several phrases which are paralleled by Shakespeare, Appian describes how Antony used the wax image of Caesar’s body as a focus, making particular use of Caesar’s gown, and balancing the whole speech on the concept of ingratitude.42 Shakespeare’s Antony reveals the body itself. The response in both cases is explosive—but whereas in Appian’s account the crowd storms off to take their destructive revenge, including the horrible killing of Cinna, whom they “cruelly tore . . . a peeces, and lefte not one parte to be put in grave,”43 Shakespeare’s crowd is restrained in order to hear the will—which establishes them as Caesar’s heirs: a will, which, in all the historical accounts, had been made known before the funeral.44 The will itself is a paradoxical text. Becoming active only when its author dies, it endows Octavius (as heir he takes on his great uncle’s transformative name), the populace, and becomes subject to Antony’s manipulations (“we shall determine/How to cut off some charge in legacies”; 4.1.8–9). The emblematic quality of the body of Caesar comes to dominate the rest of the action. The very embodiment of change, Caesar undergoes a continuous process of metamorphosis. From the opening scene representations of him are generated so that he is everything from aging hero in decline (deafness in one ear is Shakespeare’s invention) to demigod; his body is both bleeding carcass and emblem of eternal life, both sacred object and stage prop; his ghost or spirit pervades the play and history; his family name becomes synonymous with mighty ruler. Revivified by diverse texts he is destined to an eternity of transformation, bleeding afresh through such performers as Polonius and viewed as the supreme representation of fame “turn’d to clay” (5.1.206) by Hamlet.45 Historical texts emphasize the power of the word in determining the course of events, most spectacularly in Antony’s Forum speech, but equally they stress the role of silencing, especially the proscriptions which sought to eliminate all recalcitrant voices.

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Paradoxically Caesar is never more eloquent than when his past deeds and dead body are represented by Antony. Past life, past words, past deeds acquire a “nowness” as multiple histories catch up with each other and are conflated on Shakespeare’s stage. The past not only speaks but lives as Shakespeare’s actor controls the Globe audience—just as Antony controls his audience at the high point of political theater. Here is the ultimate expression of intertextuality: all “texts” intersect at a single moment in time. The respectful treatment of Brutus’s body by Antony and the account of Portia’s suicide come at the end of Plutarch’s account of the Life of Brutus. Shakespeare invents Brutus’s receipt of the news of Portia’s death (creating intense debate about the two announcements in act 4, scene 3—which produce interpretive ambiguities characteristic of the play) and Octavius’s acquisition of Brutus’s body in the closing moments: a significant move allied to delivery of the final words of the play. In his comparison of the lives of Brutus and Dion, Plutarch draws up a balance sheet of the assassination and its aftermath in which he praises Brutus for his integrity in “having no private cause of complaint or grudge against Caesar, he ventred to kill him, onely to set his countrie againe at libertie.” He says these things in the wake of an assessment of Caesar that exculpates him from most of the charges leveled against him: it seemed he rather had the name and opinion onely of a tyrant . . . For there never followed any tyrannicall nor cruell act, but contrarilie, it seemed he was a mercifull Phisition, whom God had ordeyned of speciall grace to be Governor of the Empire of Rome, and to set all thinges againe at quiet stay, the which required the counsell and authoritie of an absolute Prince. Plutarch also makes explicit Brutus’s act of ingratitude toward Caesar as a man who had forgiven his enemy and behaved as a benefactor toward Brutus, who, “notwithstanding had imbrued his hands in his blood.”46 Here, then, is a very finely balanced judgment. As if to demonstrate the problematic nature of reaching a final assessment of Brutus the man and his action, Plutarch points out that even Octavius Caesar (who was singularly ruthless in hounding to death all those sympathetic to the conspiracy in addition to the active participants) “reserved his honors and memories of him.”47 Here Shakespeare is presented with a wonderful enigma for interpretation: how can we understand the true nature and motivation of the “noblest Roman of them all” (5.5.68)? Several critics have penetrated Antony’s encomium, deconstructing it in a way that generates multiple ambiguities.48 For all the conflicting arguments and evaluations Shakespeare encountered in his texts he is clearly

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intent on multiplying them.49 Cicero’s terse comment might act as an epigraph for the play: But men may construe things after their fashion Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. (1.3.34–35) If there is any consensus about Julius Caesar it is that it generates a sense of the uncertainty attaching to historical events and that it celebrates intertextuality: the world of the play teems with narrations, masterly persuasions, deceptions, disputes, opinions, misunderstandings, historical pressures (such as the shadows of Pompey and Brutus’s famous ancestor), philosophical postures (especially the fervent belief in Rome and its destiny and such Roman values as constancy), rituals, theatricality, letters, a will, suicides— an almost unending series of representations and re-presentations. Here is a world awash with different kinds of “texts,” the authenticity of each open to several interpretations. In this paradoxical social universe Rome feels astonishingly substantial, physical, and palpable, and yet everything is in a state of flux. The swords that strike Caesar and the blood that flows could hardly be more real, but the perpetrators promptly engage in a metahistorical, metatheatrical discourse that displaces the event from the Capitol of 44 BC to theater and the present. Shakespeare draws heavily on Plutarch’s narrative, on other historical accounts, and on diverse background materials to recreate a Roman world. Having done so he then creates spaces which contain numerous biblical references and contemporary debates and invites his audience to sift, analyze, dispute, and acknowledge that the world consists of texts that impregnate each other in such a way that rest and certainty are unattainable.

Notes 1. Harold Bloom comments: “Plutarch repeats the gossip of Suetonius that Brutus was Caesar’s natural son. Shakespeare surprisingly makes no use of this superb dramatic possibility, and surely we need to ask why not” (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human [London: Fourth Estate, 1999], 115). 2. David Daniell, “Introduction” to the Arden Edition of Julius Caesar, 9, 29–32. 3. The evocative word “vesture” is drawn from Appian’s account (The Civil Wars, in The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–1975], 5: 158). Steve Sohmer draws attention to the association of Caesar with Christ via the use of “vesture” in the Gospel of St. Matthew (27: 35). The connections between Christ and Caesar are numerous. To take just two of Sohmer’s examples: all the historical accounts refer to Caesar’s twenty-three wounds whereas Shakespeare makes it thirty-three; Caesar, by “the Roman system of inclusive reckoning” like Christ “rises” on the third day (Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999], 45, 170, 144). 4. Daniell points out that Antony’s first-hand account of Caesar’s triumph over the Nervii is a fabrication because he was not there (“Introduction,” 73). Sohmer also indicts Antony as a liar because the event so finely captured by Antony’s phrase “’Twas on a summer’s evening”

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

(3.2.170) occurred in the winter of 58–57 BC (Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, 44). Cassius’s veracity about the swimming contest has also been questioned because Plutarch records no such incident but does describe Caesar’s prowess as a swimmer. Indeed, by Shakespeare’s time, Caesar’s swimming ability was legendary. Thomas McAlindon avers if “the play could be said to have one all-embracing theme it is that of metamorphosis, transformation” (Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 92). Günter Walch points out that passages “probing the differences between ‘seeming,’ ‘appearing,’ ‘acting,’ ‘fashioning,’ ‘construing,’ and the world of reality occur thirty-five times in the text” (“The Historical Subject as Roman Actor and Agent of History: Interrogative Dramatic Structure in Julius Caesar,” in Shakespearean Illuminations: Essays in Honor of Marvin Rosenberg, ed. Jay L. Halio and Hugh Richmond [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998], 234). On being teased about ruling a poor village in the Alps, Caesar replied “I had rather be the chiefest man here, than the second person in Rome.” Likewise, in Spain, he wept when comparing his own achievements with those of Alexander the Great. His courtesy is revealed in an incident where “oil of perfume” was mistakenly served with a salad but Caesar ate with relish rather than wound the host’s feelings. By contrast, he caused great offense to the Senate by receiving them, seated. For a sense of Plutarch’s closeness to the events see his Life of Antony where the historian provides a fascinating account of his grandfather visiting Mark Antony’s kitchens in Alexandria (Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 63, 67, 80, 275– 76). A critical appreciation of Shakespeare’s articulation of a distinctive social universe began with M. W. MacCallum who was the first to treat the Roman plays as a separate group (Shakespeare’s Roman Plays and their Background [London: Macmillan, 1910]). T. J. B. Spencer’s seminal work “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 27–38, was followed by several studies devoted to an exploration of Shakespeare’s creation of Roman worlds: e.g. J. L. Simmons, Shakespeare’s Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973); Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1976); Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); John W. Velz, “The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or Anachronism? A Retrospect,” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978): 1–12, and “Orator and Imperator in Julius Caesar: Style and the Process of Roman History,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 55– 75; Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare’s Roman Worlds (London: Routledge, 1989) and Julius Caesar (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); Charles Wells, The Wide Arch: Roman Values in Shakespeare (London: St Martins Press, 1993). Geoffrey Miles explores the philosophical inheritance of Stoicism (Shakespeare and the Constant Romans [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996]), and in the most recent study Coppélia Kahn is assiduous in relating her own analysis (including the important issue of “emulation”) to a wide range of critical commentary (Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women [London: Routledge, 1997]). Though he is sometimes displaced by Pompey, as in the Pageant of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, passim. Julia Kristeva, “The Bounded Text,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora et al., ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36; cited by Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), 35. An indication of the possible breadth of the term “source” is provided by Robert S. Miola: “an intermediated text (i.e., a tradition) that manifests its presence in verbal or stylistic echo or adaptation . . . allowing for a wide range of possible interactions between sources, intermediaries, and texts . . . deep source, resource, influence, confluence, tradition, heritage, origin, antecedent, precursor, background, milieu, subtext, context, intertext, affinity, and analogue” (“Othello Furens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 [1990]: 49). Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 116–25. Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 6–7. Ibid., 12. Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 137–38.

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Shakespeare’s Sources • 109 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 16, 17. Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 110. Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 13. Daniell, “Introduction,” 83. Ernest Schanzer, “A Neglected Source of Julius Caesar,” Notes and Queries 199 (1954): 196– 97. Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 25. Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 9–10. Clifford Ronan, “Antike Roman”: Power Symbology and the Roman Play in Early Modern England, 1585–1635 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 2, 165–69. Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, 183–85. Ibid., 190. Ibid., 60–61. For modern studies that draw on a wide range of historical writing, see Pat Southern, Mark Antony (Brimscombe Port Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 1998) and M. L. Clarke, The Noblest Roman: Marcus Brutus and His Reputation (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981). Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 80. Ibid., 81. Intriguingly, cobblers crop up in Plutarch’s Life of Brutus when Cassius says “Thinkest thou that they be cobblers, tapsters, or suche like base mechanicall people, that wryte these billes and scrowles which are founde dayly in thy Praetor’s chaire” (ibid., 96). For another link with the commonness of cobblers see Barbara L. Parker, “‘A Thing Unfirm’: Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 36. Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 90. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 92, 94. Commentary on this soliloquy encompasses the entire spectrum from admiration to contemptuous dismissal. Particularly interesting are A. D. Nuttal, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London: Methuen, 1983), 107–9, and Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of “Julius Caesar,” “Measure for Measure,” “Antony and Cleopatra” (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 54–56. Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 85. Ibid. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 104–5. For a detailed account see Thomas, Roman Worlds, 64–66. Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 159. As E. A. J. Honigmann puts it, “Not only has Shakespeare given greater emphasis to ‘the will’ by making Antony’s oration circle round it, and by verbal repetition. He also contrives to suggest that the man who had dominated Rome by his will (‘The cause is in my will: I will not come’) somehow wills the mischief and mutiny that follow from the reading of his testament” (Myriad-Minded Shakespeare: Essays, Chiefly on the Tragedies and Problem Comedies [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989], 34). As Bloom expresses it, “In death, Caesar devours all of Rome” (Invention of the Human, 114). Jan H. Blits sees Caesar going knowingly to his death: “Caesar’s goal is to establish the divinity of ‘Caesar,’” he “is ambitious for his name. He lives and dies for it.” While this argument seems more ingenious than persuasive, Blits draws attention to the significant point that “Unlike Plutarch and Suetonius, who discuss the numerous projects Caesar was planning at the time of his murder, Shakespeare suppresses all his future plans for Rome and avoids the impression that any were cut short by his death” (The End of the Ancient Republic: Essays on “Julius Caesar” [Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1982], 87–89). Bullough, ed., Sources of Shakespeare, 5: 133–34. Ibid., 135. A modern historian provides a contrasting interpretation claiming “Octavian demanded that Brutus’s head should be cut off and thrown down at the foot of Caesar’s statue in Rome. In view of his treatment of Cicero, Antony was hardly in a position to refuse on ethical grounds, so Octavian had his wish” (Southern, Mark Antony, 82). In a striking

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110 • Vivian Thomas departure from his sources Shakespeare’s Antony is the first to address Octavius as “Caesar.” This is startling in a play where names count for so much. As Sohmer points out, “The historical Antony bitterly resented Octavius’s famous name” (Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, 41). 48. See for example Thomas Healy, New Latitudes: Theory and English Renaissance Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 45. 49. As McAlindon expresses it, “Shakespeare’s method in this play could be termed metahistorical: that is, he dramatises the problems he himself is acutely conscious of in his attempts to make sense of historical events and to assess the reliability of his sources. In terms of chronicle and history play, this procedure constituted an artistic revolution in 1599; but what makes Julius Caesar so richly innovative . . . is that Shakespeare makes his audience unusually aware of its own involvement in interpretative problems” (Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos, 95).

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CHAPTER

4

From Monarchy to Tyranny

Julius Caesar Among Shakespeare’s Roman Works BARBARA L. PARKER

It is a critical commonplace that Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s “Roman” works, a rubric also applied to Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and The Rape of Lucrece. Apart from setting, however, scholars diverge widely on what, if anything, unites these works, or even on what Rome is intended to represent. For Vivian Thomas, for instance, the works demonstrate Shakespeare’s espousal of such Roman values as constancy and valor; for Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s concern with human behavior within political structures; for J. L. Simmons, a Christian awareness of the limitations of pagan Rome; and for John Alvis, the tragic costs of living for self-glory.1 I wish to propose another way of viewing these works, namely, that if they are considered in historical rather than compositional sequence, they collectively detail a constitutional decline closely resembling that defined in Plato’s Republic.2 That the Republic should inform what are fundamentally political works should not surprise. As James Holly Hanford observed in an essay demonstrating the concurrence of Ulysses’s speech on degree with precepts propounded in the Republic, Ulysses asserts “not simply that the state must have a single head, but that stability depends upon the preservation [of class hierarchy . . . ] The need of a firm government and of a strict preservation of social ranks was given special emphasis in Shakespeare’s day owing to recent tendencies in England toward democratic thought,” and “The Republic and The Politics furnished [ . . . Tudor] theorists with their best 111

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arguments and their chief authorities in their attempt to justify by reason what was already in practice the established social order.”3 The Roman Republic perfectly illustrated the perils of monarchic collapse, as well as the constitutional decline such collapse incurred. Fulke Greville, whose poetic treatise Of Monarchy “contains many of the ideas about ancient Rome which appear in different forms throughout the early seventeenth century,” sees “the expulsion of the kings as a disaster, the consequence of the first Brutus having mistaken the sins of one tyrant, Tarquin, for the faults of a system.”4 Greville recounts Rome’s lapse into a “many-headed Pow’r,” the realm eventually coming “‘To such descent of anarchie’ through the pretensions of the tribunes that she finally succumbed to civil war.” William Fulbecke censures the royal expulsion for the same reasons.5 The sequence of decline this expulsion precipitated is elaborated by Sir Thomas Elyot: the people “more and more encroached a license” until they compelled the Senate to institute the tribunate “under whom they received such audacity and power that they [ . . . eventually] obtained the highest authority in the public weal . . . Finally, until Octavius Augustus had destroyed Anthony, and also Brutus, and finished all the Civil Wars . . . the city of Rome was never long quiet from factions or seditions . . . so much discord was ever in the city for lack of one governor.”6 Elyot articulates what was conventionally considered the fatal flaw of republicanism: multiple sovereignty. As survival lay in unity, so ruin lay in plurality, which ensured faction (precipitating the sundering of the state), a struggle for supremacy, and thus perpetual strife. English historians, accordingly, almost unanimously endorsed monarchy, “in which the king governed with the advice of his nobles and people but did not in any sense share sovereignty, except insofar as parliamentary statutes constituted law.”7 In razing the monarchy, the Republic thus planted the seeds of its own demise, its ensuing broils rendering Rome an archetype of civil strife.8 The prototype of this political decline—the movement from monarchic collapse to tyranny—is contained in Plato’s Republic. Rigidly stratified, Plato’s state is comprised of three great hierarchically ordered classes: the artisans at the bottom, the auxiliaries or militia over them, and the guardian or guardians at the top. The state’s integrity lies in the due subordination of the lower classes to the higher, justice—the real subject of the Republic— resides in each class maintaining its bounds and function. Injustice, conversely, consists in a meddling and restless spirit, whereby one class infringes the bounds and vocation of another. The result is the ruin of the state. That monarchic collapse was a prelude to civil war was a Platonic axiom. The king, as the embodiment of reason, was the agent of unity and order and, hence, of the state’s survival. The criticality of a single, rational ruler will be apparent when we recall that the Platonic state was a macrocosm of

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the soul; in the soul, vitiation of the governing faculty of reason loosed the fractious, power-hungry passions (the correlative of the populace), the ensuing battle for sovereignty sundering the soul’s unity and incurring the equivalents of anarchy, mob rule, and civil war.9 The polity thus mirrors the ethos of its ruler, and Plato devotes Books 8 and 9 of his Republic to the corresponding perversions of rulership in the state. Kingship is the best form of government, the one most closely approaching Plato’s idea of the state. What engenders its perversion is selfinterest, in particular economic self-interest,10 which leads to an impoverished population. This gives rise to the class struggle characterizing oligarchy (the rule of the rich) and thus to potential civil war. The people then procure a champion, eventually expelling the rich to establish democracy, i.e., freedom, which is synonymous with lawlessness. But the inordinate love of liberty that characterizes democracy leads by way of reaction to tyranny as the power-seeking champion discards pretence and effects a coup d’état.11 Thereafter, individual warfare supplants class warfare as the tyrant strives to retain state control. If we eliminate, for the moment, Titus Andronicus and substitute historical for compositional sequence in the four remaining works, we are presented with a like political decline. This decline is initiated in Lucrece by abolition of the monarchy, which, together with the instatement of the consulate, paves the way for popular rule. In Coriolanus, Rome has lapsed into oligarchy, with consequences paralleling those detailed in the Republic: “such a State is not one, but two . . . the one of poor, the other of rich men; and they are living on the same spot and always conspiring against one another” (Republic, 8.551).12 Thus in Coriolanus, the famished and seditious masses seek revenge on the surfeiting patricians, who enact “piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the poor” (1.1.14–24; 83–84). With the establishment of the tribunate, democracy displaces oligarchy as the people continue to amass power. In Julius Caesar, the degenerative process is complete: democracy has passed into tyranny, both in the ruler and in the state.13 Antony and Cleopatra portrays the final stage of tyranny; Rome’s rulers continuing the battle for supremacy through murder and populace manipulation. Each of these works, therefore, depicts a separate stage of political decline and of an ever-widening power struggle ultimately waged for control of the world. Power struggle and decline are thus inextricably linked, the consequences of a realm shorn of monarchic rule. That Lucrece is political is suggested both structurally and linguistically. The Argument opens with a usurpation and closes, like the poem, with overthrow of the monarchy. Shakespeare, therefore, besides fusing Lucrece’s rape with the political story, provides a political frame for the story proper that creates an analogy between the two. Lucius Tarquinius is not only a

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tyrant, who flouts Roman law; he has, like Shakespeare’s Richard II, murdered a kinsman to achieve the crown (Argument). The situation parallels that of the rape: in a lawless realm, Lucrece solicits Tarquin for justice (544; 626–44), the rape itself being conceived as a usurpation. The rape is further politically defined. Tarquin, a “usurper” (412), seeks the “throne” and the “crown” (413; 216). The rape is an act of “treason” (361; see also 369). Even Lucrece’s body parts evoke political entities: her heart is a “citizen” (465); it is also a “cabinet” of which she is “governess”(442– 43).14 Her face is a “map” (1712). Her breasts are “worlds” (408). She herself is alternately a “city” and a “land” (469; 439). And when she pleads with Tarquin, it is for the return of “majesty” (640), whose “exile” she expressly equates with rape. This figurative exile of majesty anticipates, both verbally and literally, the poem’s conclusion: because of the king’s “tyranny,” “the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls” (Argument). The stages of the rape, narrated in terms at once sexual and political, replicate allegorically a sequence of decline spanning monarchic collapse, mob rule, and civil war. Lust is synonymous with treasonous aspiration— with the “ambitious foul infirmity” that makes Tarquin covet “Lucrece’ sov’reignty” (150; 36); and ravishment is equated with seizing the “crown” (216), a double entendre that cements the analogy between usurpation and rape. The sight of Lucrece sleeping heightens monarchic desire, prompting thoughts of violently dispossessing the throne’s occupant: Lucrece’s breasts “in Tarquin new ambition bred;/Who like a foul usurper went about,/From this fair throne to heave the owner out” (411–13). Swelling unchecked, the passions eventually achieve dominion. The results are anarchy and civil war: And they [the passions] like straggling slaves for pillage fighting, Obdurate vassals fell exploits effecting, In bloody death and ravishment delighting, Nor children’s tears nor mothers’ groans respecting, Swell in their pride, the onset still expecting. Anon his beating heart, alarum striking, Gives the hot charge, and bids them do their liking. (428–34) The political implications become explicit in Lucrece’s plea. Lucrece equates Tarquin’s lust with “misgoverning”—with the perversion of monarchy that shatters degree and incurs mob rule: “Thou art,” quoth she, “a sea, a sovereign king, And lo there falls into thy boundless flood Black lust, dishonour, shame, misgoverning, ... “So shall these slaves be king, and thou their slave[.] (652–59)

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She sues, accordingly, for “exil’d majesty’s repeal:/Let him return” (640–41). The plea, of course, is futile; and following the rape, Lucrece kills herself. The poem concludes with Brutus’s appeal to the populace, in which he adorns “bitter invective” (Argument) with a display of Lucrece’s stabbed and bleeding body (1851). “Wherewith the people were so moved, that with one consent and a general acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled, and the state government changed from kings to consuls” (Argument).15 When Coriolanus opens, roughly fifteen years have elapsed since the Tarquins’ expulsion, and we witness the initial fruits of monarchic collapse. Rome is a Republic, its sovereign “head” supplanted by a multiplicity of heads in the form of a ruling elite. The resulting oligarchy hews closely to the paradigm in Plato’s Republic, in which sovereignty resides in the richest members of society.16 Habituated to luxury and sloth, these rulers are indifferent to the plight of the people, who grow poorer as their masters grow richer. This situation gives rise to social hatred and to the defining attribute of the oligarchical regime: class conflict. As noted above, the result is the sundering of the state into two disparate and embattled entities, “the one of poor, the other of rich men,” each ceaselessly conspiring against the other (Republic, 8.551; compare Coriolanus, 1.1.14–21; 78–85). Plato’s polity, in consequence, exists in a perpetual state of imminent civil war—the situation of Rome in Coriolanus. The opening scene establishes the interrelationship between two things: the sundering of Rome without a sovereign, unifying head; and the ominous seditiousness and mutability of an oppressed but still leaderless populace. The masses, we will recall, are the Platonic analogue of the passions and thus a force for good or evil depending on how they are led. Ruled by the monarchic equivalent of reason, they are an ordered and constructive force conducing to the state’s felicity; shorn of such leadership, they become a force of anarchy and destruction, swayed by any appeal to their passions that may be devised by the unscrupulous politician. Newly kingless and still unorganized, the populace of the opening scene is as yet morally neutral, nevertheless seeking to proceed with rectitude if they could only discern where it lies. The establishment of the tribunate endows the commons with a crucial asset: leadership. Led by the demagogic tribunes, the people evolve into an organized, malevolent opposition, soon amassing enough strength to begin curbing the patriciate’s authority. Indicative of this shift in power is their revocation of Martius’s election and, more symbolically, the tribunes’ barring of Martius’s passage because “The people are incens’d against him” (3.1.31). The people, that is, have begun taking the law into their own hands. The tribunes’ action prompts an altercation, during which Martius reiterates his contempt for the citizens: he would starve them and strip them of their lawfully established representatives. Branding him “a traitorous innovator”

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and “foe to th’public weal” (3.1.173–74), the tribunes convey his sentiments to the people, with whose resulting backing they sentence him to death. The sentence sparks the first physical skirmish between the two sides, further indicative of the escalating power of the people and a harbinger of the civil strife to come. Another debate ensues: the tribunes argue why Martius deserves death, Menenius why he should be spared. Menenius prevails, but only after he agrees to bring Martius to “Where he shall answer by a lawful form—/In peace—to his utmost peril” (3.1.322–23). The balance of power is now roughly equal; the tribunes have backed down. But the patricians must now answer to the tribunes, who designate Menenius “the people’s officer” (3.1.327) and command him to bring Martius to the marketplace for trial. Should he fail to do so, the death sentence will stand. Although the power struggle now shifts to Antium, Shakespeare makes clear that the Volscian state is simply a mirror image of the Roman one, thus rendering them thematically interchangeable. Both are Republics governed by a patriciate whose impotence takes identical form: when Second Lord urges trial by process for Martius, he is overruled, as was Menenius, by the people, whose edict prevails. Their fickleness also assumes similar form: as the Romans variously extol, censure, lionize, and ultimately condemn Martius, so do the Volscians. Both possess a martial Goliath, each of whom further images the other in fame, envy, and wrath. The inhabitants are similarly interchangeable: as Aufidius punningly informs the Volscians, Martius has betrayed “your city Rome” (5.6.93). Finally, both states are characterized by schism, which encompasses not only their oligarchical polities but—in the case of Antium—the divided leadership of the army, which will spark the same struggle for supremacy transpiring in Rome. The two states thus are thematically congruent, and Martius’s death at the hands of the Volscians is tantamount to his death at the hands of the Romans. By the play’s end the patricians have been reduced to impotence, and blood vengeance has supplanted law. Gone are the simple, childlike citizens of the early scenes, whose sole condition for giving Martius their votes was “to ask it kindly” (2.3.75); that “many-headed multitude” (2.3.16–17) has grown into a full-fledged Hydra, of which their cry “Tear him to pieces!” (5.6.120) is emblematic. That cry will recur in Julius Caesar as the mob slaughters the hapless poet Cinna. The killing thus heralds not only popular supremacy but mob rule. Coriolanus, then, charts the passing of power from the patriciate to the people during a sequence of decline spanning oligarchy, democracy, and mob rule. The power struggle is integral to the play’s structure: when the play opens, the patricians are supreme, the populace impotent; at the play’s midpoint, the balance of power is approximately equal; and at the play’s conclusion, the people are supreme, the patricians impotent. Reinforcing the

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interdependence of theme and structure are three parallel scenes each presenting a confrontation between patricians and plebeians over Martius’s fate. In act 1, scene 1, the plebeians’ resolve to kill Martius is easily defused by Menenius’s tale. In act 3, scene 1, resolve erupts into violence. Menenius, urging proceeding by trial, again prevails but barely, and is now answerable to the commons. In act 5, scene 6, mob sentiment triumphs over the counsel of Second Lord, who also urges proceeding by trial; as the people cry “Tear him to pieces,” Martius is slaughtered like a beast. The people’s savagery is thus commensurate with their degree of empowerment, a Platonic phenomenon that receives its fullest expression in Julius Caesar. The triumph of mob supremacy marks the passage of democracy into tyranny—the focus of Julius Caesar. Caesar continues the political decline elaborated by Plato: with the victory of the poor over their patrician oppressors, the class warfare characterizing oligarchy has ceased, along with oligarchy and its successor, democracy, which was born with the advent of the tribunate. Democracy has in turn given way to tyranny, and to the concomitant concentration of power in one man: the people’s champion. According to Plato, the tyrant is one in whom “the basest elements of human nature have set up an absolute despotism . . . over the higher.”17 Just so in the state: tyranny follows democracy when the insatiable desire for freedom leads to anarchy, the populace ultimately usurping command of the realm. The citizens “chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority and at length . . . cease to care even for the laws . . . they will have no one over them.” They then procure “some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.” Eventually, the protector becomes a wolf: “having a mob entirely at his disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen,” killing some and banishing others. The rich begin to hate him. “And if they are unable to expel him . . . they conspire to assassinate him” (Republic, 8.562–66). The parallels between Plato’s text and Shakespeare’s are striking. The play opens on a Caesar who is the darling of the mob, who has just slain not a foreign enemy but a compatriot and kinsman,18 who has banished another fellow Roman, and who is hated by a patriciate that conspires to kill him. Cassius terms him a tyrant and a wolf (1.3.103–4), linking—as does Plato— the two concepts. Further, unlike the initially subjugated plebeians of Coriolanus, this populace is insolently contemptuous of the law: although it is “a labouring day,” they have discarded their prescribed working attire and, literally and figuratively, their “rule” (1.1.4; 7), taking an unauthorized holiday to witness Caesar’s triumph.19 This divestment of the garb emblematic of their ordained place in society underscores their hierarchical breach. Their contempt for authority, further denoted by their reported hatred of kingship (1.2.235–65), culminates in their destruction of Rome.20 Also

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suggesting the scene’s Platonic provenance are the representative cobbler and carpenter, who have no corollary in Plutarch. The following exchange occurs between Socrates and Glaucon: Suppose a carpenter to be doing the business of a cobbler, or a cobbler of a carpenter; and suppose them to exchange their implements or their duties . . . do you think that any great harm would result to the State? Not much. But when the cobbler or any other man whom nature designed to be a trader . . . attempts to force his way into the class of warriors . . . for which he is unfitted, and either to take the implements or the duties of the other . . . then I think you will agree . . . that this . . . meddling of one with another is the ruin of the State. Conversely, the division of labour which require[s] the carpenter and the shoemaker and the rest of the citizens to be doing each his own business, and not another’s, [is] a shadow of justice. (Republic, 4.434; 443) The real tyrant, Socrates emphasizes, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise the greatest . . . servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind. He . . . is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles. (9.579) Caesar’s servile flattery of “the common herd” (1.2.263) cements the parallel: . . . When he came to himself again, he said, if he had done or said anything amiss, he desired their worships to think it was his infirmity. Three or four wenches . . . cried, ‘Alas, good soul’, and forgave him with all their hearts. (1.2.267–72)21 The “convulsions” Socrates mentions are manifested in Caesar’s epileptic fits, which are replicated in the civil turbulence that rocks Rome.22 Indeed, references to sickness—of the characters, of the state, and of the cosmos— pervade the play. The very earth “Shakes like a thing unfirm” (1.3.4), the cosmos mirroring the corrupted “faculties” and altered nature of Rome’s head: But if you would consider the true cause ... Why birds and beasts, from quality and kind, Why old men, fools, and children calculate,

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Why all these things change from their ordinance Their natures and preformed faculties To monstrous quality, why, you shall find That heaven hath infused them with these spirits To make them instruments of fear and warning Unto some monstrous state. (1.3.62–71)23 Caesar, as Cassius observes, is “Most like this dreadful night” (1.3.73). The concept recalls Socrates’s equation of justice with health and well-being, and injustice with deformity and disease, justice consisting in the “natural order and government” of the soul’s faculties, and injustice in a perversion of the natural order (Republic, 4.444). “Natural” is the key word: each element maintains the place and function appropriate to its nature. Any deviation from this principle fosters the growth of a monster (9.588–89).24 In addition to mirroring the ruler’s ills, the state also mirrors his political temperament; and Caesar’s tyranny is paralleled by that of the populace. For it is not Caesar who rules; it is the mob, the state thus replicating that soul “in which the basest elements of human nature have set up an absolute . . . ‘tyranny’ over the higher, the very negation of that principle of justice whereby each element, by doing its proper work, contributes to the wellbeing of the whole.”25 Indeed, it may not be an overstatement to assert that the mob is the play’s real protagonist, for they control not only Caesar and the other characters but virtually the entire course of events. Their subjugation of Caesar is manifested in his previously-noted servility and in his repeated refusal of the crown though “he would fain have had it” (1.2.238– 39). Lest the recipient doubt Caesar’s subjugation, it is underscored by his symbolic gesture of surrender: offering the crowd his throat to cut. The conspirators are no less ruled by the mob; they enlist Brutus solely because they fear popular reprisal. As Caska observes: O he sits high in all the people’s hearts: And that which would appear offence in us His countenance, like richest alchemy, Will change to virtue and to worthiness. (1.3.157–60) The point is reiterated by Brutus himself: Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers, Caius. ... Which so appearing to the common eyes, We shall be called purgers, not murderers. (2.1.165–79)26 Later, Cassius exhorts Brutus not to let Antony address the crowd because “the people may be moved” (3.1.234); Brutus will allow Antony to do so, but only if he agrees to speak well of Caesar, cast no blame on the conspirators,

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and make clear that he speaks by the conspirators’ permission,27 all of which, Brutus contends, will “advantage” them in the eyes of the people (3.1.242). Similarly, Metellus urges their recruitment of Cicero because his silver hair and reputed “judgement” will “purchase” the people’s “good opinion” (2.1.143–48).28 Antony equally defers to the mob. Clearly recognizing that they control the fate of the counterconspiracy, he humbly addresses them as “friends” and “masters” (3.2.141; 122), manipulating them through calculated appeals to their supremacy: “You will compel me then to read the will?” And when he asks, “Shall I descend? And will you give me leave?” Third Plebeian accords him the requisite permission: “You shall have leave” (3.2.157; 160; 161). Indeed, we remain cognizant of the mob’s preeminence even when they are off stage, both through repeated references to their actions and through the shouting that twice disrupts the dialogue between Brutus and Cassius in act 1, scene 2. Shakespeare, then, as James Holly Hanford puts it: by making the corruption of society result from a substitution of will or appetite for reason, touches on the principle by which Plato explains not only the growth of democracy but the consequent development of democracy into tyranny as well. . . . The tyrant is the embodiment in a single person of the lawlessness of the community. The brute appetites in him have gained full sway; “he has purged away temperance and brought in madness to the full,” [ . . . winning] mastery of the state by championing the lawless indulgence of the populace.29 The play’s conclusion heralds the final stage of tyranny; with the passing of oligarchy and democracy, the power struggle has progressively narrowed, shifting from classes to factions to the two triumvirates. In Antony and Cleopatra it is concentrated in the triumvirs themselves, as the rulers battle each other for supremacy. This final schism is foreshadowed in Caesar, in Antony’s plan to demote Lepidus (4.1.12-40) and still earlier in Caesar’s vanquishment of Pompey (1.1.38). Also heralded is the advent of despotism, as the triumvirs arbitrarily decree who will live or die (4.1.1–6). Thus, the rulers have become laws unto themselves—the focus of Antony and Cleopatra. As Octavius instructs Thidias concerning Cleopatra, “Try thy cunning, Thidias;/Make thine own edict for thy pains, which we/Will answer as a law” (3.12.31–33). The Senate, correspondingly, has vanished, replaced by “The senators alone of this great world” (2.6.9), the triumvirs themselves.30 The protagonists embody, in small, this despotic ethos. Like the society they mirror, they are “headless”: Antony has made “his will/Lord of his reason” (3.13.3–4), destroying the hierarchy on which the soul’s integrity rests. Both lovers, concomitantly, subordinate justice to desire, a prime manifes-

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tation of tyranny. The vitiation of reason is reflected not only in their myriad infidelities (emblematic of the supremacy of the affections), but in their correlative arbitrary and despotic rule, exemplified by Cleopatra’s beating of the messenger for apprising her of Antony’s marriage to Octavia, by Antony’s parallel, unwarranted beating of Thidias, and by his veto of every suggestion that would have saved him at Actium. As Paul Cantor states, “the element common to their love and rule is an attempt to do without law”: “unlike even the revolutionary tribunes in Coriolanus,” they “appeal [neither] to law [n]or custom in making . . . their decisions.”31 The defection from one paramour to another pervades every level of society: epitomized by the lovers, it characterizes not only the commoners, but the rulers who break oaths and treaties, and their subordinates who, “whatever their personal preferences, depend on pillage and spoil to pay their legions, and must therefore gravitate to the stronger side; while tributary kings seek the best bargain from whichever conquering emperor or queen they can.”32 In the state as in the soul, the result is complete injustice, as faction and civil war continue to rend Rome (1.3.48; 46). If Caesar is more politically astute than the lovers, his despotism more than rivals theirs. This fact is continuously emphasized: by his self-serving, unilaterally-decreed edicts, by his pawning of his sister Octavia, by his deposition and imprisonment of Lepidus, and by his hanging of the innocent Alexas. What distinguishes Titus Andronicus from the foregoing works is its fictional milieu—of characters, of events, and of Rome itself. Blood sacrifice, for instance, was not a Roman custom, and the governmental regime on which the play opens never existed. Nor does Titus participate in the constitutional decline those works successively trace. It is nevertheless linked to them both politically and Platonically in its concern with the consequences of a “headless” state. As in Lucrece, headlessness derives from collapse of the monarchy, here, however, in the form of a rulerless interregnum. The play opens on a “headless Rome” (1.1.189), a metaphor at once emblematic of Rome’s kinglessness and a prefiguration of the decapitations and other dismemberments that will image the rapine of the larger body politic. In progress is a bitter factional, and fraternal, contest for the crown along with the threat of civil war as both rivals exhort their followers to back them with arms (1.1.2–4; 17). The situation parallels that in the other four works, in which a destabilized monarchy incurs power struggle, schism, and war. Also as in Lucrece, the violated female images the larger body politic: Lavinia, like Rome, is the object of fraternal rivalry, her mutilation a metaphor for the state’s.33 Her dismemberment is not only replicated in “headless Rome,” but also in Rome’s “severed” polity (5.3.67), and in Marcus’s

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metaphor of the fragmented, and fractured, realm: “O let me teach you how to knit again . . . These broken limbs again into one body” (5.3.69–71). Similarly, her rape, likened to the infliction of a wound (3.1.91–92), images the analogous rape of Rome: “Tell us,” pleads a Lord in a series of double entendres, “who . . . brought the fatal engine in/That gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound” (5.3.84–86). The potentially deadly fraternal rivalry for possession of Lavinia, furthermore, precisely replicates that of the brothers for possession of Rome, even down to the parallel claims of entitlement by reason of primogeniture. Stated alternatively, the narrowly averted armed conflict between Demetrius and Chiron replicates in small the narrowly averted civil broil between the factions of Saturninus and Bassianus. Even the language couching the contests is similar: as Tamora’s sons are “woo[ers]” of and “competitors” for Lavinia (1.1.582; 576), so Caesar’s are “suitors” of and “competitor[s]” for Rome (1.1.47; 66). Titus also addresses the opportunity headlessness presents for the unqualified, unprincipled aspirant—here, Saturninus—to seize the throne. In Rome’s resulting descent into lawlessness—into what the play terms “a wilderness of tigers” (3.1.54)—Titus encapsulates a political decline similar to that encompassed by the other four works, a decline likewise emanating from destabilized rule. Did Shakespeare know the Republic directly? In the absence of precise verbal and other correspondences,34 direct indebtedness is difficult to assess. Moreover, some of these Platonic concepts, besides being Renaissance commonplaces, could have been gleaned at second hand from such recognized Platonic theorists as Cicero, Montaigne, Erasmus, and Elyot—not to mention Plutarch. Nevertheless, as I argue elsewhere with respect to Julius Caesar,35 many of these works’ Platonic elements that appear in the Republic are found in none of the works’ known sources, suggesting that Shakespeare possessed more than a second-hand familiarity with Plato’s work. Whether Plato’s influence is direct or not is, however, less significant than the fact that all five works reveal a Platonic pro-monarchic bias, a Platonic constitutional decline, and an overriding Platonic concern with justice vis-à-vis the perils of monarchic collapse. Each of these works—Lucrece, Coriolanus, Antony, and Titus—anticipates or looks back to Caesar. Brutus is the works’ common, largely pivotal, denominator: all three Brutus figures are putative champions of liberty, all are instrumental in advancing popular rule, and all are instigators of rebellion or revolution. While Antony contains no Brutus per se, Brutus’s name is repeatedly mentioned, recalling his role in Caesar’s killing, and Antony’s role in Brutus’s death. Coriolanus evokes Caesar in the disordered and volatile populace on which it opens, in the conspiracy devised by an envious,

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power-seeking rival, and in the ritual slaughter of its titular hero. In Antony and Cleopatra, Caesarism re-emerges in Octavius (explicitly referred to as “Caesar”), and Antony supplants Brutus as a Caesar’s antagonist. The fall of the monarchy in Lucrece prefigures that of the Republic in Caesar: each follows from an inflammatory oration accompanied by a public display of the protagonist’s stabbed and bleeding corpse. The Brutus of Caesar is both the descendant and the reincarnation of the Brutus of Lucrece, whose antimonarchic role he tacitly assumes as he prepares to destroy the man who “would be crowned.” Thus did Lucius Junius Brutus “from the streets of Rome/The Tarquin drive, when he was called a king” (Caesar, 2.1.12; 53– 54). In Titus, the lately-deceased emperor is named Caesar, as all the emperors were. Caesar’s Rome, then, with its mob supremacy, is the final consequence of a state shorn of its reason or “head”: the king. “[T]he ruins of the noblest man/That ever lived” (3.1.256–57), Caesar is the embodiment of this decline, having sunk from a prince to a tyrant. Caesar does not really die. Without the unifying influence of a rational monarch, tyranny is destined to flourish undiminished, since the power struggle for supremacy will continue. This is why “the spirit of Caesar” cannot be killed, as Brutus ironically and prophetically intimates (2.1.166–69), and why it dominates the second half of the play, in which one tyrant metamorphoses into another in the ongoing battle for dominion.36 This phenomenon is impressed on us from the outset, as Caesar arrives “in triumph over Pompey’s blood” (1.1.52); Caesar is in turn vanquished and displaced by Brutus, who is displaced by Antony, who is displaced by “another Caesar” (5.1.53), Julius’s spiritual successor and incarnation.37 Thus the stage is set for Antony and Cleopatra, in which the battle for dominion will be played out. The end of Antony and Cleopatra heralds a new millennium “of universal peace” (4.6.5). Yet peace is imminent not through any virtue of the victor, who possesses the world by conquest and not by right;38 it is imminent by reason of the destruction of every rival for supremacy; the consequent cessation of five centuries of strife; and the emergence of the victor—whose name is Caesar—as “Sole sir o’th’ world” (5.2.119): the war-torn, spiritual wasteland that is Rome.

Notes Portions of this essay are reprinted by permission of Shakespeare Quarterly, which permission I gratefully acknowledge. I am also indebted to John Velz for his helpful suggestions. 1. Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare’s Roman Worlds (London: Routledge, 1989); Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London: Routledge, 1988); J. L. Simmons, Shakespeare’s Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973); John Alvis, “The Coherence of Shakespeare’s Roman

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2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

Plays,” Modern Language Quarterly 40 (1979): 115–34. Some scholars also include Cymbeline. For a more inclusive overview of studies on Shakespeare’s Roman works, and on the varying notions of which works this rubric embraces, see Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 21, n. 3. This essay can be regarded as an abstract of a book in progress, which deals with the political values expressed in Shakespeare’s Roman works. “A Platonic Passage in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” Studies in Philology 13 (1916): 102. Compare Sir Thomas Elyot’s definition of the state: “A public weal is a body living, compact or made of sundry estates and degrees of men, which is . . . governed by the rule and moderation of reason” (The Book named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg [London: Dent, 1962], 1). D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and ‘The Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 176, 177. Fulke Greville, Of Monarchy, in The Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (1870; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1966), 1: stanzas 592, 589; William Fulbecke, An Historicall Collection of the Continuall Factions, Tumults, and Massacres of the Romans and Italians during the Space of One Hundred and Twentie Yeares Next before the Peaceable Empire of Augustus Caesar (1601), 11412; both cited by Woolf, The Idea of History, 177, 179–80. The Governor, 10–11. Woolf, The Idea of History, 178. J. Leeds Barroll, “Shakespeare and Roman History,” Modern Language Review 53 (1958): 328–29. Macbeth illustrates the process within the soul. The incipient “murther” of “thought” or reason engendered by his contemplated murder of Duncan sunders Macbeth’s “single state” (1.3.139–40), plunging him into sleeplessness and terror, and a reign of carnage emblematic of the condition of tyranny to which his soul has sunk. Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 1: 39–40. My summary follows Frederick Copleston, Greece and Rome, vol. 1, pt. 1, of A History of Philosophy (1946; repr., Garden City: Image-Doubleday, 1962), 259. I omit timocracy, the first stage of the decline, since it is not germane to the works under discussion. Citations of the Republic refer to The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1892), vol. 3. References to this work appear in the text. Quotations of Plutarch (Caesar, Brutus, Antonius, Cicero) are taken from Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Englished by Sir Thomas North (1579), ed. W. E. Henley with an introduction by George Wyndham, The Tudor Translations (London: David Nutt, 1895–1896), vols. 5 and 6. For a related view of these Roman works, see John R. Kayser and Ronald J. Lettieri, “‘The Last of All the Romans’: Shakespeare’s Commentary on Classical Republicanism,” Clio 9 (1979): 197–227. Cf. Robert S. Miola, “Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985): 271–89, who finds the play ambivalent concerning whether Caesar was a tyrant. Cabinet: “The private room in which the confidential advisors of the sovereign . . . meet; the council-chamber” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., II.7.a). Although the OED lists the first such use of the word c. 1607–1625, I believe Shakespeare is here using it in such sense. The tale of Lucrece had been linked with politics for sixteen centuries, with writers as disparate as Ovid and Henry Bullinger expounding its political significance. See E. P. Kuhl, “Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece ,” Philological Quarterly 20 (1941): 352–60. Henry (or Heinrich) Bullinger (1504–1575) was a Swiss reformer who influenced English Reformation thought. Ernest Baker, The Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle (1918; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1959), 186. Francis MacDonald Cornford, trans., The Republic of Plato (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 264.

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From Monarchy to Tyranny • 125 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

Pompey’s son; he also attempted to kill Pompey (see Plutarch, Caesar, 37–48, 56–57). Pompey was Caesar’s son-in-law through marriage to Caesar’s daughter Julia. Noted by Jan H. Blits, The End of the Ancient Republic: Essays on “Julius Caesar” (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1982), 23. Compare Plutarch: “[T]his was a wonderfull thing, that they [the people] suffered all things subjects should doe by commaundement of their kings: & yet they could not abide the name of a king, detesting it as the utter destruction of their liberty” (Antonius, 13). The seizure and its attendant speech are Shakespeare’s addition. While Plutarch reports instances of Caesar’s falling sickness (Caesar, 17, 54), the occasion of his being offered the crown is not one of them (cf. ibid., 61–62). The Platonic correspondence between ruler and state was a Shakespearean commonplace: e.g., Denmark under Claudius in Hamlet, Rome under Saturninus in Titus Andronicus, and England under Henry in 1 Henry IV (notwithstanding a prevalent critical view of Henry as a good monarch, it should be remembered that he gained the throne through murder and usurpation, thus subjecting England to schism, bloodshed, and revolt). On Caesar’s perverted reason and the cause of his decline into tyranny, see Barbara L. Parker, “‘A Thing Unfirm’: Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 30–43. The monster as symbol for perversion of the natural order was another standard Renaissance concept. See James E. Phillips, The State in Shakespeare’s Greek and Roman Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 65–66. Cornford, The Republic of Plato, 264. In Plutarch, the emphasis is not on the mob but on Romans in general: The conspirators tell Cassius “that so high an enterprise . . . did not so muche require men of manhoode . . . as . . . a man of suche estimacion as Brutus, to make everie man boldlie thinke . . . the fact were holie, and just” (Brutus, 190). The subsequent invoking of “the common eyes” by Shakespeare’s Brutus has no parallel in Plutarch. See Brents Stirling, “‘Or else were this a savage spectacle,’” in Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The Interplay of Theme and Character (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 47. Plutarch’s account is the antithesis: “[T]hey durst not acquaint Cicero with their conspiracie, although he was a man whome they loved dearelie, and trusted best: for they were affrayed that he being a coward by nature, and age also having increased his feare, he woulde quite turne and alter all their purpose, and quenche the heate of their enterprise” (Brutus, 191-92; see also Cicero, 358). Hanford, “A Platonic Passage,” 107 (quoting Republic, 8.564). “As becomes clear in [2.6.]15–19, the motive for Pompey’s rebellion is that the three triumvirs have taken over the power which should belong to the Senate and have achieved the kind of political dominance for which Julius Caesar was assassinated” (Arden gloss, 155). Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 201. Margot Heinemann, “‘Let Rome in Tiber melt’: Order and Disorder in ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’” in Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Drakakis, New Casebooks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 170. The raped female was a longstanding symbol for the invaded or “violated” nation, rape and invasion being metaphorically synonymous. See Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 82–85. While there is no known sixteenth-century English translation of the Republic, Ficino’s complete Latin translation of Plato’s works was available in England. An Italian translation of the Republic was published in Venice in 1554; a complete French translation, published in Paris, did not appear until 1600, although portions were published earlier. That Shakespeare read Ficino is suggested by Howard B. White, Copp’d Hills Towards Heaven: Shakespeare and the Classical Polity (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 13; and J. Churton Collins, Studies in Shakespeare (London: Constable, 1904), 34–35, Collins arguing that Merchant of Venice, 5.1.63–65, derives beyond “reasonable doubt” from the Latin version of Republic, 10.610. Parker, “‘A Thing Unfirm.’”

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That the triumvirs re-embody the conspirators is denoted by the parallel scenes act 2, scene 1 and act 4, scene 1, in which each group debates what political foes to kill and Lepidus supplants Brutus as the vehicle to mute culpability. 37. This last point is indebted to Norman Sanders, “The Shift of Power in Julius Caesar,” Review of English Literature 5 (1964): 35. Further parallels between the two Caesars are noted by Sanders. 38. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 90.

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CHAPTER

5

“Time . . . Come Round” Plot Construction in Julius Caesar JOSEPH CANDIDO

Julius Caesar is one of the most taut, economical, and briskly paced of Shakespeare’s plays. Although it cannot be said to possess the elegant symmetry of a play like Richard II or the bold narrative counterpoint of such double-plot plays as 1 and 2 Henry IV or King Lear, it nonetheless bears everywhere the marks of careful and deliberate composition. In its clear, forward-moving, linear thrust and avoidance of embroidery or digression, the play reflects precisely those Roman values its characters seek to represent—spareness, lucidity, decisiveness, and restraint. Here, as in so many of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, dramatic architecture and thematic intention move hand-in-hand. In terms of the construction of its plot, Julius Caesar may profitably be compared in one respect with Henry V, the play that may have preceded it by only a few months at the Globe in 1599.1 In Henry V we have a play conveniently divided by the intrusions of the Chorus into five clearly separate yet unified segments; and although nothing of the precise kind occurs in Julius Caesar, it is nevertheless useful to see the plot of the later play as composed of five discrete “movements” (not, in this instance, corresponding precisely to the traditional division into five acts), each with its own character and center of interest, yet each connected to the others by a network of allusion that helps draw these separate segments into a unified whole. For the sake of convenience, I have characterized these five “movements” by what seems to me to be their central unifying element or focus: (1) “Prelude”; (2) “Storm”; (3) “Exterior Space(s)”; (4) “Interior Space(s)”; and (5) “Philippi.” 127

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As David Daniell points out in his “Introduction” to the Arden Edition of the play, the many different ways of seeing the structure of Julius Caesar are more a testimony to the multiplicity of its art than inherent contradictions regarding the nature of its action.2 My own scheme attempts neither to dispute the findings of other critics regarding the plot construction of Julius Caesar nor to offer a definitive explanation of how to understand the dramatic architecture of the play. Rather, I hope it will provide a useful, if slightly altered, angle of vision from which to appreciate some nuances of the plot of Julius Caesar as its action unfolds before us either in the theater or on the printed page.3

I. Prelude (1.1; 1.2) The opening sequence of Julius Caesar is effectively demarcated by the appearance and sudden disappearance of Flavius and Murellus. The two tribunes open the play by scattering the commoners before going off to disrobe the statues of Caesar (1.1); then, as act 1, scene 2 draws to a close scarcely three hundred lines later, we hear that they have already been “put to silence” for precisely that act (1.2.285). By virtue of the forceful presence and then immediate absence of Flavius and Murellus, and in typically efficient narrative fashion, Shakespeare both demonstrates the high passions and dangerous consequences that reign in Rome and provides a neatly circumscribed segment of action in which he raises virtually every important issue of the play. For example, in the mere seventy-six lines of the opening scene, and in rapid-fire succession, we learn of the impassioned and mutable feelings of the commoners, the hostility of much of the military class toward Caesar’s ambition, and the terrible specter of civil war—all three of which coalesce artfully in Murellus’s description of the fortunes of Pompey (1.1.33– 56). The ensuing scene, in only slightly more leisurely fashion, embroiders these concerns and connects them to new ones. Caesar, the faulty great man, appears; and his mere presence touches off a series of observations that not only centers around him throughout this particular scene but also gives narrative shape to the action to come. First, there is the fact of Caesar’s marriage and Calphurnia’s barrenness, and then the issue of Antony’s friendship and unquestioned loyalty (“When Caesar says ‘Do this’, it is performed”; 1.2.10). Both, of course, have relevance for the Brutus plot; e.g., the parallel and contrasting marriage of Brutus and Portia and the moral problems inherent in Brutus’s divided loyalties to Caesar and to Rome. The scene also brings to the fore a crucially important theme in the play—the nature and obligations of friendship, particularly in reference to one’s sense of public and private duty. Three crucial friendships are deftly embedded into the scene: Caesar and Antony’s, Caesar and Brutus’s, and, most importantly, Brutus and Cassius’s.

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Within this web of connections other concerns exist: the ominousness of prophecy as represented in the Soothsayer’s warning (1.2.18ff.); the contrast between Antony’s “gamesome” temperament and Brutus’s soberness (1.2.28ff.); and, most notably, a subtly articulated contrast between exterior, public actions and interior, private ones. The scene begins with a rapid burst of ostentatious public display—the appearance of Caesar, followed by the announcement of Calphurnia’s barrenness, the directive to Antony to touch her as he runs the race, and the Soothsayer’s prophecy. When Caesar and his company leave the stage, the scene modulates into more private, interior matters, as Cassius (amid the flourishes and shouts from the public action offstage) tries to wind himself into the private feelings of Brutus regarding Caesar. The scene is a tense one; for in it Cassius expresses the first of his many doubts about Brutus’s real feelings for him as a kinsman and friend even as he seeks to enlist him in the conspiracy. The reappearance of Caesar and his train at 1.2.176 reshifts the focus for a brief time to exterior action—but action shaded by interior concerns—i.e., the visible but silent unhappiness of Caesar and his followers and the equally visible but “private” conversation of Caesar and Antony over Cassius’s “lean and hungry look” (1.2.193ff.). After Caesar leaves the stage for the second time at 1.2.214, the scene modulates once more into the privacy of “interior” conversation as Caska, having literally been “pulled” by the cloak into the secret deliberations of Cassius and Brutus (1.2.215), unfolds for them the day’s events. By the time Caska utters his last substantive comment, that “Murellus and Flavius, for pulling scarves off Caesar’s images, are put to silence” (1.2.284–85), Shakespeare has presented us with a virtual index of matters to come.

II. Storm (1.3; 2.1; 2.2; 2.3; 2.4) Just as the opening sequence of the play is shaped by the presence of Flavius and Murellus, the second section is even more sharply demarcated by the dominant presence of the storm. “Thunder and lightning” proclaims the opening stage direction to act 1, scene 3, and throughout this and the next two scenes either the sound of violent weather or repeated references to it affirm its insistent presence. Closely linked to this inescapable fact of the storm, and central to the sense of anxiety and unease it produces, is a preoccupation throughout the section with the terrors of night, the coming of morning, and the hours of the day. Such a striking cluster of allusion— unique to this section of the play—gives further narrative coherence to the storm sequence and the two short episodes at morning (2.3 and 2.4) that follow in its wake and, in the manner of a musical coda, draw it to a close.

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The storm sequence is built around a series of simultaneous and complementary narrative lines. First, there is the storm itself, boldly announced by the thunder that initiates act 1, scene 3 and repeatedly affirmed throughout the dialogue. Our ears are assaulted with reminders of “Thunder” (2.1.333), “Thunder still” (1.3.99), “Thunder and lightning” (2.2, S.D.), “a tempest dropping fire” (1.3.10), “cross blue lightning” (1.3.50), the “unaccustomed terror of this night” (2.1.198), “the vile contagion of the night” (2.1.264), and the like. Obviously the storm, with its “prodigies” (2.1.197), “menace” (1.3.44), and “impatience” (1.3.61), spectacularly materializes the civil disruption of Rome. It also, however, gives a local habitation and a name to a powerful yet unseen psychological element in these episodes, the sense of a gnawing edginess or tension—what used to be called “nerves”—that seems to be unhinging a whole nation. The sleepless Brutus, troubled by the turbulence of inner and outer weather, voices what seems to be a universal problem when he addresses his fellow conspirators: “What watchful cares do interpose themselves/Betwixt your eyes and night?” (2.1.98–99). Absolutely no one sleeps on the stormy night before Caesar’s murder. Participating in this movement, yet functioning as a distinct narrative element of its own, is a repeated concern with the time of day and the arrival of morning. These references have been convincingly linked to calendrical matters, particularly those involved with the institution of Julian reforms and their subsequent displacement by the Gregorian system of dating in 1582, as well as with the historical Caesar’s concern with accurate timekeeping.4 But they also serve to reinforce the heightened awareness of time—the slowness of its passage, the overprecise sensitivity to it, and so forth—that people under pressure or tensely awaiting an event normally express. Brutus, in the middle of the night, needs to know what day it is (2.1.40),5 insists that the whole company heed the striking clock (2.1.191), and sets “the eighth hour” specifically as the “uttermost” time of their meeting the next day (2.1.212); at that very hour Caesar asks what time it is (2.2.114); and Portia, her faintness mirroring her husband’s edginess on the morning of the Ides of March, asks “What is’t o’clock?” (2.4.23). This overriding concern with time is seamlessly linked throughout the sequence with an anxiousness for morning light. In symbolic terms, of course, such a longing could well imply a progression away from the terrors of the night to the peaceful dawning of a new political day. This is perhaps the sentiment behind Decius’s question “Doth not the day break here?” (2.1.100) and Cinna’s seemingly hopeful reply “. . . it doth, and yon grey lines/That fret the clouds are messengers of day” (2.1.102–3). But Caska’s odd explanation of where precisely the sun will rise (2.1.104–10) could also, as Norman Sanders suggests, be seen quite differently: “men at moments of suspense often talk of trivialities to keep their minds from the immediate tension.”6

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Indeed, Shakespeare handles all this talk of time and morning with masterful irony. Caska, after all, uses his sword (the first to stab Caesar) to point where the day will dawn, and Brutus, ever the one to think precisely on the event, had observed earlier that “It is the bright day that brings forth the adder” (2.1.14). The ominous sword as well as Brutus’s metaphor hint at the ironic shape that Shakespeare gives to the movement from night to day in these episodes, for the night of “vile contagion” is hardly separable from the “dank,” “raw cold morning” (2.1.262; 235) that succeeds it. This tightly structured narrative passage, shaped by the storm and by the painstaking— and painstakingly remarked upon—movement of the hours from night to day, opens to the morning of Caesar’s murder and the new and more violent disruptions it produces. Night, characterized throughout the sequence by noise, turbulence, and terror, gives birth to an even more prodigious day. Related to all of the above elements, and further serving to unite the storm sequence as a narrative whole, are two finely realized, parallel scenes: Portia’s conversation with Brutus (2.1.232ff.) and Calphurnia’s with Caesar (2.2.8ff.). Both are “interior” scenes in a unique sense, for on these occasions, and for the only time in the play, Shakespeare gives us a glimpse of the private marital lives of two of the play’s central figures. In each scene a dutiful wife expresses concern for her husband, and in each she kneels before him to beg a favor. The sharp juxtaposition of the two episodes (2.1 and 2.2) further invites comparison, as does the fact that both scenes take place amid the turbulence of the storm (“Thunder” marks the end of 2.1 and “Thunder and lightning” opens 2.2). But there are clear differences too, particularly if we choose to see the episodes in the context of the play’s insistent preoccupation with intimacy, love, and friendship. Brutus’s response to Portia’s gesture (“Kneel not, gentle Portia”; 2.1.277), could be a sign of exasperation, but it could just as easily be a sign of respect; indeed, the latter would seem to be more in keeping with the sort of linguistic “equality” Portia achieves in the scene,7 as well as with Brutus’s “O ye gods,/ Render me worthy of this noble wife!” (2.1.301–2). Caesar makes no such response to Calphurnia, although he does acquiesce to her wishes briefly before delivering his public humiliation of her: “How foolish do your fears seem now, Calphurnia!/I am ashamed I did yield to them” (2.2.105–6). Moreover, the two women kneel for two entirely different reasons: Portia to affirm her constancy and to participate in her husband’s disquiet, Calphurnia to unnerve Caesar’s constancy by disquieting him with her “fear” (2.2.50). Each man, of course, puts aside the concerns of his wife, Brutus by simply delaying Portia and Caesar by openly humiliating Calphurnia. The comparison is an instructive one to keep in mind as Shakespeare draws the storm sequence to a close with Portia’s anxieties over her husband’s exploits on the Ides of March (2.4). The clear superiority of the Brutus/Portia

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relationship in terms of its dignity and mutuality of feeling imparts a special poignancy to act 2, scene 4, where Portia, bathed in the ironic light of morning, finds her “man’s mind” struggling helplessly to control her woman’s heart (2.4.8; 41). Portia’s emotional state surely reflects the admirable contrarieties of a great woman in love; but it also signifies just the sort of personal and societal dislocation that the “vile contagion of the night” has wrought. It is storm at daylight.

III. Exterior Space(s) (3.1; 3.2; 3.3) All three of the scenes in this section occur in the full light of day and in full view of the citizens of Rome. Here, at the structural center of the play, action is at its most blatantly “exterior.” With a swiftness reminiscent of the Flavius and Murellus episodes, the action of act 3, scene 1 proceeds in headlong fashion to Caesar’s murder. The appearance of the Soothsayer, the suits of Artemidorus and Trebonius, the intrusion of Popilius Lena, the gathering of the conspirators, the drawing off of Antony, the petition of Metellus Cimber, and the stabbing of Caesar all seem to occur in an instant. Caesar dies seventy-seven lines into the scene. What follows are two masterfully contrived moments that, taken together, signal a turning point in the play: the bathing of the conspirators in Caesar’s blood and the forceful reappearance of Antony. The gruesome ceremony that Brutus orchestrates over the body of Caesar amounts to a full and public baring of his conscience, the act of turning the interior man outward. Instructive in this regard is Brutus’s earlier enjoinder to the conspirators during the storm sequence to be “sacrificers but not butchers” (2.1.165): . . . in the spirit of men there is no blood. O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit And not dismember Caesar! But, alas, Caesar must bleed for it. And, gentle friends, Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully: Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. (2.1.167–73) The man who would recast murder as purification (“We shall be called purgers, not murderers”; 2.1.179) tries to literalize this moral paradox through a grotesque public act of physical cleansing; i.e., the “bath[ing]” in Caesar’s blood (3.1.106). But what Brutus urges his fellow conspirators to see as an act of purification (“Stoop, then, and wash” echoes Cassius; 3.1.111), cannot obscure the visual horror of “blood/Up to the elbows” and the “besmear[ed]” “red weapons” hoisted above the murderers’ heads (3.1.106– 9). In carving Caesar as a dish fit for the gods, Brutus does hew him as a

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carcass fit for hounds. The mutilated body of Caesar, which occupies the symbolic and visual center of this section of the play, thus serves as an exterior reminder of the moral incompatibilities of Brutus’s interior life. The appearance of Antony both sharpens these concerns and marks a structural turning point in the plot; for it is the dead body of Caesar that Antony seizes upon to undermine Brutus and his faction, as well as to set his own political career in motion. It is almost as if Antony somehow inhabits the energy field vacated by Caesar; for in practically a literal sense he takes Caesar’s place as Brutus’s nemesis by appropriating his dead friend’s body both for his own political ambitions and the purposes of revenge. Few stage properties in all of Shakespeare function more importantly than Caesar’s body. Antony enters at line 148 and immediately moralizes over the corpse, asks to die beside it, touches its blood as he shakes hands with the conspirators, professes his undying love for the living Caesar before it, asks that it be taken to the marketplace so that he can speak over it “as becomes a friend” (3.1.229), and then, after the murderers depart, addresses his terrible pledge of bloody revenge directly to it (3.1.254–75). Readers of the play must try to keep in mind what viewers of the play cannot help but notice: Caesar’s body dominates the stage for all but 40 of the roughly 560 lines of act 3, scene 1 and act 3, scene 2. In this sequence of “exterior” actions performed in the full light of day, nothing is more public, more visible to all, than the body of Caesar. The two great funeral orations are, of course, the focus of act 3, scene 2, and here, as with the two earlier scenes involving Portia and Calphurnia, similarities only highlight important differences. Shadowing these clearly exterior scenes of public oratory are matters of private feeling; and it is interesting to see how Shakespeare deploys Caesar’s corpse to sharpen such concerns. Brutus delivers his measured, rational, and dispassionate defense of the conspiracy in prose and without the body of Caesar nearby. His rhetorical coolness and emotional restraint is further mirrored by his willingness to detach himself from the crowd when Antony enters with Caesar’s corpse. Spattered with Caesar’s blood, seemingly indifferent to feeling or community, and most importantly, literally separate from Caesar, Brutus vacates the literal and emotional space of the Forum to his adversary. Antony’s behavior is everything Brutus’s is not. His arrival with Caesar’s body even before the end of Brutus’s speech bespeaks emotional urgency and genuineness of feeling. Using Caesar’s body as a superb visual aid (and speaking in poetry) he rivets the attention of the crowd to the human details of Caesar as a man: the will found in his closet, his wounds, his hair, the mantle, and so on. But it is in joining the body of Caesar to those of his auditory that Antony succeeds in making this most exterior moment an intensely interior one. Unlike Brutus, who descends the pulpit to vacate the

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stage, Antony comes down to mingle with the crowd to form a communal “ring about the corpse of Caesar” (3.2.158); the corpse, the citizenry, Antony, and Rome become united by the common thread of Caesar’s martyrdom and his extravagant bequest to the nation. Where Brutus offered public reasons for public action, Antony turns a public spectacle into a scene of private grieving. The abrupt death of Cinna the Poet (3.3), the brief but effective capstone to the narrative sequence, merely serves to indicate how irrevocable the emotional forces are that Antony has unleashed.

IV. Interior Space(s) (4.1; 4.2; 4.3) Throughout act 4 the wide lens of the previous section, with its public scenes in the Capitol and in the Forum, narrows to smaller, more private episodes in enclosed spaces such as Antony’s house (4.1) and the area in and around Brutus’s tent (4.2; 4.3).8 The psychological action moves inward too. Beyond the glare of public light, the Antony who appears in private conversation with Octavius seems irreconcilable with the warm, even loving, figure of the previous section. This new glimpse of a heretofore unseen Antony, hardly “gamesome” or passionate, reveals the savvy, gelid core of the man who would kill without feeling, callously abridge Caesar’s will, and treat his presumed friend, the “slight unmeritable” Lepidus, “But as a property” (4.1.12; 40). The scene is scarcely fifty lines long, yet in it Shakespeare completely alters our impression of Antony’s emotional dimensions as a man. Moreover, the episode also prepares us for the more extensive investigation of the character of Brutus which immediately follows; for just as Antony seems to harden, Brutus (ever so slightly and, one senses, almost against his will and judgment) seems to soften. In addition, the related themes of friendship, loyalty, and love, subtly raised in act 4, scene 1 and never far removed from the action of Julius Caesar at any point, receive full attention in act 4, scene 2 and act 4, scene 3. These last two scenes in fact amount to one continuous dramatic episode, separated only by the “scene change” that marks the entry of Brutus and Cassius into Brutus’s tent. Perhaps on the stage of the Globe Brutus and Cassius might simply move to a more remote area (the discovery space?) to indicate entry into the tent, or perhaps Brutus’s “let no man/Come to our tent till we have done our conference” (4.2.50–51), is enough to establish the intense privacy of the situation; regardless, there can be little doubt that the scene is—in terms of its physical and psychological space—the most “interior” of the play. The poignancy, delicacy, and economy of Shakespeare’s handling of the edgy tensions in the Brutus/Cassius relationship have been justifiably praised;9 not only is the scene as carefully written and beautifully modulated as any in the play, it also serves as the culmination of the play’s

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concern with the obligations inherent in a private friendship (in this case even kinship) that must be played out in the public sphere. The odd incident of the Poet’s intrusion marks a sort of turning point in the scene, for it comes immediately after the moving reconciliation between the two men and forces them for a moment (a mere fourteen lines) to step outside their private enclosure. When they return inside the tent they are clearly on different emotional ground than they were upon their first entry—reknitted now in “love” (4.3.118). It is in this context, and with abrupt celerity, that Brutus announces “Portia is dead” (4.3.145). The statement, in its unembroidered directness, articulates all we need to know about Brutus’s “Romanness.” What some critics see as his “lie” to Messala moments later when he pretends to be ignorant of his wife’s death (4.3.180ff.), may simply be Brutus’s way of dealing with terrible grief by enfolding it into a public system of behavior (Roman Stoicism) that gives his life emotional shape. His lack of forthrightness with Messala could well reflect, too, the fact that we often “pretend” with some people and don’t with others, for the obvious reason that we may not want to share our most private feelings indiscriminately among our friends. Viewed from this perspective, Brutus’s supposed mendacity could just as easily be seen as an indication of how much closer he is to Cassius (a fact we have just witnessed in telling detail) than even so respected a friend as Messala. As the play everywhere attests, one must earn Brutus’s intimacy. His so-called “lie,” often seen as evidence of imperfect revision of the passage by Shakespeare, may well be Shakespeare’s most subtle, and perhaps most eloquent, reflection on the friendship theme in the play.10 From here on the scene moves with characteristic swiftness to its close. Brutus’s tenderness and sense of devotion appear again, with delicate variation, in the episode with Lucius; his concern for the boy, his fondness for reading, and his love of music all bespeak a fineness of temper seen nowhere else in the play. But the appearance of the ghost of Caesar—and the sense of public consequences it heralds—signals the abrupt end of night, privacy, and reflection. What follows is daylight and Philippi.

V. Philippi (5.1; 5.2; 5.3; 5.4; 5.5) The entire last sequence of the play occurs on the open plains of Philippi and, although traditionally divided into five separate scenes, actually consists of a single, uninterrupted arch of action that builds forcefully toward conclusion. Indeed, few culminating sequences in Shakespeare give us a more complete sense of a dramatic action fulfilled or a narrative circle closed than the last act of Julius Caesar. Act 5, scene 1 opens with yet another tense “friendship,” in this instance the hastily concocted military alliance between

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Antony and Octavius. Their squabbling over who will keep the right flank suggests, as such arguments nearly always do in Shakespeare’s history plays, the self-defeating nature of civil conflict.11 But this disagreement invites comparison, too, with the frequent quarrels between Brutus and Cassius over similar matters of judgment and precedence. Real friends know how to patch up a quarrel, but Antony and Octavius haven’t the knack. The heartfelt farewell between Brutus and Cassius (5.1.107ff.), though Roman in restraint and coming on the heels of Cassius’s public jab at Brutus for not agreeing to kill Antony earlier, carries the real feeling that Octavius’s final “Come, Antony; away” so obviously lacks (5.1.62). The unadorned simplicity of expression here, ordered by a repetition that implies mutuality, gives the Brutus/Cassius parting almost an air of liturgy:

Brutus:

... For ever and for ever farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then this parting was well made. Cassius: For ever and for ever farewell, Brutus: If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed; If not, ’tis true this parting was well made. (5.1.117–21) Only in the sonnets do we see a male friendship more deep or excruciating than that of Brutus and Cassius. The poignant sense of closure here (“for ever and for ever farewell”) epitomizes the entire fifth act of the play. Omens, goodbyes, and a sense of exact retributive justice leave no loose end of the plot untied. The day of battle is Cassius’s birthday, and the terrible omens that presage the event cast a “canopy most fatal” under him and his army (5.1.87). Brutus, voicing a similar note of ominous fulfillment, announces that “this same day/Must end that work the Ides of March begun” (5.1.113). Time, as Cassius says just before his death, has indeed “come round” (5.3.23). Contributing to this sense of an exact, seemingly inevitable, movement toward close, is the manner of Brutus’s and Cassius’s deaths. Explicit in both of them is a reference to the murder of Caesar; it is almost as if Caesar’s body, so visually prominent throughout the third act and in act 4, scene 3 when the ghost tells Brutus “thou shalt see me at Philippi” (4.3.281), reacquires a sort of material presence on the day of battle. “Caesar, thou art revenged/Even with the sword that killed thee” (5.3.45–46) says Cassius as Pindarus stabs him; and upon finding Cassius and Titinius (himself killed with Cassius’s sword) Brutus remarks: “O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet./Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords/In our own proper entrails” (5.3.94–96). Even at his own death, Brutus unmistakably feels the presence of Caesar as he runs on the very sword he used to murder him: “Caesar, now be still./I killed

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not thee with half so good a will” (5.5.50–51). The curiously different manner of the deaths of Cassius and Brutus may signal their somewhat different motives in killing Caesar; Cassius is stabbed by his slave Pindarus, while Brutus himself runs on his sword as Strato holds it.12 This sense of difference is reinforced by Strato’s remark that “Brutus only overcame himself ” (5.5.56). Indeed, the metaphorical distancing of Brutus from Cassius is one of the more subtly expressed features of the closing moments of the play, and perhaps the greatest irony of all the many ironies implicit in their friendship. Antony’s famous paean that Brutus “was the noblest Roman of them all” and that “All the conspirators save only he/Did that they did in envy of great Caesar” (5.5.68–70), further underscores the point, as does the special attention accorded Brutus’s corpse at the end of the play. All the emphasis is on him and his body—the manner of his death, how he was found, his motives for entering the conspiracy, and the like. His corpse alone among those of all his faction slain at Philippi will lie in Octavius’s tent “Most like a soldier, ordered honourably” (5.5.79). In death, even as in life, Brutus remains strangely detached from his dearest friends. His last separation from Cassius looks forward as well as backward, however; for the gap that separates the two stormy friends even in death glances darkly at the future alliance of Antony and Octavius. Bathed in the full light of victory and in the deepest dramatic irony, these two new “friends” (eventually to suffer a separation even more catastrophic than that of Brutus and Cassius) prepare to share “the glories of [ . . . a] happy day” (5.5.81) that leads straight from Philippi toward Actium.

Notes 1. On the dating of Julius Caesar see David Daniell’s “Introduction” to the Arden Edition of the play, 12–16. The long-held notion that Henry V was the first play performed at the new Globe in 1599 has recently been powerfully challenged by Steve Sohmer, who claims that Julius Caesar was actually the first play performed there; see his Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 2. Daniell, “Introduction,” 78. 3. Daniell (ibid., 75–79) discusses the structure of the play in some detail, seeing it as containing two separate halves (before and after the death of Caesar) but also accommodating other structural possibilities. On the play as divided structurally at Caesar’s death into two equal parts, see Jean-Marie Maguin, “Play Structure and Dramatic Technique in Julius Caesar,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 5 (1974): 93–106; and Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 76–78. The short but pithy remarks of Frank Kermode on the dramatic architecture of the play are extremely useful; see his introduction to the play in G. Blakemore Evans et al., ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1146–50. Other studies of note include two articles by John W. Velz, “Undular Structure in ‘Julius Caesar,’” Modern Language Review 66 (1971): 21–30, and “Episodic Structure in Four Tudor Plays: A Virtue of Necessity,” Comparative Drama 6 (1972): 87–102; Adrien Bonjour, The Structure of “Julius Caesar” (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1958); and Mark Rose, Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1972), 151–53.

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138 • Joseph Candido 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

See Daniell, “Introduction,” 16–22; Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 6; and Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play, 25–35 and passim. Daniell, interestingly, links this concern to calendrical matters (“Introduction,” 21 and 199n). Norman Sanders, ed., Julius Caesar (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 175. See Daniell, “Introduction,” 66–67; and John W. Velz, “Orator and Imperator in Julius Caesar: Style and the Process of Roman History,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 55–75, esp. 63. On the question of the setting for act 4, scene 1 at “Antony’s house” see Daniell, 270n; see also his remarks on the seamlessness of act 4, scene 2 and 3 (277–78n). Regarding this celebrated scene, see ibid., 278n. An important article arguing against textual revision in the episode is Brents Stirling’s “Brutus and the Death of Portia,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 211–17; see also Daniell on the integrity of the episode as it stands with the “lie” intact (“Introduction,”142–43), and on Brutus’s Stoicism (ibid., 52). See, for example, the argument between Hotspur and Glendower in 1 Henry IV (3.1). Shakespeare, of course, is also being faithful to the account of the deaths of Cassius and Brutus as recorded in Plutarch’s Lives; but Plutarch’s account, obviously, also serves his dramatic purposes here. See Daniell for Plutarch’s account of the two deaths (358, 363).

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CHAPTER

6

“That every like is not the same”

The Vicissitudes of Language in Julius Caesar BARBARA J. BAINES

Language is, of course, extremely important in all of Shakespeare’s plays; often the action turns on a single word—“nothing” in King Lear, “indeed” in Othello, “done” in Macbeth, “boy” in Coriolanus, and “if ” in As You Like It, for example. But in Julius Caesar, language is the central concern, the play’s subject, more so than in any other play of the canon. Much of the criticism on this play demonstrates its concern specifically with the art of rhetoric and the way rhetoric determines politics in the Roman world of Julius Caesar. Most recently Richard Burt has illustrated what he calls “the Discursive Determinism of Cultural Politics” that constitutes “a dangerous Rome.”1 The play declares its focus on rhetoric with the cameo appearance of Cicero, whom Anne Barton describes as the “acknowledged grand master of the art of persuasion, the greatest orator and rhetorician of the ancient world.”2 Barton also observes that Shakespeare’s Rome is a city “of orators and rhetoricians: a place where the art of persuasion was cultivated, for better or for worse, to an extent unparalleled in any other society.”3 For worse, the play’s negative perspective on the art of rhetoric echoes Montaigne’s in his essay “On the Vanitie of Words.”4 In what I consider the finest essay on this play, Gayle Greene shows that the play reflects not only Montaigne’s but also Bacon’s deep distrust of rhetoric. Greene states: “In the Rome of Julius Caesar, language is power and characters rise or fall on the basis of their ability to wield words . . . rhetoric . . . is integral to characterization, culture, and to the central political and epistemological concerns.”5

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As Shakespeare dramatizes “the power of speech/To stir men’s blood” (3.2.215–16), he also delineates the instability and potential for misconception that is inherent in the nature of language. In what is virtually a thesis for the play, Cicero voices the anxiety of the skeptic and the nominalist: “Indeed it is a strange-disposed time./But men may construe things after their fashion/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (1.3.33– 35). The play’s action demonstrates a skepticism even deeper than Cicero’s, for men not only may but inevitably do “construe things after their fashion,” that is, according to their subjective perspectives and motives. Furthermore, contrary to Cicero’s pronouncement, the play calls into question the ability to know “the purpose of the things themselves.” In a relativism that signifies his feigned and real madness, Hamlet declares, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.250). In Julius Caesar, nothing is but speaking makes it so. Caesar, himself, is that which is most frequently construed and whose truth is never known. What I hope to show in this chapter is the power and the failure of words, both of which derive from their instability, from the inevitable slippage between words and referents. This instability enables the performativity of language, as well as the self-reflective theatrical performances that determine the political reality of Rome. Although Stanley Fish has shown that Coriolanus is “a speech-act play,” that is to say, “it is about what the theory is ‘about,’”6 no play shows better how to, and how not to, do things with words than Julius Caesar. In fact, the play illustrates what Fish describes as the undoing or “self-consuming” tendency of J. L. Austin’s theory on performative language.7 Austin begins How to Do Things with Words with a distinction between constative utterances and performative utterances. Constatives merely describe a state, condition, or event and may, therefore, be considered true or false; whereas performatives are utterances that perform an action.8 Fish claims that, by the end of How To Do Things with Words, Austin has discovered “that all utterances are performative—produced and understood within the assumption of some socially conceived dimension of assessment—and that therefore all facts are institutional, are facts only by virtue of the prior institution of some such dimension.”9 In their descriptions of individuals, events, and the state of affairs in Rome, Cassius, Brutus, and Antony demonstrate the performative nature of the constative and the ways in which all utterances in this play are self-reflexive performances. The theatricality of the political, in fact, accounts for the conspicuous metadramatic quality of Julius Caesar. What the characters do with words manifests itself first in what they do with names. Using Marvin Spevack’s concordance, Madeleine Doran notes that the name of Caesar appears 216 times in the play and that of Brutus 137 times.10 Each name is a sign, the combination of signifier (arbitrary

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sound-images) and signified (a concept or construction), a combination that allows for the disassociation of the one from the other and for various forms of symbolic divestment and investment. Cassius’s power, in fact, resides in his understanding of the work that names do—that, as R. A. Foakes explains, they are important in themselves as “marks of the lineage and standing of a character, and indicating the qualities and virtues the character ought to have, though not necessarily those he actually possesses.”11 Cassius’s strategy, therefore, is first to sever the name of Caesar, the signifier, from the concept of greatness which it has come to signify. It is the name that bestrides the world like a colossus, but it is the man whom he rescued in the swimming contest and who in Spain suffered a fever and cried for drink as “a sick girl” (1.2.128) and even now suffers from the falling sickness. It is the spirit of Caesar that resides in the signifier of his name, the spirit that Brutus would kill, without killing the man. To enlist Brutus in the conspiracy, Cassius must not only separate the name from the man but transfer the power invested in the name of Caesar to the name of Brutus: ‘Brutus’ and ‘Caesar’: what should be in that ‘Caesar’? Why should that name be sounded more than yours? Write them together: yours is as fair a name: Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well. Weigh them, it is as heavy: conjure with ’em, ‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as ‘Caesar’. (1.2.141–46) Cassius also invokes the concept of Roman republicanism and liberation from tyranny signified in the name of Brutus’s ancestor, Lucius Junius Brutus (1.2.158–60), a name to conjure Brutus into the conspiracy. Brutus is won by Cassius’ construction of “the great opinion/That Rome holds of his name” (1.2.317–18; emphasis added). Honor is the concept that Brutus would have his name signify; he loves “the name of honour” more than he fears death (1.2.88–89). But in that declaration of his identity as honor is a slippage between name and thing: to love the name or reputation of honor is not necessarily to love honor itself, as Antony demonstrates in his deconstruction of the conspirators as “honourable men.” The concept of “Caesar”—what the name signifies— for Caesar, on the other hand, is Caesar: “for always I am Caesar” (1.2.211). As God in Exodus 3:14 declares, “I am that I am,” so Caesar is Caesar. Reflecting Caesar’s self-perception, Cassius is correct when he says, “this man/Is now become a god” (1.2.115–16). Antony contributes to the elevation by defining Caesar’s word as the Logos: “When Caesar says ‘Do this’, it is performed” (1.2.10); whatever Caesar says is an illocutionary act.12 Again, in his funeral oration, Antony claims, “But yesterday the word of Caesar might/ Have stood against the world” (3.2.119–20; emphasis added).

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John Velz observes that Caesar is the only important character that does not play the orator. His language is “not persuasive but declarative, not manipulative but pontifical.”13 The words he spoke in banishing Publius Cimber become the act that cannot be revised. The performative nature of his words, unlike the “sweet words” of persuasion, defines his divine status as one who is “constant as the northern star”; to alter his word would be to “lift up Olympus” (3.1.60; 74). For his insistence upon the performative nature of his utterances, he will die by the hands of the rhetoricians; that is to say, the elevation of Caesar through his performative language results in his assassination as the conspirators realize that for them words alone do not perform in the same way they do for Caesar. Words, for the conspirators, are means of persuasion, ways of knowing, conceptual systems—most conspicuously, metaphors, the vehicles of which govern the tenors. For the conspirators, language requires the supplement of action; the deed must then be suited to the word. With the first blow, Caska cries, “Speak hands for me!” (3.1.76). Swords replace words. As Kyd’s Lorenzo of The Spanish Tragedy says, “Where words prevail not, violence prevails” (2.1.108).14 In Julius Caesar the work that words do—whether the Olympian performative utterance of Caesar or the linguistic fashioning of Cassius, Brutus, and Antony—is finally to precipitate violence. For Brutus, the ultimate performative utterance would be the exorcizing of the spirit of Caesar in lieu of killing the man. Because such a verbal enactment is so devoutly to be wished, Brutus is seduced by Cassius’s suggestion that “Brutus” is a name to conjure with, that “‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as ‘Caesar’.” Mark Rose asks the crucial question: “Is Brutus an exorcist or a conjurer, Rome’s doctor or the means by which the spirit of Caesar is permanently established in the state?” Rose concludes that the play’s action is “an attempt at exorcism that turns into a conjuration.”15 Ironically the only truly performative utterance, in Austin’s terms, that Brutus offers is in response to the forged letters Cassius provides in the name of “the general” (the citizens of Rome) urging Brutus to “Speak, strike, redress” (2.1.47; 55). To this imperative, Brutus utters the promise to which he is bound: “O Rome, I make thee promise,/If the redress will follow, thou receivest/Thy full petition at the hand of Brutus” (2.1.56–58). Much virtue in “if,” as Touchstone says, for the assassination, the act intended to “redress” or rectify a wrong, will first be dressed in the metaphors of Brutus only to be redressed or reclothed in the language and theatrical performance of Antony. In the sense of construing or fashioning, Brutus is quite good at doing things with words, but in the process, he and his fellow conspirators are “done in” by them, specifically by their metaphors. The little but important book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, makes

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clear that metaphors are inescapable, for they govern the conceptual system in our everyday lives.16 What the play illustrates is that the reign of metaphor over our conceptual system is frequently dangerous—perhaps best described as a tyranny rather than a reign—when the action contemplated is both momentous and suspect. Metaphors constitute rather than simply contain, and they hide as well as highlight.17 What they hide returns as “a phantasma or a hideous dream” (2.1.65). The play of metaphor becomes conspicuous in the soliloquy Brutus speaks in the orchard before the arrival of his fellow conspirators. The soliloquy is not Brutus’s effort to decide whether to join the conspiracy; the first line, “It must be by his death” (2.1.10), makes clear that the decision has already been made. Rather, the soliloquy presents his efforts to justify or rationalize the commitment that will shortly become the speech act of his promise to Rome (2.1.56–58). That justification is constructed not by logical reasoning but through metaphor and the conditional mode based upon the hypothetical. He begins by acknowledging that the justification for the murder is weak: “for my part/I know no personal cause to spurn at him/But for the general. He would be crowned” (2.1.10– 12). The phrase “for my part” suggests a distinction between his perspective and that of others, particularly Cassius’s—a distinction that he must overcome in order to proceed. The phrase “for the general” is usually glossed “for the common, collective good” as in the new Arden Edition, but the phrase could as easily mean “for the general” cause that “he would be crowned.” In the latter meaning, “the common, collective good” or what Antony in his funeral oration for Brutus will call the “common good to all” (5.5.72) for which Brutus joined the conspiracy is lost; and what remains is the idea that it is only Caesar’s desire to be crowned, whatever the effect of that desire, that becomes the cause of his assassination. Brutus fashions the malevolent potential of that desire through the extended adder and ladder metaphors; the latter (the ladder) is conjured in Brutus’s imagination by its rhyme with the former. Once he seizes upon the adder metaphor—perhaps it is more accurate to say that once it seizes upon him—he can extend it by equating Caesar’s possession of the crown with the sting of the serpent (2.1.14–17). His mind next tries to free itself from the tyranny of this vehicle by acknowledging that Th’abuse of greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power; and to speak truth of Caesar I have not known when his affections swayed More than his reason. (2.1.18–21) Then suddenly, as if to hide the truth of his own constative utterance, the second metaphor, “lowliness is young ambition’s ladder” (2.1.22), emerges. As Greene notes, in this metaphor the vehicle suits the tenor even less than

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in the adder metaphor because Caesar is not at the beginning of his career but at its apex—hardly, that is, “in the shell” (2.1.34).18 Brutus later acknowledges that the conspirators “struck the foremost man of all this world” (4.3.22). Unlike Shakespeare’s Henry IV at the beginning of Part l, Caesar has not in his rise to power turned his back unto the ladder; he has not cut himself off from his fellow patricians, a point that is made in his communion with the conspirators on the morning of the assassination: “Good friends, go in, and taste some wine with me,/And we, like friends, will straightway go together” (2.2.126–27). In this Renaissance representation of Rome, male friendship is predicated upon equality. Although Brutus can, in an aside, respond, “That every like is not the same” (2.2.128), he cannot face the duplicity of his own metaphors, revealed in the disparity between tenor and vehicle. The “like,” a form of metaphor, is not the same as that which it claims to be. Brutus is not seduced so much by Cassius as by his own metaphors. Once he begins to “Fashion it thus” with them (2.1.30), they do his thinking for him. Freeing him from logic, they become the content and the container of his thought. First in the opening soliloquy and then in the resolve of the conspirators, the long, crucial first scene of the second act presents the words that will fashion Caesar’s wounds. The scene culminates, appropriately, with a wound that will fashion words. The voluntary wound in Portia’s thigh elicits from Brutus a full verbal disclosure. He tells her, . . . thy bosom shall partake The secrets of my heart. All my engagements I will construe to thee, All the charactery of my sad brows. (2.1.304–7) Men “construe” even in their most private narratives and most personal relationships. Cassius also suffers the tyranny of Brutus’s metaphors as his good advice that Antony should die with Caesar is negated by Brutus’s assertion that Antony is but “a limb of Caesar” that can do no harm “when Caesar’s head is off ” (2.1.164; 182). Fashioning the assassination through his metaphors, Brutus claims that the conspirators will “be sacrificers but not butchers,” and will carve Caesar “as a dish fit for the gods,/Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.” They will thus be called “purgers, not murderers” (2.1.165; 172–73; 179). Cassius’s plain language and logic cannot contend with the transformative power of Brutus’s metaphors. His better judgment will again be subjugated by the power of Brutus’s metaphor in the decision to meet the forces of Antony and Octavius at Philippi. Cassius is, in effect, drowned in that “tide in the affairs of men/Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune” (4.3.216–17).

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As Brutus’s language shapes the assassination, it has the power to swell the number of the conspirators, as well as lead them to destruction. Of Caius Ligarius he says, “Send him but hither and I’ll fashion him” (2.1.219). Ironically, it is Ligarius who fashions Brutus in precisely the language (1.2.141–46) of Cassius’s seduction: . . . Soul of Rome, Brave son, derived from honourable loins, Thou like an exorcist hast conjured up My mortified spirit. (2.1.320–23) These lines are particularly ironic following Brutus’s wish to conjure and kill the spirit of Caesar: We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar, And in the spirit of men there is no blood. O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit And not dismember Caesar! . . . (2.1.166–69) Brutus does, indeed, encounter the spirit of Caesar but only by shedding his blood. To Volumnius, Brutus acknowledges: The ghost of Caesar hath appeared to me Two several times by night: at Sardis once, And this last night, here in Philippi fields: I know my hour is come. (5.5.17–20) With his last words, Cassius directly addresses the spirit of Caesar that ranges for revenge: “Caesar, thou art revenged/Even with the sword that killed thee” (5.3.45–46). In the suicides of Cassius and Titinius, Brutus likewise acknowledges the spirit of Caesar that the assassination has not killed but set free: “O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet./Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords/In our own proper entrails” (5.3.94–96). Although the assassination releases the spirit from the flesh, it is Antony, not Brutus, who conjures “Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge” through his curse and prophecy (3.1.254–75). His saying, in the soliloquy spoken over the corpse of Caesar, seems to make it so, in Austin’s terms.19 But Antony’s utterances, like Brutus’s, are primarily transformative rather than illocutionary; he construes with words “to stir men’s blood.” The “red weapons” that the conspirators wave over their heads as they cry “Peace, Freedom and Liberty” (3.1.110) become in Antony’s words the “swords, made rich/With the most noble blood of all this world” (3.1.155–56). Names again become significant (literally signifying) as Antony takes the bloody hand of each conspirator and speaks his name. This act of naming not only ends anonymity and community among the conspirators in the ritualized murder

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but also establishes their names as signifiers of the bloody deed. Cinna, the Poet, discovers what is in a name. What Brutus fashions as a ritual sacrifice becomes through Antony’s refashioning the “savage spectacle” (3.1.223) that Brutus tries unsuccessfully to hide in metaphors. Brutus’s sacrificers—who would carve Caesar as a dish fit for the gods, “Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds”—become in Antony’s metaphor and pun the hunters who bay and slay the brave hart: “O world, thou wast the forest to this hart,/And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee” (3.1.207–8). The conspirators are “butchers” (3.1.255), and Caesar’s wounds become “dumb mouths [that] ope their ruby lips/To beg the voice and utterance of [Antony’s] tongue” (3.1.260–61). The funeral orations of Brutus and of Antony (3.2) best demonstrate what can be done and undone with words. Brutus’s speech is no less rhetorical and no more reasonable than Antony’s,20 but Antony has the advantage of speaking last and thus from the “deconstructive” position. Antony also understands that performative language is “circumstantial through and through. The success of a performative depends on certain things being the case when it is uttered; performatives therefore are appropriate or inappropriate in relation to conditions of utterance rather than true or false in relation to a reality that underlies all conditions.”21 Because Brutus stakes the belief in his words upon the plebeians’ belief in his honor, all Antony needs to do is call that honor into question by refuting Brutus’s unsubstantiated assertion that Caesar was ambitious. Through repetition and recontextualizing the words “honour,” “honourable,” and “ambitious” Antony divests them of their meaning in Brutus’s oration. Only one of the three points of Antony’s refutation is relevant to the issue of the conspirators’ cause. The first, Caesar “hath brought many captives home to Rome,/Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill” (3.2.89–90), in fact, suggests that Caesar might well have deserved a crown. The “evidence,” “When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept” (3.2.92), and the will that gives to each man seventy-five drachmas and to the public Caesar’s private parks and orchards, attests to Caesar’s compassion and generosity but does not, as Antony illogically implies, refute Brutus’s claim that Caesar was ambitious. The only relevant evidence that Antony offers is the reminder that when thrice offered a kingly crown on the Lupercal, “he did thrice refuse” (3.2.98). Even this evidence is suspect, given Caska’s account of the offer and refusal as a theatrical performance staged to win the plebeian audience. As he denies his intention and ability to sever Brutus’s words from their meaning, Antony also fashions his own words as the truth, “I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,/But here I am to speak what I do know” (3.2.101–2). By implying that Brutus speaks only “words,” he claims the knowledge of what Cicero calls “the purpose of the things themselves.” He continues to cleverly construct his words as truth by claiming that they

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merely reflect what the plebeians already know: “I tell you that which you yourselves do know./Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,/And bid them speak for me” (3.2.217–19). The “truth” resides not simply in what he has told them but in what he is about to show them, a kind of ocular proof that fires their imaginations. Although all of Antony’s rhetorical strategies are effective, his triumph— his ability to stir men’s blood—resides in his theatricality: his ability to replay the assassination as he would have his audience experience it. The ultimate irony and triumph of Antony’s achievement lies in his theatrical power to deconstruct Cassius’s and Brutus’s perception of the assassination as a “lofty scene” to be “acted over/In states unborn and accents yet unknown” (3.1.112–13). Antony rewrites (all too suddenly and in language too well known) their metaphoric scene of ritual sacrifice and liberation as literally “a savage spectacle.” Like the fine player in Hamlet who weeps for Hecuba, Antony breaks his oration to shed tears for Caesar: “his eyes are red as fire with weeping” (3.2.116). With Caesar’s will as a stage property, he plays to his audience’s curiosity and greed. Generating suspense, he first refuses to read the will, claiming that its contents would sanctify Caesar; a napkin soaked in his “sacred blood” (3.2.134) would become a holy relic to be bequeathed as a rich legacy. This image, like the rest of Antony’s verbal refashioning, is an ironic appropriation of Brutus’s image of Caesar as a dish fit for the gods. The political is the theatrical—only and all a play. Antony gives the plebeians a part in his play by inviting them to insist upon the reading of the will. He draws them into the action, collapsing the distinction between player and audience: “Then make a ring about the corpse of Caesar,/And let me show you him that made the will” (3.2.158–59). The written will is merely the device to focus the attention of the plebeians upon the body as text. With the rents in Caesar’s mantle and the wounds of the corpse as spectacle, Antony replays and reinterprets the meaning of the assassination. The mantle worn first “That day he overcame the Nervii” (3.2.171) serves to remind the plebeians of the courage and conquest associated with the name of Caesar. Just as he previously named the conspirators as he took their bloody hands, Antony now reenacts the murder by giving the names of the major conspirators to various rents in the mantle. Antony’s verbs oblige the plebeians to see the violence of the deed: Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through: See what a rent the envious Caska made: Through this, the well-beloved Brutus stabbed, And as he plucked his cursed steel away, Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it, As rushing out of doors to be resolved If Brutus so unkindly knocked or no[.] (3.2.172–78)

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The last three lines above show that whereas Brutus is governed by metaphor, Antony is its master. Caesar dies not from the many wounds but from “the most unkindest cut of all” (3.2.181), the wound of ingratitude. The mantle as stage property comes into Antony’s play once more as he describes Caesar’s final gesture: “And in his mantle muffling up his face . . . great Caesar fell” (3.2.185–87). The image is particularly effective because it suggests Caesar’s acknowledgement of the shame inherent in the assassination and particularly in Brutus’s participation. Antony finally fashions the fall of Caesar as universal, something akin to the Judeo-Christian concept of the Fall: “O what a fall was there, my countrymen!/Then I, and you, and all of us fell down” (3.2.188–89). The plebeians now weep not only for the fall of Caesar but for their participation in it. It pays to be “a masquer and a reveller” (5.1.61), one who loves plays (1.2.202–3). Antony’s work is done; he need say nothing over the corpse itself, for through his words he has perfectly suited the rents in the mantle to the wounds in the body. Caesar’s will at this point is superfluous to the act of stirring men’s blood, for the crowd cries, “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!” (3.2.199). That the will is merely one of a number of devices Antony uses to manipulate the plebeians is apparent in act 4, scene 1 as he commands Lepidus, “Fetch the will hither, and we shall determine/How to cut off some charge in legacies” (4.1.8–9). What is written can always be rewritten. While the inflamed mob seeks out the conspirators, names again come into play as Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus coldly decide the fate of many senators, including the innocent Cicero. Messala’s source tells of a hundred senators, Brutus’s source tells of seventy (4.3.171–76), who are reduced to “names” that are pricked and blotted. With his uncreating word, Antony then turns on Lepidus, reducing him by metaphor to a beast of burden fit only to bear “diverse slanderous loads” (4.3.20). He finally dismisses Lepidus altogether by telling Octavius, “Do not talk of him/But as a property” (4.1.39–40). Filling the void left by the death of Caesar, Antony in this scene becomes a kind of parodic Logos declaring, in effect, “Let there be death.” The death-dealing power of Antony’s word, or merely the prick of his pen, is juxtaposed with the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius in which their words initially have no meaning at all. Because Brutus has come to distrust the word of Cassius, he seeks meaning in gestures instead. When Lucilius, Brutus’s officer, describes the cool reception Cassius gave him, Brutus accounts for this change with what by now we might expect: a metaphor, one that is exceedingly ironic in light of the one that Antony has just devised to fashion Lepidus: But hollow men, like horses hot at hand, Make gallant show and promise of their mettle:

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But when they should endure the bloody spur, They fall their crests, and like deceitful jades Sink in the trial. . . . (4.2.23–27) When these brothers (Cassius is married to Brutus’s sister) come face-toface, their accusations and denials carry no weight. We finally do not know if Cassius has taken bribes, if he has “an itching palm” (4.3.10), if he has denied Brutus the funds to pay his soldiers. The quarrel, a form of dark comic relief in a play so focused on demonstrating the power of words, becomes most ludicrous when Cassius declares, “I am a soldier, I,/Older in practice, abler than yourself ” (4.3.30–31), an assertion that generates the following exchange:

Brutus: Go to, you are not, Cassius. Cassius: I am. Brutus: I say you are not. Cassius: Urge me no more. I shall forget myself. Have mind upon your health. Tempt me no farther. Brutus: Away, slight man! (4.3.33–37) When Brutus threatens to laugh at Cassius’s waspish words, Cassius is forced to retract his boast: “You wrong me every way: you wrong me, Brutus./ I said an elder soldier, not a better./Did I say better?” (4.3.55–57). By this time, Brutus no longer cares what he said. To win Brutus back, Cassius must abandon words and take up his weapon (“There is my dagger,/ And here my naked breast”; 4.3.99–100) in a highly melodramatic gesture that replays that of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as he woos Lady Anne in Richard III. Where words prevailed not, the threat of violence prevails. Brutus responds to the gesture: “Sheathe your dagger:/Be angry when you will, it shall have scope” (4.3.106–7). This lovers’ quarrel begins with each man addressing the other as “brother” in a context and tone that makes the filial term ironic and empty of its conventional meaning. Proper names signify differently as well; they no longer have the power to conjure, although Cassius claims that the name of Brutus protects Brutus from Cassius, and Brutus claims that “The name of Cassius honours this corruption,/And chastisement doth therefore hide his head” (4.3.15–16). In the first ninety-one lines of this scene, names are used in direct address as each accuses the other. At first, neither presumes to sound his own name by referring to himself in the third person, as both do in the first half of the play. Then finally Cassius refers to himself in the third person as he evokes their former bond by baring his breast to Brutus and inviting the revenge of Antony and Octavius: “Revenge yourselves alone on Cassius,/For Cassius is a-weary of the world” (4.3.93–94). Then, as Brutus

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reaffirms their bond, Cassius refers to himself and Brutus in the third person, to sound each name: “Hath Cassius lived/To be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus” (4.3.112–13). Once Brutus and Cassius are reconciled, they speak each other’s names repeatedly as an affirmation of their bond. In a citational repetition, the filial address returns as well, redressed now in genuine affection: “Hear me, good brother . . . O my dear brother . . . Good night, good brother” (4.3.210; 231; 235). This bond between brothers—one of the finest dramatizations of love between men in the canon—is given full expression in their conversation and leave-taking before the battle. Realizing that this may be “The very last time we shall speak together” (5.1.98), Cassius asks the crucial, intimate question: “If we do lose this battle . . . /What are you then determined to do?” (5.1.97–99). In response, Brutus voices his condemnation of the suicide of Cato: . . . I know not how, But I do find it cowardly and vile, For fear of what might fall, so to prevent The time of life . . . (5.1.102–5) That he knows not how he has come by this opinion is both poignant and ironic, for it was precisely “For fear of what might fall” that he chose “to prevent/The time of life” of Caesar. Brutus seems here completely unaware of the verbal process by which he fashioned the justification for Caesar’s assassination; he does not recognize how completely his own metaphors have controlled his thoughts and assumptions. Now his words, like weapons, turn upon him to refashion the assassination as cowardly and vile. His response to Cassius’s next question, “You are contented to be led in triumph/Thorough the streets of Rome?” (5.1.108–9) surely fashions the time of life for Cassius as well as for himself: “No, Cassius, no: think not, thou noble Roman,/That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome./He bears too great a mind” (5.1.110–12). He thus equates, as in a metaphor, the name of Cassius with the epithet “noble Roman” and elevates his own name through the use of the third person. Political realities have been consistently shaped and reshaped by rhetorical figures, particularly by the power of metaphors, and by theatricality. In sharp contrast, the private and personal farewell speeches of Cassius and Brutus—their final utterances to one another—are stunning and deeply moving in their linguistic simplicity:

Brutus:

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... For ever and for ever farewell, Cassius. If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then this parting was well made.

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Cassius: For ever and for ever farewell, Brutus: If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed; If not, ’tis true this parting was well made. (5.1.117–22) They speak as one voice as Cassius repeats the words of Brutus, worthy of citation. The “farewell” is literalized and serves as the performative blessing, “may you fare well.” The process of construing and misconstruing that defines the nature of language and thus the nature of these Romans also defines ultimately the fate of Cassius, Titinius, and Brutus, as they fashion their own retribution. When Pindarus misconstrues success as defeat, thinking Cassius’s “best friend” (5.3.35) Titinius has been captured, Cassius accepts this narrative as the thing itself and commits suicide. As he dies, he suits the word to the action: “Caesar, thou art revenged/Even with the sword that killed thee” (5.3.45–46). Cassius’s deed is then fashioned by the metaphor of Titinius’s encomium: But Cassius is no more. O setting sun: As in thy red rays thou dost sink tonight, So in his red blood Cassius’ day is set. The sun of Rome is set. Our day is gone[.] (5.3.60–63) Titinius’s observation, repeated by Messala, “Mistrust of good success hath done this deed” (5.3.65–66), recalls the mistrust of Caesar’s success, expressed in Brutus’ orchard soliloquy, that leads to the assassination. The fear that Caesar would be crowned leads to the ironic crowning of Cassius in death: “But hold thee, take this garland on thy brow;/Thy Brutus bid me give it thee, and I/Will do his bidding” (5.3.85–87). Titinius’s account of Cassius’s fatal error, “Alas, thou hast misconstrued everything” (5.3.84) applies, like the apothegm of Cicero, to all of the characters and the action of the play. Such misconstruction necessitates further expiatory sacrifice in the suicides of Titinius and Brutus. The dying words of Brutus once again constitute a rhyme in a couplet that, with the exception of Caesar’s name, is monosyllabic and deeply moving in its simplicity: “Caesar, now be still./I killed not thee with half so good a will” (5.5.50–51). In these final words, suited to the action, Brutus imagines himself as the exorcist who, with the sacrifice of his own life, will finally dispel the spirit of Caesar. Exorcism, however, is rewritten by history as conjuration, for the spirit of Caesar is reified in imperial Rome. Mark Rose observes that “as a representation of the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Empire, Julius Caesar may be understood as yet another of the many originary myths of the Imperial Tudor State.” He adds that “by transforming the historical fact of the defeat of Brutus and the republican movement in Rome into a metaphysical confirmation of the inevitability of imperial greatness,

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Shakespeare’s play implicitly confirms the legitimacy of the Tudor state.”22 What Shakespeare does with words within his own historical, political context thus mirrors the work of metaphors and theatrical performance in the political world of Rome. Julius Caesar illustrates the observation of Marion Trousdale that the Renaissance acquired from Augustine and Erasmus a basic understanding of the fundamental difference “between divine and human language. God’s word is substance; it is ontologically real. But in man language is accident, not substance.”23 Language defines us as fallen; it speaks the Fall in the arbitrary connection and slippage between signifier and signified. In Derrida’s words, the “sign is always a sign of the Fall.”24 Julius Caesar, as the dramatization of the performativity of language, of how we do things with words, illustrates a fall, nevertheless, most fortunate.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

Richard A. Burt, “‘A Dangerous Rome’: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Discursive Determinism of Cultural Politics,” in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. MarieRose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 109– 27. Anne Barton, “Julius Caesar and Coriolanus: Shakespeare’s Roman World of Words,” in Shakespeare’s Craft, ed. Philip H. Highfill, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. Gayle Greene, “‘The Power of Speech / To Stir Men’s Blood’: The Language of Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 11 (1980): 68, 69. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 221. Ibid., 231. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 3–11. Fish, Is There a Text?, 198. Madeleine Doran, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 224, n.1. R. A. Foakes, “Language and Action in Julius Caesar,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Julius Caesar,” ed. Leonard Dean (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), 58. Foakes observes that the “word Caesar had long been in use to signify an all-conquering, absolute monarch and is used in the play with this implication” (61). I am suggesting here that the difference in ways words work for Caesar and for everyone else in this play fits the following explanation by Austin: “we also perform illocutionary acts such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking, &c., i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force. . . . we may also perform perlocutionary acts: what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading” (How to Do Things, 108). John W. Velz, “Orator and Imperator in Julius Caesar: Style and the Process of Roman History,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 65. Revels Student Editions, ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Mark Rose, “Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599,” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 297.

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“That every like is not the same” • 153 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 3–10. Ibid., 10–13. Greene, “‘The Power of Speech,’” 80. Austin, How to Do Things, 7. Greene explains that “Brutus’s most effective device is to present the issue as though it were a choice between two alternatives which leave no choice but to assassinate Caesar, but which rest on unexamined assumptions concerning Caesar: so that, again, the argument is a selfreferential construct that makes sense in its own terms but casts no light outside itself to its supposed subject.” His oration is marked by the “illusion of . . . logic” and “is far from an appeal to the intellect with ‘real reasons’ . . . It is a brilliant piece of oratory, brilliantly suited to manipulating a difficult crowd, while resorting to none of the obviously cheap tricks so conspicuous in Antony’s performance. Thus it enables Brutus to preserve his conception of himself in his own eyes and others’ as a rational man reasonably motivated” (“‘The Power of Speech,’” 83, 84, 85). Velz contends that “Antony’s superiority over Brutus lies as much in his place in the sequence of speakers as in his oratorical method” (“Orator and Imperator,” 56). Fish, Is There a Text?, 198. Rose, “Conjuring Caesar,” 303. Marion Trousdale, Shakespeare and the Rhetoricians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 150.

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CHAPTER

7

From Theatre to Globe The Construction of Character in Julius Caesar J. L. SIMMONS

Character is not, of course, the sixteenth-century word for the subject of this chapter. When Titinius asks the gods to give him “leave” to kill himself, he justifies his representation of the noble Roman suicide with a theatrical pun on the term still common: “This is a Roman’s part” (5.3.89). The Elizabethan character still had its origin in print, although it had begun the trajectory toward mentalité: “I will construe to thee,/All the charactery of my sad brows” (2.1.306–7). That which is written on his face and which Brutus will read to Portia has yet to shift into the signification of Brutus “himself,” behind his “sad brows.” This semantic trajectory offers a quintessential example of Lacan’s observation that words in modernity often cling to their usage and sense in the early modern period when the schism between subject and object was not yet complete.1 Furthermore, because “charactery” as writing can never achieve the transparency that modernity also begins to insist upon, character can only signify a concept of the printed part, like the corollary application of the word to the subjectivity of all men and women that are “merely players” and are construed in and constructed by discourse. It is, however, in the modern, popularly transparent sense that characters claim honorific place in literary criticism, even though in critical theory they are always already concepts of the parts and not to be identified with the printed—the materially charactered—part. The twentieth-century reaction to A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy established the truism that we cannot approach roles in a play as though they are historical and real. Nevertheless, despite its parodic dismissal of 155

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the number of Lady Macbeth’s children into the bin of critical inquiry, modern criticism of the great Shakespeare characters did not theoretically disturb the sense of their having a conceptual totality signified by a fixed and definitive discourse. At such a point criticism might well take pause: the characters in Shakespeare as a readerly consequence of the texts are intrinsic to the cultural phenomenon of “Shakespeare” in history. Not only have “they” been foremost in assuring Shakespeare his preeminence, the criticism focused on those characters has also helped to shape the modern subject as much as any intellectual determination since Descartes. Freud and his employment of Hamlet in the formulation of the Oedipal Complex is only the climactic example. In an irony of postmodernity Freud becomes the text whereby Lacan deconstructs the totalized individual; and postmodern psychoanalysis and critical theory find the postmodern subject, real as well as fictive, to be indeterminate and multivocal, not centered and whole. The heart of Hamlet’s mystery becomes as imaginary as any univocal and essential Self that is a subject of discourse. In their plenitude the Shakespeare texts of course survive this schism: they even become evidence for this historical rupture in subjectivity. It is in Julius Caesar, not Hamlet, that we can best see elementary movement of the text in the construction of parts that play upon the audience’s imaginative apprehension of “that within which passes show” (Hamlet, 1.2.85). My purpose in this chapter is to examine some textual means whereby this illusory dimension of the parts expands in perceptual and conceptual potential. The universal that sponsors this development in 1599 is signified in the new playhouse charactered as the Globe and underscored with the Latinate precept that all the world plays the actor. The Swiss traveler Thomas Platter has left a record of seeing Julius Caesar on 21 September 1599, thereby establishing it as one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays for presentation at the Globe, reconstructed from timbers of the old Theatre, dismantled and moved in 1597 from Shoreditch to its new location in Southwark. In his narrative of Caesar’s peripheral performance before the Roman people Caska leaves trace of earlier interaction between Lord Chamberlain actor and London audience wherein the parts are one-dimensional, naive in both representation and reception, such practice as might be imagined in an older venue for an audience with unsophisicated theatrical (and political) sensibilities, but with the power nevertheless to determine the theatrical (and political) success of the performance: . . . If the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him, according as he pleased and displeased them, as they use to do the players in the Theatre, I am no true man. (1.2.257–60)

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(I capitalize the name of the “playhouse,” as in the Folio text, because the modernization to lowercase deletes the identification of the historical with the contemporaneous allusion to the first fixed stage constructed by James Burbage in 1576.) For the Globe the part of Julius Caesar is decentered from the tragedy as subject and becomes the object for Romans and other audiences (the London playgoers) to construe. In his off-stage performance Caesar plays contradictory parts in bipartite action: he rejects the offered crown and at this magnanimous gesture with “the back of his hand” (1.2.221) gains from the audience such applause that Caesar entertains another offer and yet another “putting by” (229). This binary action, thrice performed, reflects the ambitious part that Brutus represents to the crowd; but it also represents the magnanimous Caesar with which Antony contradicts the negative interpretation: “Mark ye his words? He would not take the crown;/Therefore ’tis certain he was not ambitious” (3.3.113–14). In the funeral scene we have oratorical presentation of the two Caesars that Ernest Schanzer recognized as the problematic “dramatic device” central to the play.2 Both medieval Worthy and Renaissance aspiring tyrant are fashioned out of the Thrasonical Caesar, a typed part in the Senecan tradition3 with the potential to please and to displease. In their constructions, however, Brutus and Antony decisively separate the two Caesars. The perspective on the platform stage of the new “theatre” is enlarged not only because Caska’s narrative of a ritualized duality is transposed into direct representation but also because the playhouse audience that is thereby pleased and displeased construes the even more engaged audience reacting within the play—most explicitly, of course, in the scene of the funeral orations. Antony’s version triumphs because of the more effective performance of the actor over the orator, with all of the theatrical employment of a text interactive with the audience, a text employing dynamics, pauses, climaxes, gestures, properties, and indeed “all forms, moods, shapes of grief,/That can denote” persuasively, if perhaps not “truly” (Hamlet, 1.2.82–83). Brutus presents concepts, i.e., the “spirit” of Caesar. Antony moves to the thing itself, the “spectacle” of the Roman actor’s body. Caesar’s objectification is complete: actor becomes property.4 The grand climax of Antony’s performance is based upon the property of the will, the single documentary evidence. Textually we might identify the “will” of Caesar, in which he proclaims “the cause” of his action (2.2.71), with this testament that Antony “found . . . in his closet” (3.2.130). This will is authentic, because Antony will proceed to “determine/How to cut off some charge in legacies” (4.1.8–9); but as evidence of an authentic Caesar it is as unstable as any textuality, certainly a postmortem textuality, that can have no Presence. Even the living actor playing Caesar living or dead, body or Ghost, is a charactery of absence. In the classically old-fashioned

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theatricality of Caesar’s role, the part is discontinuous from the performing “I”: “I rather tell thee what is to be feared/Than what I fear: for always I am Caesar” (1.2.210–11). This “I” is unstably subject to change as it attempts identification with an imaginary will so conflicted that it becomes willful. Struggling to be a name not “liable to fear,” the apprehensive “I” becomes the focused subject in the play for the only time as Caesar seeks a pleasing construction of the omens. Demonstrating the wisdom of Cicero’s hermeneutics, Caska and Cassius “construe things after their fashion,/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (1.3.34–35). It is a different process with the two antagonists. Brutus ignores the heavenly fireworks altogether, except as they allow him to construe the fraudulent letter: “The exhalations whizzing in the air/Give so much light that I may read by them” (2.1.44–45). Caesar is nonplussed by signs that insist only upon signification: he is persuaded by Calphurnia’s displeasing interpretation until Decius counters with a pleasing one, “well expounded” (2.2.91), and the sly suggestion that Caesar might in his indecisiveness appear fearful to the Senate. Like the augurer’s sacrificial beast and Calphurnia’s dream of the sacrificial Caesar, the omens allow readings as contradictory as Caesar’s will: “I will stay at home”; “Give me my robe, for I will go” (2.2.56; 107). When Caesar decides to “go forth,” he has his part cut out for him: to deny that being crowned, in Brutus’s theoretical projection, “might change his nature” (2.1.13). Thus he dies proclaiming that he could not change if he wanted to: “I am constant as the northern star” (3.1.60).5 The conclusion of his Caesarian grandiloquence breaks into the humble plea that his audience acknowledge his qualification for the role: “that I am he,/Let me a little show it even in this” (3.1.70–71). Schanzer observed that the assassination is, in its prepared staging and motivation of parts, almost “a play within a play.”6 Like Caesar, Brutus insists that constancy will determine the theatrical success of their performance: Let not our looks put on our purposes, But bear it as our Roman actors do, With untired spirits and formal constancy. (2.1.224–26) It is not constancy that reveals the “flesh and blood” of these Roman parts but the pattern of juxtaposed inconstancies, oppositions and contradictions that suggest not Stoic centeredness, but eccentricities of complexity, confusion, and ambivalence. Another important Roman that will not survive into the latter half of the play exhibits the same contradiction of parts. In her first scene Portia represents a noble Roman matron by the self-mutilation that she exhibits, literal flesh and blood that shows her qualifications for a marriage of mutuality:

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I have made strong proof of my constancy, Giving myself a voluntary wound, Here in the thigh. (2.1.298–300) In her second and last scene, however, she breaks part when the dignity of Roman wife shifts into the flurry of a traditional anxious wife: “how weak a thing/The heart of woman is” (2.4.40–41). With typically antifeminist impulses she finds it all but impossible to remain in the domestic sphere and to “keep counsel” (2.4.9): “O constancy, be strong upon my side” (2.4.6). Even though she is Cato’s daughter and Brutus’s wife, her “man’s mind” is supported by only “a woman’s might” (2.4.8). In two instances the closely juxtaposed contradictions are so dire that editors have suspected textual signs of revision. John Dover Wilson, to be sure the most compulsive of the Shakespeare disintegrators, finds the shifting of parts in Caska from act 1, scene 2 to act 1, scene 3 impossible to reconcile.7 In his first scene Caska is secure in the romanitas of cynical ironist; then, after only enough lines to prevent his immediate reentry, he is cast into the nervous and superstitious “part of men to fear and tremble” (1.3.54). In act 1, scene 2 Cassius commends approvingly the “tardy form” that Caska “puts on” (298) and in act 1, scene 3 he rebukes a different put-on: . . . those sparks of life That should be in a Roman you do want Or else you use not. You look pale, and gaze, And put on fear . . . (1.3.57–60) The contradictory parts of Caska are no more irreconcilable than those of Portia, although the misogynistic context of the latter make the contradictions more familiar. The second instance of suspected revision is in the dual revelation of Portia’s death. If no editor has been so radical as to alter the Folio text, the passage has become a crux shadowed by editorial notation that almost certainly the second revelation was marked in the copy for a deletion that the typesetter missed.8 In the first revelation Brutus has in grief confided to Cassius that Portia is dead. After the entrance of Messala and Titinius with news from Rome, Brutus denies any word of her. When a reluctant Messala also denies any knowledge, Brutus is dubious: “Now, as you are a Roman, tell me true”; and Messala, again in echo, sets up Brutus’s reaction: “Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell” (4.3.185–86). Thus Brutus responds to the second revelation of his wife’s death: Why, farewell, Portia: we must die, Messala: With meditating that she must die once I have the patience to endure it now. (4.1.188–90)

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Exercising Stoic patience to assure his constancy, Brutus wins approval of his Roman endurance, but only after his reticence (if that is what it is) has become an outrageous lie and “in art” the Roman betrays “nature” (4.3.192– 93). The critical desire to delete this performance must be explained in part because the unflattering representation of Brutus “with himself at war” (1.2.46) so counters the political disposition of the twentieth century to create a sympathetic Brutus. But the insistence in the text on an historical ethos at war with “nature” here warrants the doubt Granville-Barker expressed in regard to Caska’s second revelation of “himself ”: “what means is the actor given of showing that this is a dramatic inconsistency?”9 The discontinuity of the two revelations is so entirely in keeping with the patterning of action in act 4, scene 3 that a theory of revision is at the outset special pleading. In the famous argument, Brutus’s anger at Cassius’s extortions of gold rises to Caesarian pomposity and then, within the same line, reveals blind hypocrisy all the more dissonant in its righteous indignation: There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats: For I am armed so strong in honesty That they pass by me as the idle wind, Which I respect not. I did send to you For certain sums of gold, which you denied me, For I can raise no money by vile means. (4.3.66–71) After their warm reconciliation, Brutus again becomes imperious with the intruding poet, against the indulgent good humor of Cassius. The warm and the cold Brutus clash in the dual revelations. Then, in planning their next strategic move, Brutus overrides Cassius yet a final time (after two earlier series of such dictatorial moves in 2.1 and 3.1) by insisting upon Philippi. At this point the repetitive effect of Brutus’s contradicting Cassius in favor of historical disasters has a comic component—like Napoleon urging Waterloo. The “cause” is now “in [ . . . his] will,” as a weary Cassius suggests: “Then with your will go on” (4.3.222). After the tenderness of their separation for the night, in a gentle remark that Brutus makes to the boy Lucius, an apologetic subtext acknowledges a Brutus arrogantly blind to his own failure. The moment summarizes the just completed scene of his interaction with Cassius: Look, Lucius, here’s the book I sought for so: I put it in the pocket of my gown. Lucius: I was sure your lordship did not give it me. (4.3.250–52) This conjunction of pleasing and displeasing rhetorically identifies the dual charactery of this Roman’s part and prepares for the return of the

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homologously charactered Caesar, who claims Brutus as “Thy evil spirit” (4.3.280). The abruptly truncated scene between them suggests that the development of Brutus as “character” has reached its dead end: “Ill spirit, I would hold more talk with thee” (4.3.286). But the text incites no further dialogue, and no “morning air” (Hamlet, 1.5.58) is required to part them. The concluding scenes feature one more contradiction when Brutus responds to Cassius about what he is “determined to do” (5.1.99) in defeat, a passage that is climactically confused and confusing: Even by the rule of that philosophy By which I did blame Cato for the death Which he did give himself—I know not how, But I do find it cowardly and vile, For fear of what might fall, so to prevent The time of life—arming myself with patience To stay the providence of some high powers That govern us below. Cassius: Then, if we lose this battle, You are contented to be led in triumph Thorough the streets of Rome? Brutus: No, Cassius, no: think not, thou noble Roman, That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome. He bears too great a mind. (5.1.100–112) The Stoic virtue of patience in the face of adversity meets the alternate Stoic virtue that allows suicide as the final enfranchisement of the noble mind. Different strains of Stoicism allow both positions on suicide but not both in the same or the next breath. The contradiction leads to another Caesarian echo, Brutus in third person. Most devastating of all in this intellectual incoherence, the imperial rhetoric echoes the “great minde” that in North’s translation represents Plutarch’s judgment, here transferred as Brutus’s ironic evaluation of himself. There only remains the bathos of Brutus’s farewell fatuity, his “joy” that is contradicted by his every encounter in the play: “My heart doth joy that yet in all my life/I found no man but he was true to me” (5.5.34–35). With two death scenes to dramatize, Shakespeare did not demote Brutus from honorific part but ended it in a final scene of hurried diffidence, with Brutus interacting ineptly with Clitus, Dardanius, Volumnius, and finally Strato as he seeks an assisted suicide. The mechanical series of exchanges strike no genuine emotion and evoke no terror or pity. By contrast, the death of Cassius fills a scene in which tragic tension, powerful affection, and emblematic signification bring the tragic themes and action of the play into full resolution. Cassius has begun his part with the soliloquy of the stage

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Machiavel (1.2.307–21), confessing his deception of Brutus and his entirely personal opposition to Caesar. After Brutus comes to dominate the conspiracy, in a series of countermands to Cassius’s sound if brutal political instincts, Cassius might at least assume that his private greed can flourish. The argument scene, however, firmly puts him in his place, leaving Cassius with nothing but a sentimental appeal to love: Strike as thou didst at Caesar: for I know, When thou didst hate him worst, thou lov’dst him better Than ever thou lov’dst Cassius. (4.3.104–6) With this material Shakespeare counters and refashions the conspirator who after his first scene has only reacted in bewilderment to the contradictory rigidities of representation in Brutus that even the appearance of Caesar’s Ghost does not disturb. Cassius’s “love” is much more promising. His Epicureanism fails him as much as Stoicism fails Brutus, but Cassius, unlike Brutus—indeed unlike any other Roman—acknowledges that “now I change my mind” (5.1.77). His change, however, is not to another part: I but believe it partly, For I am fresh of spirit and resolved To meet all perils very constantly. (5.1.89–91) The two adverbs partly and constantly blend well. In his death scene the eye imagery that Cassius introduced to seduce Brutus returns as a commentary on the limits of perspective, and he reads victory as defeat: “My sight was ever thick” (5.3.21). Titinius in despair laments that Cassius has “misconstrued everything” (84). Still, the death of Cassius evokes love from his bondman Pindarus whose “will” would have preferred Cassius to liberation: “So, I am free; yet would not so have been/Durst I have done my will” (47–48). Titinius lovingly crowns Cassius with a garland and shows his regard by ending his “Roman’s part” with a rhyme upon “Titinius’ heart” (89–90). For all the greatness of Julius Caesar signs of the play as “early” can, I think, be seen in definitive circumscriptions characterizing the parts. Because a donnée of Shakespeare’s pagan world is the tragic limitations of Rome,10 these limitations suggest a degree of imitative structure in the charactery of the parts. My argument, however, has been on the construction of these limitations as an advance over, say, the impenetrability characterizing the pleasing and displeasing contradictions in King Henry V, from earlier in 1599, shortly before the move to the Globe.11 In playing their parts the Roman actors represent the reversals and complications of action with reversals and complications that alter the constancy, the countenance of the actors, breaking parts so as even in incoherence to decenter and fragment a wholeness that textual experience and instability disallow. If the

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technique for achieving this destabilization in Julius Caesar can itself become a “formal constancy,” it also leads to the multivocality of an actor of parts like Hamlet, eluded by a role to play, but capable of the most intelligent dramaturgical critique and contradiction: “Why, what an ass am I!” (Hamlet, 2.2.578).

Notes 1. See Jacques Lacan, “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” trans. James Hulbert, Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 44–45: “To understand the Elizabethans one must first turn certain words around on their hinges so as to give them a meaning somewhere between the subjective one and the objective one.” 2. See Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of “Julius Caesar,” “Measure for Measure,” “Antony and Cleopatra” (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 32– 33. 3. See Harry Morgan Ayres, “Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the Light of Some Other Versions,” PMLA 25 (1910): 183–227; Joan Rees, “‘Julius Caesar’—an Earlier Play, and an Interpretation,” Modern Language Review 50 (1955): 135–41. 4. Actor becomes property in Antony’s contemptuous evaluation of Lepidus: “He must be taught, and trained, and bid go forth;/A barren-spirited fellow . . . /Do not talk of him/But as a property” (4.1.35–40). Caesar is more spirited as actor, more spectacular as property. 5. Elsewhere I have urged the influence on the play of Sir John Stradling’s Two Bookes of Constancie (1594), a translation of Justus Lipsius’s De constantia (1584), one of the major contributions of the Continental and then English neo-Stoic revival in the late 1590s. A central part of this discourse was to distinguish Stoicism from Christian doctrine in regard to the positive potentials of passion and the fallen nature of reason. See my “Shakespeare’s Treatment of Roman History,” in William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence, ed. John F. Andrews (New York: Scribner’s, 1985), 2: 479. 6. Schanzer, Problem Plays, 66. 7. See John Dover Wilson, ed., Julius Caesar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), 97. Compare Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 2: 362: “Cassius is by no means all of a piece, and makes the more lifelike a character for that.” But about Caska he is doubtful: “It is all very well to say with Dowden that Casca appears in the storm with his ‘superficial garb of cynicism dropt,’ and that, while dramatic consistency may be a virtue, Shakespeare here gives us an instance of ‘a piece of higher art, the dramatic inconsistency of his characters.’” But, he continues, what “means is the actor given of showing that this is a dramatic inconsistency?” (376). 8. See W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Biographical and Textual History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 289–90; C. J. Sisson, New Readings in Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 2: 189–90. Brents Stirling, in “Julius Caesar in Revision,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 187–205, has offered bibliographical evidence of revision that “actually makes deletion less plausible than before” (194). 9. See note 7. 10. See my Shakespeare’s Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973), 14–15, passim. 11. I have in mind the positive and negative representations and readings of the titular king that Norman Rabkin attempts to justify in his “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 279–96.

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CHAPTER

8

Buying and Selling So(u)les

Marketing Strategies and the Politics of Performance in Julius Caesar NAOMI CONN LIEBLER

For approximately two decades now, it has been a commonplace critical gesture to discuss the Elizabethan public playhouse as a “site of active and partisan ideological contestation”1 where many of the social dynamics that informed life outside the theater were represented in quasi-fictional terms, and where the emotions, concerns, interests, loyalties, and anxieties of potentially volatile assemblages of citizens representing every social stratum were replicated. Although the dimensions of its representations and replications, their “meanings,” are still the occasional subjects of debate, the idea of the stage as a site of contestation is well established. Those dimensions draw critical attention not only to what is being represented but also to how it is represented, with what degrees of approval or disdain, applause or condemnation. Oddly, in discussions of the first Shakespearean tragedy to be performed in Elizabethan London’s most celebrated public theater, it is sometimes forgotten that “the Elizabethan theater is an institution that is . . . a creation of the plebeian culture of the Renaissance.”2 Moreover, as Douglas Bruster has argued recently, “London’s playhouses were, of course, actual markets” where “plays [ . . . were] retailed in concrete, textual form . . . The plays people saw and heard spoke to them about their shared society . . . in ways more ordinary than radical.”3 The plebs gets an unusually large amount of stage time in the two Roman plays concerned with the earliest and last days of the Republic: Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. Despite the fact that the fate of the political structures 165

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under which they live is very much the play’s subject, the representation of the plebs has interested surprisingly few commentators on Julius Caesar. Even Robert Weimann’s Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, whose critical focus is often upon representations of class divisions and their consequences, only briefly and just once glances at the play’s images of plebeian culture: “The cobbler’s brilliantly conceived riddling wordplay . . . (I.1.10–30), where tension and excitement first build and then slacken, approximates the larger historical theme of fickle allegiances.”4 In this essay I will suggest that the principal contestation represented in this play is for the allegiances—the “So(u)les”5—of the plebs (who are anything but fickle), and that it is specifically through the rhetoric of the marketplace that Antony offers a precise demonstration model of the purchase-power of language as the catalyst to action. The theater is more like a market than a pulpit or a political podium; it depends for its successful function upon a combination of words and goods, the abstractions of rhetoric and the concrete material of display. Anonymous “extras” in the play of history, like the “None else of name” ironically and simultaneously counted and discounted among the bodies on the field at Agincourt in Henry V (4.8.106), the plebeians of Julius Caesar are the commodities that produce, and the fodder that fuels, the history we review in these plays. On this view, the play is not an indictment of proletarian stupidity or even gullibility; rather, it dramatizes the power of political hucksterism in the hands (or in the words) of a skillful showman such as Antony.6 In a recent essay, Nicholas Visser dismantles several commonplace critical misconceptions about what, exactly, characterizes the plebeians of Julius Caesar. It is not the case, he writes, that audiences and critics have “misunderstood” the representation of the plebs for the past four centuries, but rather that understanding such representations flexes and shifts with the social and political lives of audiences and readers. Those who know something experientially about politically volatile crowds are likely to “read” Julius Caesar’s plebs quite differently from those who do not. Visser narrates two kinds of exposures to the play that occurred during the schools boycott in Grahamstown, South Africa, in 1980: students studying the play at Rhodes University were shown Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 film starring James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, and Marlon Brando as Antony. Black students boycotting the schools but seeking to pass their exams through independent study successfully petitioned the university to allow them to see the same film. Visser describes the different responses of the two groups of students. For the university students, “the scenes of crowd activity confirmed several unquestioned assumptions: crowds are easily swayed, irrational, prone to violence, prey to ‘mob psychology’”; for the black matriculation students, on the other hand, “there

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was nothing at all ‘realistic’ about the presentation of the crowd [in the film].” The reason for such divergent views was obvious, he says: “the Rhodes students in all likelihood had no personal experience of political crowds, and could not have imagined that alternative perspectives on the matter were available. They were operating from a set of beliefs so socially and historically entrenched as to constitute a form of ‘knowledge.’” The black students, in contrast, were living through a formative political experience of mass meetings, demonstrations, ‘freedom funerals’, and other forms of mass political action . . . For them there was nothing irrational about the actions of political crowds, nothing fickle about their commitment to certain courses of action. The notion that a political crowd would be swayed by whomever happened to be addressing them, far from confirming prevailing ‘wisdom’ on such matters, seemed ludicrous.7 Visser concludes this section of his essay by noting that “Through these strikingly different receptions, we are provided insight into how formidable an ideological signifier the crowd is, how deeply embedded in middle-class mentality are ‘commonsense’ beliefs about the crowd, and how successfully literary and dramatic works—or, more accurately perhaps, the receptions, productions, and reproductions of literary and dramatic works—serve to codify and confirm these beliefs.”8 Even the most dispassionate critical reception of this or any Shakespearean play is inevitably shaped by one’s own experience and understanding of words and actions imitated on stage. Visser’s strong-voiced critique of audience and reader perspective is important here: in the light of recent work by social historians who have focused attention on “the view from below” and called for a radical revision of our understanding of collective political activity, “pronouncements today about the aptness and astuteness of Shakespeare’s depiction of the plebeian crowd . . . are shown up for the class-based prejudice they are instead of the certain knowledge they purport to be.”9 Perhaps this is a caution we should attach to Cassius’s rumination about future replications of the “lofty scene” of tyrannicide “In states unborn and accents yet unknown” (3.1.112–13). Indeed, few audiences whose theater the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka once characterized as “a form of esoteric enterprise spied upon by fee-paying strangers, as contrasted with a communal evolution of the dramatic mode of expression,”10 can ever claim to understand the “unknown accents” of a stage that flourished over four hundred years ago. But we keep trying. The plebs are key figures in the pitch of this play. Certainly Brutus and Antony devote a great deal of rhetoric to enlisting their partisanship after Caesar’s assassination. That rhetoric has been meticulously analyzed in several important essays of relatively recent vintage, and there is no need to

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replicate those analyses here.11 Anonymous these commoners may be, but obviously they are seen as a potent force by the principal if not the secondary named figures in the play—Brutus, Antony, and, of course, Caesar, though less so Flavius and Murellus, the people’s tribunes, and the conspirators other than Brutus. Their reception and the consequences to them of the play’s political actions make them the surrogates of many of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre audience, themselves a formidable body of Elizabethan plebeians on whom the playwright significantly depended for his popular success. As Douglas Bruster has noted: In some ways the playhouses for which the Renaissance dramatist wrote can be seen as metaphors of the city and the urban experience generally. Sometimes, in fact, the formal operations of city and playhouse struck observers as being closely aligned. Each tended to be characterized by crowding, and by the potential effects—both good and bad—of groups of people in proximity. Satisfying these groups through the spectacle of performance, whether political or theatrical, became the key to their continuance.12 It was not for moderns but for his own audience that Shakespeare put the contemplation of future representations into Cassius’s mouth. That audience of 1599 constituted the first of many “states unborn and accents yet unknown” hypothesized by Cassius. Any well-grounded critique of the play’s negotiations of theater and politics, and of the political impact of theater through language, must necessarily come to grips with the principal characters’ appeal to this nameless population. In this regard Visser’s essay offers further useful observations: If . . . the scene demonstrates that crowds will be swayed by whoever happens to address them at any given moment, are we, then, to imagine, that had Brutus decided to have Antony speak first and himself after, the outcome would have been different? . . . Both speakers, albeit in different ways, have deliberate designs on the crowd. After Caesar’s death, Brutus seeks to put aside all else “till we have appeased/The multitude” (3.1.179–80), while Antony explicitly states his intention to “let slip the dogs of war” (3.1.273) before the speeches begin. The crowd does not simply spontaneously respond to Antony’s speech; he deliberately manipulates their response towards ends of his own devising. . . . The crowd is . . . responding to what Antony presents as evidence to refute Brutus’ accusations against Caesar; that is, they are responding rationally.13 That Visser’s assessment is correct is evident from the sheer effort devoted by both Antony and Brutus (and especially by Antony) to persuading the

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crowd. Antony understands far better than Brutus does the mechanisms of both verbal and visual persuasions. Indeed, Brutus hardly understands the power of language at all, in most of the crucial scenes in which we see him engage with others. He rejects the power of verbal testament in the scenes with the conspirators (“No, not an oath”; 2.1.113), and assumes that he and Antony mean the same thing when he later sets the conditions under which Antony will speak at Caesar’s funeral—“You shall not in your funeral speech blame us,/But speak all good you can devise of Caesar,/And say you do’t by our permission” (3.1.245–47)—and Antony agrees. Brutus understands and is moved by actions, which speak to him louder than words: Portia’s pleas that he “Tell [ . . . her his] counsels” get her nowhere until she displays the bleeding wound in her thigh (2.1.297–308). It is not so much that Brutus lacks rhetorical skill—his most eloquent speeches, however, are delivered in soliloquy or in private conversations with the other conspirators—as that he lacks the particular praxis of public oratory. Antony knows and betrays this when he says, with what must have been great irony: I am no orator, as Brutus is, But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man ... For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech To stir men’s blood. I only speak right on[.] (3.2.210–16) This is, of course, the speech that closes: “ruffle up you spirits and put a tongue/In every wound of Caesar that should move/The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny” (3.2.221–23); in accord with his calculation, those “stones” (so called as well by the tribune Murellus at 1.1.36) send back the echo of Antony’s last word: “We’ll mutiny” (3.2.224). Shakespeare’s focus on the plebs at the beginning of a play about the end of the Republic and again with such dramatic emphasis in the postassassination scenes (3.2 and 3.3) is worth exploring. These commoners share a dramatic function with the plebs who open Coriolanus. In both plays, Shakespeare reminds us that the weight of historical events being represented had its greatest impact not upon the titular figures whose deaths, respectively, signaled profound changes in the political identity and structure of Rome, but upon those who lived to experience those alterations. As I have argued elsewhere,14 tragic heroes are surrogates for the communities represented in their plays, embodying and performing all of the anxieties, concerns, crises, and contradictions inherent in those communities, and finally sacrificed for them. Those communities are the real sites of a tragedy’s action. Paul Siegel has noted that the “basis of Greco-Roman society was the slave, the ‘speaking tool’ . . . instrumentum vocalis.”15 While most of

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the plebeians in Julius Caesar are certainly not slaves, their commodification is signalled in the opening scene when they are identified by their crafts— their productivity in the culture—though later they lose even that distinction and become merely “Plebeians.” Of course, this later indistinction is central to the trajectory of the post-assassination devolution, the “Mischief ” promised by Antony (3.2.251) under the aegis of Ate, goddess of chaos.16 These “speaking tools,” defined as commodities by their place in the Roman social economy, are thus the cultural capital whose purchase is necessary for the political success of either the Imperial or the Republican enterprise, and language is the coin (supplemented with real coin) with which their partisanship is purchased. It is not, after all, to his own faction that Antony addresses his carefully crafted rhetoric, though, interestingly, Brutus does have to persuade his to be “sacrificers but not butchers” (2.1.165), having been persuaded by Cassius and his own divided self to join the conspiracy. Here the critique of Raymond Williams seems particularly pertinent: “The major emphasis on language as activity began in the eighteenth century, in close relation to the idea of men having made their own society, which we have seen as a central element in the new concept of ‘culture.’”17 Williams locates the shift a century after Shakespeare, with Descartes and Vico, but certainly the playwright who so persistently played with, and sometimes invented, language should be noted as a terminus a quo for a concept of language as creative or generative activity. The value of Williams’s point is that it identifies an important historical change in the way European culture understood language as constitutive, rather than merely indicative, of “reality.” The task that both Brutus and Antony undertake in addressing the crowd after Caesar’s assassination is the formation of “the truth” about Caesar, about whether his death was necessary or envious, to use Brutus’s alternatives in addressing the conspirators earlier at 2.1.177, and about the political identity of the Rome that will survive him. In reading or watching the play, we may focus primary attention upon Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, or Antony; but the very vocal presence of the plebs throughout three entire scenes (one of them quite lengthy) should remind us that Shakespeare was thinking actively about what happens to a community when, to ironize Brutus’s intended meaning to Octavius, “Good words are better than bad strokes” (5.1.29), good words actually become bad strokes. In Julius Caesar, the jovial craftsmen of act 1, scene1 multiply and become first the “tag-rag people” who “clap . . . and hiss” the political performer “according as he pleased and displeased them, as they use to do the players in the theatre” (1.2.257–59), and later the indiscriminate, inchoate mob who attack the hapless poet. Their verbal wit in the opening scene is reduced by the second scene to theatrical noise (clapping and hissing, although it may be significant that we hear this reported by an unsympathetic

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patrician rather than witness it directly), and then finally at the end of act 3, scene 3 becomes the roar of a mob of arsonists and intentional murderers whose immediate target is a craftsman of language.18 The theatrical metaphor of the middle phase in this devolution is, as many critics have noticed, not an idle one: the message is there for the Globe Theatre’s inaugural audience. We might recall on this point Kenneth Muir’s astute observation, in his Introduction to the Arden Edition of Macbeth, of Shakespeare’s tendency to include his own audiences in his tragedies’ references: “only the morally complacent could witness a good performance of Macbeth without an uneasy feeling that if they had been so tempted they might conceivably have so fallen. We cannot divide the world into potential murderers and those who are not.”19 The audience, commoners and all, are always present in the plays’ representations, and are always implicated in the actions and behaviors performed on stage. Occasionally this point is foregrounded in films made of Shakespeare’s plays. One of the most resonant opening scenes I can recall is in Peter Brook’s direction of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s film version of King Lear (1970). As the film opens, the camera pans over a vast crowd, silent and immobile, assembled outside Lear’s castle, waiting to learn the fate of the kingdom whose citizens they are—or were. Though there is little awareness manifested in the text—until Lear’s epiphany that he has “ta’en/ Too little care”(3.4.32–33)—that the division of the kingdom involves the people who live there as well as those who govern it, this extra-textual camerawork seems to me an eloquent reminder for the film’s audience of something that may well have been too obvious to need saying to Shakespeare’s original audience.20 Moreover, we can never forget that, whatever the national or political “identity” of the fictive populations represented in the plays, Shakespeare was always “speaking” to his own audience: At the time of Coriolanus the plebeians were predominantly small farmers who lived within the city walls but went out every day to cultivate their fields. At the time of Julius Caesar the city had grown enormously with the influx of dispossessed farmers and uprooted people from other portions of Italy who constituted a propertyless and jobless proletariat. Shakespeare could have learned about the class character of his “Roman citizens” from Plutarch and Appian. However, he was not concerned about a historical depiction of them: they were to be timeless London artisans. They are like Jack Cade’s men, goodhumored and delighting in the bandying of witticisms but easily inflamed and manipulated.21 Or, as Visser, Gilbert, and Fuzier have persuasively demonstrated, not so easily. It takes the seasoned, carefully crafted rhetoric of a Mark Antony to

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turn a crowd into a mob. The transformation does indeed go against the grain for such men as the carpenter and cobbler of act 1 to become killers and arsonists. They are untrained for such labor, like another group of workers, the household servants in Romeo and Juliet who confront each other in (again) the opening scene: “Draw if you be men. Gregory, remember thy washing blow” (1.1.59–60). Antony, who “loves . . . plays” (1.2.202–3), loves words better: “Of all the principal men in Julius Caesar, only one is never associated with a sword or dagger: Antony. Like St Antony, his weapons are the testament (3.2) and the pen (4.1). But Shakespeare . . . knew Mark Antony for a liar.”22 He also knew him for a coward, as Plutarch describes his behavior immediately after Caesar is killed: “Antonius and Lepidus, which were two of Caesars chiefest frends, secretly conveying them selves away, fled into other mens houses, and forsooke their own.”23 While there is no question that Shakespeare read North’s Plutarch, we can only speculate whether many among his Globe audience were equally familiar with the text from which Shakespeare primarily drew. If they were, they would have come across this passage summarizing Caesar’s own personal “legacy”: Caesar dyed at six and fifty yeres of age: and Pompey also lived not passing foure yeares more then he. So he reaped no other frute of all his raigne and dominion, which he had so vehemently desired all his life, and pursued with such extreame daunger: but a vaine name only, and a superficiall glory, that procured him the envy and hatred of his contrie.24 Had they known this passage, the audience might have heard with a great sense of irony Antony’s famous speech: “The evil that men do lives after them:/The good is oft interred with their bones./So let it be with Caesar” (3.2.76–78). So it would have been, had not Antony scripted—I use the word deliberately to define the activity of this lover of plays—another quite different “reputation.” It is in the presentation of Antony, and in Antony’s presentation of Caesar, that Shakespeare draws the pointed connection, the intersection of marketplace, theater, and politics through the double media of carefully constructed language and carefully organized spectacle. Antony is truly a man of the theater, expert in delivering its multiple metaphors to manipulate his audience toward a particular response. At the time of the Globe’s opening and Julius Caesar’s premiere performance, there was a remarkable coincidence of cultural conceptions about the triple domains of theater, marketplace, and political arena. Bruster quotes several particularly apt contemporary reminders that theater and marketplace were easily seen as reciprocal metaphors, citing (among others) a passage from John Hall’s The Advancement

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of Learning (1649): “Man in business is but a Theatrical person, and in a manner but personates himself, but in his retired and hid actions, he pulls off his disguise, and acts openly,” and another from Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Horn-Book (1609): “The theatre is your poets’ Royal Exchange, upon which their Muses—that are now turned to merchants—meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware than words—plaudits and the breath of the great beast which, like the threatenings of two cowards, vanish all into air.”25 In his path-breaking study of the “geopolitical domain”26 represented by the liminal suburban location of the public theaters, where function follows form, Steven Mullaney argues that dramatic performance is “a performance of the threshold, by which the horizon of community was made visible, the limits of definition, containment, and control made manifest.”27 Mullaney is offering a view—by now widely accepted (though his was one of its earlier articulations)—of the Elizabethan public theater as an optimal site, by its very location at the margins of the city, for the circulation of subversive as well as orthodox ideas: in other words, the liminal location of the theater made it a perfect place to stage ambiguity, especially for a playwright alert to the polyvalences of language. With its frequent reiteration of Cicero’s apothegm, “men may construe things after their fashion/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (1.3.34–35), Julius Caesar offers a case study not only for but also in interpretation, construction, and misconstruction.28 That is, the political interpretation of performance is not only its legacy to students of the play since 1599, but also its subject. When we consider the particular period of history in which the play is set, this ambiguity, this difficulty of interpretation, should come as no surprise. As Paul Siegel noted, Augustus himself, and next the historians such as Plutarch, Appian, and Tacitus who “recorded” his reign, including the glorious Pax Romana, “promoted [ . . . a] strange ambivalence toward Julius Caesar and his republican foes” marked by a paradoxical nostalgia that “looked back admiringly at the adherents of libertas but enjoyed the peace and security of the imperial rule.”29 Literate and learned Elizabethans received this ambivalent view of both Caesars (Julius and Augustus) not only from their historians but also from St. Augustine, who expressed in Book 3 of The City of God a confusion even greater than that expressed by the historians about just exactly what Julius Caesar had started and Augustus completed: “Ceasar [sic] Augustus . . . appears in every way to have wrested from the Romans that liberty which was no longer even in their own eyes glorious, but rather productive of discord and destruction, and now quite feeble and inert, and . . . introduced the totalitarian absolutism of kings, and, as it were, restored and renewed the republic when it was sunk in senile decay . . . ”30 As Siegel says, this is more than a little contradictory.

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It will not go unnoticed that in the historiography of the end of the Republic, except perhaps in Plutarch’s account, Antony’s instrumentality is all but occluded by a focus on Augustus’s military and governmental achievements. But in Shakespeare’s account, Octavius (later Augustus) remains a shadowy figure, at best a latent Caesar awaiting the results of Antony’s rhetorical machinations. Shakespeare was obviously far more interested in Antony (both here and in the later play where Antony is half of the titular hero). One master of rhetoric, one theatrical innovator, foregrounds the other. Both are the semantic shapers of what many in later generations took for truth; through Antony, Shakespeare acknowledges the dangers inherent in that potent verbal magic. That Antony’s is a “created” drama is nowhere more evident than is his chilling, Vice-like, aside: “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot:/Take thou what course thou wilt” (3.2.251–52), as if he himself were not the sole liberator of that Mischief, the one who cried “havoc” (3.1.273) in a crowded theater. Like any good theatrical producer, he makes full use of the visual domain that his stage offers. But unlike his author, Antony is not so much a playwright as a side-show mountebank, a hawker of fake cures, most evident when he publicly markets Caesar’s body as a sacred object: Let but the commons hear this testament — Which, pardon me, I do not mean to read — And they would go and kiss dead Caesar’s wounds, And dip their napkins in his sacred blood, Yea, beg a hair of him for memory, And, dying, mention it within their wills, Bequeathing it as a rich legacy Unto their issue. (3.2.131–38) These lines recall John Heywood’s interlude, The Four PP (pr. 1544), whose Pardoner’s pack is filled with “the great-toe of the Trinity,” the “blessed jawbone of All-Hallows,” and “the buttock-bone of Pentecost” (497–521), as well as other phony relics, and anticipate Shakespeare’s own Autolycus: “they throng who should buy first, as if my trinkets had been hallowed and brought a benediction to the buyer” (Winter’s Tale, 4.4.601–3). But in Julius Caesar, this mercantilism is not used for parody; it is a very serious maneuver by Antony to “sell” Caesar’s sacrificial function. Antony literally commodifies Caesar’s body as a collection of relics which he then peddles to the crowd. This metaphoric “translation” of Caesar’s body is quickly shored up with a material legacy of real estate (“he hath left you all his walks,/His private arbours and new-planted orchards,/On this side Tiber. He hath left them you/And to your heirs for ever”; 3.2.238–41) and real money: plebeian partisanship is bought by giving “To every several man, seventy-five drachmas” (3.2.235). This gesture effectively dismantles the collective “commons” and

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fractures it into an aggregation of individuals (“every several man”); the body itself becomes a property whose numberless individual hairs can be passed on “as a rich legacy.” It is striking that a predictable progression from metaphoric to “real” legacy, to sensational display is not what Shakespeare gives us. Instead, the extraordinary theatrical gesture with which Antony whips the mantle off Caesar’s corpse and displays the bleeding body is sandwiched between the narratives of commodification: “Kind souls, what weep you when you but behold/Out Caesar’s vesture wounded? Look you here,/Here is himself, marred as you see with traitors” (3.2.193–95) so that theater progression ends with a coup de théâtre that is also, simultaneously, a coup de bourse. Antony as scriptor out-scripts an ordinary (and predictable) playwright, and Plutarch as well. Antony wants more than one proclamation of partisanship from these now-fragmented, newly purchased loyalists. The “piteous spectacle” cues a staccato of voices (“O noble Caesar!” “O woeful day!” “O traitors, villains!” “O most bloody sight!”), which very quickly move toward the emotional pitch Antony requires: “We will be revenged!” “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!” (3.2.196–200). At this point Antony has assured himself that his targeted “market”—in the marketplace—is primed for “closing,” which he does by reading the will. In Antony’s progression, Shakespeare rearranges Plutarch’s narrative which makes the will-reading and the display of the body simultaneous: The next morning, Brutus and his confederates came into the market place to speak to the people, who gave them such audience, that it seemed they neither greatly reproved, nor allowed the fact: for by their great silence they showed, that they were sory for Caesars death, and also that they did reverence Brutus. Nowe the Senate graunted generall pardonne for all that was paste, and to pacifie every man, ordained besides, that Caesars funeralls shoulde bee honored as a god, and established all thinges that he had done: and gave certaine provinces also, and convenient honors unto Brutus and his confederates, whereby every man thought all things were brought to good peace and quietnes againe. But when they had opened Caesars testament, and found a liberall legacie of money, bequeathed unto every citizen of Rome, and that they saw his body (which was brought into the market place) al bemangled with gashes of swordes: then there was no order to keepe the multitude and common people quiet, but they plucked up formes, tables, and stooles, and layed them all about the body, and setting them a fire, burnt the corse. Then when the fire was well kindled, they tooke the fire-brandes, and went unto their houses that had slaine Caesar, to set them a fire. Other also ranne up and downe the citie to see if they could meete with any of them, to cut them in peeces.31

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In both accounts, it is clear that a marketplace mentality has combined with shock-charged theatrical spectacle to overtake any solemn and sacrosanct priority the funeral rite might have had. Antony has closed the sale. It is especially interesting to note that in Plutarch’s account, the will is found and read by an unspecified “they,” possibly the Senators or just as possibly the crowd of people who “saw his body (which was brought into the market place) al bemangled,” and that the sight of the body occurs simultaneously with the disclosure of Caesar’s material legacy. In Shakespeare’s play, it is Antony who “reads” the will, and it is implicit in his delivery that he already knows what it says: “I must tell you then./You have forgot the will I told you of ” (3.2.230–31). Moreover, there is no mention of “real estate” in Plutarch, none of the “walks,/His private arbours and new-planted orchards,/On this side Tiber” (3.2.238–40). To a propertyless groundling populace whose penny-admission price could not be taken for granted nor given up easily, this embellishment over the Plutarchan narrative could buy much partisanship. From the second meeting of the conspirators at “Pompey’s Theatre” (1.3.126; 147; 152) through the assassination at the Capitol to the funeral in the marketplace (3.1.228; Plutarch, Lives, 5: 69), the loci of politics, performance, and purchase are the scenes of the staging of the central action of this play. In a play recording a cataclysmic change in the culture upon which Elizabethan England so assiduously modeled itself,32 the mechanism of change operates through the rhetoric of the Exchange. This is not the fanciful pun it might at first glance appear to be. Bruster notes that the Royal Exchange, the seat of national and international finance and distribution of new coinage, was built in 1566–1567, exactly contemporaneous with the opening of the Red Lion playhouse and just a decade before the opening of the Theatre and the Curtain, the first generation of public playhouses. He directs his readers to lines from Thomas Heywood’s Second Part of If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (1605, probably at the Curtain) for evidence of that playwright’s clear analogy between the actual architectural design of the playhouse and that of the Royal Exchange.33 The play’s conjunction of politics, performance, and marketplace should not appear to be a particularly radical move on Shakespeare’s part. In a now-classical study of the relation of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theaters to the society that produced them, L. C. Knights, following a remark by William Gifford in his edition of Jonson’s Works, observed that the dramatists of the age were “‘the most clear-sighted politicians of those troublous times,’” and that “the reactions of a genuine poet to his environment form a criticism of society at least as important as the keenest analysis in purely economic terms; that the intelligence and perception that help to make great poetry do not function in a special ‘poetic’ sphere, but are immediately relevant to all questions of ‘the good life,’”34 including, of course, the economic

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life. That there is a pointed warning to Shakespeare’s audience about the risks of volatile crowds even when those crowds demand and receive careful “reasons” for incitement may be reflected in Roger Manning’s calculation that “Between 1581 and 1602, the city was disturbed by no fewer than 35 outbreaks of disorder. Since there were at least 96 insurrections, riots, and unlawful assemblies in London between 1517 and 1640, this means that more than one third of the instances of popular disorder during that century-and-a-quarter were concentrated within a 20-year period.”35 Though no historian that I know of locates the sites or origins of those outbreaks in theaters, the point would not have been lost on Shakespeare’s Globe audience: the sight of ordinary, otherwise decent people re-enacting the scene described in Plutarch’s account above, or the one performed at the end of act 3 in Julius Caesar, may well have been, in Antony’s terms, one of the “dreadful objects” that had already and would again become “so familiar” (3.1.266) in other parts of the city. Exactly how the fuses were lit that set off those riots, what words were spoken, shouted, or performed and by whom, has been lost to history, or historiography; in Julius Caesar we have a compelling example, drawn from a well-known model in Plutarch, of exactly how the price of “costly blood” (3.1.258) can be exacted from the hides of a populace by artful language, a bequest of land, and seventy-five drachmas.

Notes 1. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (London: Methuen, 1985), 20. For a representative range of views on this debate, see, in addition to Bristol’s study, Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1–20; Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Bristol, “Carnival and the Institutions of Theater in Elizabethan England,” Journal of English Literary History 50 (1983): 637–54. 2. Ibid., 637 (emphasis added). 3. Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9–11. 4. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, 138. 5. In the Arden Edition of Julius Caesar, David Daniell modernizes the spelling as “soles” but glosses the “pun on ‘souls’” in a footnote. To preserve the important pun, I depart only in this instance from the Arden text in favor of the Folio spelling at TLN 18. 6. Anthony Gilbert’s splendid essay offers a persuasive comparison of Antony and Iago as masterful rhetoricians. See “Techniques of Persuasion in Julius Caesar and Othello ,” Neophilologus 81 (1997): 309–23. 7. Nicholas Visser, “Plebeian Politics in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 7 (1994): 22. 8. Ibid., 22–23. 9. Ibid., 23. 10. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 38.

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178 • Naomi Conn Liebler 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

The most comprehensive and detailed analysis is Jean Fuzier, “Rhetoric versus Rhetoric: A Study of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 5 (1974): 26– 65. See also Gilbert, “Techniques of Persuasion”; Visser, “Plebeian Politics”; and Charles and Michelle Martindale, Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity: An Introductory Essay (London: Routledge, 1990), 156–58. Readers interested in tracing the precise mechanisms of rhetoric in the play, and especially Antony’s, are referred to these excellent studies. Bruster, Drama and the Market, 22. Visser, “Plebeian Politics,” 24. Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (London: Routledge, 1995). On this point in regard to Julius Caesar specifically, see also Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 105. Paul N. Siegel, Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays: A Marxist Approach (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), 101. See also on this point Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” in The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 9–10. In the Arden Edition of Julius Caesar, Daniell’s gloss on Antony’s invocation of Ate at 3.1.271 identifies her as the “Greek goddess of blind infatuation, daughter of Zeus in Homer, of Strife in Hesiod, and sister of lawlessness; Shakespeare uses her for the stirrer of ‘blood and strife’, as [sic] KJ 2.1.63, and LLL 5.2.676–7 . . . ” The Oxford Classical Dictionary identifies Ate as a condition, specifically a “mental aberration, infatuation causing irrational behaviour which leads to disaster” but also notes the Homeric and Hesiodic personifications, and an Aeschylean reference in the Agamemnon to ate as “a daemonic force and instrument of ruin” (Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, ed., Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 199). Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21– 22 (emphasis added). Interestingly, by the time Coriolanus is written, the direct confrontation of the plebs that opens Julius Caesar has itself devolved to a condescending, oblique, but effective “Fable” delivered by Menenius to pre-empt the riot that threatens to erupt at the start of that play. In the “Fable,” of course, Shakespeare is following his Plutarchan source nearly verbatim; see Plutarch, The Life of Coriolanus, in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; Englished by Sir Thomas North Anno 1579 (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 2: 149. Kenneth Muir, ed., Macbeth (London: Methuen, 1964), liv. In a similar perspective, though he does not mention the film, Peter Holbrook has articulately catalogued the numerous instances in King Lear where we can read of “the heroism of common people in the play” and where the “populace . . . is an enormous and inspiring presence in this play.” See “The Left and King Lear,” Textual Practice 14 (2000): 356. Siegel, Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays, 123–24. Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 39–40. Plutarch, The Life of Julius Caesar, in Lives, 5: 68. Ibid., 70. Bruster, Drama and the Market, 7. Mullaney, The Place of the Stage, 9. Ibid., 31. On this view, see also John Drakakis, “‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the Politics of Theatrical Representation,” in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, ed. Susan Zimmerman, New Casebooks Series (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 140–54. See Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy, 98–99. Siegel, Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays, 103–4. Quoted ibid., 105. Lives, 5: 69 (emphasis added). On Early Britain’s conscious emulation of “Romanness,” see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 162– 63. Bruster, Drama and the Market, 3–6. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), 175. Knights goes on to deny a specific discourse about economic issues to the plays themselves; for him, “the dramatic treatment of economic problems showed them as moral and indi-

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Buying and Selling So(u)les • 179 vidual problems—which in the last analysis they are” (176). He was mainly interested, in this book, in Jonson’s plays. I think his point is important in relation to the “critique” that a play such as Julius Caesar offers of the growing marketplace mentality, though obviously I have drawn a conclusion quite different from his. 35. Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 187; quoted in Bruster, Drama and the Market, 17.

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CHAPTER

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“There is Restitution, no End of Restitution, only not for us” Experimental Tragedy and the Early Modern Subject in Julius Caesar ANDREAS MAHLER

The key word is “prevent” (Julius Caesar, 2.1.28). The question is: how is it possible to “restore” order when there is no conclusive proof that the existing order has been disturbed? Disorder authorizes action, order does not. Most of Shakespeare’s plot making is based on disorder being restored to order. Many Shakespearean characters seem literally obsessed by chances to “redeem,” “remediate,” “make even.” “Then is there mirth in heaven,” harmonybound Hymen classically corroborates at the end of As You Like It, “When earthly things made even/Atone together” (5.4.107–9). But what if the “earthly things” have not yet been disrupted? And what if the world—outside comedy—has become too complex for one single agent to “make all this matter even” (5.4.18), as Rosalind in As You Like It is still confident to do? I shall argue that Julius Caesar, opening the Globe in 1599, is the first Shakespearean play in a whole series of attempts to explore the paradoxes, and loose ends, of a hitherto largely unquestioned ideology of restitution.1 In order to do so, I shall first discuss the plot pattern of the play; I shall then go on to demonstrate how this pattern is put to the use of negotiating the improbabilities of “medieval” closure against the vagaries of early modern experience; finally, I shall focus on the idea of agency slowly unhinging itself from preordained authority and shifting to the individual instance of the self. But first to the plot pattern of the play. 181

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Brotherhood of Love Shakespeare’s plots are plots of restitution. Their potentialities of action are based on universes of discourse which posit mutual respect and collective solidarity as fundamental values guaranteeing social order. This is the old dualist logic of fealty.2 Its imaginary rationale is that of a stable brotherhood of love, with one of its representatives being universally recognized as their eternal, rightful primus inter pares.3 In this view, order can be visualized as the simultaneous and peaceful coexistence of all members of the feudal class in the same social field. If one representative of this class, however, no longer accepts, or misconstrues, his position within the existing order, its harmony becomes disrupted. Bolingbroke and the King in Richard II, Oliver and Duke Frederick in As You Like It, Claudius in Hamlet, Angelo in Measure for Measure, Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and the King in Lear, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, as well as Antonio, reigning Duke of Milan in The Tempest, are cases in point. In not knowing their “place”—in misjudging their fate— they jeopardize the stability of a society that is wont to see “reality” as a timeless given guaranteed by God.4 Such a view of reality is grounded on a notion of cyclical time. Unwarranted behavior—be it personal weakness or overreaching ambition—is conceptualized as a mere temporary disturbance, setting in motion the wheel of fortune eventually expected, as it always has, to “come full circle” (Edmund’s insight in King Lear, 5.3.172). This also means that the “heroes” in such a scenario are by no means agents of their own free will; rather, they must be seen as instruments in a divine plan. “[B]orn to set it right” (Hamlet’s complaint at 1.5.197), they tread the providential path of a divine logic that eventually leads to the reestablishment of the old order, reinstituting the brotherly network of sympathies as the visible sign of all earthly things “made even.”5 In the late 1590s, however, with the end of Elizabeth’s reign inadmissibly drawing near, such closure, which in comedy is perpetrated through reintegration whereas in tragedy it can only be brought about through elimination and/or death, becomes increasingly improbable. This is the Shakespearean moment of experimentation. Instead of continuing in the vein of his highly successful, yet rather unreflected, exploitation of the plot pattern of restitution, producing either plays as people “like them” or plays the monarch is satisfied to see, Shakespeare gradually turns his attention to the epistemic inconsistencies of the plot pattern itself. In the comedies, this involves an experimental destabilization of the symbolic happy ending; in the histories, it opens up topical readings, which inadvertently run the risk of rousing immediate political reaction. As a consequence, Shakespeare seeks shelter in the more fictionalized genre of tragedy. In tragedy, he finds a less precarious space for exploring the improbabilities of restitution without incurring direct political pressure. Julius Caesar is Shakespeare’s first “experimental” tragedy.

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In Julius Caesar, the ancient phantasmagoria of a brotherhood of love is projected onto the group of the conspirators. It is epitomized in the relation between Cassius and Brutus. Their “love” is negotiated twice, both before the beginning of the conspiracy and before the final battle. In the interspersed moments of the specifically Roman feast of Lupercal, behind the scenes of Caesar’s mock coronation, Cassius opens their first conversation in the play with a complaint: Brutus, I do observe you now of late. I have not from your eyes that gentleness And show of love as I was wont to have. You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand Over your friend, that loves you. (1.2.32–36) Giving love, yet not getting love in return, Cassius seems worried about the status of their brotherhood. As a consequence, Brutus is quick to reassure him: “Be not deceived,” he begs, “let not therefore my good friends . . . / . . . construe any further my neglect/Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,/Forgets the shows of love to other men” (37; 43; 45–47). Brutus explains his lack of love as the result of a melancholy humor. This is accepted by Cassius: “Then, Brutus, I have much mistook your passion” (48), he says, and only too willingly renews the brotherly contract. This first restitution of love between Cassius and Brutus is followed by a second and more complicated one at Sardis. This time, it is Brutus who is in doubt about their relationship, fearing that he has read signs indicating that their “love begins to sicken and decay” (4.2.20). Cassius, who seems to be fearing the same, comes dashing in, reproaching him: “Most noble brother, you have done me wrong” (37), whereupon Brutus first of all tries to lure him away from their armies of soldiers, arguing that these “should perceive nothing but love from us” (44). In the ensuing “conference” (51), which is marked by diverse threats of rupture and in which Cassius admonishes Brutus not to “presume too much upon my love” (4.3.63), at times feeling “Hated by one he loves, braved by his brother,/Checked like a bondman” (95–96), the two yet again manage to reach reconciliation. It is based on the idea that a friend should have “love enough” (118) to “bear his friend’s infirmities” (85), the infirmity in question this time being Cassius’ “rash humour,” making him just as “forgetful” (119–20) as the melancholy mood has done for Brutus. Their brotherhood is thus reestablished. The end of the quarrel scene reads like the end of comedy. Cassius “cannot drink too much of Brutus’ love” (160); both are to each other “dear” (231) and “good brother” (235) respectively, sincerely wishing for “such division” never again to come “’tween our souls” (233); “Everything is well” (234); and there is even music (264). The relationship between Cassius and Brutus undergoes a double course,6 but in the end the balance is restored. The wheel of “love” has come full circle.

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Linguistically, the idea of an orderly state functioning as a united, happy “band of brothers” (Henry V, 4.3.60) is not only expressed by the insistent recurrence of terms such as “love”7 and, of course, “brother,” but also, and perhaps more importantly, by constructions verbalizing relational equality such as “no more/no less than,” “as . . . as,” and, above all, once again “even.” Inequality seeks to disqualify; equality gives strength and qualifies for action. As long as Cassius sees himself “Older in practice, abler than yourself ” (4.3.31), he and Brutus are at discord; only when he concedes, “I have as much of this in art as you,” meaning his brother’s faculty to endure, “But yet my nature could not bear it so” (192–93), do the two of them begin to reunite. That this union is meant as “everlasting” (5.1.116) is indicated in the parting scene: “For ever and for ever farewell, Cassius,” says Brutus, adding, “If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;/If not, why then this parting was well made,” and Cassius tunes in: “For ever and for ever farewell, Brutus;/If we do meet again, we’ll smile indeed;/If not, ’tis true this parting was well made” (5.1.117–21). Such brotherly concord is the prerequisite for successful action.8 When Cassius articulates his grief about Caesar’s Rome, Caska signalizes his readiness to join in by pointing out that he will set his foot “as far/As who goes farthest,” with Cassius commenting this as “bargain made” (1.3.119–20). At the nightly meeting of the conspirators, Brutus avoids a common oath, insisting that they act in “honesty to honesty engaged” (2.1.126), safeguarding the “even virtue” (132) of their enterprise. Immediately after the murder, they ritually unite to “bathe” their hands “in Caesar’s blood” (3.1.106) and then to “walk . . . forth even to the market-place” (108), brandishing their swords and shouting “Peace, Freedom and Liberty” (110). Trying to draw Mark Antony into the circle of their brotherhood, Brutus offers: “Our arms in strength of malice, and our hearts/Of brothers’ temper, do receive you in,/ With all kind love, good thoughts and reverence,” and Cassius adds: “Your voice shall be as strong as any man’s/In the disposing of new dignities” (174– 78). And Mark Antony seems to accept, shaking their bloody hands “in love” (189) and proclaiming: “Friends am I with you all, and love you all” (220).

(Pr)Event The world model as presented by the play is that of the union of brothers. Order in the play’s Rome is conceived as accord among loving, noble “freemen” (3.2.24) with Caesar as their legitimate and caring leader, “the foremost man of all this world” (4.3.22). In the Estonian semiotician Jurij Lotman’s terms, the “plotless system”9 underlying Julius Caesar is the medieval fantasy of all earthly things—of one scale—being even. Yet there is definitely no mirth in heaven. The prolonged thunderstorm, theatrically covering no

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less than two and a half scenes, insistently indicates disorder, something “rotten” among the Gods or in the state of Rome: “Either there is a civil strife in heaven,” Caska fearfully deliberates, “Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,/Incenses them to send destruction” (1.3.11–13). But what do “Thunder and lightning” (1.3.0) and “Thunder still” (100) indicate precisely? Are they, as Caska fears, “portentous things” (31), “tokens” or “heralds” (55–56) of something beyond the grasp of human comprehension; are they, as Cassius is convinced, “instruments of fear and warning” (70) of something terrible to come; or are they, as Cicero ignoringly pretends, contingent natural phenomena, no signs at all? The universe of discourse in Julius Caesar is hermeneutically open. Resemblances have lost their stable meanings.10 It is, as Cicero points out, “a strange-disposed time” where “men may construe things after their fashion” (33–34). The play is full of signs, dreams, visions, whose meanings remain open to construction. Brutus’s failure in his “show of love” may be a breach of friendship or forgetfulness; the augurers’ “beast without a heart” (2.2.42) can be read as “state without its leader” or as “leader without courage”; the statue, from Calphurnia’s dream, “with an hundred spouts,” running “pure blood” (77–78) is either “warning and portent” of “evils imminent” (81) or emblem “fair and fortunate” (84) giving and granting life; “Two mighty eagles” (5.1.80) may signify strength and support or, being “gone” (83), presage death and decay. Throughout the play, things are “mistook” (1.2.48); dreams “all amiss interpreted” (2.2.83); “hateful Error, Melancholy’s child” keeps suggesting “to the apt thoughts of men/The things that are not” (5.3.67–69); and characters die having “misconstrued everything” (84). Rome’s “world” (1.2.306) is pervaded by semiological uncertainty. So is the “plot system.” Lotman’s central idea is to understand “plot” in spatial terms.11 Julius Caesar is constructed along the vertical axis. Its worldwithin-the-text is divided into a “top” (A) and “bottom” sphere (B); the main characters are all part of the top (F1); the border between the spheres is impenetrable; and an “event” is defined as “the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field” in spite of this.12 This can be visualized as follows:13 “top” F1 A C B “bottom”

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The basic plotless structure of Julius Caesar ideally reunites all “freemen” (F1) in the sphere of a “free” Rome (A).14 Its classificatory order respects the border between A and B. The “crossing of that forbidden border” is the “movement of the plot, the event.”15 The medieval Christian world picture imagines this as “sin.”16 Sins against the ideology of “love” are termed “hate,” “envy,” or “ambition.” They emanate from individuals who must be “chastised” in a gesture of “revenge.” The plot, the event, which is “the ‘revolutionary’ element in relation to the world picture,”17 must be annulled and taken back; in a cyclical world guaranteed by God there must be restitution. But what is wrong in Caesar’s Rome? For Cassius, the case seems clear. With “many of the best respect in Rome/(Except immortal Caesar) . . . / . . . groaning underneath this age’s yoke” (1.2.59–61), he thinks the brotherhood neglected. Knowing himself (and Brutus) to have been “born free as Caesar,” to “have fed as well,” and to “Endure the winter’s cold as well as he” (97–99), he is outraged to see that Caesar “Is now become a god, and Cassius is/A wretched creature, and must bend his body/If Caesar carelessly but nod on him” (116–18). His diagnosis of the current state is pertinently summarized in the last part of his persuasio addressed to Brutus: Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars But in ourselves, that we are underlings. ‘Brutus’ and ‘Caesar’: what should be in that ‘Caesar’? Why should that name be sounded more than yours? Write them together: yours is as fair a name: Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well. Weigh them, it is as heavy: conjure with ’em, ‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as ‘Caesar’. Now in the names of all the gods at once, Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed! Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods! When went there by an age, since the great flood, But it was famed with more than with one man? When could they say, till now, that talked of Rome, That her wide walks encompassed but one man? Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough, When there is in it but one only man. (134–56)

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The world Cassius depicts follows the vertical scheme. In it, what is “the breed of noble bloods” (150) with “as fair” (143), “as well” (144), “as heavy” (145) and as conjuring a name “as ‘Caesar’” (146) walks “under” (136) Caesar’s legs as “petty men” (135), as “underlings” (140) subdued by “but one man” (154) “grown so great” (149) that there seems “room” (155) in Rome for “only” (156) him. In other words, an event seems to have taken place, shifting all freemen (F1)—except “immortal” Caesar, as Cassius snorts—from the sphere of a free Rome (A) to one of serfdom, slavery, and dishonor (B). The topological antagonism is semantically specified to the oppositions of “± freedom, honor, and nobility,” and topographically concretized into “Rome” vs. “non-Rome,”18 with only one F1-character left. This is the fearful fantasy of absolutism.19 If this were so, if an event had really taken place, something indeed would have to be done. One thing would be, as Flavius suggests in defense of removing Caesar’s trophies from his statues, to see that Caesar has his “growing feathers plucked” to “make him fly an ordinary pitch,/Who else would soar above the view of men,/And keep us all in servile fearfulness” (1.1.73–76); another would be death. “It must be by his death,” Brutus concludes, accepting Cassius’ “story” (1.2.92) of Caesar’s unstoppable “ambition” (319), and yet concedes, “and for my part/I know no personal cause to spurn at him/But for the general” (2.1.10–12). Brutus’s dilemma lies in the fact that the event to be feared seems imminent, yet has not come. The mere suspicion ratifies no restitutional action. In a remarkable act of willful autosuggestion, he therefore tries to convince himself that what is not will soon be so: . . . He would be crowned: How that might change his nature, there’s the question. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, And that craves wary walking. Crown him that, And then I grant we put a sting in him That at his will he may do danger with. Th’abuse of greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power; and to speak truth of Caesar I have not known when his affections swayed More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder Whereto the climber upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend. So Caesar may. Then, lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel

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Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities. And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg Which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell. (12–34) Brutus clearly sees that the cause fails him. Caesar has neither done him wrong (11), nor has he ever proved irrational in his use of power (18–21), nor is there anything to suggest that he is about to forget his fellow friends (21–27). The “quarrel” clearly bears “no colour” (28–29). All there is are suppositions: Caesar’s nature “might” change (13), he “may” become dangerous (17), he “may” forget the union of brothers (27), so, “lest he may, prevent” (28). But in a circular logic, too, one needs proof: if the wheel has not half turned (shifting the F1-characters into B), it will not come full circle (reestablishing them in A).20 Brutus therefore resorts to make-believe. “Fashion[ing]” (30) Caesar’s rise as ambition beyond reach and “think[ing]” (32) him the bad element apt to spoil the rest, he posits a putative event as given, imagining an opportunity to act as if a transgression had already happened. This is the central “question” (13) of the play: how can one prevent things in a system that authorizes action only after an event has taken place?21 Brutus’s decision to act is based on unsafe ground. And yet he is not altogether wrong. From his first appearance, Caesar is worried about the “sterile curse” (1.2.9) of dying without an heir; he indulges in the absolutist fantasy that “When Caesar says ‘Do this’, it is performed” (10); he self-confidently utters the conviction: “always I am Caesar” (211); and he sees the reason for his actions in his “will, I will not come,/That is enough to satisfy the Senate” (2.2.71–72). More importantly, he seems at times disposed to look dismissively upon the union of brothers. He suggests they all walk to the Senate House “like friends” (127), not as friends, as they are supposed to be; he treats his equals as if they were “children” (3.1.39), asking “What is now amiss/That Caesar and his Senate must redress?” (31– 32); and he does not bear correction the way Cassius and Brutus manage to correct each other: “Know, Caesar doth not wrong” (47). This escalates in the murder scene. Metonymically refusing to enfranchise (57)—to restore to “free” citizenship (A)—a “banished” brother (44), Caesar, in his last long speech, seems to confirm the conspirators’ worst fears: I could be well moved if I were as you: If I could pray to move, prayers would move me. But I am constant as the northern star, Of whose true-fixed and resting quality There is no fellow in the firmament.

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The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks: They are all fire, and every one doth shine; But there’s but one in all doth hold his place. So in the world: ’tis furnished well with men, And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive. Yet in the number I do know but one That unassailable holds on his rank Unshaked of motion. And that I am he Let me a little show it even in this, That I was constant Cimber should be banished And constant do remain to keep him so. (58–73) This adamant stance may be read as a first step of Caesar trying indeed to disjoin “Remorse from power” (2.1.19). Seeing himself as the only “one” (3.1.64; 68) who “unassailable holds on his rank” (69), definitely not “as” (58) the others, but unique “as the northern star” (60), with “no fellow” (62) by his side, Caesar haughtily provokes an absolutist misunderstanding. What in other circumstances might have appeared as an awkwardly hubristic self-assertion of the commonwealth’s most noble brother reads in the present situation as the ultimate proof of his reckless ambitions. This is precisely the moment for the conspirators to let their “hearts, as subtle masters do,/ Stir up their servants to an act of rage” (2.1.174–75) and, consequently, to “stab” (3.1.76) Caesar. Caesar’s death is the turning point of the play. It constitutes the interface of two mutually exclusive, yet complementary plots. In the first version, that of the conspirators, it marks the end of their restitutional efforts, eliminating Caesar by symbolically leaving him “on Pompey’s basis . . . /No worthier than the dust” (115–16). In the second version, it is the starting point, the “event,” asking for redemption and “revenge” (270). This can be described as a classical instance of “discrepant punctuation.”22 What in Brutus’s eyes is the moment of “redress” (2.1.47; 57), a “purg[ing]” (179) act, making “sick men whole” (326), paying “Ambition’s debt” (3.1.83) and restoring all to their respective “place in the commonwealth” (3.2.43), is to Mark Antony the moment of disorder, an act of savage “butcher[y]” (3.1.255), “envious[ly]” (3.2.173) felling “the noblest man/That ever lived in the tide of times” (3.1.256–57). Where Brutus, killing his “best lover for the good of Rome” (3.2.45), restores them all from “slaves” (23) to “freemen” (24; reestablishing all F1-characters back in A), Mark Antony, stressing Caesar’s brotherly love (142) and generosity (“Here is the will”; 233), interprets Caesar’s death as “fall,” in which “I, and you, and all of us fell down” (188– 89; shifting the complementary set of F1’s into B), and consequently takes this as authorization for restitutional action. Brutus’s “general good” (1.2.85)

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is Antony’s “general wrong” (3.1.170) and vice versa: the F1-rivalry between Caesar and Brutus is instantly replaced by another F1-rivalry between Brutus and Antony. And Antony seems in the right. With Brutus acting prematurely, the only “event” there is is Caesar’s unwarranted death. But is Antony a “restitutional” hero fighting for a union of brothers? Right from the start, he is the one to nourish Caesar’s absolutist pretensions (1.2.10); after the murder, he does not go into exile, nor does he put on any kind of disguise,23 but lets himself be received “in,/With all kind love, good thoughts and reverence” (3.1.175– 76); even though he, wars-of-the-roses-like, prophesies “Domestic fury and fierce civil strife” for “all the parts of Italy” (263–64), he does not act against it, but sets “Mischief . . . afoot” (3.2.251), risking false victims (“Cinna the poet . . . not Cinna the conspirator”; 3.3.29; 32); and instead of creating an atmosphere of brotherly concord among the triumvirs, he is immediately prepared to sacrifice Lepidus’s “brother” (4.1.2) along with his own “sister’s son” (5), seeing in Lepidus “a slight unmeritable man” (12) and claiming superiority over Octavius on the grounds of having “seen more days than” (18) he has. All this clearly goes against the ideology of brotherly love. The play presents two restitutional heroes with decisive flaws: the one who believes in restitution cannot succeed, and the one who succeeds does not believe in it. This discrepancy between restitutional agent and individual action is much more fundamental than the discrepant punctuation of the underlying plot system into two complementary versions of the same story; it reveals an intrinsic doubleness in the play’s plot structure itself. What it negotiates is the question of agency in the face of an increasing disintegration of providentialist belief.24 It addresses the problem of the early modern subject.25

Agency The tragedy of Julius Caesar is based on a “double world,” in which “final” and “causal” motivation, providence, and causality are inextricably intertwined.26 For Brutus to be able to act in the name of God means that he finally has to authorize himself; and Antony, endowed with divine authorization, immediately turns it to the heretical use of pursuing his very personal intentions. The one, hoping for some final motivation to justify his action, has to experience that he himself becomes the cause of disorder to be eliminated, with Cassius dying “Even” (5.3.46) and Brutus rightfully admitting that he did not kill Caesar “with half so good a will” (5.5.51) as he kills himself; the other, having the final motivation played into his hands, instrumentalizes it for causal action, using it as he uses his fellow Romans: as men who “must be taught, and trained, and bid go forth” (4.1.35). Both of them,

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although “officially” acting within the ideological framework of a “guaranteed reality,” transcend it; they—unwillingly or wilfully—begin to create a “reality as the result of an actualization,”27 they—inadvertently or surreptitiously—begin to act as subjects in their own name. The paradoxical superimposition of restitutional pattern and individual action, of providentialist belief and ineluctable subjectivity is the decisive characteristic of Julius Caesar. It finds itself emblematized in the title hero himself. In the warning scene, Calphurnia tries to talk her husband out of going to the Senate. His first reaction is that “Caesar shall forth” (2.2.10), arguing that nothing “can be avoided/Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods” (26–27). Despite this belief, Caesar then lets himself be persuaded into staying: “Mark Antony shall say I am not well,/And for thy humour I will stay at home” (55–56). After Decius’s arrival, this is transformed into self-confident subjectivity: “tell them that I will not come today./Cannot is false; and that I dare not, falser./I will not come today. Tell them so, Decius” (62–64). This turns into blatant self-assertion: “The cause is in my will, I will not come,/That is enough to satisfy the Senate” (71–72), before Decius renews Caesar’s conviction “I will go” (107). Referring to providence and to his own autonomy, Caesar ends up acting upon a contingent piece of flattering advice. This also applies to the conspirators. Cassius, who starts on the grounds that “Men at some time are masters of their fates” (1.2.138), ends hoping that “The gods today stand friendly” (5.1.93) and, after a grotesquely contingent “misconstru[ction]” (5.3.84), dies with the providentialist conviction: “Time is come round” (23). And Brutus, who, “constru[ing] things after [ . . . his] fashion” (1.3.34), activates his imagination to authorize his action, in the end arms himself “with patience/To stay the providence of some high powers/That govern us below” (5.1.105–7), before he goes on to die in a self-authorized suicide, activating the “power” everybody bears “in his own hand” (1.3.102; 101) to determine when his “hour is come” (5.5.20). In the end, every attempt at restitution turns out to have been a step into subjectivity. For the world’s time to come round, some individual’s time has to go on: cyclicality and linearity no longer tally, they have lost their divine synchronization. The “idea of God as the guarantor of the reliability of human knowledge”28 remains a figural projection. What emerges is the autonomous responsibility of modern man. This is finally illustrated by Antony’s epilogue on Brutus: This was the noblest Roman of them all: All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar. He only, in a general honest thought

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And common good to all, made one of them. His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’ (5.5.68–75) The epilogue is the restitutional hero’s moment to explain the righteousness of his actions. Its function is to affirm the invariable validity of the divine order; celebrating the annulment of the “event,” it underlines the “classificatory character”29 of the play’s plotless structure. In characterizing the “conspirators” (69) as transgressors out of “envy” (70), Antony legitimizes their elimination. But Brutus defies classification. Describing him as “honest” (71), “gentle” (73), acting for the “common good” (72), the “noblest Roman of them all” (68), Antony posthumously groups him among Rome’s foremost “brothers,” as F1-character clearly belonging to the upper sphere (A). But in doing so, he forfeits the possibility to justify his death. If Brutus is not guilty of a “sin,” he cannot be the target of “revenge.” In terms of the play’s ideology, Brutus’s death remains unexplained. The play’s ending finds no closure. Either Brutus is a conspirator and must be punished, or he is a symbol of restitution and must be praised. But he cannot be both. Brutus is a typical “in-between” character. In acting individually, he is a “man” (75); but in committing his subjectivity to restitution, he “fashions” himself as a restitutional hero anachronistically trying to reestablish the divine order as the result of a self-authorized realization.30 But Brutus is no restitutional hero, he only tries to represent one. As such he is used by Antony. It is Antony’s final strategy to fix Brutus’s pragmatic impulse onto the outgoing semantics of a restitutional imaginary, reinstituting the ancient ideology even where it obviously fails. There is restitution, no end of restitution, only not in Shakespeare’s Rome.31 The tragedy of Julius Caesar marks a nodal point in Shakespeare’s career. It is the beginning of an ever more insistent questioning of the epistemic reliability of a restitutional imaginary. With it, Shakespeare embarks upon the interminable project of probing the “plot aspect” of early modern reality. “Plot,” Jurij Lotman suggests, “represents a powerful means of making sense of life. Only as a result of the emergence of narrative forms of art did man learn to distinguish the plot aspect of reality.”32 This seems to be all the more important in times of radical change. “The more a man’s behavior takes on the characteristics of freedom in relation to the automatism of genetic programs, the more important it is for him to construct plots about events and behavior.”33 By 1599, the “automatism” of the restitutional plot pattern seems to have lost its power to make sense of early modern English life. No longer interested in reproducing pleasing plots serving as basis for successful comedy, and carefully intent on eschewing topical imprudences,

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Shakespeare begins to construct plots that defy restitutional closure without overtly denying the restitutional pattern as a meaningful option. He thus continues following the track he happened to hit upon in Richard II. Brutus is a Bolingbroke transposed—an F1-character who, torn between an ideology of feudal duty and an ambivalent situation demanding action for the “common good,” is goaded into a form of self-authorized agency which finally disrupts the very order it has set out to preserve. The problem of selfauthorized, “premature” action becomes the central issue in Shakespeare’s future experiments. It is addressed in Hamlet’s hesitancy as well as in Edmund’s impatience, in Cordelia’s banishment as well as in Macbeth’s temptation into murder. But the questioning begins in Julius Caesar. The tragedy of Julius Caesar is Shakespeare’s first attempt to deconstruct his very own masquerade of Tudor absolutism as universal “brotherhood.”

Notes Thanks go to Renáta, Rudi, Ute, and Beate. 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

It is in this sense that I would like to intend my modification, in the title, of Stephen Greenblatt’s dictum: “There is subversion, no end of subversion, only not for us,” which is itself an adaptation of a remark Kafka apparently once made to Max Brod on the possibility of hope; see Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 29. See Theodor Mayer, “Die Ausbildung der Grundlagen des modernen deutschen Staates im hohen Mittelalter,” Historische Zeitschrift 159 (1939): 462. Mayer, despite his erroneous conclusion, very convincingly traces for the Germanic countries in the Middle Ages a constitutional shift from a dualist and decentralized idea of the “state” as a union of aristocrats with inalienable rights and duties (“Personenverbandsstaat”) via the more centralized system of a feudal union to the modern, monist conception of the “state” as a territory (“Flächenstaat”) represented by a more or less absolutist king granting or imposing such rights and duties (466). For a theory foregrounding the imaginary as the decisive force in instituting social structures see Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987). For this idea as against the more modern concept of “reality” as the result of an act of— linear—realization see Hans Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel,” in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, trans. David Henry Wilson et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 30–34. For the idea of “sympathy” as one of the core elements in a Renaissance episteme see Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 32ff. For this concept as a recurrent structural feature in medieval romance see Hugo Kuhn, “Erec,” in Hartmann von Aue, ed. Kuhn and Christoph Cormeau (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 17–48. The word and its variants occur no less than fifty-six times in the play; see David Daniell’s “Introduction” to the Arden Edition of the play, 8. Daniell refers to G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (1931; repr., London: Methuen, 1958), 63ff. Of course, I would argue that this has nothing to do with “eroticism.”

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194 • Andreas Mahler 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

Cf. “Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength” (Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.137); Ulysses’ diagnosis. Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1977), 238. The decisive advantage in Lotman’s approach to plot analysis lies in the fact that he analyzes plot as a “model of the world” and not as a “sequence of events” (for this view see the synopsis in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics [London: Methuen, 1983], 6ff.), which enables him to interpret the relation between textual “plot” and extratextual “world picture” as a meaningful hermeneutic difference. For a brief introduction to Lotman’s thinking see my “A Lost World, No NewFound Land: Disorientation and Immobility as Social Criticism in Early Seventeenth-Century Tragedy,” in Jacobean Drama as Social Criticism, ed. James Hogg (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 30ff.; for an attempt at further systematization see my “Welt Modell Theater: Sujetbildung und Sujetwandel im englischen Drama der frühen Neuzeit,” Poetica 30 (1998): 1–45. For a change from an episteme of “resemblances” to an episteme of “representation” see Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 60ff.; for the idea of an early modern semiotic crisis see Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse , ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). This is based on the insight that human orientation in the world is, first and foremost, spatial. For basic topological divisions into internal vs. external spheres (“my own” vs. “theirs”) or basic interpretations of the opposition of “up” vs. “down” and their quasi-universal motivations (desire for safety; experience of gravity) see Yuri M. Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 131ff. For the idea of the “work of art” as a secondary modeling system, “a model of an infinite universe” rendering the world interpretable, see Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 208ff., the quotes 209. For a more general view on the epistemological function of spatiality see Roger M. Downs and David Stea, Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 233; for the notion of the boundary as “the most important topological feature of space” see 229ff., for a brief summary see 240: “It follows from the above that the mandatory elements of any plot will include: 1) some semantic field divided into two mutually complementary subsets; 2) the border between these subsets, which under normal circumstances is impenetrable, though in a given instance (a text with a plot always deals with a given instance) it proves to be penetrable for the hero-agent; 3) the hero-agent.” For the sake of brevity, I concentrate on the A/B-dichotomy; C must be understood as an enclave, an outer or inner exile (forest, madness, disguise, etc.) granting a “time out” to reassemble the forces necessary to “set the world right.” In Julius Caesar, C is the phase of the conspiracy that the text terms as the “interim” working “Like a phantasma or a hideous dream” (2.1.64–65), in which the conspirators’ hearts are granted the “licence” to “Stir up their servants to an act of rage/And after seem to chide ’em” (175–76). For a full discussion of the restitutional cycle, with particular reference to As You Like It, King Lear, and Hamlet see my “Welt Modell Theater,” 12ff. As a consequence, all “slaves” (F2) belong to B. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 238. See e.g. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 13: “The world picture which the Middle Ages inherited was that of an ordered universe arranged in a fixed system of hierarchies but modified by man’s sin and the hope of redemption.” Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 238. For the methodological necessity to analyze spatiality in the order of (1) topology, (2) semantics, and (3) topography see my “Welt Modell Theater,” 7, n. 32. For the idea of absolutist power being delegated by the people to the sovereign as their unique representation see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); for a comparative discussion of the ideas of “authority” and “representation” in Shakespeare and Hobbes see Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, 11ff. For a reading of Julius Caesar as “depicting a struggle among

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20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

aristocrats . . . aimed at preventing one of their number from transcending his place and destroying the system in which they all ruled as a class” with the consequence that in that case, “the assassination is not regicide, but an attempt to restore the status quo ante,” see Wayne A. Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 78f. This is the reason for Hamlet’s hesitations. For the inherently “heretical” aspect of the new concept of “reality” “to actualize a world” in rivalry to God’s creation see Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality,” 38ff., the quote 39. See Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin, Don D. Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 54ff. and 93ff., the quote 94. In this connection, the “questions important to the play” are, as Robert S. Miola has rightly enumerated: “how to tell a tyrant from a just king; how to tell envious murderers from heroic republicans; how and when to justify assassination” (“Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 [1985]: 273). I.e., he does not transfer into C, which is what a “normal” restitutional hero would do; cf. e.g., Duke Senior, Hamlet, Cordelia, Edgar. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 83ff. See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 1991). For the idea of an—early modern—shift in narrative genres from a providentialist “motivation from behind” (“Motivation von hinten”) to an individualist “motivation from in front” (“Motivation von vorn”) see Clemens Lugowski, Die Form der Individualität im Roman (1932; repr., Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1976); for the terms “final” and “causal motivation” and their hybrid deployment in the paradoxical construction of “double worlds” in narrative see Matías Martínez, Doppelte Welten: Struktur und Sinn zweideutigen Erzählens (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 27ff., 34. Blumenberg, “The Concept of Reality,” 33. Ibid., 32. Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, 236. Propagating action on the basis of a mutually ratified “even virtue,” i.e. in “honesty to honesty engaged” (2.1.132; 126), Brutus seems to be following less a concept of obedient allegiance, but a modern, rational concept of acting according to socially negotiated—and negotiable—role-play. For the highly suggestive further thought that “in its shuttling between the generic requirements of de casibus tragedy, and the Senecan tragedy of revenge . . . [i]n its vacillation between ‘fate’ and human agency as the origins of action, and hence of history itself, Julius Caesar enacts the precarious position of the Globe itself,” see John Drakakis, “‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the Politics of Theatrical Representation” (1992), in Julius Caesar: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Richard Wilson, New Casebooks (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 77–91, the quote 87. Jurij M. Lotman, “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 182. Ibid., 183; this also applies to the automatisms of “cultural” programs.

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PART

III

Current Debates

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CHAPTER

10

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Marxist and Post-Marxist Approaches DAVID HAWKES

The distinction between “Marxism” and “Post-Marxism” is hotly disputed, and many people of every political and philosophical allegiance would claim that it is redundant. Either, they would assert, one adheres to the fundamental doctrines of Karl Marx, or one does not; the idea of a nebulous intermediary status, such as is implied by the term “Post-Marxist,” is untenable. The major problem with this argument is that there is no general or scholarly consensus regarding Marx’s own opinions. In fact, the historically dominant strain of “orthodox” Marxism rests upon a decidedly tendentious reading of Marx. There is thus a good case, often made by self-proclaimed “Post-Marxists,” for the proposition that it is the deviations from the mainstream Marxist tradition which are actually most faithful to the spirit of Marx’s own works. In order to understand the basic differences between various forms of Marxism, it is necessary to grasp the milieu in which Marx’s theories first took shape. His intellectually formative years were spent as a member of the loose association of German radicals known as the “young Hegelians.” Within this movement there developed a deep division between thinkers such as Max Stirner and Bruno Bauer, who followed up the “idealist” strain in Hegel’s thought, and those, like Arnold Ruge, Moses Hess, and Marx, who emphasized the material and political implications of the master’s ideas. The polemical exchanges between these groups grew very sharp and, in his efforts to refute Bauer and Stirner, Marx made several comments which can be read as dogmatically materialist. The most famous of these is from 199

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The German Ideology: In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven. . . . The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.1 It need not concern us here that this passage is by no means unambiguous, or that its apparently uncompromising materialism is contradicted elsewhere in Marx’s oeuvre. What is important for our purposes is the fact that most twentieth-century Marxists have assumed that it was Marx’s view that human ideas are directly produced by material activity.2 In particular, according to the Leninist interpretation which remained the dominant influence on Marxist thought until the 1960s, it was economic activity which was held to determine consciousness. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels declared that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,”3 and many Marxists believed that it followed from this that a person’s class-position was the most important, or even the only important, factor molding his or her ideas. In the field of literary criticism, such a belief in the centrality of the economy and the class struggle tends to produce two main interpretative strategies. First, Marxists of this kind might look at the economic circumstances of a text’s production. The author’s own class-position would be relevant here, as would the wider condition of the class struggle at the historical moment of composition. Second, the class-positions of characters within the work might be analyzed, often with a view to demonstrating the centrality of their influence over plot or personality. Any overt discussion of economic issues within the text would also be closely scrutinized in this kind of approach. When looking at Julius Caesar, then, such a Marxist (for the sake of convenience I will refer to this species as “materialist” Marxism) would initially remark on Shakespeare’s own class-position. Materialist Marxism would find it revealing that the playwright’s class circumstances and allegiances reflect the wider economic forces at work in Renaissance England. Shakespeare’s father was a moderately wealthy landowner, and also a money lender.

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According to orthodox Marxist history, this means that John Shakespeare held an ambiguous or dual class-position, bespeaking the transition between a land-based feudal economy and a money-based capitalist society. William Shakespeare was successively an actor being paid a wage, and hence a member of the urban proletariat; an entrepreneur enriching himself through investment, and thus a member of the bourgeoisie; and a landowner who purchased a noble coat-of-arms, and so an aspirant aristocrat. A materialist Marxist might suggest that it was this plural class identity which gave Shakespeare his breadth of vision and his ability to capture the essence of sweeping historical changes. This approach would also remark on the ways in which Shakespeare uses the class struggles of ancient Rome as a vehicle for observations regarding economic conflict in his own day. As Shakespeare would have known from Plutarch, the history of Rome had been characterized by bitter class warfare for five hundred years before the death of Caesar. In 509 BCE, a group of aristocrats drove out the king and established the principles of republican government, in which legislative power lay with the Senate. The nobles who sat in this assembly represented the patrician class, which made up between 5 and 10 percent of the free population. The more numerous, poorer class in republican Rome were the plebeians, and their struggle for political and economic rights dominated Roman history for centuries. They were generally excluded from the Senate, and their interests were represented by a plebeian assembly and by elected tribunes of the people. Following the devastation of Italy in the Second Punic war, land ownership became progressively concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Many plebeian small farmers were dispossessed or impoverished by debt, and they often moved to the city, where they formed an unruly urban proletariat, and a potential mob. Their labor on the land was replaced by slaves captured in Rome’s increasingly numerous foreign wars.4 The influx of slave labor further damaged the economic position of the plebeians and also added an additional combustible element to Roman society: the frequency and severity of slave revolts grew markedly toward the end of the Republic. Between 133 and 121 BCE, the brothers Gracchus attempted to use their positions as tribunes against the Senate and to introduce a series of reforms designed to alter the balance of power decisively in favor of the plebeians. The younger, Gaius Gracchus, also promoted the interests of the burgeoning class of businessmen, merchants, and financiers, who were known as the equites. The defeat of the Gracchi plunged Roman politics into a century of violence and gang warfare, as ruthless leaders exploited class divisions and economic distress in pursuit of personal power. This, in brief, was the situation of the Roman class system by the time of Julius Caesar. There were significant similarities, remarked upon by

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Shakespeare, between this situation and the one pertaining in sixteenthcentury England. There too, dispossessed small-holding farmers were flocking to the capital in search of employment, a freshly fledged mercantile class was stretching its economic wings, and an established, self-confident aristocracy fought for control of the government with a would-be absolute monarch. There were, of course, practically no slaves in Shakespeare’s England, but neither are there any in Julius Caesar. The original audiences of the play must have been struck by the similarities between the class relationships it depicts and those they could observe in their own society.5 The parallel between Roman and Elizabethan class conflict is established in the first scene of the play. The action opens with the two tribunes, Flavius and Murellus, castigating their plebeian constituents for disobeying the sumptuary laws. In Rome as in Shakespeare’s London, these laws maintained visible class distinction by regulating the clothes which the different social ranks could wear. In both cities, the authorities were frequently called upon to enforce these rules, as the two tribunes are doing at the start of Julius Caesar:

Flavius:

. . . What, know you not (Being mechanical) you ought not walk Upon a labouring day, without the sign Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou? Carpenter: Why, sir, a carpenter. Murellus: Where is thy leather apron, and thy rule? What dost thou with thy best apparel on? (1.1.2–8) Being a manual laborer—a “mechanical”—the carpenter has no right to be wearing his “best apparel” on a working day. The tribunes distrust such violations of class boundaries, and they associate it with the fickleness of the mob, who now cheer Caesar as they once did his opponent, Pompey. Shakespeare alludes here to the topical anxieties of the city fathers and puritan preachers of Elizabethan London, who viewed the neglect of the sumptuary laws as a prelude to and symbol of civil disorder. In both Plutarch and Shakespeare, Cassius’s appeal to Brutus is made on the grounds of class loyalty. Plutarch reports Cassius’s rhetorical demands: What, knowest thou not that thou art Brutus? Thinkest thou that they be cobblers, tapsters, or suchlike base mechanical people, that write those bills and scrolls which are found daily in your Praetor’s chair, and not the noblest men and best citizens that do it?6 By this argument, Plutarch’s Brutus is convinced that the assassination of Caesar would not constitute a vulgar insurrection, but rather a just reassertion of ancient aristocratic privilege. In Shakespeare, Cassius incites

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his friend with the observation that Caesar has arrogantly exalted his own status above that of his rightful class peers: “I had as lief not be as live to be/ In awe of such a thing as I myself./I was born free as Caesar, so were you” (1.2.95–97). And later in the play, Caesar’s own speeches amply confirm his lack of solidarity with the aristocratic caste from which he has emerged: These couchings and these lowly courtesies Might fire the blood of ordinary men, And turn pre-ordinance and first decree Into the lane of children. Be not fond To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood That will be thawed from the true quality With that which melteth fools . . . (3.1.36–42) The political struggle in Julius Caesar takes place between the patrician class of senators and quasi-monarchical demagogues such as Caesar and Antony. What the conspirators fear is the alliance of such charismatic individuals with the many-headed monster of the mob.7 Caska perceives just such an alliance in the charade of Caesar rejecting Antony’s offer of the crown: . . . the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands, and threw up their sweaty nightcaps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar; for he swooned and fell down at it. . . . . . . If the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him according as he pleased and displeased them, as they use to do the players in the theatre, I am no true man. (1.2.243–47; 257–60) Caska’s mention of the theater, the potential of which for fomenting social disorder was a current and hotly debated issue in Elizabethan London, indicates that Shakespeare has an eye on the class configuration of his own time. Like the Roman patricians, elements among the Elizabethan aristocracy, along with many of the growing mercantile and business class, were growing weary of the incremental centralization of power in the hands of the monarch, which had been advancing for over a century. They regarded it as an arrogation of excessive privilege on the part of a ruler whose family, like Caesar, had recently been merely primus inter pares. Worse, this excessive monarchical power was bolstered by the superstitious adoration of the common people, which often seemed no better, and no more, than religious idolatry. Although it eschews partisanship, Shakespeare’s play clearly displays the need for the patrician class to respect the collective power of the plebeians

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and to guard against any potential alliance between them and an ambitious individual. In ancient political theory, such an alliance was the very definition of demagogic tyranny. Shakespeare uses the demise of the Roman Republic as a cautionary example of how tyranny can vault to power via an appeal to the multitude. Whereas Murellus, for instance, recklessly displays his contempt for the “mechanicals,” abusing them as “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!” (1.1.36), the demagogic orator Antony successfully flatters them with an explicit denial of this insult: “You are not wood, you are not stones, but men” (3.2.143). A Marxist critic would also note that the famous quarrel between Brutus and Cassius hinges upon their different attitudes toward money. Cassius has been offering and accepting bribes, and the high-minded Brutus regards this as corruption: “Let me tell you, Cassius, you yourself/Are much condemned to have an itching palm,/To sell and mart your offices for gold/To undeservers” (4.2.9–12). For Brutus, this is precisely what the conspirators have been fighting against: Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake? What villain touched his body, that did stab And not for justice? What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world But for supporting robbers: shall we now Contaminate our fingers with base bribes, And sell the mighty space of our large honours For so much trash as may be grasped thus? (4.3.19–26) Brutus despises the unstable, amorphous medium of money, which he calls “trash.” He favors instead the fixed hierarchy of “honours” and birth. His verbal assaults on Cassius are couched in terms of class decorum and propriety: “Go show your slaves how choleric you are,/And make your bondmen tremble. Must I budge?/Must I observe you? Must I stand and crouch/Under your testy humour?” (4.3.43–46). However, the proud class-consciousness which characterizes Brutus throughout the play also ironically undermines his financial rectitude. Later in the scene, we discover that Brutus’s grudge against his friend has a more self-interested origin than he has yet admitted: . . . I did send to you For certain sums of gold, which you denied me; For I can raise no money by vile means: By heaven, I had rather coin my heart And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash By any indirection. (4.3.69–75)

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Brutus’s snobbery prevents him from condescending to appeal to the lower classes for money, which he again terms “trash.” Instead, he demands it from Cassius as the rightful due of personal friendship. Once again, a Marxist will detect here the influence of contemporary economic developments on Shakespeare’s thought. Late sixteenth century England was in the early stages of transition from a feudal to a capitalist society and, while it would be simplistic to suggest that either Brutus or Cassius “represent” one or the other of these economic attitudes, it is clear that their mutual misunderstandings with regard to money reflect a more general uncertainty. Brutus assumes that the nature of his relationship to Cassius means that his friend incurs certain obligations toward him, but the quarrel scene reveals that this understanding is not mutual. Shakespeare does not make it clear who is in the right, and the audience is left in doubt as to whether Brutus is justified in his outrage over Cassius’s parsimony or ridiculous in his refusal to deal with the peasantry. Cassius eventually ends the quarrel by protesting his disregard for worldly lucre and thus regaining his high place in Brutus’s ostentatiously moralistic regard: . . . There is my dagger, And here my naked breast: within, a heart Dearer than Pluto’s mine, richer than gold. If that thou beest a Roman, take it forth. I that denied thee gold will give my heart. (4.3.99–103) So far, we have seen examples of the themes and incidents which materialist Marxists, who are sometimes also known as “economic determinists,” might find important in Julius Caesar. There are many virtues to such a method of reading. It can unearth the buried significance of Shakespeare’s intricate allusions to Elizabethan class conflict, and it can illuminate the actions and motives he ascribes to characters of various social ranks. Over the last twenty or thirty years, however, many critics—including many former materialist Marxists—have begun to recognize the limitations of this approach. In part, this is due to the fact that social conflict in the postmodern Western world seems to encompass a wider range of issues than the class struggle. Inequalities of gender, race, and sexuality, and efforts to redress them, have come to occupy a great deal of the political attention which was previously devoted exclusively to class conflict. By the 1960s, there was, therefore, a demand for a theoretical approach which could describe and explain a range of power imbalances and forms of oppression, beyond the narrowly economic or class-based. In order to distinguish them from the economic determinism which still characterized much Marxist criticism, various attempts to fill this void became known as “Post-Marxism.” The most influential precursor of Post-Marxism was

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Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist leader of the 1920s whose concept of a gradual “war of position” between classes seemed better suited to the conditions of the late twentieth century West than the revolutionary doctrine of Leninism. This “war,” according to Gramsci, could be—indeed had to be—fought at the level of culture and ideology as much as on economic terrain. In the 1960s, Gramsci’s ideas were extrapolated by Louis Althusser into the concept of the “relative autonomy of the superstructure.” This phrase refers to Althusser’s most important departure from orthodox Marxism: the recognition that the “superstructure” of ideas has a logic and a development which are to some degree independent from the economic “base.” Althusser inspired such thinkers as Michel Foucault to analyze the ways in which systems of oppression and domination operate beyond the economy, in modes of speaking and acting which Foucault called “discourses.” In 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy8 attempted to fuse Gramsci and Foucault into a general theory of social oppression in its postmodern form, and with this book Post-Marxism was popularly acknowledged as an identifiable movement within political philosophy. A Post-Marxist reading of Julius Caesar might observe that the subjugation of the play’s “mechanicals” does not take place through economic oppression alone. In fact, the most obvious characteristic distinguishing them from their social superiors is their inability to manipulate discourse in the prescribed manner.9 As with Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare identifies the lower orders with a tendency to comic misprision and malapropism. In the opening scene, he immediately shows us the discursive impasse separating the plebeians from the tribunes, Murellus and Flavius. The different orders simply cannot make sense of each other:

Murellus: . . . You, sir, what trade are you? Cobbler: Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but as you would say, a cobbler. Murellus: But what trade art thou? Answer me directly. Cobbler: A trade, sir, that I hope I may use with a safe conscience, which is indeed, sir, a mender of bad soles. Flavius: What trade, thou knave? Thou naughty knave, what trade? Cobbler: Nay I beseech you, sir, be not out with me: yet if you be out, sir, I can mend you. Murellus: What mean’st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow? (1.1.9–19)

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When the patrician characters wish to dictate the plebeians’ behavior, they do so, not through economic coercion, but by discursive persuasion. As their speeches at Caesar’s funeral show, Brutus and Antony are both masters of rhetoric. The ability to manipulate this discursive mode was, in ancient Rome, the first prerequisite for political power. The plebeians are portrayed as utterly lacking in this ability. In fact, the lower classes are so ignorant of rhetoric that they are not even aware that they are being subjected to its influence: Antony can win them to his side with the self-refuting assertion that “I am no orator, as Brutus is . . . I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,/Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech/To stir men’s blood” (3.2.210; 214–16). The allegiance of the plebeians gravitates toward whichever patrician orator happens to be speaking at the time, because their ignorance of rhetorical discourse renders them incapable of resisting it. A Post-Marxist critic, then, would lay heavier stress than a Marxist on the plebeians’ exclusion from the sphere of privileged discourse, and would point out that Shakespeare’s play makes rhetorical manipulation the most prominent means by which the patricians maintain their hegemony. This approach shows the influence of the various forms of philosophy which, by the 1970s, were collectively referred to as “postmodernism.” The term is so wide as almost to elude definition, but the various modes of thought it encompasses share in common a pronounced interest in language and a tendency to claim that signifying systems construct, rather than reflect, our experience of the world. From this perspective materialist determinism is “reductive” in that it reduces discursive phenomena to mere reflections of economic conditions. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, materialist Marxism seemed to be permanently discredited. In the West, any opposition to the status quo appeared likely to spring from the “new social movements,” which espoused such causes as the liberation of women, homosexuals, and ethnic minorities, rather than from an antiquated socialism which placed its hopes in a disintegrating working class. These new movements necessarily avoided the concept of economic determinism, since it was clear that the forms of oppression they struggled against cut across class lines. The Post-Marxism of Foucault, or of Laclau and Mouffe, therefore became extremely fashionable and popular during the 1980s and 1990s. However, those decades were also marked by an exponential growth in the power and influence of the market economy. The system of economic exchange expanded unopposed throughout the second and third worlds, and in the West the everyday lives of individuals and the ideology of society grew progressively more dominated by the modes of thought and behavior appropriate to the marketplace. Whereas class division and conflict were by no means as sharp as under previous stages of capitalism, so that society could no longer be easily divided into a “bourgeoisie”

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and a “proletariat,” it was nevertheless true that people were gripped more tightly than ever by economic forces beyond their control. In the 1990s a mode of literary criticism arose which sought to address this situation by combining the most pertinent aspects of both Marxism and Post-Marxism. In fact, it is tempting to portray it as the dialectical synthesis which has emerged from the conflict between the two. A recent collection of essays has suggested for this kind of analysis the title of “new economic criticism.”10 Economists such as Deirdre McCloskey, philosophers such as Jean-Joseph Goux, and literary critics like Marc Shell have pointed out the striking similarities between the postmodern economy (which no longer relies on the production of material goods, but is fueled by the exchange of various forms of money) and the depiction of language offered by postmodern semiotics (in which words do not designate substantial, extra-linguistic referents, but rather construct reality out of their own interrelations). These thinkers avoid both the reductive base/superstructure model of traditional Marxism and the naive disregard of the economy evinced by many Post-Marxists, suggesting instead an identity, or “homology,” between financial and linguistic systems of representation. In other words, this form of criticism returns to economic determinism by means of an expansion of the term “economic.” Language is a form of economy, and the economy is a form of language. There is no need to worry about which is the primary or the determining factor, since the two phenomena cannot be separated. A critic who took this approach would find Julius Caesar a very fruitful text. He or she would note that the economic circumstances of the late Roman Republic present one especially striking similarity with those of the nascent capitalist society in which Shakespeare wrote. Karl Marx has observed: In ancient Rome, beginning with the last years of the Republic, when manufacturing stood far below its average level of development in the ancient world, merchant’s capital, money-dealing capital, and usurer’s capital developed to their highest point within the ancient form.11 To an extent unmatched until early-modern times, the world of Julius Caesar exhibited the predominance of financial exchange over material production. Shakespeare lived amid the first modern stirrings of this “usurer’s capital”— his father was twice charged with usury before the Royal Exchequer12—and works such as The Merchant of Venice and the Sonnets show his keen awareness of the impact of “usurer’s capital” on people’s actions and thoughts.13 It should not surprise us, therefore, that Julius Caesar teems with economic tropes, which often seem to take on a logic of their own and even to determine the course of the action. We have already seen how Antony’s skill

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as a rhetor enables him to dictate the behavior of the plebeians through the clever manipulation of language. Rhetorical word-play shares with usury the assumption that mere signs—either linguistic or financial—can have effective value in themselves, rather than by virtue of any external referent.14 When addressing the conspirators after the assassination, Antony draws attention to this resemblance: “My credit now stands on such slippery ground/ That one of two bad ways you must conceit me,/Either a coward or a flatterer” (3.1.191–93). His skill with words enables him to restore his “credit” and to confound the conspirators. But the assassins evince a similarly economic understanding of signification. Debating whether to include Cicero in their plans, Metellus exclaims: “O let us have him, for his silver hairs/Will purchase us a good opinion,/And buy men’s voices to commend our deeds” (2.1.143–45). Silver coins are not the incarnation but the sign of value; however, in an exchange-based economy the fiction that money is literally valuable becomes socially necessary. Here, Metellus observes that Cicero’s silver hairs, although not in themselves the repositories of wisdom or virtue, will nevertheless become efficacious signs when interpreted by the population. This is what critics such as Shell or Goux mean by a “homology” between different levels of semiosis. The most interesting literary inheritors of the Marxist tradition might also note that the manipulation of images, of material signs, forms a vital part of the rhetorical repertoire employed by Shakespeare’s contending parties. The first concerns of Flavius, having observed the disorder of the plebeians in the opening scene, are neither military nor political, but semiotic: “Disrobe the images,/If you do find them decked with ceremonies. . . . Let no images/Be hung with Caesar’s trophies” (1.1.65–66; 69–70). He understands the power of signs, and so do his enemies: in the next scene we learn that “Murellus and Flavius, for pulling scarves off Caesar’s images, are put to silence” (1.2.284–85). In Plutarch, the assassins find their deed approved by the fact that Caesar expires beneath the image of Pompey: [Caesar] . . . was driven either casually, or purposely, by the counsel of the conspirators, against the base whereupon Pompey’s image stood, which ran all of a gore-blood till he was slain. Thus it seemed, that the image took just revenge of Pompey’s enemy . . .15 In Shakespeare, however, the ingenious Antony interprets this incident to the opposite effect, using the detail that Pompey’s statue “all the while ran blood” (3.2.187) to fire the plebeians with indignation against the sanguinary perpetrators of the murder. The weighty significance and supernatural powers attributed to visual images in ancient Rome was, for early Christian writers, the clearest possible evidence of idolatry and, by extension, of the irredeemable turpitude of the empire. To Antony, however, this credulousness

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provides another opportunity for the rhetorical manipulation of signs for political effect. A Post-Marxist critic would be likely to note that idolatry was a topical concern for Shakespeare. The Puritans of Elizabethan England were obsessively devoted to the eradication of idolatry in all its forms. As Shakespeare perceived, there were clear political implications to this moralistic semiotics. In Julius Caesar, as in Renaissance Puritanism, it is but a short step from theological iconoclasm to anti-monarchical and republican sentiments. Cassius’s most telling argument against Caesar is that his elevation above his class peers has made him into a false god, an idol: . . . and this man Is now become a god, and Cassius is A wretched creature, and must bend his body If Caesar carelessly but nod on him. (1.2.115–18) We can illustrate the fundamental difference between materialist Marxism and Post-Marxism by considering the two schools’ responses to the theme of idolatry in Julius Caesar. A materialist Marxist would argue that the power of “usurer’s capital” in Caesar’s Rome and Shakespeare’s England caused those societies to become interested in the question of idolatry. When money, which is originally and properly a sign pointing to an external referent, becomes fetishized as a thing in itself, capable of independent reproduction, this naturally and inevitably produces a fetishized consciousness. Such a consciousness will, of course, indulge in religious and monarchical idolatry, but these are merely the ideological forms of appearance taken by the underlying economic reality. In contrast, a Post-Marxist would point out that essentially the same process has taken place in the spheres of economics, politics, and religion. In each of these areas, such a critic would perceive a fetishization of the sign, and it is the process of fetishization itself which would be of interest, rather than the putatively causal relations between the various forms in which it becomes manifest. By this stage, the reader may be wondering why it is necessary to retain the term “Post-Marxist” at all. Has the critical method described above not departed so radically from the doctrines of Karl Marx that it is misleading any longer to invoke his name? This question returns us to the issue with which we began, namely the true provenance of Marx’s own thought. If Marx was indeed a materialist, then Post-Marxism is a repudiation rather than a development of his theories. The Post-Marxist response would be that Marx was not a materialist but a Hegelian dialectician. As such, he took it for granted that all binary oppositions are mutually definitive. For example, the categories of “material” and “ideal” define, and thus create,

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each other. They can have no independent existence, and it is therefore nonsensical to argue that one of them causes or determines the other. In that case, one might respond, how is a Post-Marxist criticism to be distinguished from any other mode of investigation—from deconstruction, say, or even from liberal humanism? The answer is that Post-Marxism is a “totalizing” philosophy. To return to the example used above, it is possible to understand that the categories of “material” and “ideal” are mutually definitive only by conceiving of them as forming a totality, which is greater than the sum of its constituent parts. Such a totalizing approach to Julius Caesar is able to perceive that the bleeding of Pompey’s image, the efficacy of Antony’s rhetoric, and the attitude to money evinced by Cassius are part of a greater and wider process of mutation which simultaneously effects every sphere of representation. It is this ability to totalize which separates Post-Marxism from other forms of literary criticism. Indeed, “totalization” has become a common term of reproach, frequently used by other critical schools to attack Marxists and Post-Marxists alike. To a great extent, this usage of the term rests upon a semiconscious association of “totalization” with “totalitarianism,” and of the latter with Marxism. But it is also used to criticize the act of referring the individual and contingent phenomena of empirical experience to a larger social and historical context. Ironically, this line of attack claims inspiration from Michel Foucault, who we earlier identified among the Post-Marxists. And this fact brings into question, once again, the validity of the term “Post-Marxism.” As we have seen, “Post-Marxism” came into being because of the failure of economic determinism to predict or explain the nature of postmodern Western society. Largely due to the erroneous version of his ideas propagated by the Soviet Union, this was often understood to be a failure in Marx himself and thus was raised the call for a “Post-Marxism,” which might be more adequate to the situation of the late twentieth century. If, however, as I have suggested here, Marx was not, and could not have been, an economic determinist, then the category of “Post-Marxist” does indeed seem redundant. Rather than traduce the authentic inheritors of Marx’s ideas with the diluted label of “Post-Marxist,” it might be more apposite to designate the materialist critics, who purport to deduce ideal and semiotic phenomena from the logic of the economy, by the tutelary appellation of “Pre-Marxist.” At the very least, this would constitute a rhetorical sleight-of-hand which might deserve the applause of Antony.

Notes 1. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, trans. W. Lough, vol. 5 of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 36–37.

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

See especially V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Notes Concerning a Reactionary Philosophy, trans. David Kvitko, vol. 13 of V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1927), passim. Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Collected Works, 6: 482. Marx blames usury for the impoverishment of the plebeians: “As soon as the usury of the Roman patricians had completely ruined the Roman plebeians, the small peasants, this form of exploitation came to an end and a pure slave economy replaced the small-peasant economy” (Capital, vol. 3, trans. Ernest Untermann, Collected Works, 37: 590). As Wayne A. Rebhorn points out, “it is reasonable to infer that Elizabethans coming to Julius Caesar would have seen in the play not just a re-creation of the revered Roman past but a representation of aspects of their contemporary social and political order” (“The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar ,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 [1990]: 81). Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. From Greek into French by James Amyot and from French into English by Thomas North, ed. Paul Turner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 2: 167–68. See Richard Wilson, “‘Is This a Holiday?’: Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival,” Journal of English Literary History 54 (1987): 31–44. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 2001). See Thomas Moisan, “‘Knock me here soundly’: Comic Misprision and Class Consciousness in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 276–90. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, ed., The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (New York: Routledge, 1999). Marx, Capital, vol. 3, Collected Works, 37: 588. Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 37. See David Hawkes, “Sodomy, Usury and the Narrative of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Renaissance Studies 14 (2000): 344–61. See also Marc Shell, “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” The Kenyon Review, n.s., 1 (1979): 65–92. Plutarch, The Lives, 2: 44.

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CHAPTER

11

Constructing Caesar A Psychoanalytic Reading DAVID WILLBERN

But men may construe things after their fashion Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. (Julius Caesar, 1.3.34–35) In Shakespeare’s opening scene, common citizens are challenged by Roman tribunes for not wearing the evident signs of their professions. The issues involve social class and civic order, but also the question of significance itself: how is meaning conveyed and understood by signs? The political problem of indiscernible social identity or place parallels the cognitive problem of interpretation, construction, or reading. A salient term in this play is “construe.”1 When in the opening scene a cobbler engages in feisty comic banter with the tribunes (he claims to be “a mender of bad soles”; 1.1.14), his puns and ambiguities intensify the impact of literally impertinent speech: language that does not communicate, or seems insignificant, or adds to commonplace meaning a surplus personal significance. “What meanest thou by that?” one tribune demands (1.1.19). Finding no satisfactory answer, the tribunes proceed to “disrobe the images” of Caesar that the people have bedecked with crowns and garlands as signs of their devotion (1.1.65–66). Agents of the Republic thus attempt to re-install a presumably constant significance (reified in marble) by removing temporary excrescences of personal meaning.2 Meaning is the result of a provisional confluence of intention and interpretation, articulation and understanding, based on acknowledged and unacknowledged assumptions about language and signs. The opening scene 213

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of Julius Caesar calls into question the terms of that provisional agreement. One way to approach the play psychoanalytically is to focus on these issues of intention, interpretation, articulation, and understanding, as dramatized in Shakespeare’s early-modern play and as described in Freud’s modern theories. I will take such an approach, but first I want to review some prior interpretations. An early psychoanalytic reading of Julius Caesar—one still produced— views the play as Shakespeare’s dramatization of Freud’s fable of the “primal horde,” whereby sons band together to kill and consume a totemic father in order to control the tribe (and acquire its women).3 This interpretation retains a brutal power, which is why it is reproduced. The reading can be elaborated in terms that value distinctions among Shakespeare’s characters, each of which represents a different style of reacting to the facts and fantasies of potent paternity. I will very briefly define four essential terms, then interpret four major characters, and finally consider a core problem: the question of interpretation itself. The first term is incorporation, which in the terminology of psychoanalysis describes a fantasy of (oral) containment, and is the corporeal prototype for the later and more complex process of identification. As the earliest mode of object-relationship, incorporation has two primary affects: pleasure and aggression. Its two behavioral modes are sucking and biting; its aims are nourishment and destruction. It has three goals: (1) pleasure from the object, (2) destruction of the object, and (3) acquisition of the object’s qualities.4 This last goal impinges on identification, which is the psychological assimilation of attributes of the object, based on modeling or imitation. Human development proceeds via a series of identifications, within the family, and outside, in society. The primitive dyad of infant-mother relation (incorporation) expands into triadic (Oedipal) relations, yet still informed by early (oral) styles of desire. Identification operates via recognition of resemblance suggesting oneness or identity: i.e., mirroring, which according to most psychoanalytic theories, eventuates in the “constitution of the human subject.”5 Emulation is a type of identification and imitation, but with a difference: competitive ambition or jealous rivalry.6 It is brilliantly described by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, when Ulysses slyly advises Achilles about the perils of heroism: . . . Take the instant way, For honour travels in a straight so narrow Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path, For emulation hath a thousand sons,

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That one by one pursue. If you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an entered tide they all rush by And leave you hindmost; Or, like a gallant horse fall’n in first rank, Lie there for pavement for the abject rear, O’er-run and trampled on. . . . (3.3.154–64) Shakespeare’s imagery evokes the volatile pressure of emulation. Honor is first a solitary parade of “one,” but when imitated it becomes a hectic progress of pursuit, “one by one.” As honor turns into emulation, it produces a mimetic chain of envious aspirants to an ideal. In the terms of the primal patriarchal allegory of Julius Caesar, sibling rivalry is here multiplied into “a thousand sons,” and the fraternity of conspirators becomes a mob—or, as Antony remarks, “a sudden flood of mutiny” (3.2.206). Ambivalence is a psychoanalytic term that indicates a blend of contradictory affects, such as love and hatred, toward a single object or person. Typically one affect is unconscious. Sometimes controlled and sometimes unstable, the tense binary dynamic produces a rhythm of admiration and resentment. It is at the core of envy and a driving force for emulation. Freud cited Brutus as a classic example.7 In its primitive infantile stages it gets enacted through sucking and biting, and thus includes incorporation and identification as positive (assimilation) and negative (destruction) object relations.8 Major characters in Julius Caesar can be viewed through the interpretive lenses of these psychoanalytic terms. First, Caesar. He represents an ideal of constancy, permanence, and absoluteness: a style of integer vitae that asserts itself even when apparently weak or infirm. In Freudian terms, Caesar is an ego-ideal to which others either aspire to or conspire against.9 Caesar’s famous constancy is his virtù, an ideal of virility and ethical integrity. He is the colossus that bestrides the world (1.2.134–35), as Cassius sarcastically portrays him. (The sarcasm betrays a spectacular envy.) His symbolic value persists after his death, culminating in the ghost that appears to Brutus as an embodied sign of the emotional ambivalence that underlies the revered totemic figure. Next, Cassius, that agent of invidious comparison who takes the measure of Caesar-the-man, noting his physical inferiority (his deafness, his epilepsy, his inept swimming). Although he appeals to “Rome” and “honor,” Cassius’s hatred of Caesar proceeds from an inverted empathy: a projection of his own negative self-image into the ideal of Caesar. “I had as lief not be,” he admits, “as live to be/In awe of such a thing as I myself ” (1.2.95–96). He represents a style of pathologically limited self: character as caricature, or

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mere instrument of envious emulation. For Cassius, Caesar is an immediate antagonist, whose past and present make him dangerous. Cassius’s relation to Brutus is as an agent that bends and manipulates: he is a seducer. Brutus is initially an agent of positive empathy, or equitable comparison. Unlike Cassius, he loves Caesar, yet remains susceptible to his own ambivalence. For Brutus, Caesar is not an immediate but a projected antagonist, whose potential future makes him hazardous. Brutus’s famous soliloquy (“It must be by his death . . . ”; 2.1.10ff.) proceeds by a simple progression of thoughts, associations, and aphorisms. The speech presents a divided self, or self-experiencing ego, briefly self-aware but ultimately subject to Cassius’s seductions. The moment of the soliloquy sketches a self-observing ego, trying to make sense of (“construe”) accumulating emotional and intellectual data. It is a model of a mind divided, intellectually and emotionally, against itself: an intrapsychic split. Antony is the successful “son” of Caesar, who easily manages identification and rhetorical display (his words, Caesar’s body) to advance his own project. That project is not envious removal (Cassius) or ambivalent honor (Brutus), but conscious revenge, retribution, and replacement. As Brutus calls him, he is “a limb of Caesar” (2.1.164). This instrumental symbolism is established at the beginning, when Antony enters as a naked figure of fertility who touches the presumably barren Calphurnia along the ritual course of the Lupercal (1.2.1–11). This displaced potency inaugurates Antony’s symbolic value.10 In Brutus’s view, Antony’s wit points to a personal deficiency: “I am not gamesome. I do lack some part/Of that quick spirit that is in Antony” (1.2.28–29).11 Antony’s funeral oration combines all aspects of his power as Caesar’s symbolic agent. In summary, the figure of Cassius presents the question, “Who is Caesar (in relation to my negative idea of myself) that he should presume to be, or be presumed to be, such and such (say, a god)?” Cassius justifies his part in the conspiracy through a rhetorical demonstration of Caesar’s objective flaws—a picture driven by Cassius’s own subjective envy and animosity. The figure of Brutus asks, “Who am I (in relation to my positive idea of myself), that Caesar should become my enemy and victim?” Brutus gradually understands his own participation in the conspiracy through a convoluted and muddied examination of his own subjectivity: an awkward effort to be objective about his thoughts. Antony asks, “How can I use the fact of Caesar’s death and represent it and myself to this audience at this moment, so that I can achieve my goal?” Antony effects a rhetorical identification with Caesar, so that he can speak through and for the mute, bloody wounds of Caesar’s corpse. The figures of Brutus and Cassius are mirroring twins who enact the ambivalence of emulation: honorable identification and envious rivalry.

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Antony represents a successful combination or merger of these options. He is the son who does not kill the father, yet profits from his death.12 The “primal horde” and sibling rivalry analyses offer intrafamilial reconstructions of Shakespeare’s play. A more social analysis might focus on the relations of the conspirators and Caesar not as sons and father, but as friends and lovers. As G. Wilson Knight noted, the prevailing affective atmosphere in the play is homoerotic.13 Indeed, the homoerotic fraternity of Rome is intense and ambivalent, as fathers, sons, brothers, lovers, and rivals each protest love as a guise for hatred, or hatred as a guise for love. Such anxious hyper-virility, along with idealized fantasies of a potent patriarch, provokes a subordination or repression of women as active agents. Julius Caesar is Shakespeare’s last dramatic investigation of a relatively unalloyed society of men, after the history plays, before the suppressed maternal matter erupts into the tragedies.14 Oedipal and homoerotic readings have found fertile evidence in the play. I will focus on more strictly psychological or cognitive issues, both for characters and for readers and audiences. For example, after hearing Caska’s narration of sensational events (earthquakes, raging ocean, fiery tempests, a lion in the Capitol, men burning in the street), which he proclaims “portentous things” (1.3.31), Cicero replies: Indeed it is a strange-disposed time. But men may construe things after their fashion Clean from the purpose of the things themselves (1.3.33–35). The process of misunderstanding based on personal motives, conscious or unconscious, is a cornerstone of many cognitive psychologies, including psychoanalysis, which assume that interpretation is affected by unconscious emotion, wish, or fear. Cicero speaks again at the Capitol, doubtless with equal wisdom. The only problem is that we cannot understand him.

Cassius: Caska: Cassius: Caska:

Did Cicero say anything? Ay, he spoke Greek. To what effect? Nay, and I’ll tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’th’ face again. But those that understood him, smiled at one another, and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me. (1.2.277–83)

As phenomenon speech is evident, but its effect may not be. The moment suggests a conspiracy of secret understanders. For everyone else, it is language without meaning, sound without sense. Caska’s strange rejoinder (“Nay, and I’ll tell you that . . . ”) suggests that if he were to know Greek he would

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then be above or beyond face-to-face acquaintance with Cassius. Such knowledge would distort or disrupt a common bond. The retort evokes the relational problem of trust and mirroring that the play poetically and dramatically develops, notably between Cassius and Brutus. The problem of knowledge is especially acute when we move from the level of the construing of objects, speech, or events to the construing of self. In the trajectory of Shakespeare’s rhetorical dramatizations of human subjectivity, Julius Caesar occupies a pivotal moment between the relatively conventional soliloquies of Richard II and Prince Hal, and the fully articulated intrapsychic investigations of Hamlet. The figure who speaks in this Shakespearean moment is Brutus, or more precisely, Brutus as coached by Cassius:

Cassius: . . . Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face? Brutus: No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself But by reflection, by some other things. (1.2.51–53) Cassius continues to instruct Brutus in reflected self-observation, by offering to be the mirror in which Brutus can see his “hidden worthiness.” Brutus is concerned that his friend would lead him into “dangers” and have him “seek into myself/For that which is not in me,” but Cassius assures him that he will “modestly discover to yourself/That of yourself which you yet know not of” (1.2.54–70). This interview is an early-modern adumbration of a psychoanalytic session, in which a patient (Brutus) anxiously assents to selfdisclosure or revelation, facilitated by an analyst (Cassius) who has the skills to evoke hidden or denied wishes and motives. This analyst, of course, has his own motives, and is engaged in the pseudo-therapeutic exchange in order to seduce Brutus to discover and act on his own hidden impulses. Cassius is thus a precursor of Iago, playing on occult elements of his friend’s psyche. Cassius’s human mirror offers both likeness and opposition. It shows Brutus both what he knows and what he knows but cannot or will not admit. Like a therapist, Cassius helps Brutus to disclose and acknowledge an internal motive: to eradicate Caesar. Cassius’s explicit realism and evident personal resentment toward Caesar the man are matched by Brutus’s implicit idealism and feelings for Caesar as symbol. Brutus has already admitted his ambivalence (“poor Brutus, with himself at war”; 1.2.46); Cassius works to animate the unacknowledged or repressed side of that ambivalence. To do so, he enhances the magnitude of the patriarch and the diminutive size of his sons:15 Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a colossus, and we petty men

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Walk under his huge legs and peep about To find ourselves dishonourable graves. (1.2.134–37) The figure evokes a colossal virility. Any petty man walking under such immensity, should he peep upward, will quickly lower his eyes, wishing for death as both relief and punishment.16 The mirroring moment of external reflection by the other (Cassius and Brutus) is followed by a scene of internal self-reflection, when Brutus soliloquizes in his garden (2.1). Like Othello and Macbeth, who also contemplate killing an idealized beloved (“It is the cause”; Othello, 5.2.1, italics added— “If it were done”; Macbeth, 1.7.1, italics added), he first voices the unacknowledged issue by speaking of the un-referenced pronoun, “it”: It must be by his death: and for my part I know no personal cause to spurn at him But for the general. He would be crowned: How that might change his nature, there’s the question. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, And that craves wary walking. Crown him that, And then I grant we put a sting in him That at his will he may do danger with. Th’abuse of greatness is when it disjoins Remorse from power; and to speak truth of Caesar I have not known when his affections swayed More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder Whereto the climber upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend. So Caesar may. Then, lest he may, prevent. And since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities. And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg Which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell. (2.1.10–34) This speech is remarkable for itself and for its position as one of Shakespeare’s earliest dramatic models of private thought, or intrapsychic process, or the influence of emotion upon reason. It begins with its conclusion; all the rhetoric that follows is subordinate to the initial decision. Yet that decision is

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immediately countered by flat denial of any personal motive: “I know no personal cause.” After Freud, readers and hearers may be appropriately suspicious of gratuitous denials of personal motives. But what could be Brutus’s personal motive? In this speech he is careful to construct a virtuous yet virtual political motive, through a mix of hoary allegories (adder and ladder) and aphorisms (“Th’abuse of greatness”) that are countered as soon as announced (“to speak truth”). The Caesar that Brutus convinces himself to kill is a constructed or projected object, a Caesar as construed by an unacknowledged motive, called into service by Cassius’s seductive therapy. Remarkably, the speech confesses such projective construction, while it succeeds in moving its speaker to the edge of action. By reconstructing the case against Caesar according to a set of commonplace fictions and presumptions framed as logic (“And since . . . /And therefore . . . ”), Brutus retrospectively fashions an argument and then projects a conclusion (“And since . . . extremities”). Cicero’s earlier remark about the “purpose of things” and the “fashion” of men to misconstrue is now realized. Here is a model of a mind in search of justification, urged on by motives only barely comprehended. An appropriate term is “rationalization”—or the use of commonplace and intellect to justify a choice made out of unacknowledged emotion, or wish.17 The pseudo-logic discloses itself in the collapse of distinction between political ambition (climbing the ladder) and “kind” or nature (the venomous adder). Brutus’s Caesar is both a ruthless political aspirant and a simple creature that merely follows its “mischievous” nature: the figure is both rational person and instinctual animal. Brutus’s speech constructs a figure of Caesar that is both culpable and innocent, as a fitting reciprocal to the deep ambivalence that motivates the construction. Brutus thus fashions a decision from his ambivalence. He loves Caesar and he wants to kill Caesar: indeed, as he later confesses, he loved him even when he killed him (5.5.51). This condition of volatile ambivalence, in which a wish strives for expression within an arena of restraint, is a mental and emotional state that Shakespeare explored at several crucial moments, especially in the tragedies. As many commentators have noticed, Brutus is a study for Hamlet, and as some have observed, the character adumbrates Macbeth as well. Brutus’s speech co-joins dream and intellect, fantasy and politics, irrationality and purpose, rebellion and council, in a tense allegory of mental process that represents one of the first early-modern sketches of the problematic process of moving from wish through rationality (or rationalization) to decision and then to action. Brutus’s soliloquy sketches a recalibration of internal motive (partially unconscious) and external object, whereby the constant, idealized object (Caesar) is destabilized, while inconstant, subjective thoughts and emotions are confirmed. The speech

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represents a rudimentary process of constructing a new internal relationship with an object-as-reconstructed.18 If Brutus’s rationalizing rhetoric is unable to maintain a distinction between rational human (“ladder”) and instinctual animal (“adder”), it is yet capable of entertaining a fantastic distinction in the eventual action such rhetoric supports. The conspirators intend to kill Caesar, publicly and in the Capitol, yet Brutus wishes to describe the killing in special terms: i.e., to fashion or construe it. “Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers,” he asserts (2.1.165). The killing is to be sublime ritual, not mere murder: “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,/Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds” (2.1.172–73). Brutus wishes to dilute all personal emotion from the deed (“kill him boldly, but not wrathfully”; 2.1.171), and to frame it mythically and not criminally. The wish mirrors the ambivalence that underlies it. Caesar is a divine meal, not a carcass; the conspirators are gods, not dogs. Another dramatic instance of the volatile instability of significance in the play is the argument of Caesar and Calphurnia in act 2, scene 2. Caesar reports that his wife, who has had nightmares and who is anxious about reports of spectacular portents (lions born in the street, graves opening, battles in the clouds, ghosts shrieking), has had a vivid dream: She dreamt tonight she saw my statue, Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts, Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it. (2.2.76–79) At his wife’s insistence, Caesar will therefore not attend the Senate—although he explains his absence not in terms of her dream but in terms of his will: “The cause is in my will” (2.2.71). Decius Brutus, a quick-witted conspirator who has come to bring Caesar to the Senate, interprets Calphurnia’s dream as “a vision fair and fortunate” wherein Caesar is a positive sign for Rome and Romans: the bleeding statue “signifies that from you great Rome shall suck/Reviving blood . . .” (2.2.83– 90). With the additional remark that a crown awaits Caesar at the Senate and the implication that it is unmanly to be ruled by a woman’s fears, Decius convinces Caesar to change his mind and to proceed to the Capitol. Several commentators have noticed the interpretive shift from a dream of assassination to a dream of nourishment, or from a masculine model of bleeding phallus (suggesting a murdered father) to a feminine model of revivifying liquid (suggesting a nursing mother).19 That the imagined scene can be read in such contradictory ways is itself a sign of the structural ambivalence underlying and fracturing this play. Actually the play insistently encourages contradictory images, ideas, and attitudes about Caesar. He is ideal and absolute, yet also effeminate and

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disabled: an epileptic colossus. As Schanzer noted, Caesar is variously described by several characters, including himself.20 Ambiguity is refracted into several possibilities, highlighting the general problem of reading, judging, or constructing the character. Shakespeare simultaneously promotes and subverts our perceptions of Caesar, producing a destabilized dynamic of idealization, interrogation, and denial. Ambivalence is not only a characteristic of the imagined dramatic character of Brutus, but of the play itself. Ultimately, Caesar’s apparent autocratic inflexibility becomes a dramatic fault that makes him vulnerable to the conspirators. At the exact moment he proclaims his stellar constancy (“I am constant as the northern star”; 3.1.60)—in a vehement affirmation of integrity and virility that would earn him the title of “phallus” in the Lacanian order—Caesar falls to the conspirators’ blades. He is cut down at his highest, by a filial band of brothers who need first to aggravate paternal virtù, and then to castrate it.21 Imagine the ensuing scene as Brutus proposes it: the conspirators rush from the Senate, Caesar’s blood streaming down their arms, proclaiming “Peace, Freedom, and Liberty” (3.1.105–10). How might Roman citizens construe this moment? Brutus relies on a stable, understandable meaning— or significant link between image and act—whereas actual public response is likely to be quite different. At precisely this moment, Shakespeare makes the metadramatic observation that future ages will enact “this our lofty scene” in countries yet unfounded and languages yet unknown (3.1.111– 13). Where Brutus imagines sacred ritual, others may see bloody mayhem or “savage spectacle” (3.1.223). It is one thing to bear the symbolic sign of Caesar’s image (as in the opening scene); it is another to wear the physical sign of Caesar’s body (his blood). Antony enforces this physical distinction of meanings when he says to Brutus and the other conspirators, “Now, whilst your purple hands do reek and smoke,/Fulfil your pleasure.” Brutus replies with a symbolic or metaphoric distinction: “. . . yet see you but our hands/ And this the bleeding business they have done:/Our hearts you see not; they are pitiful” (3.1.158–69). Antony proceeds to shake the hand of each conspirator, manifestly enacting the gesture of courtesy while latently marking the objects of his revenge. With each civil greeting, as he takes hands, he is taking names, and disregarding hearts. The next scene (3.2) is the famous sequence of addresses to the Roman people: first Brutus, then Antony. Shakespeare has Brutus speak in prose; he saves his potent pentameter for Antony. Brutus is blunt and plainspoken: he asks his audience to respect his “cause” and to be quiet so they can hear him (3.2.14). He addresses the crowd as if they were available for logical persuasion, treating the plebeians to his own oxymoronic rationale: “As Caesar loved me . . . I slew him” (3.2.24–27). He remains committed to his

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own fashioning or construction of events, disregarding the constructions of others. Then Mark Antony begins, not with rhetoric but with the physical fact of Caesar’s corpse, which he carries or has carried onto the podium. Throughout his oration, he alludes or points to Caesar’s bloody body, and when he is not pointing, his language hints at auditory accusation: “O judgement, thou art fled to brutish [Brutus] beasts” (3.2.105; italics added). Following the interpretation of Caesar’s wounds by Ebel,22 recent feminist critics have elaborated the symbolic ambiguities of the dead father as bleeding woman. “The assassination,” writes Kahn, “resoundingly feminizes Caesar.”23 The sight of his corpse makes men cry; the wounds are like “dumb mouths” (3.2.218; silent women) that passively indicate his victimhood. Antony—or Antony’s language as created by Shakespeare—makes brilliant use of the inherent ambivalence in the sign of Caesar as potent patriarch and loving parent. After Antony’s speech destroys the single, stable significance presumed by Brutus, the play disintegrates into a series of anarchic scenes in which “forms” are “plucked down” (3.2.250) and Cinna the poet is dismembered by the mob because of his name (3.3). Sign is confused with substance, or substance bleeds into sign. After the assassination of the patriarchal center of significance (the “phallus”), the symbolic world of the play—linguistic and political—is threatened with demolition. The appearance of Caesar’s ghost highlights the issues of sign and interpretation. Still Catholic in spirit, early-modern England was uneasy about the status of ghosts (Hamlet, brother to this tragedy, remains the most vivid instance). Brutus sees the ghost late at night, while reading by a flickering candle. He first explains the “monstrous apparition” in terms of “the weakness of mine eyes,” then asks Hamlet’s questions about angel or devil. Finally he urges the ghost, “Speak to me what thou art.” The ghost replies, “Thy evil spirit, Brutus” (4.3.276–80). Just as in Hamlet, Shakespeare here explores an intermediate ontology and epistemology between medieval and earlymodern comprehensions. Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Macbeth offer both a theological or superstitious understanding of ghosts, and a psychological or rational understanding. The ghost is both an intruding external agent and a projection of internal fears. It is both dead father and paternal imago. To interpret the phenomenon as one or the other does an injustice to the complexity of Shakespeare’s dramatic art and psychological acumen. The final scenes of misinterpretation occur in act 5 when the conspiracy disintegrates and Brutus and Cassius fall into fraternal squabbles. Cassius kills himself because he misinterprets a military report and believes his cause has failed (5.3.20–46). As Titinius laments, “Alas, thou hast misconstrued everything” (5.3.84; italics added). Warned by the ghost of Caesar and the corpse of Cassius, Brutus kills himself, expressing his ambivalence to the end:

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Caesar, now be still. I killed not thee with half so good a will. (5.5.50–51) The sword he runs upon, in classic Stoic Roman fashion, is aimed at himself and the Caesar within him. His ambiguous final words disclose his grief and self-punishment, as well as his pleasure in the fantasized (re)murder of Caesar. Perhaps because of its powerful ambivalences, the cultural value of Julius Caesar remains weighty to this day. Students throughout the world regularly read the play, and the “lofty scene” of violent usurpation is indeed “acted over/In states unborn and accents yet unknown” (3.1.112–13), sometimes in historical events and sometimes in intellectual narratives. A recent instance is E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy—an argument for shared, authorized information throughout American society—which opens with the author recalling his own father’s favorite quotation, from Julius Caesar: There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune: Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. (4.3.216–19).24 The lines represent a twofold mark of patriarchal passage: from the father, about filial affairs. This piece of paternal wisdom is a tricky guide to success in manly negotiations with nature and time. Careful attention to the passage reveals a wary sense of the brevity and fragility of any intersections between individual intent and natural or social circumstance, where human ventures (“affairs of men”) meet with supra-human realities (the ocean tide) to wishfully produce a deceptive pun: “leads on to fortune” (both super-personal agent and human goal). While their lives ebb, and they dispute desperate battle strategies, Brutus and Cassius again co-produce a divided yet mirrored perspective on the interrelation of mortal ambition and actual circumstance. They enact a filial posture of devotion and doubt, affiliation and skepticism: in short, a style of early-modern ambivalence that prefigures modern psychological models of the interrelation of thought and emotion.25

Notes 1.

2. 3.

From Latin struo, struere: “to pile up,” “join,” “build.” The term is rooted in physical models of construction and assemblage. Its major uses in early-modern English were grammatical: combination and translation, analysis and interpretation. Gradually it acquired intellectual significances, such as comprehension, explanation, and the interpretation of actions and events (see Oxford English Dictionary). The word “construe” occurs more frequently in Julius Caesar than in any other Shakespeare play (four times, counting “misconstrue”). On Roman statues as images of an “externalized self,” see Ralph Berry, “Julius Caesar: A Roman Tragedy,” Dalhousie Review 61 (1981): 325–36. The earliest psychoanalytic comment on the play is by Freud, who remarked on Brutus’s ambivalence: see The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), vol. 5 of The Standard Edition of the

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4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1968), 424. As a fourteen year old, Freud actually played the role of Brutus in a “duologue” based on a play by Schiller; see Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953), 1: 23. Cynthia Marshall substantially develops the biographical and theoretical connections in “Totem, Taboo, and Julius Caesar,” Literature and Psychology 37 (1991): 11–33. See also Philip Armstrong, Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2001), 45–47. The Oedipal (patricidal) motive was pointed out by Otto Rank in Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage: Grundzüge einer Psychologie des dichterischen Schaffens (Leipzig: Franz Deutike, 1912) and later briefly developed by Ernest Jones in Hamlet and Oedipus (London: Gollancz, 1949). For a survey of early psychoanalytic readings of the play, see Norman N. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 212–14, passim. Freud described his foundational myth of the primal horde in Totem and Taboo (1913), Standard Edition, 13: 1–162. Edward T. Herbert in “Myth and Archetype in Julius Caesar,” Psychoanalytic Review 57 (1970): 303–8, and Lynn de Gerenday in “Play, Ritualization, and Ambivalence in Julius Caesar,” Literature and Psychology 24 (1974): 24–33, explore these connections to Julius Caesar, which are fully elaborated in Marshall (“Totem, Taboo, and Julius Caesar”). The most recent allusion is in Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1998), 118. An important historical issue underlies the Oedipal interpretation. According to Plutarch, Shakespeare’s source, the notion of Brutus as illegitimate son of Caesar was more than rumor. Critics from Rank and Jones to Bloom have stressed this occluded, undeveloped motive in Shakespeare’s treatment of the story. See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth and Karnac, 1973), 211–12, and D. W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications,” in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 86–94. Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-Analysis , 206. Two quintessential theoretical perspectives on early identification are Jacques Lacan, “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), and Winnicott, “Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development,” in Playing and Reality, 111–18. The term derives from Latin aemulari: “to rival.” Dictionary meanings involve “copy,” “imitate,” “equal,” “excel” (see Oxford English Dictionary). C. T. Onions, in A Shakespeare Glossary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925) glosses it as “the ambition to equal or excel.” In its earliest medieval uses the term pertained more to thought or emotion; later early-modern uses involve action. See The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, 5: 424, and “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (1909), Standard Edition, 10: 180 (the “Rat Man case”). In psychoanalytic theory, the radical ambivalence of early identifications was crudely developed by Melanie Klein, and later modified by Winnicott. Briefly, the ego-ideal describes an intrapsychic, idealized self-image produced by a confluence of narcissism and parental identification, to which the ego aspires and against which it judges itself (via the superego). It is thus a template for identification. (See Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-Analysis, 144–45.) In Shakespearean terms, “Caesar” might be the egoideal, while Brutus’s ambivalent honor—embodied in Caesar’s ghost—is the superego. In “Shakespeare’s Dog Images: Hidden Keys to Julius Caesar,” American Imago 36 (1979): 2– 31, Mark Kanzer analyzes the scene as Caesar’s “gift” of Calphurnia to Antony, in a displaced homosexuality and symbolic intercourse that produces (after twenty-eight days) a newcomer that arouses jealousy in brothers Brutus and Cassius (26–27). The terms “quick” and “spirit” have sexual senses, as “alive” and “semen”: see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1960) and Barbara Parker, “The Whore of Babylon and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35 (1995): 255. On Antony as Caesar’s displaced phallic “will,” see Richard Wilson, “‘Is This a Holiday?’: Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival,” Journal of English Literary History 54 (1987): 31–44; David Willbern, Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), xvi–xvii; and Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 104.

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On Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar as splits of ego and superego, see Andrew M. Wilkinson, “A Psychological Approach to Julius Caesar,” Review of English Literature 7 (1966): 65–78. (Reprinted in M. D. Faber, ed., The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare [New York: Science House, 1970], 65–78.) Emulation and ambivalence, although usefully distinguished, can also be viewed as aspects of a similar tense psychological and historical dynamic. Viewed as a powerful social force in early-modern England, emulation is described by Wayne A. Rebhorn in “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 75–111, as “an unstable combination of identification and rivalry, love and hate” (77). See also Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 91–95. 13. G. Wilson Knight, “The Eroticism of Julius Caesar,” in The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (1931; repr., London: Methuen, 1958), 63–95. Knight was not a psychoanalytic critic, but was closely attuned to senses that other critics might term “unconscious.” See also Wilkinson, “A Psychological Approach”; Henry Ebel, “Caesar’s Wounds: A Study of William Shakespeare,” Psychoanalytic Review 62 (1975): 107–30; and Parker, “The Whore of Babylon,” who presses the hypervirility of the play to its limits. 14. See C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986),12, 236, passim, and Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11–12. Most scholars agree that Julius Caesar was written just prior to Hamlet (in 1599). For an excellent treatment of the place of women in the play, see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 77–84, 96–101. 15. In addition to the “primal horde” readings noted above (note 3), see Kanzer, “Shakespeare’s Dog Images,” for a deeply psychoanalytic speculation about Shakespeare’s own emotional situation as the oldest son in a family with two other male children. 16. See Parker, “The Whore of Babylon,” on Caesar’s “phallic enormity” (253–55). 17. Samuel A. Tannenbaum, in “Psychoanalytic Gleanings from Shakespeare,” Psyche and Eros 1 (1920): 29–39, was first to notice the wish underlying the specious logic in Brutus’s speech; see Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare, 213. “Rationalization” is a frequently used term; see Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), 118, and Ebel, “Caesar’s Wounds.” 18. Shakespeare’s early-modern mode of “object-relations” is limited not just by a pre-Freudian lack of theoretical sophistication, but by a neglect or repression that also limited Freud’s theories: the deep maternal ground of all object-relations. 19. Kahn calls the description “an image of mammary vigor”(Roman Shakespeare, 104). She also relates the image to the iconic totem of Rome: the wolf that suckled the twins, Romulus and Remus. Gail Kern Paster, citing Bakhtin, contrasts the closed, stony body of Caesar’s statue with the open, bleeding body of Caesar’s corpse; see “‘In the spirit of men there is no blood’: Blood as a Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 284–86. 20. Ernest Schanzer, “The Problem of Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 305–6. 21. Plutarch suggests that Brutus’s fatal blow was delivered to Caesar’s groin. Marshall notices that Caesar represents the “nom du père” in the Lacanian order, although she neglects Antony’s symbolic significance as displaced phallus (“Totem, Taboo, and Julius Caesar,” 28). 22. For Ebel, Antony’s exhibition is “a grotesque apotheosis of Caesar’s femininity,” not because of flowing blood but because of the vaginal symbolism of wounds (“Caesar’s Wounds,” 199). 23. Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 104. Kahn relies on Paster’s reading of Caesar’s body as marked “with the shameful stigmata of ambiguous gender, especially the sign of womanly blood” (“‘In the spirit of men,’” 285). See also Madelon Sprengnether, “Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 96. 24. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (New York: Random House, 1988), 9. 25. Although he does not address Julius Caesar, Stanley Cavell’s project of examining the origins of skepticism in Shakespeare’s tragedies can be extended to this play, especially in its concern with the tenuous constructions of signs and meanings; see Cavell’s “Introduction” to Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–37.

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CHAPTER

12

“It’s an actor, boss. Unarmed” The Rhetoric of Julius Caesar SIMON BARKER

Bertolt Brecht’s great anti-Fascist play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, was completed in 1941, in the last months of the playwright’s exile in Scandinavia and just before his move to the United States. This was a significant period in Brecht’s career. For many years he had been meditating upon the structure, staging techniques, and rhetoric of Elizabethan and Jacobean English theater, while at the same time developing a fascination, probably dating back to his New York visit of 1935, with the American gangster movies of Warner Brothers and First National. Indeed, as John Willet and Ralph Manheim have noted, Brecht had demonstrated an “obsession” with American settings for his poetry and plays as far back as the early 1920s, and was specifically drawn to the city of Chicago, the scene, together with neighboring “Cicero,” of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.1 With an eye, perhaps, on future American audiences, Brecht’s parable for the theater was developed from an earlier prose work set in classical Italy, a piece that Walter Benjamin described as a satire “on Hitler in the style of a Renaissance historian.”2 The new American setting provided a perfect structure of analogy for a play that traces the rise of a petty gangster, Arturo Ui, from street-corner bully to all-encompassing dictator. It is a fictional world of venal council members, dodgy businessmen, and a maleficent magistracy that managed to retain something of the Italian atmosphere of the original prose (since the gangsters are Italian Americans) while drawing upon the popular contemporary movie genre. The parallels are straightforward: Arturo Ui is Adolf Hitler, Chicago is Germany, Cicero is Austria, the “Cauliflower Trust” represents Junkers 227

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class of East Prussia, and the vegetable dealers are the petty bourgeoisie. Ui’s gang includes Giri (Göring), Roma (Röhm), and Giva (Goebbels). The play’s thematic and structural components are designed to reveal their derivative and intertextual bases. The gangster mob depends upon an audience’s recognition of the slang, dress, manners, and violence of Al Capone and other figures of contemporary legend, and the stylish cinematic interpretations that gave that legend a wide circulation in terms of popular culture. The play’s episodic scene structure, together with its use of a Prologue and an Epilogue, owe much to classical theatrical models as well as to the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Indeed the first appearance of the figure of Arturo Ui is accompanied by an Announcer’s remark that: Doesn’t he make you think of Richard the Third? Has anybody ever heard Of blood so ghoulishly and lavishly shed Since wars were fought for rose white and red? (Prologue, 38–41) This literary link with Richard III is reinforced by Ui’s wooing of Dullfleet’s widow (Scene 13), recalling Richard’s wooing of Anne in the second scene of Shakespeare’s play, and again by the appearance to Ui, in a nightmare, of the ghost of the murdered Roma/Röhm in Scene 14. Richard III is a reference point in Brecht’s play since its protagonist is a recognizable authority in the business of persuasion and “theatricality,” as well as a memorably bloodthirsty source of civil war. The overall structure of historical analogy in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, that which signals a political parable, is reinforced for the audience by means of the projected inscriptions, or signs, that explain the parallels between the world of the play and events in Germany. For example, the gangsters’ burning of a warehouse is accompanied by a projection that reads “February 1933, the Reichstag fire. Hitler accuses his enemies of instigating the fire and gives the signal for the Night of the Long Knives” (Scene 6). It is interesting to note that these inscriptions presented problems for acting companies, and were the source of some revision by Brecht himself as the play went into production. Questions arose over the effect of the historical narrative: the selection of historical moments; the reduction of history to a kind of “peep-show”; and, tellingly for some commentators, the absence of a role for the proletariat. These historiographical concerns call to mind arguments over Shakespeare’s use of history in both his English history plays and his reworkings of the texts of classical historians. However, despite Brecht’s hesitation, the device itself remained a coherent one for Brecht. The audience is subject to a defamiliarization of the historical events through

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the parallel with the easy violence and transparent language of persuasion seen at work on the streets of Chicago, a process aimed at demystifying the rhetoric of Fascism itself. Brecht noted that the political purpose of the play was that “the great political criminals must be completely stripped bare and exposed to ridicule. Because they are not great political criminals at all, but the perpetrators of great political crimes, which is something very different.”3 There is, however, something of a discontinuity between the use of analogy in the pursuit of Brecht’s model of epic theater, as a relatively stable source of meaning for the audience, and the accompanying system of reference points in the early modern textual antecedents. The appeal to the audience’s assumed knowledge of Richard III is itself a complex one. Brecht’s Arturo Ui shares some of Richard of Gloucester’s humor, manipulative linguistic dexterity, and a sense of dramatic presence. Yet the latter’s seduction of the audience is licensed only because he is an agent of God in the cleansing of a fallen world, destined to fall with it at the end of the play. Arturo Ui, by contrast, is a resourceful and successful figure who survives until the end and whose final appearance (usually against an unfolding swastika) is the point at which the analogy is dismantled and Ui and Hitler become a single, swaggering entity. The post-1941 Epilogue insists: Therefore learn how to see and not to gape. To act instead of talking all day long. The world was almost won by such an ape! The nations put him where his kind belong. But don’t rejoice too soon at your escape— The womb he crawled from still is going strong. (99) Brecht’s debt to the theater of the English Renaissance was immense; his famous set of oppositions between the dramatic theater of the late nineteenth century and his blueprint for an epic, revolutionary theater was a kind of alchemy partly produced by mixing Marx with Marlowe, Shakespeare with socialism, and didacticism with dialectics. In terms of theatrical process, Brecht’s epic theater depended upon “devices” reclaimed from the Renaissance theater which countered the enveloping, seductive regimes of naturalism and realism. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui invites important questions concerning the power and effect of Shakespeare’s language (seen in the play as something of a paradigm of rhetoric) that are central to the play’s explanation of political persuasion. If the traffic between the play’s gangster world and the “historical” world creates a tension that is alienating, ideally serving a demystifying of the rhetoric of persuasion (although the effect is by no means guaranteed), then this is a relatively unproblematic component of

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Brecht’s concept of alienation by comparison with his evocation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as a source of rhetorical excellence. The scene in which Julius Caesar is cited is usually very funny in the theater, although we might heed Brecht’s remark that “it is risky to encourage a people to laugh at a potentate after once failing to take him seriously.”4 In order to enhance his sense of “presence” and his powers of persuasion, Arturo Ui takes lessons from an elderly Shakespearean actor, who is surprisingly “unarmed” in this dangerous society, and who claims to be able to teach Ui “the classical manner” in ten minutes. Indeed, within a few lines, the actor has Ui strutting the stage in the style of Adolf Hitler, before proceeding to coach him in the skills of public speaking: THE ACTOR: Shakespeare. Nothing else. Julius Caesar. The Roman hero. He draws a little book from his pocket. What do you say to Mark Antony’s speech? Over Caesar’s body. Against Brutus. The ringleader of Caesar’s assassins. A model of demagogy. Very famous. I played Antony in Zenith in 1908. Just what you need, Mr Ui. He takes a stance and recites Mark Antony’s speech line for line. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! Reading from the little book, Ui speaks the lines after him. Now and then the actor corrects him, but in the main Ui keeps his rough staccato delivery. (47) The Actor’s choice of Mark Antony’s speech clearly contains an irony for an audience that knows Shakespeare’s play; and the figure of the Actor itself is a kind of joke at the expense of a worn-out tradition of English classical acting. Yet notwithstanding this, the idea of Shakespearean verse as an epitome of rhetoric, and the ease with which Ui masters it, opens up a range of questions about the structures of power and language in both Julius Caesar and The Resistible Rise of Arturi Ui. Brecht’s play uses the speech from Julius Caesar in a seemingly unmediated way (in terms of the qualities of rhetoric) that depends upon a range of assumptions about Shakespeare’s language. On one level there is the customary elevation of Shakespeare to a symbol of cultural worth, since the Actor is keen to impress upon Ui that although he has himself been “ruined by Shakespeare” (stuck in an inescapable “method”), Shakespeare offers the “grand style” that will suit Ui’s sense of domination over his listeners. It is an aesthetic that knows no history, since the Actor claims that “Art knows no calendar” (44). Yet Arturo Ui and his gang have little idea about what Shakespeare means in these terms so that at another level, the focus is on the sheer power, the theatrical textuality, of Shakespearean language. In Brecht’s play this is clearly very accessible. Its transforming power can be apprehended in minutes as Ui takes over the

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Mark Antony speech and begins to deliver it with a menace that presages his later rallying speeches. It is a kind of sleight-of-hand that will empower the individual who learns the trick. As Ui remarks, he is “not trying to convince professors/And smart-alecks. My object is the little/Man’s image of his master” (45) and this gives Shakespeare a highly charged and peculiarly compelling symbolic role in Brecht’s play. The point is clearly one of form above content (as Ui’s remark about professors makes clear) and the force of the speech lies in the audience recognizing it as a medium for persuasion and an index of mastery, even if the speech itself is unfamiliar. Brecht’s use of the Mark Antony speech invites us to revisit Julius Caesar in terms of the relationship between rhetoric and persuasion in three historically different contexts. The first involves the distinct categories into which can be placed the various forms of rhetoric in the play itself. Here critics have suggested that Mark Antony’s language, together with certain gestural conceits, provides a kind of shattered reflecting glass that deconstructs the smooth linguistic flow of the general rhetorical discourse of the play. In this sense, Mark Antony’s rhetoric, instead of being regarded as set in a context provided by the conspirators, is itself a context for the language of the conspirators themselves. Second, this inter-contextual relationship can be extended into the political effect and philosophical underpinning of the play in terms of its 1599 theatrical and historical setting. This was a potentially unsettling play in a period of concern over the power of theatrical representation in the dual public spheres of the playhouse and politics, and Shakespeare’s treatment of his sources and his sensitivity to narratives of history in the context of contemporary politics was as charged in his day as Brecht’s was in his. Third, there is a modern context: are we simply to make of Shakespeare’s rhetoric a general point about “spin-doctors” and political persuasion, leaving the play with its timeless and universal value as an exposition of something we already know, that human beings are susceptible to rhetoric, persuasion and “mastery” in a critically sceptical blend of consumerism and liberalism where we recognize ourselves as subject to “dissembling” whilst naturalizing this as the logic of “the system?” Or can we trace that quality of resistance that Brecht asserted in the Epilogue to The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui? Taking the language of Mark Antony first, critics have for a long time indicated a range of characteristics that distinguish it from that of other figures in the play. As David Daniell has pointed out, this distinctive, “memorably gripping,” quality has an impact because it appears as a sudden deviation, in the third act, from a discursive norm established earlier in the play, a norm that Mark Antony initially shares with other figures in his first, very brief speeches.5 In particular, the message from Mark Antony, delivered to the assembled conspirators by his servant, is oddly a kind of pastiche of the

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rhetoric of Brutus’s funeral speech “as if,” Daniell notes, “Antony had heard it”:6 Thus, Brutus, did my master bid me kneel. Thus did Mark Antony bid me fall down, And being prostrate thus he bade me say: Brutus is noble, wise, valiant and honest. Caesar was mighty, bold, royal and loving. Say I love Brutus and I honour him. Say I feared Caesar, honoured him and loved him. If Brutus will vouchsafe that Antony May safely come to him and be resolved How Caesar hath deserved to lie in death, Mark Antony shall not love Caesar dead So well as Brutus living, but will follow The fortunes and affairs of noble Brutus Thorough the hazards of this untrod state With all true faith. So says my master Antony. (3.1.123–37) What Mark Antony appears to have “heard” is a public rhetorical register that he imitates, partly for pragmatic reasons and partly, it might seem, for the forceful effect of its contrast with that of his own funeral oration. Furthermore, the servant’s speech is a remarkable device for separating out the speaker from what is spoken, thus problematizing this relationship in terms of authority, authenticity and hierarchy. Just before the arrival of the servant, Cassius has been predicting the unrivalled importance of Caesar’s death for future generations in a burst of hyperbole that is a kind of caricature of the series of speeches that are made in order to justify it: Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence Shall this out lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown? (3.1.111–13) The servant’s words are the words of Mark Antony, in the style of Brutus; yet in a way this removed ventriloquism is actually the first “acted over” account of the death of Caesar and is, indeed, in the “unknown accent” of a servant.7 There is a curious dualism about the authority that Mark Antony’s rhetoric gives the servant. He is center-stage (the conspirators have spent some time worrying about Mark Antony’s response to Caesar’s death), and has, therefore, to speak the speech according to the gravity of the moment. Yet he is also prostrate before the listeners, a position which at once contrasts with the rather condescending tone of the speech itself, and emphasizes the idea of “acting” as “service,” in this case service as one of his duties that fall to him as Mark Antony’s servant.8 More importantly, this little scene of the

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servant-actor speaking the words of a “great man,” reminds the audience that the whole business of representation (in terms of acting) foregrounds a feature of the Elizabethan theater that some contemporary commentators found most disturbing, that players were free to “impersonate” kings and nobles in a public arena, dangerously usurping the sense of mystery that such people held as their prerogative. The assembly of great men addressed by the servant is an assembly of actors pretending to be “great men” and when Mark Antony turns up himself a few lines later, he too is an actor pretending to be a figure from Plutarch. It is almost as though the servant is aware of this sense of theatrical artificiality. It is curious that he insists on maintaining a sense of Mark Antony’s prompting through the use of the repeated word “say” in a way that draws attention to the idea that what is said may merely be for effect, as though Mary Antony will get his servant to say whatever is necessary to gain him entry to the proceedings. Moreover, the speech itself is structured as a near sonnet, displaying its special “poetic” status and the conditional terms of its engagement with the conspirators, who may be seduced by its aesthetic appeal (and therefore to recognize its integrity) to the same degree that the theater audience is invited to recognize the sheer artificiality of the device. In a convincing account of the shift in rhetorical register that takes place in the play, David Daniell has noted how forcefully Mark Antony, now summoned to speak for himself, clearly dominates the whole Forum scene: What comes into the play with Antony is a different rhetorical skill in a tone of passionate mourning. By contrast with everyone else in the play (even Portia, who should be similar in this), his language over long passages is apparently driven by feeling for someone else. Towering above the Forum scene is his grief for Caesar. This is the counter to Stoic insensibility to suffering, now challenged through the second half of the play. Antony, it is true, is a master of rhetorical, and thus political, craft, ruthlessly working to make that grief stir his hearers to violence in support of him. . . . But in the Forum scene, whatever he is saying, his linguistic eye, if we may so express it, is on his dead friend and leader, in grief for him.9 There is, however, a very sharp distinction to be made between Stoicism as an “insensibility to suffering” and Stoicism as a liberation from the constraints of enduring grief in the pursuit of action (war, vengeance, justice); Mark Antony’s rhetoric throughout the Forum scene contrasts with that of the conspirators’ continuing justification of the death of Caesar in the sense that the “personal” has become “political” in an agitational way that substitutes the living Caesar (of the first two acts of the play) for a “resurrected” Caesar of emerging myth.

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Speculating on the sources of drama, theater historians have drawn attention to evidence of early funeral rites, along with other folk customs and rituals, as a possible “origin.” A speaker, perhaps a “plain blunt man,” as Mark Antony describes himself (3.2.211), would step forward and rehearse the life of the deceased, perhaps coming close to acting out significant and memorable deeds. This, certainly, is Antony’s approach. His grief may be “personal,” but his rhetoric seeks to raise the figure of Caesar from the dead in order that it will play an active part in the campaign to come. Alone on the stage he rehearses this approach for the audience: Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood. Over thy wounds now I do prophesy (Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue) A curse shall light upon the limbs of men: Domestic fury and fierce civil strife Shall cumber all the parts of Italy: Blood and destruction shall be so in use, And dreadful objects so familiar, That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war: All pity choked with custom of fell deeds, And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice, Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial. (3.1.258–75) The imagery is militaristic and merciless, but the rhetorical technique includes a medieval Christian sense of the return of Caesar as a restless ghost. This predicts later events in the play when Caesar appears like the ghost of Hamlet’s father or the spirit of Don Andrea in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Yet in this play the ghost, rather than making a self-ordained appearance as the unsatisfied spirit from beyond the grave, is actually “summoned” by Mark Antony’s rhetoric while at the same time giving that rhetoric its very source and authority. Once again there is a kind of ventriloquism at work here: Casear’s wounds “ope their ruby lips” using Mark Antony’s voice, just as Mark Antony “spoke” earlier through the voice of his servant. This sense of removal, distancing the utterance from the speaker, again draws attention to the sheer theatricality of Antony’s rhetoric in the next part of the play.

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Critics have noted the centrality of Casear’s body as a dominant part of the action from his death onwards, a signifier of multiple meanings for those who speak above it, and clearly a presence on the stage capable of drawing varied responses. For most of the time the body seems to promote language: speeches, excuses, claims of its significance to history, and so on. Shakespeare, however, complicates these responses and even provides a moment where speech becomes redundant, or at least, “unspeakable.” At the point where the servant enters to report on the whereabouts of Octavius Caesar, his eyes suddenly fall upon the corpse, stopping him in the middle of a sentence that is about even more words, both written and spoken:

Antony: Caesar did write for him to come to Rome. Servant: He did receive his letters and is coming, And bid me say to you by word of mouth— O Caesar! (3.1.278–81) However, the act of resurrection, the giving of a voice to Caesar, makes the body more than simply a prop. Caesar’s “spirit,” his mantle, with its provenance and evidence of the “speaking wounds,” the written words of his will (deferred but again, finally given a voice by Mark Antony), are all marshalled as a source of Antony’s rhetoric. Caesar is his script writer and prompter. It is as if the dullness of Brutus’s prosaic funeral oration can be accounted for by his having failed to read the script, or listen to the prompting, of the revived Caesar, a figure whose death marks not the end of his linguistic presence in the play, but its beginning. Mark Antony’s appeal to the listeners on the stage (and to the theater audience itself) is successful not because it is inherently sympathetic or particularly intellectually advanced by comparison with that of Brutus and the others. Nor is it simply a model of rhetoric in terms of the classical rules of oration, although there are elements of these.10 And it is not as though Mark Antony, in some way, “becomes” Caesar for the duration of the Forum scene. Rather, this is the anti-humanist stance of Brecht’s Arturo Ui. In the Brecht play there is much evidence of the persuasive quality of Shakespearean acting, there is a sense of the appeal of “the classic style,” and an idea of the “word . . . against the world” as in Julius Caesar (3.2.119–20). Yet the source of Ui’s rhetorical authority lies with the summoning of a figure from the past in a chain of meaning that draws the modern dictator back into the symbolic realm of history. Brecht has Ui speak the words of William Shakespeare, who wrote a script for Mark Antony so that he, in turn, could speak the words of Caesar in order to give himself an authority that will persuade his listeners that their only response is one of active participation. In Shakespeare’s play this is action against Brutus; in Brecht’s play

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this is action in support of Ui as the embodiment of the coming Third Reich. Whatever its own limitations in terms of popularizing a radical theater for the masses, the legacy of Brecht’s theater has surely included an acute awareness of the relations between dramatic literature and narratives of history. Walter Benjamin’s note concerning the earlier experiment with a prose work “on Hitler in the style of a Renaissance historian” is a revealing one. Brecht was concerned with the Renaissance as the “early modern” because he saw it as the historical epoch that brought about the conditions for early capitalism in terms of both economic base (Mother Courage) and philosophical, super-structural crisis (in, say, Galileo), even if purist critics have accused him of failing to mesh the two in a properly Marxist way. The period provided a realm of analogue that suited his notion of “parable” through an intelligible sense of historical difference. Yet he was also drawn to the Renaissance, in itself, as a source of myth that was particularly at work in the West in the years between the First and Second World Wars. The rhetoric of Fascism was based to a very large degree upon spectacles, symbolism and theatrical images, as a kind of pastiche, derived from an ideal of the ancient world that had itself been mediated through the “recovery” of classicism during the European Renaissance. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui sought, through its juxtaposition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar speech with the ascendancy of Fascist rhetoric, to expose the materiality of the language and symbolism of political power in relation to the double set of listeners—the plebeians on the “outer stage” and the audience in the theater itself. Recent approaches to Julius Caesar have, like Brecht’s, been greatly concerned with the historical relationship between political rhetoric and “the people” subject to it, and this area of scholarship has provoked a fierce critical debate. To a large extent this debate has depended upon an exploration of the appropriation of images of Rome during the English Renaissance, as distinct from the more general sense of the pan-European Renaissance. Edward Pechter notes, for example, that “whatever else it may have meant to Shakespeare and Jonson, ‘the matter of Rome’ meant the public world, civic duty, acting in history, political power in action.”11 Yet investigation of the precise terms of the engagement between Shakespeare’s text and the accompanying (non-dramatic) authority of the classical world has shifted the argument toward the way that rhetoric itself performed as an ideal example of the classical world resonating in the Realpolitik of Elizabethan court and in scholarly discourse. Timothy Hampton has noticed how the play is “haunted by rhetoric’s capacity to skew the significance of reality” (and is so full of letters, messages, orations and “scripts”); thus it became a touchstone for a late-Elizabethan world obsessed with the power of the

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spoken and written word.12 Indeed, some critics have viewed the play as so bound up with prophesy and the interpretation of recent history that it actually predicted the downfall of the Tudor and Stuart absolutist project that itself depended upon a rhetoric of divine authority based upon narratives of “history” fashioned around an origin in ancient Rome.13 For Robert Miola, Julius Caesar may be one of the “intellectual origins of the English Revolution” in that it revealed the sheer untrustworthiness of sources of authority.14 While contemporary scholars were studying classical Rome, constructing, in Marjorie Garber’s clever phrase, “A Rome of one’s own,”15 Shakespeare was revealing the arbitrary nature of Rome’s most valued legacy, the skill and the power of rhetoric. However, while the struggle continues to validate the reputation of Caesar, to make his spirit somehow authentic by the use of rhetoric (backed up by his testament and all manner of other guarantees), the focus in the play swifts to the effect of all this upon the consciousness of the plebeians. This shift of emphasis is tantalizing matched by the evolving critical attention given the play over the last decade or so and has been the source of some of the more profound arguments about its rhetoric. On the one hand, Shakespeare’s foregrounding of the role of the populace (however malleable), and its admission of the cry of “Peace, Freedom and Liberty” (3.1.110), not only acknowledges a crisis in the absolutism of the Tudor administration, but also anticipates a tendency toward modern democracy.16 Another point of view, however, suggests that Shakespeare offers a glimpse of a more universal and discouraging vision of the rhetoric-soaked mob. The play is clearly framed by a certain disquiet amongst the Roman authorities over the role of popular carnival in a state whose elite is already anxious over the limits of power within its own ascendancy. Similarly perhaps, carnival has been the subject of anxiety in the modern world of modern criticism and a clear source of opposing views: is it on the one hand a potentially subversive, liberating force which carries forward the ambitions of “the people” (which are always inherently opposed to the elite), or is it, instead, a means of control, releasing a popular spirit temporarily only in order to contain it more firmly in the longer term? It is an important question, partly because it is very much analogous to theories about the role of theater itself and thus a key conditioning factor in long-standing arguments over the “radicalism” of the Elizabethan theater as a kind of subversive carnival. One thing that is clear is that carnival needs people in the same way as the theater needs its audience, and Shakespeare’s acknowledgement of the role of the populace in Julius Caesar determines for the play a particular function in recent debates that have sought to promote “universal” ideas of the mob, dehistoricizing it in a fundamental way which has implications for the evaluation of rhetoric in Shakespeare’s period and our own. The

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work of René Girard, for example, subverts what might still be seen as a common view, that the crowd is usually subject to the rhetoric of the aspiring leader. Girard, instead, sees the leader as subject to the “violent essence” of human culture, best observed in the savagery of the mob: in a sense, then, rhetoric is the voice of the mob, guaranteeing it endlessly its only authentic expression, that of violence:

Julius Caesar is centered neither on Caesar nor on his murderers; it is not even about Roman history but about collective violence itself. The real subject is the violent crowd. Julius Caesar is the play in which the violent essence of the theater and of human culture itself are revealed. Shakespeare is the first tragic poet and thinker who focuses relentlessly on the foundational murder.17 This supremely depressing model, based on Girard’s wider vision of human history as determined by inherent collective violence and a thirst for sacrifice, has not gone unchallenged.18 It marks a departure from the more familiar analysis of the dialectical relationship between the mob and the leader explored by critics who have sought to posit Julius Caesar as a critique of rhetoric in an Elizabethan world where oratory skill was defined as the basis of “respectability” (in that it could be tested by the amount of “respect” that the orator would elicit from listeners). One might even suggest that such a skill marked out a notion of “sophistication” (in the modern sense of the word) just at a time when Shakespeare’s play might have invited its audience to consider that rhetoric was actually a matter of sophistication in the earlier, supernatural sense of the word: to do with raising the dead, “drugging” opponents with words, necrophilia and ventriloquism. Brecht’s “mob” is the mob of gangsters subject to his rhetoric; yet these figures are not simply “open to persuasion” in the sense that they are empty vessels. Rather, as Brecht makes clear, they are already ideologically constructed to be susceptible to that rhetoric, and in this there is a clear lesson for an examination of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Brecht shows the economic and historical circumstances that allowed the rise of Hitler, and he reveals something of the power of rhetoric to mobilize ideas of the past in pragmatic and neutralizing ways. Those constructed by this history, shaped by the rhetoric of Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, appear to have no other history. Like propaganda, this discourse succeeds by exhausting alternatives and making them seem less powerful or inappropriate. Julius Caesar shows a similar kind of pre-programmed mob, always already susceptible because of the historical and ideological conditions that have informed their own subjectivity. Unless we follow the line of Girard toward some atavistic (and impossible to prove) idea of a pre-programmed violence, the play’s constant concern with the materiality of rhetoric and the contest for the meaning of

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history (in terms of the spirit of Caesar and the general issues of monarchy and the state that were topical for Shakespeare’s audience), we can only see Julius Caesar as inviting a severe critique of the power of rhetoric. It is an issue that concerns us daily in the modern world as much as it clearly concerned Shakespeare in his. We are produced by rhetoric (as subjects) at the very point when we are urged to think of ourselves as consistently able to see it as somehow transparent; and Shakespeare’s mastery of the terms of rhetoric has certainly impressed us, as it impressed Arturo Ui’s supporters, as an ideal. Yet, what the Epilogue to The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui warns us about is as true for this sense of idealism as it was for Brecht’s view of the rise of the dictator: we should learn “to see and not to gape.”

Notes 1. Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, ed. John Willet and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1981), ix. References to the play are to page numbers in this edition. 2. Ibid., 19. 3. Ibid., 107–8. 4. Ibid., 107. 5. David Daniell, “Introduction” to the Arden Edition of Julius Caesar, 68. 6. Ibid. 7. Cassius’s remark has more to do with a literal sense of the assassination being justified by subsequent generations’ intent on similar acts of liberation, yet Shakespeare’s conjunction of “acting” in terms of action, and in terms of stagecraft is a familiar one. 8. John Drakakis has noted an additional dimension here in that there is a fine irony in the contrast between Brutus’s “Let’s all cry, ‘Peace, Freedom and Liberty’” (3.1.110) and the very servitude of the servant who appears at line 123. See his “‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the Politics of Theatrical Representation,” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1992): 71–72. 9. Daniell, “Introduction,” 70. 10. Daniell traces the classic forms of negatio, demonstratio, etc. in the various sections of Mark Antony’s speeches (ibid., 72–73). 11. Edward Pechter, “Julius Caesar and Sejanus: Roman politics, inner selves and the powers of the Theatre,” in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 61. 12. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 225. 13. See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), chapter 1 and passim. 14. Robert S. Miola, “Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985): 271. 15. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (London: Methuen, 1987), 52. 16. An example of the kind of criticism which suggests this optimistic interpretation is Annabel Patterson’s Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 11 and passim. 17. René Girard, “Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar ,” Salmagundi 88–89 (1990/1991): 416. 18. See especially Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (London: Routledge, 1995), 17.

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CHAPTER

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Julius Caesar ’s Analogue Clock and the Accents of History DENNIS KEZAR

In an extensive account of the various Royalist and Parliamentarian deployments of Julius Caesar from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century, Michael Dobson has observed that the play’s adaptability has been instrumental in Shakespeare’s canonization.1 On 28 April 1738, the committee appointed to erect Shakespeare’s monument in Westminster Abbey inaugurated its project by commissioning a performance of Julius Caesar at Drury Lane. In Noel Porter’s explicitly Whiggish, pro-Brutus prologue to this performance, Shakespeare enjoys the coronation denied Caesar: While Brutus bleeds for liberty and Rome, Let Britons crowd to deck his Poet’s tomb. To future times recorded let it stand, This head was lawrel’d by the public hand.2 Like Caesar’s ghost, the disembodied playwright became for this memorial committee a name to conjure with; in 1739 Lewis Theobald invoked both spirits for the final theatrical observation of Shakespeare’s monumentalization, a production of Hamlet at Covent Garden: Immortal Shakespear! we thy claim admit; For, like thy Caesar, thou art mighty yet! Thy spirit walks abroad; and at our hands The honorary tomb, thy right, demands.3

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As Caesar’s triumph comes “over Pompey’s blood” (Julius Caesar, 1.1.51), so has Shakespeare’s laureation been achieved by the interpretive opportunism that the history play both participates in and represents. Like Brutus, who must “dismember Caesar” to “come by Caesar’s spirit,” Shakespeare’s executors abstract his genius in the same stroke that renders his image (and his texts) the property of a less predictable history and “public hand.” Like Antony, who figuratively dismembers the dead Caesar’s will in an effort to determine “How to cut off some charge in legacies” (4.1.9), Shakespeare’s executors value ideological utility over authorial intention. In this sense, as we shall see, the play renders up to Shakespeare what is Caesar’s. Nothing is more conducive to the ideological appropriation of literature than the creation of such a malleable author and authority; and few things ensure canonicity more effectively than ideological appropriability.4 It is not surprising, then, that Shakespeare’s Abbey monument was constructed in a period during which his plays were read for blatantly political purposes; a period during which the invocation of his transcendent and timeless spirit could serve the most transitory and historically determined ends. Recent criticism broadly identifiable as the new historicism has reminded us that all such invocations of timelessness in fact serve time and historically situated cultural interests, that texts should be read as history and history as a text. The alleged novelty of such historicism, when compared with the traditional historical analysis against which it defines itself, lies in this chiastic (rather than reflective) relation between text and history, and in resistance to stable and totalizing claims of a text’s context and world view.5 In an historicist reading, a text participates with and is constructed by its context—a process not limited to the text’s original appearance but continued in every act of reproduction and reinterpretation. While such readings typically deny the signifying autonomy of text and author, my purpose in this chapter is to consider the ways in which Julius Caesar anticipates—with an unusual degree of self-consciousness—the accents and emphases of historicism. If we can speak of appropriability as an authorial intention, it would seem that in the case of Julius Caesar Shakespeare’s will has been observed to the letter.

Clock Strikes A place to start is with Julius Caesar’s famous anachronism, the clock that strikes when the conspirators hatch their plot (2.1.192). For a more traditional analysis in which history has a violable identity that Shakespeare’s Roman plays seek to appreciate if not preserve,6 the clock-strike presents something of a problem: if Shakespeare meant to represent the otherness of antique Rome, why does he allow the intrusion of a nonclassical time

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piece here? Though Sigurd Burckhardt’s brilliant reading of this passage should not be understood as a full-fledged historicist one, his treatment does assert an important equivalence between text and history: . . . in 1582 Pope Gregory had decreed the reform of the Julian—that is to say, of the traditional Christian—calendar, which . . . had drifted almost ten days out of phase. This reform had immediately become an issue in the bitter politico-religious struggles of the age; the Catholic countries accepted it and so adopted the so-called “New Style,” while the Protestant countries rejected it and clung to the “Old Style.” Thus at the turn of the century—Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599— a situation existed in Europe exactly analogous to that of Rome in 44 B.C. . . . The striking clock is not only a metaphor; it is a touchstone. Proud classicists, sure of their learning, will mark it as evidence that Shakespeare had, in Ben Jonson’s words, “small Latin and less Greek.” But in the very act of doing so they betray their blindness, their refusal fully to surrender to the actually given—in this case to the carefully wrought pattern of time references by which Shakespeare defines the precise meaning of his anachronism.7 For Burckhardt’s Shakespeare, the clock is an instrument of neither transcendent timelessness nor fixed historical situation; rather, it performs analogue time—asserting the formal connections between the play’s historical subject matter and the circumstances under which the play itself is produced. As a product of the play text, moreover, the analogue clock asserts the power of drama to open up history by converting historical sources into theatrical resources. As long as the play text survives as an invitation to subsequent performance, its performative indeterminacy corresponds with the historical open-endedness in which it itself participates. Julius Caesar’s self-consciousness of this performative indeterminacy and historical open-endedness frequently appears as metadrama, and nowhere more clearly than in the conspirators’ anticipation of a future stage history for their regicide play:

Cassius: Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown? Brutus: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport That now on Pompey’s basis lies along No worthier than the dust? (3.1.111–16) By imagining “states unborn” and “accents yet unknown,” Cassius prophesies the linguistic and cultural differences Shakespeare encounters as he recovers this “lofty scene” from history. His principal source for the play—

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North’s English translation of Amyot’s French version of a Latin translation of Plutarch’s Greek Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans—already suggests the transformation of historical fact by collaborative literary manufacture. Simultaneously, Cassius and Brutus look back to an anterior future when the English state and language were “yet unknown” and forward to a present when those restaging the scene might have “small Latin and less Greek,” a time when Cicero’s linguistic inaccessibility to Caska (1.2.277– 83) might reflect Plutarch’s to Shakespeare. It was Greek to both of them. Of course this prophecy becomes for Shakespeare an opportunity for dramatic irony. We know what for the conspirators is tragically “unknown” and “unborn”—that this “lofty scene” will first be “acted over” in Antony’s accent, that the play will conclude with the conspirators’ deaths and the birth of the Second Triumvirate. From Shakespeare’s literary and historical perspective, however, the irony goes further and becomes indeed an historicist irony. For by the end of the sixteenth century Cassius’s and Brutus’s first performance had long been the stock of dramatists and the debated exemplum of moralists and political theorists, receiving different “accents” or evaluative emphases as monarchy and republic, tyrants and traitors, were viewed from different historical and cultural vantages.8 For a playwright capable of imagining an audience of “eyes not yet created” (Sonnet 81, line 10), the shortest path to obsolescence and the revision that dooms the conspirators is to deny the historical contingency of such emphases, to assume a unanimous and monological interpretive community, and to forget that his play is the property of the very history it represents—that his text (especially before the posthumous First Folio) has no status, only unforeseen “states.” The political ambiguity of Julius Caesar, its diptychous structure and bifurcation of the hero’s role is therefore the design of a survivor, not a victim. This survivorship, however, though instrumental to Shakespeare’s canonization, involves submission to the kind of interpretive appropriation exercised by the playwright’s executors in the installation of his monument. Julius Caesar’s own plotting of history is subject to the same interpretive energies it employs, energies that in the words of Samuel Johnson leave Shakespeare’s text appearing like Caesar’s body: But of the works of Shakespeare the condition has been far different [from that of works published under the direct supervision of their authors]: he sold them, not to be printed, but to be played. They were immediately copied for the actors, and multiplied by transcript after transcript, vitiated by the blunders of the penman, or changed by the affectation of the player; perhaps enlarged to introduce a jest, or mutilated to shorten the representation; and printed at last without the

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concurrence of the authour, without the consent of the proprietor, from compilations made by chance or by stealth out of the separate parts written for the theatre . . . 9 In similar language Alexander Pope emphasizes the mutilation of the Shakespearean corpus when he describes the original manuscripts as “cut” and “divided” into the “Piece-meal Parts” of the “Prompter’s Book.”10 The play’s self-consciousness of this vulnerable textual condition and performative contingency appears in the fate of its eponym, whose essentialist declaration “always I am Caesar” (1.2.211) becomes ironically untenable as he is digested by the violent forces of public drama. A number of critics have argued that Caesar’s death coincides with his historicization and textualization. Noting that “Julius Caesar is built upon the tension between the present tense of dramatic reenactment and the past of history, between the ordinary flesh and blood of life and the immobile statues of antiquity,” Mark Rose claims: As Caesar leaves behind the frailty of the flesh and enters history, Shakespeare gives him the one Latin line in the play, underscoring the transformation. The vulnerable man has been revealed as the marmoreal figure of history. Caesar has become Caesar.11 By such a reading, Caesar’s (paene) ultima verba seem to function antithetically to the anachronism that strikes in act 2, scene 1: unlike the clock, Caesar’s Latin appears to italicize the difference of history and its distance from the drama that relates it. Yet his last words are themselves the product of theatrical appropriation: although they live in the popular memory in Shakespeare’s translation, they were originally delivered in Greek.12 Caesar may die in his native tongue, but his speech is rendered alien by his maker. It is a fundamental irony of Julius Caesar that its most explicit presentation of the autonomous past of history proves inextricably bound to the contingencies of dramatic reenactment and reinterpretation. The italics of Caesar’s last words, like the “pure blood” that issues from his marble statue in Calphurnia’s dream (2.2.76-78), serve not to recognize the signifying alterity and perfect tense of history, but rather its transumption by the imperfect terms of dramatic production. Why should this history play meditate so insistently on the fact that history exists not as a privileged terminus a quo, but instead as a priori theater? Drama’s capacity to render history imperfect and subject to the refashioning of subsequent cultural moments had aroused a great deal of antitheatrical criticism by the end of the sixteenth century. Stephen Gosson described “true history” as a prior authenticity endangered by playwrights who manipulate it for local and transitory needs:

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. . . if a true History be taken in hand . . . the Poets driue it most commonly vnto such pointes, as may best showe the maiestie of their pen . . . or wring in a shewe, to furnish the Stage, when it is to bare; when the matter of it selfe comes shorte of this, they followe the practise of the cobler, and set their teeth to the leather to pull it out. So was the history of Caesar and Pompey . . . when the history swelled, and ran to hye for the number of y persons, that shoulde play it, the Poet with Procrustes cut the same fit to his owne measure; when it afoorded no pompe at al, he brought it to the racke, to make it serue.13 Early in the seventeenth century, the author of A Refutation of the Apology for Actors would castigate playgoers who “know the Histories before they see them acted [and] are ever ashamed, when they have heard what lyes the Players insert amongst them, and how greatly they deprave them.”14 Why should Shakespeare’s play seem not only to acknowledge, but to celebrate, history’s subjection to dramatic representation?

Global Matters An important historicist answer lies in the fact that Julius Caesar inaugurates the new Globe Theatre. While some scholars still regard Henry V as the Globe’s first play, Julius Caesar’s candidacy has recently received strong support.15 While I accept the priority of Julius Caesar, however, the alternative candidate does not disable my argument, since the Chorus of Henry V also metadramatically meditates upon “Th’abuse of distance” as history submits to actors who “force a play” in “this wooden O” (2. Chorus, 31; Prologue, 13). My claim here is that the Globe presents Shakespeare with a new metaphor that constitutes a new technology, and that the reflexivity occasioned by this novelty defines a moment of self-consciousness that begins in 1599 and reaches into the first years of the seventeenth century. In 1599, the year of Julius Caesar’s first production, the Chamberlain’s Men complete a metaphoric transition—from The Theatre, through The Curtain, to The Globe16—that makes increasingly bold claims for the equivalence between play text and social text, acting and living. The operative metaphor of the Globe, equating stage and world, introduces new modes of epistemology and representation by dissolving traditional boundaries (the theatre, the curtain) between actors and audience. Scholars such as Andrew Gurr have noted one important response to this metaphorical shift—that, around the year 1600, Shakespeare begins to reconceive his customers as active spectators rather than passive auditors.17 An ultimately more telling critical assessment, however, appears in the possibly apocryphal dialogue between Shakespeare and Jonson—traditionally

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remarked as an exchange over the alleged motto of the Globe, Totus mundus agit histrionem:

Jonson:

If but stage actors all the world displays, Where shall we find spectators of their plays? Shakespeare: Little, or much, of what we see, we do; We’re all both actors and spectators too.18 However dubious the biographical authenticity of this exchange, its heuristic value lies in its accurate description of the differences that appear between Shakespeare and Jonson as they respond to the new Globe. The fundamental difference involves Shakespeare’s acceptance of a heterogeneous and participatory spectatorship, Jonson’s attempt to define an ideal and limited audience; Shakespeare’s conception of the Globe’s active spectators as a kind of common law jury, Jonson’s desire to impose a kind of Roman law in order to limit the possibilities of interpretation. What would later in Jonson’s dramatic career become an effort to create a poetic readership rather than a theatrical spectatorship19 takes early shape in his wish to submit his play text to a single judge, not a large jury. John Michael Archer’s description of “the paranoid construction of Jonsonian authorship,” which “sought to control audiences and readers as well as performers through the authority of the text,”20 appears clearly in Poetaster (1601), where “An armed Prologue” defends the text from rooms filled with “base detractors, and illiterate apes.”21 Throughout the play Jonson seems indeed to subscribe to Gosson’s account of the stage as a travesty of the courtroom, where the defendant has no voice and an injudicious jury has replaced a single judge: At Stage Plaies it is ridiculous, for the parties accused to replye, no indifferency of iudgement can be had, beecause the worste sorte of people haue the hearing of it, which in respecte of there ignorance, of there ficklenes, and of there furie, are not to bee admitted in place of iudgement. A Iudge must be graue, sober, discreete, wise, well exercised in cases of gouernement, which qualities are never founde in the baser sort.22 For Jonson, “this faire-fild Globe”23 is actually a “baud.” The “apologeticall Dialogue” that attends Poetaster therefore attempts to recreate Augustus’ court by addressing not a multitudinous spectatorship but an individual reader—a fit audience, however few: “Where, if I proue the pleasure but of one/So he iudicious be; He shall b’ alone/A Theatre vnto me” (226–28).24 Shakespeare’s altogether different tack appears quite clearly in his answer to Jonson’s prophylactic “armed Prologue,” the “Prologue armed” that in Troilus and Cressida invites the audience to participate as autonomous, potentially combative and arbitrary judges:

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Like or find fault; do as your pleasures are; Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war. (Prologue, 23; 30–31) In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare concedes the potential violence of the new Globe’s mixed and multitudinous jury by representing in the dramatic action an analogously “strange-disposed time” in which “men may construe things after their fashion/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (1.3.33– 35). This concession, which we might actually characterize as an anxious celebration, appears in the play’s portrayal of an audience that has become actors, in representations willfully misconstrued by playwrighting politicians and by an increasingly dangerous mobile vulgus. By the end of the sixteenth century, fear of the mob led to unprecedented legislation against London’s public stages. On 28 July 1598, the Privy Council resolved that all public playhouses were to be “plucked down” due to the “lewd matters that are handled on the stages” and the “very great disorders” resulting from the “resort and confluence of bad people.”25 This order, which would have given specific topical resonance to the antitheatrical and anticongregational tribunes who object to the shoemakers’ holiday in the first scene of Julius Caesar, was, of course, never enacted; but it marked the beginning of an intense period of legislation against London’s public theaters. Fittingly, the Globe itself was constructed of legally contested property. On 28 December 1598, James and Richard Burbage and a dozen tradesmen dismantled the deserted Theatre and transported its valuable timber to the Bankside, where it was erected as the new home of the Chamberlain’s Men. Giles Allen, the increasingly antitheatrical landlord of the Theatre, had requested the departure of his thespian tenants earlier that year. In a subsequent lawsuit Allen’s complaint is remarkable for its representation of the defendants as a mob run amok, threatening city and crown. The Burbages and their accessories (the “newly built” Globe became “the possession of William Shakespeare and others”26 in 1599), charges Allen: . . . then and there armed themselves with divers and many unlawful and offensive weapons, as, namely, swords, daggers, bills, axes, and such like, and so armed did then repair unto the said Theatre. And then and there, armed as aforesaid, in very riotous, outrageous, and forcible manner, and contrary to the laws of your Highness’ realm, attempted to pull down the said Theatre, whereupon divers of your subjects, servants, and farmers, then going about in peaceable manner to procure them to desist from that their unlawful enterprise, they (the said riotous persons aforesaid) notwithstanding procured then therein with great violence, not only then and there forcibly and riotously resisting your subjects, servants, and farmers, but also then and

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there pulling, breaking, and throwing down the said Theatre in very outrageous, violent, and riotous sort, to the great disturbance and terrifying not only of your subjects, said servants, and farmers, but of divers others of your Majesty’s loving subjects there near inhabiting.27 When we compare this riotous representation to Julius Caesar’s plebeians— “moved,” by Antony’s rendition of Caesar’s will, to “Pluck down benches./ Pluck down forms, windows, anything” (3.2.249–50)—ancient Rome becomes a palimpsest of Renaissance London. What finally mobilizes the crowd, in fact, is Antony’s promise of a recreational park (fit for “common pleasures”; 3.2.241) that he describes with a geographical reference that could distinguish the Globe’s location from the Theatre’s and Curtain’s: “On this side Tiber” (3.2.240). Why does Allen’s no doubt embellished account come so near the energies that Shakespeare lets slip in the Globe’s inaugural play? Why does Shakespeare confront the Globe’s first audience with an image of itself that confirms the worst fears of the antitheatricalists? Why does Julius Caesar so insistently represent its characters and their history as subject to a theater conceived as violent mistrial? I suggest the answer to these questions lies in the fact that Shakespeare not only responds defensively to the new economies of the Globe; in Julius Caesar he also manages them with a prolepsis that defines the play as a participant with, rather than a simple victim of, the kind of spectatorship it represents. Victimhood, specifically an Orphic victimhood, was a Jonsonian stance against the energies of public drama that threatened to consume poetry.28 In his dedicatory epistle to Lord Aubigny, for instance, Jonson identifies Sejanus’s (1603) negative reception with that of its dismembered “subject” and characteristically seeks to appeal the Globe’s unjust verdict to a single literary judge: “It is a poeme, that (if I well remember) in your Lo. sight, suffer’d no lesse violence from our people here, then the subiect of it did from the rage of the people of Rome; but, with a different fate, as (I hope) merit.”29 Shakespeare’s quite different position is to dramatize in the third person the victimization that Jonson narrates in the first, thereby revealing his own complicity with the “violence” that Jonson laments. In Julius Caesar, the central and emblematic scene of this metadramatic co-optation appears in the mock treason trial of a character Shakespeare significantly labels “the poet.”30

Cinna: I am not Cinna the conspirator. 4 Plebeian: It is no matter, his name’s Cinna. Pluck but his name out of his heart and turn him going. 3 Plebeian. Tear him, tear him! . . . Exeunt all the Plebeians [dragging off Cinna]. (3.3.32–35)

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If this scene contains a self-conscious reference to Orpheus’s dismemberment, we must make a crucial distinction between Shakespeare’s allusion to the archetypal poet-victim here and the similarly oblique suggestion of Orpheus’s fate in Jonson’s dedication to Sejanus. Unlike Jonson, Shakespeare does not represent this figure—and the violence inflicted upon him by “the rage of the people of Rome”—in a moment of injured self-identification. Rather, Shakespeare conjures the specter of Orpheus’s sparagmos to demonstrate the fate of a kind of poet when subjected to the abattoir of public theater. Like the officious camp poet whose silly jigging “fashion” jars with the martial “time” later in the play (4.3.133; 134), Cinna the poet is outmoded by the new economies of the Globe (as, indeed, Jonson feared to be). But by representing him as an anachronistic victim of a theater in which “men may construe things after their fashion/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves,” Shakespeare the theater-poet declares that time (however “strange-disposed”) is on his side. The interpretively open-ended drama that conspires against Cinna, killing him with a literalized pun, is Shakespeare’s.

Appropriation as Analogy But to say that this conspiratorial play belongs to Shakespeare is to ignore the self-conscious, metadramatic terms by which Shakespeare defines the play as the property of the Globe and “all which it inherit” (The Tempest, 4.1.154). I have suggested that this reflexive aspect of the play arises from Shakespeare’s acknowledgment of, and participation with, an historical moment in which the energies and technologies of public theater were being reconceived. To borrow from the vocabulary of speech-act theory, we could describe this moment as one in which formerly privileged illocutionary intentions dissolve into indeterminate perlocutionary effects, in which conventions of authorial signification are challenged and complicated by spectatorial participation.31 When in 1601 Queen Elizabeth famously identified herself as the property of a public beyond her control (“I am Richard II. know ye not that? . . . this tragedy was played 40tie times in open streets and houses”),32 she was responding to the same puzzling moment. The preexisting text of Richard II’s story—whether represented by Shakespeare’s play or Hayward’s tract—had not changed; what had changed was the palpable proliferation of interpretive possibilities, the “‘open’-ness,”33 that made Renaissance theater a potential liability for its representations. In the mirror of Richard II, Elizabeth recognized her own lack of control over selfrepresentation and theatrical contingency: she was not Richard because she wished to be, but because others wished her to be. By the end of the sixteenth century, textual conditions already present in earlier plays such as

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Richard II had been revived and enacted by history. What Keir Elam has described as Richard II’s dramatization of “the interpretive efforts of the listener”—exemplified by Exton’s tyrannicidal construction of Henry IV’s ambiguous utterance (5.4.1–2; 7–9)34—became political theater in 1601, when Essex’s party converted the play’s undetermined illocutionary speechact into perlocutionary action. Julius Caesar’s inauguration of the Globe, where Jonson’s authorial anxieties and Elizabeth’s fear of dramatic reiteration and reinterpretation in “open streets and houses” would be produced, designates such possibilities as theatrical facts. Indeed Julius Caesar defines itself, its characters, and all figures of authorship and self-fashioning as the property of a public capable of fashioning the action as it likes it. The play renders Caesar’s “always I am Caesar” as untenable as the Essex party’s deployment of Richard II would render Elizabeth’s motto “Semper Eadem.” The “strange-disposed time” dramatized and engaged in the play—in which “men may construe things after their fashion/Clean from the purpose of the things themselves”—empowers everyone to participate in Julius Caesar, but leaves no participant safe from revision and misconstruction. Writing their own “Tragedy of Julius Caesar,” the conspirators construe things after their fashion. Decius deceptively claims that Calphurnia has “all amiss interpreted” her vision (2.2.83), and provides an alternative reading that leads Caesar to his slaughter. Similarly Brutus admits the expediency of construing Caesar after his own fashion, clean from the purpose of the thing himself: . . . And since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities. (2.1.28–31) For Brutus, as for Gosson’s violator of “true history,” “the matter of itself comes short.” His response is to write a play, billing the conspirators as sacrificers, not butchers, and converting men such as Caius Ligarius into stock characters with unambiguous parts to play: “Send him but hither and I’ll fashion him” (2.1.219). But Julius Caesar is beyond the conspirators’ perspectival management. The conspirators involuntarily involve themselves in their own plot the moment they script it and declare it finished. In act 3, scene 2 Antony, who himself treats men “as a property” of the stage (4.1.40), assigns to the conspirators the butchers’ roles they had eschewed. Nor is Antony’s authorial usurpation the end, for he in turn loses sole authorship of his counterplot as it becomes the collaborative product of the other triumvirs. Having judged the proscription list complete, he is forced by Octavius to add the name of Lepidus’s brother, a revision Lepidus makes contingent upon the inclusion of Antony’s nephew. Like Caesar’s will and Cinna’s

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misconstrued words of protest, all texts composed in this play are subject to politicized readings beyond the author’s control. In such an environment, Jonson’s concern for textual and interpretive ownership proves unavailing and absurd. In Shakespeare’s Global economy, an author can claim no more control over a text’s consequences than Antony claims over the people he has “moved” through a carefully staged scene that converts spectators into actors: Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot: Take thou what course thou wilt! (3.2.251–52) When Jonson described his plays as “The Works of Ben Jonson,” he not only staked a possessive claim to his texts; he also declared the cultural and social “work” of his drama to be performed and perfected by the author alone. In Antony’s collaborative envoy, however, the subject of “work” merges authorial intention with an unpredictable reception that will initiate further action; the personified “Mischief,” like the audience of Troilus and Cressida, is enjoined (at once simply and problematically) to “do as your pleasures are.” If a play such as Julius Caesar were to be described by taxonomies familiarized by new historicism, we would need to say that the play stresses otherfashioning over “self-fashioning,” interpretive incontinence and opportunity over currently besieged models of subversion and containment.35 If the play constitutes a dramaturgic declaration of power, it is a declaration critical of the constituency of this power and aware of the continued vulnerability and contingency that such power entails. If Julius Caesar invests Shakespeare with the recognition that (like great Caesar’s ghost) he remains “mighty yet,” it does so by first recognizing that the principle power of the author’s will (like Caesar’s) lies in its existence as a document or corpse to be spoken for by others. Just as the wounds that gape “like dumb mouths” on Caesar’s body (3.1.260) record an ambiguous performance that is predicated on subsequent performances, so does Shakespeare’s text invite the sponsorship it refuses to provide itself. Through analogies conferred by history, the eighteenth-century installation of Shakespeare’s monument at Westminster Abbey provides examples of such sponsorship. The realization of Julius Caesar is that there have been more. There will be more.

Notes 1.

2.

See Michael Dobson, “Accents Yet Unknown: Canonisation and the Claiming of Julius Caesar,” in The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. Jean I. Marsden (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 11–28. Dobson traces the simultaneous canonization and ideological appropriation of Julius Caesar by Royalists (including Jacobites) and by Whigs of various degrees of libertarian leaning. Printed in Pierre Bayle et al., A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical (London: G. Straham, 1734–1741), 9: 189. This and the following passage from Theobald are quoted by Dobson, “Accents Yet Unknown,” 23–24.

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Julius Caesar’s Analogue Clock and the Accents of History • 253 3. London Daily Post and Advertiser, 12 April 1739. 4. In Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism 1730–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 70, Jonathan Bate has claimed that “Shakespeare’s ‘classic’ status is a function of both his infinite appropriability . . . and his occasional intractability.” I do not mean to paper over the important second half of Bate’s formula, but “occasional intractability” proves difficult to produce in a play like Julius Caesar, in which, as I argue in this essay, Shakespeare insists on the author’s subjection to interpretive energies he invites but does not control. Were I to attempt the location of such intractability in Julius Caesar, I would focus upon the role of Caesar’s ghost in the second half of the play: having been rendered a corpse, Caesar nevertheless continues to signify, to predict with some degree of agency, Julius Caesar’s denouement. In a different essay, one might produce an account in which this resuscitated agency stood for Shakespeare’s desire to mean beyond the stage and the grave. 5. The classic formulation of this chiastic model appears in Louis Adrian Montrose’s essay, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 28–54. New historicism is frequently criticized for the kind of formalism prescribed by this chiasmus. New historicism is also frequently criticized for not being new (Hegel, after all, was an historicist). Part of new historicism’s novelty, however, is a blurring of Hegel’s historicism with Marx’s materialism. 6. An excellent example of such a study is Paul A. Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). 7. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 6, 10. 8. One need only consider the different assessments of Caesar’s death in Plutarch, Appian, Dante, Michelangelo, Fulbecke, Sidney, and Milton for a sense of its interpretive possibilities. For a history of divergent political interpretations of Julius Caesar, see John Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 9. Johnson on Shakespeare, vol. 7 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 51–52. 10. Alexander Pope, “Preface to ‘The Works of Shakespear,’” in Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 54. 11. Mark Rose, “Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599,” in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 264. 12. See Richard Macksey, “Last Words: The Artes Moriendi and a Transtextual Genre,” Genre 16 (1983): 508. It is true that Plutarch, though writing in Greek throughout, makes a point of saying that Caesar spoke in Latin to Caska; and we cannot expect that Shakespeare would have been aware of Suetonius’ and Dio’s earlier accounts, which had Caesar saying “Kai su, teknon?” as Brutus stabbed him. But my point here is that “Tu quoque, mi fili” and “Et tu, Brute” are later reports, the second a theatrical invention apparently already becoming a convention by the time of Shakespeare’s play. In Every Man Out of His Humour, 5.6.79, Jonson would parody it as a cliché. This and all subsequent references to Ben Jonson’s drama are taken from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952). 13. Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (c. 1582), 168–69. All references to Gosson’s dramatic criticism appear in Arthur F. Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1974). 14. A Refutation of the Apology for Actors . . . By I. G. (1615), quoted in Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 81. For similar statements, see Gosson’s The Schoole of Abuse (1579), 92–93, and Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions, 194–95. 15. See Gary Taylor, “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays,” in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 121; and Marvin Spevack’s “Introduction” to the New Cambridge Edition of the play (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1–6. In Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) Steve Sohmer forcefully argues that Julius Caesar was specifically chosen for the Globe’s premiere.

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254 • Dennis Kezar 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

Between 1597 and 1599 the Chamberlain’s Men probably performed at The Curtain while The Theatre at Shoreditch was being razed and its timber used to build The Globe at Bankside. See Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 2: 134. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 93. This exchange was first recorded by William Oldys, who penned different and unattributed versions of the couplets on the title page of his copy of Gerard Langbaine’s Account of the English Dramatic Poets. George Steevens also reports this encounter in his 1778 edition of Shakespeare, and it has been suggested that the verses were Oldys’s creation, perpetuated by Steevens as a hoax (see Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970], 93–94). For Jonson’s fully articulated desire for a “blind audience,” see The Prologue to The Staple of News. For a discussion of the antagonism between spectacle and word that developed with some continuity throughout Jonson’s career, see D. J. Gordon, “Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,” in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D. J. Gordon, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 77–101. John Michael Archer, Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 95–120, the quote 100. See also Stanley Fish, “Authors—Readers: Jonson’s Community of the Same,” Representations 7 (1984): 26–58. Poetaster, “The Third Sounding,” 6, 9. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions, 164. Every Man Out of His Humour, 4.3.68. As late as 1611, Jonson intermittently appeals to a higher evaluative court; his epistle to the Earl of Pembroke, published prefatorily to Catiline, reveals an attempt to convert drama to patronage poetry: “Now, it approcheth your censure cheerefully, and with the same assurance, that innocency would appeare before a magistrate.” Like Milton after him, Jonson inhabits a fragile kingdom of intentionality “with dangers compassed round,” and he seeks to define his hermeneutically “fit audience” by insulating it from “the barbarous dissonance” of those inimical to his poetic meaning. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 2: 416. From the postmortem inventory of Sir Thomas Brend (16 May 1599). Cited by Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 209. This quotation appears in C. W. Wallace, The First London Theatre (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1913), 278–79. In Golding’s Ovid, the figure of Orpheus, dismembered by the Bacchantes, offered an euhemeristic account of the displacement of Greek lyric poetry by Dionysiac ritual drama. See James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in “Titus Andronicus,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and “Richard II” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 28–30. Jonson, “To the No Lesse Noble, By Vertve, Then Blovd: Esme, L. Avbigny,” 9–12. In North’s Plutarch, only one of the two accounts of “the murther of Cinna” describes the victim, in passing, as “a Poet.” In this account, moreover, the crowd that kills Cinna genuinely confuses him with the conspirator, and we are told only that the plebeians “presently dispatched him” and “slue him outright” without reference to dismemberment (Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; Englished by Sir Thomas North Anno 1579 [New York: AMS Press, 1967], 6: 69–70, 201). In an extended essay on this scene, Gary Taylor has claimed that Cinna the Poet is a figure of Shakespearean self-identification (“Bardicide,” in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994], 333–49). This self-identification, which differs entirely from my reading of Cinna as a victimized other on Shakespeare’s stage, leads Taylor to indict Shakespeare for both exaggerating the historical rabble’s indiscriminate violence in this scene and depicting

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Julius Caesar’s Analogue Clock and the Accents of History • 255 an apolitical poet’s victimization at their hands—thereby creating a false opposition “between the poet and the people,” “between the apolitical poet and the political conspirator” (338). The playwright, charges Taylor, creates a defense of poetry at the expense of truth. In my reading, Cinna’s representation as an Orphic poet outmoded by drama demonstrates the indistinction between playwright and conspirator; the scene constitutes not false consciousness but dramatic self-consciousness. 31. The speech-act terms “illocutionary” and “perlocutionary” are familiarized by J. L. Austin in How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). 32. Recorded by William Lambarde. See Peter Ure’s “Introduction” to the Arden Edition of Shakespeare’s Richard II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), lix. 33. See Stephen Greenblatt, “Introduction” to The Forms of Power and The Power of Forms in the Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt, Genre 15 (1982): 3. 34. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 164–65. 35. Michel Foucault’s subversion-containment model was introduced to Renaissance new historicist studies most influentially by Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), esp. 21–65.

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CHAPTER

14

Major Among the Minors A Cultural Materialist Reading of Julius Caesar1

GRAHAM HOLDERNESS and MARCUS NEVITT

Our youths and wildness shall no whit appear, But all be buried in his gravity. (Julius Caesar, 2.1.147–48) When Metellus Cimber makes this contribution at the conspirators’ conference in Brutus’s orchard, he is alerting his fellow confederates to the essential importance of including Cicero in their design to overthrow Caesarean tyranny. While the conspirators’ broad logic is that the restoration of Roman republican virtue can only be achieved by an exemplary, purgative act of extreme violence, Metellus adds the proviso that this in turn can only be sanctioned via the legitimating cultural authority of Cicero’s wisdom and age. His “silver hairs” will “purchase” the “good opinion” of the populace and force all citizens to “commend” a political act they might otherwise have dissented from. For Metellus it is only the popular perception of Cicero’s sagacity that can remove the taints of youth and “wildness” adhering to the act of assassination, only his “judgement” that can sublimate butchery into sacrifice (2.1.143–46). He is, in a sense, exactly right. Brutus’s refusal to incorporate this popular elder statesman, orator and philosopher into the conspiratorial plot is but the first of a series of political blunders which blight his progress and precipitate his tragic fall in Shakespeare’s play.2 But upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that Metellus’s remark delineates much more than either Brutus’s tragic misprision or his political naivety. What Metellus actually reveals at this point is a finely nuanced 257

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understanding of the manner in which authority and power are manufactured. His brief comment betrays an insightful awareness that hegemony is neither immutable, natural, nor pre-ordained. For Metellus, republican liberty ought to triumph over quasi-monarchical domination not only because he, the other conspirators and Cicero himself deem republicanism a more just and more democratic form of government, but also (and crucially) because it and they possess the material conditions through which constructions and representations of Ciceronian sage maturity can be transmitted and circulated. If the pamphlets and letters which litter the earlier moments of this act and which ultimately persuade Brutus to join the conspiratorial faction are viewed alongside the outbreak of post-assassination pulpit oratory as commensurate signifying practices, then the accuracy of Metellus’s insights begins to emerge. This glaringly familiar world, where truth is constructed by powerful men, is, of course, sketched for us by Cicero himself earlier in the play. Responding sceptically to Caska’s catalogue of fantastical portents he has witnessed during the storm, he replies: Indeed it is a strange-disposed time. But men may construe things after their fashion Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. (1.3.33–35) While most commentators have ignored the gender specificity of Cicero’s claim, the fact that only “men” are deemed possessors of the requisite interpretive faculties, many have highlighted the manner in which the word “construe” is riven with competing constructive and deconstructive forces here.3 Simultaneously denoting both the act of representation and the act of interpretation, the verb is at the heart of the play’s political and hermeneutical structures. Thus, when Metellus (however briefly) offers his confederates the opportunity to both interrogate and demand, to interpret and create, to “construe” Ciceronian authority for the conspiratorial cause, he also offers them the keys to taking and consolidating political power. It is an offer that they do not take and it should therefore come as no surprise that their cause dies with Brutus and Cassius having “misconstrued everything” (5.3.84). Cassius commits suicide tenaciously holding on to the belief that “men are . . . masters of their fates” but still tragically unaware as to why Caesar should be “grown so great” compared to Brutus, when it was only the former’s “name” that was “sounded more” (1.2.138; 142; 149). Brutus, of course, denies himself but grants Antony the right to interpret, represent, and appropriate the authority of Caesar’s dead body before the countrymen of Rome. As Jonathan Dollimore, Terence Hawkes, Alan Sinfield, and others have demonstrated, modes of cultural materialist analysis are predicated upon a

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belief in the continuity of connection between the Renaissance text and the world of contemporary politics and upon the necessity of pledging a political commitment within that world.4 This is a belief we share. However, given the preceding paragraphs it may appear difficult to discern any correspondence between the tensions and faultlines which course through a sixteenthcentury Roman play and the instabilities which New Right and Center-Left political alliances have brought to contemporary British society. “Cicero” is certainly no modern day spin doctor’s buzzword, nor does it have much resonance beyond the confines of certain university departments or public schools. However, this need not invalidate the cultural materialist project in this instance. We contest that what is at stake in both Shakespeare’s play and in the maneuvering and policy-making which take place in the contemporary conservative political arena are the means and techniques whereby cultural (and therefore political) authority are conferred. It will be the task of the rest of this essay to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s name, wisdom and authority, and indeed the name, wisdom and authority of Julius Caesar itself, have been “construed” by the political Right in Britain in much the same way as Metellus counsels his fellow conspirators to assume and consolidate power through interpretations and representations of the authority of Cicero. “Me and my party ain’t gonna take what them on the Left ses is OK. Right?” (John Major, Speech to the Conservative Party Conference 1993)5 For people of varying political persuasions, the idea of a Conservative British Prime Minister deploying ungrammatical, non-standard English discourse in the middle of a peroration to his annual party conference is fantastically or heretically absurd. Yet on Friday 8 October 1993 in the packed Empress Ballroom of the Winter Gardens in Blackpool, Lancashire, this is exactly what happened. The response of the assembled Conservative Party delegates was similarly surprising. Rather than deride or scorn the malapropian Prime Minister, they instead greeted the moment (and the rest of the sixty-seven minute speech) with a rapturous thirteen minute standing ovation and several rounds of “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” In the days following the speech, waves of optimism and confidence engulfed a Tory Party which only one week earlier had been beleaguered by dissent and political in-fighting and which was still reeling under the weight of a £50 million budget deficit.6 Even the most sceptical of political commentators was begrudgingly acknowledging the speech to “have been the best . . . he [Major] has ever made.”7 Brief attention to the fuller context surrounding Major’s remarks and the Tory Party conference can account for the apparent absurdity of this situation. Plagued by virulent Euroscepticism, a slender parliamentary

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majority of seventeen seats, and the need of Chancellor Kenneth Clarke to make an imminent budget statement in which the government would announce the unpopular VAT on fuel, the Conservative Party had to embark upon a support-winning campaign which would give new impetus to Major’s second term in office. Thus “Back to Basics” was born. The meaning of the slogan, which aimed to marry the government’s new policies on education and the family, is best defined in the words of Major himself: “Back to basics are a series of very hard edged policies that meet the concerns of ordinary people. It [ . . . has] a moral dimension. It is concerned about responsibility for others and obligations to others.”8 It was with his speech to the Tory Party conference at Blackpool that Major launched this campaign. Reform of the education system was the fulcrum around which the other “basics” were returned to and Major, famously, chose to speak in nonstandard English to illustrate the point. It is worth pausing to consider the finer points of Major’s conference speech in more detail. Hurrying over the issue of the budget deficit and less-than-popular economic policies, he offered the following rallying cry in an attempt to rouse the traditional right wing instincts of his audience: High on every Conservative list is raising standards in our schools. . . . Our children must be taught what they need to know. That’s why we must have a national curriculum. And we need national testing, not just for the sake of it but to find out what they have learnt and what they have failed to learn. . . . The principle of testing is not negotiable. We don’t need reams of complex papers. . . . What we do need is the simple pencil and paper tests this party has always asked for. . . . I saw a letter recently from over 500 university teachers in English and they say that it is disastrous and harmful to teach standard English, great Literature and Shakespeare in our schools! . . . What claptrap! Well I’ll answer them in words perhaps they might approve of. Me and my party ain’t gonna take what them on the Left ses is OK. Right? Over the past few months I’ve made it clear the attack on crime would be the centerpiece of next year’s legislation. But don’t let’s pretend we’ve been idle over the past 14 years, we haven’t. We’ve increased sentences, built more prisons . . . recruited more police . . . but we know it was not enough. We have tried being understanding. We have tried persuasion. It hasn’t worked.9 According to the Prime Minister, British culture and society are about to be obliterated by forces of anarchy and liberalism. Only the school and the prison can save us. The logic of adjacency is telling; just as “children must be taught what . . . to know,” the transgressive and the dissident must be taught how to behave. While the implied imputation of latent criminality

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to the young or uneducated is arresting enough in itself, the means through which the Prime Minister envisages the enforcement of conformity is particularly noteworthy. Harsher prison sentences and greater numbers of prisons and police will be deployed in tandem with “standard English, great Literature and Shakespeare.”10 It is surely unsurprising that in a world where the literary is transmuted into the punitive, and forces of “understanding” and “persuasion” become irrelevant, dissent should be stripped of its vitality and become mere “claptrap.” The particular piece of “claptrap” that Major is inveighing against here is a letter written by twenty-one English Literature academics and signed by a further five hundred which complained of the government’s doctrinaire and punitive view of language and literature. The letter was published in the Times Higher Education Supplement and openly criticized the Conservatives’ exclusive promotion of standard forms of speech at the expense of other regional and working class forms. It continued: We are all committed to the study of Shakespeare; but to make such study compulsory for 14 year olds . . . is to risk permanently alienating a large number of children from the pleasurable understanding of classical literary works. Even more disquieting is the plan for a dictatorially imposed canon of supposedly great works, in gross and wilful ignorance of more than two decades of intellectual debate. . . . These philistine and ill informed proposals would . . . do serious damage to the moral and social development of our children, and so to the cultural life of society as a whole.11 The specific policies that the letter refers to will be dealt with in due course, but suffice it to say that the Prime Minister’s dismissal of such arguments, based as they are upon decades of intellectual debate, as mere “claptrap” betrays a degree of anti-intellectualism which sits uneasily within the context of a governmental pronouncement on education. Even if it is merely interpreted as an act of wilful myopia, the further implications of his own non-standard response to the letter are particularly troubling. By deploying a non-standard, ungrammatical, regional mode of discourse as a riposte to the academics (“Me and my party ain’t gonna take what them on the Left ses is OK. Right?”) and playing the line for laughs to his Conservative gallery, Major conflates the non-standard and the laughable at the same time as he elides the ungrammatical and the threateningly aggressive. Civility, culture, discipline, and community can only be restored with Major’s resumption of dominant, standardized discourse.12 The Prime Minister’s label of “claptrap” is even less satisfactory once we realize that this particular piece of claptrapping had actually accrued much more political weight than either Major was willing to concede or the

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number of signatories at the bottom of the letter appeared to suggest. The letter first made its appearance in an earlier issue of the Times Higher Education Supplement in the November of the previous year at a time when the Conservative government’s policies of educational reform had provoked intense political controversy.13 In the summer of 1992 it was revealed that the results of that year’s national General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations for all sixteen-year-olds were the best ever. For the fourth consecutive year since the examinations were introduced in 1988 success rates were rising. To the dismay and anger of the entire teaching profession John Patten, the Secretary of State for Education, then announced that this was not due to the intelligence and industry of teachers and school pupils alike, but was actually a truer reflection of an endemic decline in standards of marking and modes of assessment. In English, this meant that a review of the way in which the subject was taught at all levels in effect heralded the replacement of progressive teaching practices with the kinds of pedagogy that John Major outlined in his speech to the conference at Blackpool.14 The suggested reforms to the English order for eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds were those which prompted most disquiet. Between 1988 and 1992, following the introduction of the GCSE examination, progressive teachings methods had meant that canonical authors were no longer necessarily the cornerstone of a school’s literature provision, and when Shakespeare was taught he was being treated increasingly irreverently.15 Furthermore, child-centered education theories, the move toward teaching topics or themes rather than individual Great Authors, and the extension of exams to the less able were, in the words of Alan Sinfield, “undermining cultural hierarchies.”16 The Conservative counter to what Patten dubbed “these progressive orthodoxies” was swift, harsh, and absolute.17 In September 1992, following extensive resource cuts, the National Curriculum Council (NCC) published a highly critical report on the teaching of English. It made five main recommendations for change. First, a new emphasis should be placed on correct spelling and good handwriting. Second, children should be properly instructed in grammar. Third, a literary canon should be established that “fosters creativity and imagination and deepens moral and spiritual understanding.”18 Fourth, phonics should be used in the teaching of reading, and, fifth, children should learn standard English. As much recent criticism has shown, Shakespeare is rarely absent from those cultural arenas where canonicity, and one’s capacity or willingness to interpret and live by the canon’s codes, become an index of one’s “moral and spiritual” health.19 Thus it is unsurprising to find John Patten positing Shakespeare as the cornerstone of the English education of the nation’s eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds. Speaking on the day of the publication of the NCC’s recommendations, the Education Secretary decreed:

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It is essential that pupils are encouraged to develop an understanding and appreciation of our country’s literary heritage. Studying the works of Shakespeare is central to that development. That is why Shakespeare is an explicit requirement of the National Curriculum. . . . I think parents and teachers alike will welcome the inclusion of Shakespeare in the English tests for 14 year olds next year. This will ensure that our 14 year olds receive the introduction to Shakespeare which many may have missed out on in the past. . . . Those who claim Shakespeare is too difficult are wildly out of touch. . . . The plays themselves are about enduring themes which will capture the imagination of pupils.20 Patten paints the familiar picture of Shakespeare as the repository of transhistorical truth and transcultural value, a picture whose origins can be traced back to Ben Jonson’s famous assertion that his fellow dramatist’s work “was not for an age but for all time.” Yet (à la Major) Patten bases his argument on an inaccurate assessment of the contemporary intellectual debates about Shakespeare. He does not claim that opposition to the proposals might be founded upon their refusal to shed any light on the particularities and contingencies of specific communities of texts, writers, and readers, but merely upon the supposition that people think “Shakespeare is too difficult.” This is a wilful misrepresentation of the debate. Opposition to the curricular prescription of Shakespeare is based upon an objection to the way in which traditional forms of pedagogy and assessment transform “difficulty” into necessary difficulty. Such teaching methods deny pupils access to avenues which might lead them to an appreciation of a Shakespeare play in reassuringly familiar cultural contexts, only to march them up and down the potential blind alleys of historical alterity and linguistic obliqueness. 21 Furthermore, Patten’s view is founded upon another fundamental misunderstanding of the environment in which his pronouncements on Shakespeare were made. His claim that “parents and teachers alike will welcome the inclusion of Shakespeare in the English tests” was astonishingly wide off the mark. Having accorded Shakespeare a centrality in his revised curriculum, Patten, the NCC, and the School Examination and Assessment Council (SEAC) resolved and legislated that 9:30 a.m. on 9 June 1993 would witness the moment when around 600,000 fourteen-year-olds put pen to paper in mandatory tests on Shakespeare for the first time. What took place instead on that day was what one political commentator dubbed “the most direct challenge to government policy since the poll tax,” a challenge which manifested itself in a nationwide boycott of the tests and the resignation of John Marenbon, the government’s senior education adviser.22 Analysis of the boycotted paper is especially instructive for gaining an insight into the way in which the Major administration “construed” the

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apparently timeless wisdom and authority of Shakespeare in an attempt to consolidate its own political position. The earlier comparisons with Metellus’s advice to the conspirators are not only suggestive but highly relevant here as Julius Caesar was one of the three plays that the government demanded, and in fact still demand, that the schoolchildren of England and Wales read.23 Between the ages of eleven and fourteen children experience Shakespeare at one of three distinct levels. The ablest will undergo a comprehension test of one of the more “difficult” passages of a play, an intermediate group of pupils will have a supposedly less testing extract to respond to, while the least able students are denied access to Shakespeare altogether and have to answer questions on extracts from non-canonical authors. Such ideological sleights of hand whereby a supposedly “universal” culture (to which equal access and appreciation are therefore by definition guaranteed) becomes a site wherein individuals can be privileged, discriminated against, or excluded from according to their comprehension of that culture have been expertly highlighted by Alan Sinfield.24 However, the ideological basis of the 1993 Key Stage 3 exam in Shakespeare is much more obvious than that. It will be the purpose of the remaining section of this chapter to expose the manner in which right-wing government policy converts Shakespeare’s play into an unambiguous text which advocates antipopulism and fetishises social hierarchy. It will be our argument that the names of Cicero and Shakespeare alike are sounded nearly four hundred years apart to steady the hearts, sway the minds, and stay the hands of “the rabblement.” When John Marenbon resigned from his position as the government’s senior education advisor on the day of the first proposed compulsory Shakespeare tests, he paused to single out the difficulty of the questions on Julius Caesar: It seemed to me that in many cases whether someone did well or badly would depend much more on guessing what happened to be in the examiner’s mind, than whether he [sic] knew the work well or was good at reading. The questions did not make clear what was wanted and had to be marked against a pretty rigid scheme.25 In this context it is not even Shakespeare who is the controlling genius who can disseminate timeless wisdom to the ignorant and the young, but instead the equally elusive and ethereal “examiner’s mind.” A pupil’s creativity and originality must be suppressed (or go unrewarded) as “he” goes in search of the unambiguous and authoritative truth which the examiner has “construed” for him from the play text. Marenbon’s comments are borne out with reference to the exam paper that the abler fourteen-year-olds would have had to face had not their teachers had the commitment and foresight

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to engage in industrial action. Section A opens with an extract of some forty lines from Antony’s funeral oration followed by six comprehension questions based on that extract. The student has twenty-five minutes to gain a maximum of twelve marks from a section that corresponds to half of the total marks for the Shakespeare paper.26 Unfortunately, even the ablest of the abler students would spend a sizeable proportion of the allotted twenty-five minutes in actually trying to ascertain where exactly the extract comes from in the play as act and scene references are omitted. The candidate is provided only with wholly inaccurate line numbers to demonstrate and contextualize her knowledge of the play. Even when she ascertains that the extract in question comes from that moment in Antony’s speech where he has finally revealed Caesar’s dead body to the multitude and is endeavoring to persuade the populace “to rise and mutiny” (3.2.223), the student is still faced with a comprehension test which is not only bizarrely oblique but which also rewards a highly subjective, selective reading of the play.27 This is suggested by the very first question on the paper. Instead of easing students into the extract by drawing attention to, say, the obvious importance of the repetition of the word “honourable” in Antony’s interrogation of the relationship between Brutus, Caesar, and virtu, the test actually begins by asking for an explanation of Antony’s evocation of the conspirators’ “private griefs.”28 The marking scheme is unambiguous: marks can be awarded only if the candidate refers to the conspirators’ “personal grievances” or offers a suggestion that “their motives were selfish,” whereas an answer that mentions simple “grievances” must be penalized.29 The objection in this particular case is not that the prescribed answers are necessarily incorrect, but that the prescription of a highly subjective reading of the play, which can convert finely nuanced ambiguities into simple right and wrong answers, is an inappropriate method by which to ascertain a teenager’s understanding and appreciation of a literary text.30 This conversion of potential ambiguity into determinacy is, of course, a process which can occur in the wake of acts of decontextualization. The examiners’ refusal to reprint the act, scene, and line references for the extract, followed by their decision to reconfigure the original text so that Antony’s “Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up” becomes line 1, is an exemplary instance of this. Candidates are thereby encouraged to, and rewarded if, they read the extract simply as a discrete unit which has neither connectives with nor relevance to other sections of the text, sections of other texts, or any other hermeneutical or historical context beyond the “examiner’s mind.” This is taken to its most disturbing extreme in question 4: Suggest one impression of the citizens which this passage gives. Justify your answer by referring to the passage.31

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Recent research has shown that questions which register the plebeian presence of Julius Caesar might appear to be informed by progressive pedagogy and assessment; this is resolutely not the case here.32 Students could only possibly attain the maximum two marks for this question if they wrote an answer along the following lines: • They are violent or vindictive: “We’ll burn the house of Brutus.” • They are impulsive: they are ready to embark on an orgy of violence before Antony has finished speaking. • They are fickle: Caesar is now “noble”; a little while ago they thought of him as a tyrant.33 Meanwhile, the less able students who could aspire to only one mark on this question were writing “They are of limited intelligence: they don’t speak very well.”34 To mark the question in such a way is clearly to privilege those students who are adept at learning and delivering anti-populist broadsides based upon limited knowledge of the text as a whole. The fact that the mark scheme prevents candidates from offering anything more than “one” impression of the plebeians here, to take any account of their political decisions and behavior before they have been prompted by Antony’s spectacular display of Caesar’s bloodied corpse, is to reduce the complexity of Shakespeare’s play and (much more disturbingly) to transform exam success into an unacknowledged pledge of political allegiance. It is true that “the tag-rag people” can clap, hiss, hoot, and violently dismember an innocent poet when enraged, but it is as valid to highlight and assess (in all contexts) their moments of developed political literacy. Thus, following Brutus’s attempt to legitimate the conspiratorial cause and sanction Antony’s funeral speech at the Forum there is the following exchange:

All: 1 Plebeian: 2 Plebeian: 3 Plebeian: 4 Plebeian:

Live Brutus, live, live. Bring him with triumph home unto his house. Give him a statue with his ancestors. Let him be Caesar. Caesar’s better parts Shall be crowned in Brutus. (3.2. 48–52)

Their awareness of the political function of spectacular ceremonial display is less relevant than the fourth plebeian’s correction of his countryman’s desire to make Brutus Caesar. Attuned to the dangers and implications of simply replacing one form of Caesarean absolutism with another, he envisages a moral dismemberment of “Caesar’s better parts” and contorts them into the image of a gory, yet distinctly un-imperial crown realized in the

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figure of Brutus. Accordingly it is the fourth plebeian’s easy use of highly rhetoricized, imagistic speech which foregrounds itself here, and this is heightened further with Antony’s grisly revelation of an image of all-tooliteral mutilation some 150 lines later. That said, the fourth plebeian’s correction of his countryman is no case of mere political pedantry, but actually reveals the dialogical basis of the plebeians’ epistemological and political enquiries. It is essential to recall that as Brutus delivers his justification of the conspiracy so too, offstage, does Cassius and that “some of the Plebeians” exit the scene with Cassius moments before Brutus’s peroration begins. As this separation of “the numbers” is taking place, two plebeians stand aside and converse:

1 Plebeian: I will hear Brutus speak. 2 Plebeian: I will hear Cassius, and compare their reasons When severally we hear them rendered. [Exeunt Cassius and some of the Plebeians.] (3.2. 8–10) That the resolution to the dialogue never actually takes place, that truth never arrives through dialectical method, is less the fault of plebeian obtuseness than the tide of destructive violence which drowns the play’s entire second half. There is no scope to account for popular rationality and political literacy within the structures of the national examination paper we have just examined. There are scenes in Julius Caesar where the plebeians are clearly neither “impulsive” nor “violent,” but this is, apparently, irrelevant and beyond the limits of the ablest teenager’s intellect. Furthermore, to give half marks for a question to a student who claims that the plebeians “don’t speak very well” is to fall back on the misguided prejudice that popular forms of linguistic resourcefulness are either inconsequential or unachievable. The verbal dexterity evidenced by the fourth plebeian and the exquisite homophonic punning of the cobbler which gives the opening scene of the play its vitality surely discredit this. In more than one sense, therefore, the boycotted Key Stage 3 examination paper bears John Major’s indelible stamp. Not only was it produced by his Education Secretary and his civil servants, but it furthermore exemplifies his, and more broadly the Conservative, promotion of the central above the marginal, the standard above the non-standard, the major above the minor. To “construe” the epigraph which opened this essay in a different manner: had not the teaching unions been resolute in their opposition to Major’s administration and stood by their conviction of the validity of progressive teaching methods our “youths and wildness” might indeed have been buried “in his gravity.”

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Notes With thanks to Matthew Turner and Conal Walsh for the invaluable discussion, assistance, and advice offered throughout the preparation of this chapter. 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

This chapter is conceived as a performance of a variety of cultural materialist practices. For interesting recent discussions of the theoretical frameworks of radical historicist criticism see John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Jeremy Hawthorn, Cunning Passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the Contemporary Literary Debate (London: Arnold, 1996); Kiernan Ryan, ed., New Historicism and Cultural Materialism: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), ix–xviii. The nearest thing to a cultural materialist policy statement can be found in the foreword to Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ed., Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2d ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), vii–viii. This sense is heightened by the fact that Shakespeare ignores the negative connotations of Cicero’s age found in his principal source. According to Plutarch, the conspirators sought to enlist “all those also whome they thought stowt enough to attempt any desperate matter, and that were not affrayed to loase their lives. For this cause they durst not acquaint Cicero with their conspiracie, although he was a man whome they loved dearelie, and trusted best: for they were affrayed that he being a coward by nature, and age also having increased his feare, he woulde quite turne and alter all their purpose, and quenche the heate of their enterprise, the which speciallie required hotte and earnest execucion, seeking by perswasion to bring all thinges to suche safetie, as there should be no peril” (Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Sir Thomas North, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–1975], 5: 97). One need only glance at the manner in which Caesar and Decius privilege their own exegetical endeavors and dismiss Calphurnia’s accurate interpretation of her own dream to gain a sense of the patriarchal logic underpinning Cicero’s utterance. For an interesting recent reading of this passage see Dennis Kezar, “ Julius Caesar and the Properties of Shakespeare’s Globe,” English Literary Renaissance 28 (1998): 22. See Dollimore and Sinfield, ed., Political Shakespeare; Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992); Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992); Graham Holderness, ed., The Shakespeare Myth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985). This speech is reprinted in its entirety in The Daily Telegraph, 9 October 1993, 10. For extracts of and commentary on the same speech see The Guardian, 9 October 1993, 1, 6. For a fuller context, see The Economist , 22 March 1997, and The Guardian , 9 October 1993, 1. Simon Hoggart, “A Range of Duck-Billed Platitudes Concisely Put,” The Guardian, 9 October 1993, 1. Reuters News Service, 17 February 1994. Such words would, of course, come back to haunt Major as several prominent Tory ministers were discovered showing scant concern for “obligations” and “responsibility” of their positions in the Tory “sleaze” scandals of the early 1990s. The Daily Telegraph, 9 October 1993, 10. The statement is yet another instance which substantiates Alan Sinfield’s claim that in Britain “Shakespeare has been made to speak mainly for the right” (“Give an account of Shakespeare and Education, showing why you think they are effective and what you have appreciated about them. Support your comments with precise references,” in Political Shakespeare, ed. Dollimore and Sinfield, 158–81, the quote 159). See also Sinfield, “Heritage and the Market, Regulation and Desublimation,” ibid., 255–79. Times Higher Education Supplement, 11 June 1993, 15. Another interesting example of the ways in which Shakespeare and non-standard modes of speech contend in political discourse occurred in the March of the previous year. At the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions in parliament, the leader of the Labour opposition, Neil Kinnock, challenged Major to defend the Conservative Party’s record in office in a televised

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13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

debate. Major declined but retorted: “We have better than a debate. We have a general election at which the case can be taken to the people. If I accurately recall my Shakespeare: “You draweth out the thread of your verbosity finer than the staple of your argument”—appropriately from Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Labour will lose.” Kinnock responded with “The Prime Minister read a quotation from Shakespeare. Let me give him one from Mrs Thatcher: ‘He’s frit.’” “Frit” is a non-standard dialect word meaning “frightened” which Margaret Thatcher had mockingly used several years earlier in an attack on the former Labour leader Michael Foot (see The Independent, 13 March 1992, 11). Times Higher Education Supplement, 20 November 1992. On the furor itself see Isobel Armstrong, “Chasm Widens Between Two Schools of English,” ibid., 11 June 1993, 22; Michael Rosen, “Clean the Floor, Maltworms,” The New Statesman, 1 Febrary 1993, 42–43; Peter Thomas, “Ordinary Myths and Fairy Tales,” Times Educational Supplement, 12 October 1992, 24; Rod Mackenzie, “The Right’s Wrong to rewrite English,” ibid., 12 October 1992, 20; Brian Cox, “Keep Faith in the English Revolution,” ibid., 25 September 1992, 22; “Ministers Are Failing Our Children,” The Independent on Sunday, 13 September 1992, 22; James Langton, “It’s Back to School,” The Daily Telegraph, 13 September 1992, 21. See Patrick Parrinder, “Nationalising English,” London Review of Books, 28 January 1993, 5; Sinfield, “Heritage and the Market,” 262. Ibid., 258. Ibid. The Daily Telegraph, 10 September 1992, 16. The report is reprinted in part ibid., and in Times Educational Supplement, 11 September 1992, 2. See Dollimore and Sinfield, ed., Political Shakespeare, and Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare. UK Government Press Releases, 9 September 1992. The prevalence and force of such reactionary theories are amply demonstrated by Patten’s famous remark at that year’s Tory Party conference. In the course of reviewing that year’s series of record-breaking results in English, he was horrified to discover that an advertisement for hamburgers had been used in a comprehension test in the English Language GCSE examination. He informed his rapt audience that “I want Shakespeare in our classrooms, not Ronald MacDonald” (The Independent on Sunday, 21 March 1993, 8). The Times, 7 May 1992, 5. It was the restrictive and mandatory nature of the tests which caused particular concern, and threats to boycott the tests were being voiced as early as December 1992. Marenbon’s resignation letter singled out the ninety-minute Shakespeare test as both “inadequate and unfair” and as the principal reasons for his resignation (The Guardian, 10 June 1993, 5). Julius Caesar is still present as prescribed reading at this level of the National Curriculum. The other Shakespeare plays that pupils had to be assessed on in 1993 were A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet. Sinfield, “Give an account of Shakespeare and Education,” 160. The Guardian, 10 June 1993, 5. Department of Education and Science, English , Key Stage 3, Tier 7–10 (1993), 2–4. The Shakespeare and English Anthology paper in turn constitutes one third of the total assessment. The exam extracts 3.2.203–43. Department of Education and Science, English, 3. Department of Education and Science, KS3 English Mark Scheme, Paper 2 Part 1, 25. For further suggestions of how this might be achieved see Sinfield, “Heritage and the Market,” 258; see also The Times, 10 June 1993, 8. Department of Education and Science, English, 4 (original emphasis). See Sinfield, Faultlines, 16–28. Department of Education and Science, KS3 English Mark Scheme, 26. Ibid.

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CHAPTER

15

“Passions of some difference”

Friendship and Emulation in Julius Caesar COPPÉLIA KAHN

My heart laments that virtue cannot live Out of the teeth of emulation. (Julius Caesar, 2.3.12–13) In 1931 G. Wilson Knight, lacking the conceptual and lexical resources of queer theory, began an essay on Julius Caesar by remarking that the play “is charged highly with a general eroticism. . . . emotional, fiery, but not exactly sexual, not physically passionate.”1 Thanks to the ground-breaking work of such critics as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Alan Bray, today we can understand the play’s peculiar “eroticism” in terms at once more theoretical and more historical than Knight’s. Sedgwick hypothesizes a “homosocial continuum” of bonds between men, from social bonds to sexual ones, held together by a kind of desire that is neither sexual nor physically passionate but rather serves as “the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship.”2 In combination with Alan Bray’s research into the codes by which early modern England signified masculine friendship, this formulation allows us to understand what Knight called eroticism as emulation—the form of desire that, I will argue, defines Brutus and Cassius as Romans, as men, and as friends.3 Emulation (from Latin aemulari: “to rival”) is the central motif of the Greco-Roman heroic tradition called the agon, that “zero-sum game” of rivalry through which the hero wins his name by pitting himself against his likeness or equal in contests of courage and strength. From Achilles and Hector to Antony and Octavius, pairs of evenly matched heroes act out a 271

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mixture of admiration, imitation, and domination that the English Renaissance calls emulation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines emulation as “to copy or imitate with the object of equalling or excelling.” In emulation, the admiration that generates a desire to imitate someone easily turns into rivalry, the desire to excel him, and finally becomes the desire to defeat or destroy him and take his place.4 This kind of agonistic rivalry structures not just the battlefield but also the forum and the friendships that arise in both contexts. As friends and as political agents, Brutus and Cassius are defined by emulation. It is a structure of desire, moreover, as recognizable in early modern England as in classical Greece and Rome.5 Emulation, then, is the social and affective framework within which these two friends form the conspiracy, carry it out, and suffer its consequences. Emulation is deeply imbricated in a certain conception of Rome—the Rome that is so frequently invoked as touchstone of liberty and freedom (the word occurs thirty-two times in some form, more than in any other Shakespeare play). This Rome was born from the uprising led by Brutus’s ancestor and namesake Lucius Junius Brutus against the Tarquin kings. It is the mythos of the Republic that impels Brutus to lead the conspiracy against Caesar, that compels the conspirators’ belief in their cause, that generates a discourse instating them and Caesar as well with identity, agency, and masculinity. In this play more than any other, Shakespeare grounds virtus—Roman manhood—in a specific political ideology, one that both constitutes and fractures its male subjects. The “public” style of the play, consistently noted as one of its defining qualities, dramatizes this republican mode of being and action. Major scenes take the form of oratorical persuasions or public debates, and even in private characters speak formally, in lofty abstractions.6 All the Romans, but especially Brutus and Cassius, conceive themselves and others in terms of their national identity, referring to themselves in the third person, as though they are spectators and audience of themselves as public figures. And at several strikingly metatheatrical moments, they present themselves as actors both histrionic and historical in the “lofty scene” of politics, performing their parts with the “formal constancy” of stage actors before an audience of posterity.7 In this construction of the self as a public entity, Shakespeare dramatizes the patrician veneration for public service that, over the long history of the Republic, entrenched itself in Roman social practice and was reflected in Roman literary and historical texts. According to Leo Braudy’s account, . . . the political history of Rome was clearly written in the genealogies of its great families for all to see. Nobilis in Latin originally means someone who is known. The upper class, the political class, was there-

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fore by definition a class whose families were known for their public adherence to the public good . . . a class history had made extremely sensitive to their visibility in the state. In all Roman noble houses were displayed imagines (wax masks)—first idealized, later realistic—of ancestors who had held the chief offices in Rome reserved for those of aristocratic privilege.8 The play’s predominantly public mode, then, reflects Shakespeare’s fidelity to an image of republican Rome evident throughout Plutarch, Livy, Virgil, Cicero.9 As Gary Miles comments, however, “It is . . . precisely the public dimension of his Romans’ lives that is most problematic for Shakespeare,” because he also pursues such “a distinctive interest in the interior life of his characters.”10 The coexistence of private and public and the dilemma of their interrelationship forms a problematic linking of the republican ethos, on the one hand, and the friendship of Brutus and Cassius on the other. The friendship and the ethos are separable only for the sake of analysis: dramatically speaking, what draws the two Romans together, whatever the temperamental differences between them, is their dedication to a vision of Rome as a Republic. However, Shakespeare dramatizes the separation of the inner subjective realm from the distinctively public world of romanitas in such a way that it is readable as ideologically produced in that world by the ethos of the Republic. Even as this private subject is being constituted in and by a social field, it is also being gendered masculine, through the association of the public realm with Roman “firmness” and the private realm with the “melting spirits of women” (2.1.121). While this engendering of republican virtue is centered in the character of Brutus, his emergence into Roman virtue is itself staged as a social process: the conception and formation of the conspiracy, the assassination, and the shift of power to the triumvirate afterward. That social process is dramatized as the evolution of oppositions between private and public, feminine and masculine. Scripted in these oppositions, Brutus becomes the supreme representative of republican virtus, who slays his best lover to restore “Rome.” In contrast, Cassius, who is at first the prime spokesman for Roman firmness in defense of the Republic, by the play’s end melts into its best lover. Indeed, the trajectory of their friendship traces the contradiction between republican virtue as sacrifice of self for the common good, and the emulation that inevitably produces one man who stands out as, precisely, supreme exemplar of republican virtue.

A Swimming Match The Republic as an ideology is intricately bound up with the basically agonistic, highly competitive nature of the Roman ruling elite. Cassius’s vignette

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of his swimming match with Caesar (Shakespeare’s invention, an addition to his Plutarchan source materials) captures the routine intensity of competition central to the definition of Romans as men: For once, upon a raw and gusty day, The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores, Caesar said to me, ‘Dar’st thou, Cassius, now Leap in with me into this angry flood And swim to yonder point?’ Upon the word, Accoutred as I was, I plunged in And bade him follow; so indeed he did. The torrent roared, and we did buffet it With lusty sinews, throwing it aside, And stemming it with hearts of controversy. (1.2.100–109) Buffetting the torrent, stretching their lusty sinews on a raw and gusty day, the two Romans are displaying their mettle—their masculine toughness and stamina. Puns on this sort of mettle and “metal” as in iron or steel run through the play, contrasting with references to the “melting spirits of women.”11 As the story continues, Caesar doesn’t simply lose the race. Rather, he starts to sink, calls to Cassius for help, and Cassius “as Aeneas . . . /Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder/The old Anchises bear” (1.2.112– 14) carries him to safety. Rebhorn notes the ironic contrast between Aeneas as the supreme emblem of pietas and Cassius’s use of the emblem to suggest “the triumph of one man over another.”12 In the anecdote Cassius tacks on to this one, he goes even farther to denigrate Caesar by feminizing him, telling of a moment in the Spanish campaign when, afflicted with a fever, the pale and shaking Caesar cries out to his comrade “give me some drink”— like “a sick girl,” Cassius says (1.2.127–28). The swimming match presented here as a spontaneous, gamesome challenge at a casual moment was institutionalized in Roman political life as the cursus honorum, aptly translated by Leo Braudy as “the racetrack of honors.”13 Through a series of electoral contests for state office, patricians won the race for power and prestige, fell behind, or just managed to keep in the running. The play’s first scene ironically recalls one of the biggest races ever, the rivalry of Caesar and Pompey: the tribunes rebuke the people for celebrating Caesar’s triumph—but only because the tribunes themselves are embittered supporters of the defeated Pompey. Caesar and Pompey were allies before they were enemies; Brutus first supported Pompey, but when Pompey fell, became Caesar’s favorite; Brutus and Cassius, though bound together by shared ideals, subtly compete with each other. It is relations between men, not between men and women, that inculcate virtus, and male friendships are indistinguishable from politics

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itself, from which women are formally excluded. Like politics, friendships are innately rivalrous, shifting ambivalently between alliances and enmities; in Rebhorn’s apt description, “an unstable combination of identification and rivalry, love and hate.”14 But how can emulation coexist with “the general good?” The Republic with its balance of powers and the cursus honorum of electoral office might have served to keep emulation within ideological bounds; personal ambition might have fulfilled itself in serving the general good. But historically, it didn’t: Miles remarks that “As the glory and wealth that could be won in the service of a growing empire increased, so did the intensity of competition among aristocrats . . . the leading figures in this new, highly charged, heady atmosphere of political competition did not fit the more restrictive molds of Roman politics.”15 That is the precipitating cause of the conspiracy. As the play opens, Caesar “comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood” (1.1.52), a colossus dwarfing the patricians who were formerly his fellow contestants, on his way to an actual race—the “course” forming part of the celebration of Lupercal.16 Republican ideology is already in crisis, for emulation has generated the biggest winner of them all, who could become king and cancel out the Republic.

Brutus’s Ladder Thus the conspirators’ assumption that all Romans are brothers, united by their shared belief in the Republic, is flatly contradicted by an equally Roman spirit of emulation. In the traditionally character-oriented criticism of Julius Caesar, Cassius bears the burden of an idiosyncratic envy, in contrast to the supposedly altruistic Brutus.17 But Brutus, in fact, is not free from the drive to excel his fellow republicans; rather, he competes in precisely republican terms which, paradoxically, make civic altruism the touchstone of distinction among men. A close look at a key moment, the soliloquy in which Brutus tries to work out a justification for murdering Caesar, will demonstrate this contradiction. Brutus begins with a conclusion: “It must be by his death” (2.1.10) and then works backward to adduce reasons. The first one is impeccable: “I know no personal cause to spurn at him,/But for the general,” he declares, echoing an earlier affirmation of his willingness to risk death for “the general good” (1.2.85). As Brutus struggles to explain how Caesar threatens “the general,” he does not name his desire to be crowned. Surprisingly, this Brutus is willing to brook a king in Rome. Rather, it is how being crowned “might change his nature” (2.1.13) that gives Brutus pause. In trying to move from the conditional “might” to some surer statement of the danger lurking in Caesar’s ambition, Brutus draws on maxims of doubtful applicability: “It is

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the bright day that brings forth the adder” (14), for example. He falters when his own direct observations fail to support the conclusion he seeks: “to speak truth of Caesar,/I have not known when his affections swayed/ More than his reason” (19–21). Then he turns to “a common proof,” as follows: . . . lowliness is young ambition’s ladder Whereto the climber upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend. . . . (2.1.22–27) The ambitious Caesar climbs up the ladder of advancement, which is composed of “lowliness,” his inferiors, the “base degrees” of men whom he is at first willing to look in the face, but on whom he turns his back when he has gotten to the top. This ladder, its climber, and his fellows who serve him in his advance epitomize the institutionalized emulation of the Roman state. Implicitly, Brutus figures as one of those “base degrees” by which Caesar attains “the upmost round.” It is this vision of being trampled on by Caesar that enables Brutus to get to the end of his soliloquy, to “Fashion it thus” even though he has to admit that “the quarrel/Will bear no colour for the thing he is” (2.1.28–30), to make the leap beyond logic and proof to kill Caesar. In images strikingly similar to Brutus’s ladder, Shakespeare also portrays emulation in two plays set in Greek society where the agonistic tradition of western culture was first established: Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida. In Timon, the Poet pictures Fortune enthroned on “a high and pleasant hill,” its base “rank’d with all deserts, all kind of natures/That labour on the bosom of this sphere/To propagate their states.” When Timon, “one man beckon’d from the rest below” advances to the top where Fortune is throned, his “rivals” are “translated” to “slaves and servants,” but when Fortune spurns him, he is cast ruthlessly down to be trampled on by others (1.1.64–90). In Troilus and Cressida, the Trojan War provides a quintessentially emulous context for all relationships.18 Ulysses, arguing that the Greeks can’t win the war because, lacking any respect for their generals, they are split into factions competing with each other, uses an image like Brutus’s: . . . The general’s disdain’d By him one step below, he by the next, The next by him beneath; so every step, Exampled by the first pace that is sick Of his superior, grows to an envious fever Of pale and bloodless emulation. (1.3.129–34).

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Ulysses returns to this kind of image in his extended admonition to Achilles, when he is trying to persuade him to resume fighting and take on Hector’s challenge. The route to honor, he says, is a narrow “strait,” Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path; For emulation hath a thousand sons, That one by one pursue. If you give way Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an entered tide they all rush by And leave you hindmost; Or, like a gallant horse fall’n in first rank, Lie there for pavement for the abject rear, O’er-run and trampled on. Then what they do in present, Though less than yours in past, must o’er-top yours[.] (3.3.155–65) Brutus’s ladder of ambition, Timon’s hill of Fortune, and Ulysses’s narrow, crowded path are fantasies of isolated humiliation: a single man is pictured as falling behind a crowd of rivals, of whom only one can gain the summit, be the sole winner. The reader is encouraged to identify with this solitary loser, but only momentarily, because the image warns us not to fall behind, not to be trampled on, but to “stay the course” (as George H. W. Bush urged in the 1988 U.S. presidential election), chasing the chimera of being “one man” above all others. Throughout Julius Caesar, Brutus is presented as the one Roman to whom the conspirators look for leadership. Cassius casts him in the ancestral role of Rome’s savior; Cinna yearns “O Cassius, if you could/But win the noble Brutus to our party” (1.3.140–41); and Caska thinks Brutus’s participation “Will change to virtue and to worthiness” whatever appears offensive in the conspiracy (1.3.157–60). The conspirators want Brutus to represent the republican principles of egalitarian liberty that the daily agonistic practices of their own social and political life contradict. Brutus readily supplies that representation, suppressing emulation by binding them together as a group, rejecting individual oaths to rely on their internalized, collective commitment to the Republic. Superseding Cassius as the instigator of the conspiracy, Brutus becomes its architect. At precisely those points at which he fulfills his function as the voice of republican purism, however, he also pursues a not-so-subtle oneupmanship against Cassius.19 In a single line, Cassius suggests that the conspirators take an oath; Brutus, in a twenty-seven line rebuttal appealing to the virile courage, faultless honesty, and Roman birthright of his fellows, deems it superficial (2.1.112–39). Cassius urges that Cicero be included in the conspiracy; Brutus vetoes it on the grounds that Cicero won’t take direction (2.1.140–51). Cassius proposes killing Mark Antony as well; Brutus

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opposes him, in a long speech fashioning the murder as a ceremonial sacrifice and the conspirators as its priests (2.1.154–90). In each instance, as many critics have noted, Brutus makes a tactical error. This succession of blunders marks the ideological fault line of Julius Caesar, the point at which republican idealism and emulation meet and clash. Earlier, when Cassius gloated over his success in bending Brutus’s “honourable mettle” (1.2.308), Cassius saw persuasion as a seduction, in which he was the active partner and Brutus the feminized one who lacked the firmness to resist (“For who so firm that cannot be seduced?”; 1.2.311). He even fantasized a counterpart competitive moment, in which he, unlike Brutus, remained firm: If I were Brutus now, and he were Cassius, He should not humour me. . . . (1.2.313–14) No longer seducible, Brutus blocks his seducer’s pragmatic suggestions with a firm, masculine wall of principle. In this oblique contest Brutus wins because he finds the most resonant and compelling rhetoric by which to represent the conspiracy as a noble enterprise for the general good of Rome. Republican principle has become the stakes in a contest of emulation in which Brutus competes to distinguish himself as the Roman most devoted to the Republic. His character no less than that of Cassius, and that of Caesar, is conceived and shaped in terms of the contradiction between republican virtue and Roman emulation.20 Shakespeare goes out of his way to make this point in a little-noticed brief scene devoted to Artemidorus (2.3). After reading aloud his statement warning Caesar of the conspiracy, Artemidorus comments, My heart laments that virtue cannot live Out of the teeth of emulation. (2.3.12–13) A few lines later Caesar, determined to be first in republican virtue, brushes Artemidorus aside, saying “What touches us ourself shall be last served” (3.1.8). The emulation that imbued him with a virtus supreme among Romans is literally the death of him.

Contests of Love Commenting on the popularity and prominence of North’s Plutarch in sixteenth-century England, Bruce Smith writes that the book offered the male readers to whom it was implicitly addressed “a model of male bonding that closely matched the ways in which men related to men in their own society.” In fact, Smith argues, For most sixteenth-century readers the very act of reading North’s translation of Plutarch was an exercise in homosociality. . . . Noble

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men’s lives are the subject of North’s book, in more ways than one. Inspiring his readers to emulate “the speciall actes of the best persons, of the famosest nations of the world” (1.3) is North’s very purpose.21 In other words, the world of Plutarch’s heroes bears a strong resemblance to that of literate sixteenth-century men, an “intensely masculine world [in which] emotional ties are a function of political ties.”22 Thus Sedgwick’s idea of “the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual,” one of the founding concepts of queer theory, pertains not to what was “queer” about sixteenth-century England but rather to what was “straight.”23 From serving men to courtiers, in guildhalls and universities, men sought and enjoyed the company of other men for pleasure, for business, for power. The conventional signs of such friendship included, according to Alan Bray, “the embraces and protestations of love, the common bed and the physical closeness, the physical and emotional intimacy” as well as the public kiss, that we today would tend to call homosexual or “queer.”24 As G. Wilson Knight noted, the love of men for each other permeates Julius Caesar, but the play is utterly lacking in the imagery and diction that, in Coriolanus for example, suggests or even draws attention to the kinds of physical closeness and emotional intimacy that make for eroticism. For example, Aufidius compares his feelings upon receiving Coriolanus into his camp to what he felt for his bride when she first crossed his threshold, and recounts nightly dreams of grappling with his enemy in battle: “Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat” (4.5.126). Julius Caesar, like Coriolanus, is a play driven by emulation, but written in an entirely different register, as it were: its characters’ passions are almost wholly framed within the chaste dictates of “the common good,” “Rome,” “honour.” After the assassination, though, in the scenes at Philippi, Shakespeare shifts focus to the love of Brutus and Cassius for each other and for other men. Thus he complicates our sense of the homosocial continuum in the play’s world, counterbalancing agonistic masculinity with altruistic devotion. In the famous “quarrel scene” (4.3) and the suicide scenes (5.3 and 5.5), he dramatizes the points at which a need for love vies with a desire to come out on top; in which hidden vulnerabilities are revealed despite the characters’ parry and thrust confrontation. The quarrel scene is compelling because Shakespeare reverses the predominant traits so far displayed by each character, revealing the emotional neediness hidden behind Cassius’s cagey, self-possessed demeanor in the conspiracy, and Brutus’s capacity for snarling, mean-spirited rage in contrast to his customary lofty, reasoned abstractions. While each man feels himself slighted by the other, and each accuses the other of failing to deliver what is expected of a friend, the major ironies of

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the scene cut against Brutus. It is Brutus who rebukes Cassius for “rash choler” (4.3.39) in language that is itself rash and choleric (“fret till your proud heart break,” “Must I stand and crouch/Under your testy humour?”; 4.3.42; 45–46). And it is Brutus who stingingly rebukes his friend for having “an itching palm” (4.3.10), yet also for not sending him gold—even though it was raised “by vile means”—to pay his soldiers (4.3.69–77). Cassius, in contrast, simply becomes more and more stunned and wounded, lapsing into impotent threats (“Do not presume too much upon my love:/I may do that I shall be sorry for”; 4.3.63–64), but it is he who actually ends the quarrel by making the ultimate gesture of love: . . . There is my dagger, And here my naked breast: within, a heart Dearer than Pluto’s mine, richer than gold. If that thou beest a Roman, take it forth. I that denied thee gold will give my heart. Strike as thou didst at Caesar . . . (4.3.99–104) The gesture is effective because it is cloaked in the republican ethos. It echoes two previous gestures that also signify dedication to “the common good.” Like Caesar who, “when he perceived the common herd was glad he refused the crown . . . offered them his throat to cut” (1.2.262–65), Cassius bares his breast to Brutus’s knife. In doing so he echoes his own previous gesture of “[baring his] bosom to the thunder-stone” during the storm (1.3.46– 52). This time, to express his desolation at the supposed loss of his friend’s love, he again evokes the self-sacrifice of the republican patriot. He is now ready to die for love as he was prepared earlier to die for the Republic. At this point, Brutus calls himself “a lamb,” confesses he was “ill-tempered,” and offers not only his hand but his heart (4.3.109–17). In effect, by representing his love for Brutus as dedication to the Republic, Cassius has trumped Brutus. As Jan Blits comments in a richly perceptive essay: The republican contest for love . . . is a contest in manliness for the love of other manly men. . . . As manliness is displayed primarily in battle, so the combat between warriors does not stop at the city’s walls. It pervades their loves as well as their enmities.25 In such contests, Brutus always stands to win insofar as no other can equal his manly dedication to the high principles on which the Republic is built. In this skirmish, however, by conflating love of the Republic with love of his friend, Cassius wrests an admission of love from Brutus, who for a moment allows love to prevail over honor. In the performance of each hero’s death, a similar contest between love and honor is staged, and the outcomes epitomize the difference between

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their characters. Even by Plutarch’s time, suicide had acquired its own conventions of performance, in which the death of Portia’s father Cato, to avoid defeat at the hands of Caesar, was the supreme model. The early modern stage took its hermeneutics of suicide from the Romans, for whom death by one’s own hand signified a rationally grounded free will, which was widely admired even in the face of Christian strictures. In Julius Caesar as in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses suicide to articulate the problematics of emulation.26 Essentially, suicide is the final stage of emulation, because it is understood primarily as a means not merely of avoiding defeat, but of defeating one’s rival by depriving him of his expected triumph. Etymologically speaking, suicide means the killing of oneself, a misnomer in the Roman terms of its performance, because it is an affair between men. Both Cassius and Brutus rely on other Romans to accomplish their deaths (similarly, in Antony and Cleopatra, Antony relies on his servant Eros). Should a man follow the dictates of honor and help a fellow-Roman to honorable death, or should he refuse, for the sake of love? Characteristically, Cassius desires to die for the sake of his friend Titinius. Mistakenly believing that Titinius has been captured and will be killed, he wants to share his death: O, coward that I am, to live so long, To see my best friend ta’en before my face. (5.3.34–35) (Similarly, when Titinius discovers Cassius’s body, he too kills himself for love, saying, “Brutus, come apace,/And see how I regarded Caius Cassius”; 5.3.87–88.) Cassius asks his slave Pindarus to keep an oath to which he swore previously, and promises him his freedom if he guides the sword on which his master would fall. Pindarus obliges—but is then smitten with guilt, and flees for shame, “Where never Roman shall take note of him” (5.3.50). He obeyed his master’s request out of honor and self-interest both, but his love prevails in the end.27 Brutus, on the other hand, asks three friends in turn to assist his suicide, and counts their refusals as testimony of their loyalty: My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me. (5.5.34–35) Here he seems to prize love over honor. But in his next lines, the balance tips the other way: I shall have glory by this losing day More than Octavius and Mark Antony By this vile conquest shall attain unto. (5.5.36–38) In his final moments, he strikes the characteristic note of the Roman ever measuring himself against his fellows, ever striving against them to win in

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the “racecourse of honor.” And Antony’s eulogy reaffirms that attitude by recasting it in terms of the republican ethos. Singling out Brutus from the other conspirators, he declares: He only, in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them. (5.5.71–72) which makes him “the noblest Roman of them all” (5.5.68). It is a compliment that agrees exactly with Brutus’s idea of himself.

Notes Portions of this chapter have been adapted from my book Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London: Routledge, 1997). 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 63. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosexual Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Bray’s work has proven indispensable to our understanding of the historical specificity of homosocial and homoerotic relations in early modern England. He identifies male friendship as inhering in a “network of subtle bonds amongst influential patrons and their clients, suitors, and friends at court,” a network central to civil order that nonetheless bore “an unacknowledged connection” to sodomy (“Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994], 42, 47). Wayne A. Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar ,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 77. For a discussion of emulation as a pervasive cultural style in early modern England, see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 91–93. On the play’s public style, see Gayle Greene, “‘The Power of Speech / To Stir Men’s Blood’: The Language of Tragedy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 11 (1980): 67–93, and John W. Velz, “Orator and Imperator in Julius Caesar: Style and the Process of Roman History,” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 55–75. On this performance of Roman identity, see John W. Velz, “‘If I Were Brutus Now . . .’: Roleplaying in Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 149–59, and Brents Stirling’s chapter “‘Or else were this a savage spectacle’” in his Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy: The Interplay of Theme and Character (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 40–54. Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 59. See J. T. B. Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 27–38. Gary B. Miles, “How Roman Are Shakespeare’s ‘Romans?,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 257–83. Brutus remarks that Caska was “quick mettle when he went to school” (1.2.295); in the next scene, that mettle is shaken by the storm, “when all the sway of earth/Shakes like a thing unfirm” (1.3.3–4), impelling Caska to argue with the unshaken Cassius that “It is the part of men to fear and tremble” (1.3.54) at such moments. Brutus asserts that the conspiracy has reasons strong enough “to steel with valour/The melting spirits of women” (2.1.120–21), spirits he contrasts to “th’insuppressive mettle” of the conspirators (2.1.133). Caesar opposes his unshakable constancy to “that which melteth fools” (3.1.39–42). Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy,” 83. Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 61. Rebhorn, “The Crisis of the Aristocracy,” 77. Miles, “Shakespeare’s ‘Romans,’” 260–61.

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“Passions of some difference” • 283 16. See Naomi Conn Liebler, “‘Thou Bleeding Piece of Earth’: The Ritual Ground of Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 175. 17. For a discussion of the persistent critical opposition of character to “the political,” see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 78–79. 18. See Eric Mallin, “Emulous Factions and the Collapse of Chivalry: Troilus and Cressida,” Representations 29 (1990): 143–79. 19. In the 1959 essay that challenged the prevailing idealization of Brutus, Gordon Ross Smith listed fourteen occasions on which he “demands control for its own sake” because he cannot “bear the thought of anyone’s being able to rule over him” (“Brutus, Virtue, and Will,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 [1959]: 367–79). Gayle Greene analyzes Brutus’s use of rhetoric to avoid facing moral questions (“‘The Power of Speech,’” 78–84). Gary Miles’s portrait of Brutus as naïve, self-deceived, and exemplifying “the essential weakness of all humanity” (“Shakespeare’s ‘Romans,’” 279) follows the recent tendency toward disenchantment with Brutus. 20. As critics have noticed, Brutus can be paired with both Cassius and Caesar. Norman Rabkin, for example, argues that in two successive scenes (2.1 and 2.2) Brutus and Caesar are paralleled as “flawed giants” who both put country before self, yet in doing so reveal their vanity; see his Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), 112. While I recognize these patterns of characterization, I think the common ideological formation for Brutus and Cassius as Romans and republicans works at a deeper, more determining level, where the contradictions inherent in republican ideology drive the dramatic action. 21. Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 56–57. 22. Ibid., 57. 23. Sedgwick, Between Men, 1. 24. Bray, “Homosexuality,” 46. Bray explains how the signs of such legitimate friendship could be confused with the signs of the crime of sodomy, under the terms of “a kind of code . . . something individuals were still free to manipulate” (51). 25. Jan H. Blits, “Manliness and Friendship in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Interpretations 9 (1981): 158–59. 26. For this interpretation of Roman suicide, see Kahn, Roman Shakespeare, 121–27, 130–33. 27. For a meticulous close reading of the suicides in this scene, see Blits, “Manliness and Friendship,” 162–66.

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PART

IV

Julius Caesar on Stage

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CHAPTER

16

Stage Worlds of Julius Caesar Theatrical Features and Their History JAMES RIGNEY

Important reasons for the popularity of Julius Caesar are the scope it provides for spectacle, its rhetorical high-spots such as Mark Antony’s funeral oration in act 3, scene 2, and the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius in act 4. Nonetheless, Julius Caesar is also acknowledged to be a play with substantial theatrical drawbacks. These drawbacks include the absence of significant female roles, a crowd that must be neither too active nor too passive, a titular hero who dies before the play is half over, two (or perhaps three) other roles of great interest competing for attention, and two final acts that threaten to dwindle into anti-climax. In terms of both character and structure, therefore, Julius Caesar is found wanting. In what follows I will examine two perceived deficiencies from among this list, the dwindling of acts 4 and 5 and the lack of a clearly determined central figure, and some of the ways in which productions from the long history of Julius Caesar on stage have attempted to deal with them. There are both editorial and theatrical answers to the perceived imbalance of the play. For J. M. Robertson, who discussed the structure of Julius Caesar in his The Shakespeare Canon (1922), the play’s structure points to the combination of two plays—Caesar’s Tragedy and Caesar’s Revenge— into one play known as Julius Caesar.1 A less disintegrationist theory was put forward half a century later by Marvin Spevack in his New Cambridge Shakespeare Edition of the play (1988), where he suggested that a climax falling in the middle of the play is explicable and, moreover, allows for a second half where, as with Romeo and Juliet (recently finished when Julius 287

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Caesar was written) and Hamlet (perhaps in progress at the time), the focus of the play falls on the growing isolation and estrangement of the hero.2 This explanation in terms of the play’s treatment of character is supported by Harley Granville-Barker’s view that Shakespeare’s plays in general are driven by character rather than by event.3 According to such a view the apparent character imbalances are explained away by positing that Shakespeare wrote four intensely interlaced psychological studies. In performance such a view underlies, for example, Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 film of Julius Caesar. There, within a broad division of the story into two parts—the plot of the conspirators and the counter-plot of Antony—Mankiewicz structured his play around contrasting human events: Caesar’s entrance and his limping exit, the storm and the battle, the pleading of Portia and the pleading of Calphurnia, the murder of Caesar and the murder of Cinna, the quarrel between Antony and Octavius and Brutus and Cassius. Cutting the text provides another model for managing the play. Herbert Beerbohm Tree, for example, cut the text substantially for his 1898 production, and Michael Benthall in 1955 coped with what he saw as the problems of act 5 by removing large portions of the text completely. However, successful cutting on a large scale is uncommon, and Bekki Jo Schneider’s reduction of the play to a running time of one hour and forty-five minutes in 1979 is a rare example where skillful cutting produced an impression that was striking rather than jarring. The scenic potential of the battle scenes of act 5 was powerfully exploited by the staging of the Duke of Meiningen’s Company in 1881 and provided an argument for retaining much of this act. In the Meiningen production the downstage area represented the plain of Philippi, while a rocky height rose on stage right. In the middle of the stage was a gully over which arched a high bridge. While Octavius, Antony, and their armies marched from stage right into the valley, Brutus and Cassius with their legions made a slow descent from the heights: the one above, the other below. When the curtain finally fell, the victorious commanders stood high on the bridge, lit only by torches, looking down on their defeated enemy lying in the shadows. An alternative to such sparseness was to clutter the scene with the desolation of war, as Barry Sullivan, for example, did in his 1864 Melbourne, Australia, production and the American John McCullough did in his revivals between 1878 and 1884. Roger Hermantier’s 1955 production utilized the outdoor arena in Nimes. The opposing armies could charge at each other quite realistically in that large space. (This was later modified when Hermantier moved the production into the large indoor stage of the Palais de Chaillot.) However impressive or exciting such staging may be, it cannot in itself eradicate the ambiguity of the play’s ending.

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One strategy for linking the parts of the play has been to reintroduce a manifestation of Caesar in act 5. In the 1958 Old Vic production, for example, the ghost was reintroduced here to cry, “I am thy evil spirit. Philippi, Philippi, Philippi!” In Sir Frank Benson’s productions from 1892 to 1915, as Cassius died shouts of “Ave Caesar” were heard off-stage. The Northern Star reappears as Brutus delivered his eulogy to Cassius in Glen Byam Shaw’s 1957 production. In Tree’s 1898 production, Brutus is seen pointing, as though at the ghost of Caesar, as he delivers his lines at 5.3.98–110. More chillingly, in David Thacker’s 1993 production one of the soldiers killing prisoners after the battle removes his balaclava and reveals himself to Brutus as the ghost of Caesar. The director Robert Atkins recorded that in one of Benson’s performances “Arthur Bourchier, the Brutus, must have collected every scrap of tin, brass and iron he could lay his hands on for the battle scene, for no Roman ever clanked as he did. The enemy must have heard his approach from miles away.”4 In a similar vein, Alec Guinness recalled two equally appalling productions of Julius Caesar he had seen as a schoolboy in the early 1930s— the first of these had been Ben Greet’s production at Eastbourne: . . . it was obvious that most of the men had spent the day sunbathing on the beach; they were scarlet except for white areas, revealed by togas or Roman armour, where their one-piece bathing costumes with shoulder straps had protected them. Ben Greet himself shuffled around as Casca and you caught glimpses of his rolled-up trousers under his costume.5 The grandeur and spectacle of opposing armies which has so often been the route by which directors have sought to rescue the play from theatrical disintegration, or at least paper-over its faults, encounters the same tension that is at work in the early part of the play. Beneath the armor and the politics are human beings whose fallibility and complexity mock the smooth lines of classical theatrical choreography. The issue whether Antony, Brutus, or Cassius, or even Caesar himself, is the most important role in the play is one that has complicated the history of Julius Caesar both in performance and interpretation. It is recorded of the actor, David Garrick: I have seen the character of Cassius accurately delineated in Mr Garrick’s own hand-writing . . . and it is very probable that he had given his consent to act the part, but that, on serious reflection, he had renounced his intention, as the weight of applause, in the much admired scene between these great men in the fourth act of the play, must have fallen to the share of Brutus.6

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One solution has been to pander to the egoism of actor-managers and resolve the dilemma according to which role they chose to play. So William Charles Macready, although he worked hard for an ensemble effect in his productions, expected all other parts to defer to his own: Whatever was his part for the night, whether it was . . . Brutus or Cassius . . . that part must be the feature of the play; and this was to be effected not by his own towering and surpassing excellence in the character, but by such an arrangement of the scene, and such a position of every other person on the stage, as must make all others subordinate.7 To the British politician, Michael Foot, writing in the program notes to Ron Daniels’s 1983 Royal Shakespeare Company production, Cassius was the real hero of the play, “the real man of flesh and blood and feeling, the true, responsible, far-seeing revolutionary.” In the nineteenth century, the American actor Edwin Booth’s Cassius was comet-like, rushing and terrible—not lacking in human emotion, but possessing an emotion colored with something sinister, while his contemporary Lawrence Barrett sought to express the intellectual and aristocratic isolation of Cassius. Rob Edward’s Cassius in David Thacker’s production at Stratford in 1993 combined these two traditions into a portrait of a man driven by both a personal loathing of Caesar and a need for the male camaraderie of conspiracy. Lawrence Barrett was so impressed with Antony’s seductive qualities that he habitually changed his costume after two acts as Cassius, slipped on a blonde wig, played the oration scene, got his reward of applause, and then finished his part of Cassius in succeeding acts. From the time of Robert Wilks, who is first revealed as playing Mark Antony in 1707, through William Milward and Spranger Barry (Mark Antony in 1734–1736 and 1750–1751, respectively), it was customary to play Antony as a chivalrous young athlete. The temptation to play Antony as the more virile character can expose a weakness in characterization, so Bryan Johnson, Antony in Donald Wolfit’s 1949 production, was described as “dressed like a rowing Blue” and delivering his oration “as might be expected of a man about to stroke Oxford to victory next spring.”8 The Meiningen’s Ludwig Barnay (in John Ripley’s view the first really subtle Mark Antony)9 made the Forum speech a scene of naturalistic demagoguery. Barnay’s performance inspired Tree to take this role in his revival of the play, but Tree could not resist cutting the text in order to highlight his character. The assassination scene and the Forum scene therefore became the focus of the play, and only as much of acts 4 and 5 as were required to tie up the loose ends of the play were retained to avoid an anti-climax after the Forum speech.

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Even though Coleridge famously confessed himself unable to “see into Shakespeare’s motive, the rationale—or in what point he meant Brutus’ character to appear,”10 eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century commentators saw him as the principal character. Some twentieth-century critics such as Mark Hunter and producers such as Orson Welles have gone further and revised Brutus’s status as a hero, seeing him instead as an egotistical, priggish, maladroit politician11—a view reflected in many twentieth-century productions. Vivian Thomas in Shakespeare’s Roman Worlds (1989) has observed the manner in which Shakespeare made a number of subtle shifts to cast ironic light on the figure of Brutus whom he inherits from Plutarch, highlighting for example the sense of Brutus’s betrayal of Caesar and Brutus’s lack of awareness of this, as well as investing Brutus with an abrasive and sometimes over-confident quality that is also absent from Plutarch.12 For much of the stage history of the play interpretations have diminished these qualities. Betterton’s acclaimed performance as Brutus at the beginning of the eighteenth century, as well as generally ensuring the popularity of Julius Caesar on the contemporary stage, also established a particular sense of Brutus as an embodiment of heroic dignity. The pre-eminence of Brutus, and this particular representation of his character, was aided and abetted by the Dryden/Davenant version of the play (published in 1719) which provided the contemporary text. This version cut speeches to present Brutus in the best possible light: so, for example, his advice to the conspirators to dissimulate was excised along with his business with the lost book in act 4 and other signs of human frailty in order to create a more proper, if less human and credible, figure. Thus dignity is the principal quality demanded of actors playing Brutus, and commentators were quick to notice when it was absent. George Bernard Shaw criticized Lewis Waller’s performance as Brutus in Tree’s production: His intention clearly was to represent Brutus as a man superior to fate and circumstance; but the effect he produced was one of insensibility. Nothing could have been more unfortunate; for it is through the sensibility of Brutus that the audience have to learn what they cannot learn from the phlegmatic pluck of Casca or the narrow vindictiveness of Cassius: that is, the terrible momentousness . . . of the impending catastrophe.13 To the eighteenth century, Caesar was the villain of the play, a strutting tyrant removed from the scene by the real heroes—Brutus and Cassius. As a result the role was generally played by a weak actor, or by an actor hoping to use it as a stepping-stone to better parts. Hugh Hunt, at the Old Vic in 1953 was one of the earliest directors to seek to centralize the character of Caesar. Robert Stephens in Steven Pimlott’s 1991 production shifted from

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imperial wreck to potent manipulator: at one moment searching with unfocused eyes for Antony, at the next pitching his voice so that Cassius will hear his criticism of him. Caesar must fulfil the dramaturgic need for his character to overshadow the play, to account, for example, for the storm and the portents, unless these are to be presented as hysterical amplifications of a piece of bad weather. Directors continue to be torn between showing a Caesar in decline or a Caesar still potent. The importance of the choice lies in the need for Caesar to provide a motive for the conspiracy. Caesar has to give some reason for the conspiracy to happen, yet if he is nakedly Fascist, as in Terry Hands’s production in 1987, then Brutus’s moral qualms become difficult to explain. Moreover, as Anthony Brennan has shown, Shakespeare is at pains to give significance to the claim that Caesar is mighty beyond death. The emergence of Caesar’s ghost in pursuit of revenge is simply the most obvious, culminating sequence of the pervasive power of Caesar that is being impressed in the audience by various means throughout: the Lupercalian ceremony, the dramatic use of Caesar’s corpse, and the proportion of the major roles.14 Following the lead set by Hugh Hunt in 1953, Glen Byam Shaw’s Stratford production in 1957 offered what was still a bold centralization of Caesar. Shaw’s production began with the revelation of a large statue of Caesar which was moved off-stage to allow the parting of the set walls and the living Caesar, Cyril Luckham, was revealed (the niche in which his statue stood stayed eloquently empty in the background of Brutus’s garden). As a figure dominating the Roman landscape Caesar’s influence has, in some modern productions, been expressed and enhanced by monuments. In Terry Hands’s 1987 production a large statue of Caesar dominates the opening scenes; after his death the statue, and sometimes a Roman eagle, are projected onto the back wall. John Schlesinger’s 1977 production featured bas-reliefs of Caesar’s head protruding from mobile concave flats, while a medallion head of Caesar dominated much of Peter Hall’s 1995 Stratford production, debouching rivulets of blood from under its hairline in the second half of the play. This marmoreal representation of Caesar suits those productions that respond to the appeal of the play with monumental sets that dwarf the human figures and evoke the great weight of classical civilization. Their inadequacy is written in the blood that marks the center and the ending of the play—individual deaths, the products of human passion that is contained neither by Shakespeare’s play nor by productions of it.

Notes 1.

J. M. Robertson, The Shakespeare Canon (London: Routledge, 1922), 1: 66–154.

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Stage Worlds of Julius Caesar • 293 2. Marvin Spevack, “Introduction” to Julius Caesar, ed. Spevack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 16. 3. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (1930; repr., London: B. T. Batsford, 1961), 2: 351. 4. Robert Atkins, An Unfinished Autobiography, ed. George Rowell (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1994), 49. 5. Alec Guinness, My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor (New York: Viking, 1997), 43–44. 6. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, new ed. (1780, 1808; repr., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 1: 134. 7. George Vandenhoff, Dramatic Reminiscences (1860); quoted in John Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 88. 8. Harold Hobson, “Mr. Wolfit’s Brutus,” The Sunday Times, 25 September 1949. 9. Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 148–50. 10. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism , ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2d ed. (London: J. M. Dent, 1960), 1: 14. 11. See Mark Hunter, “Politics and Character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, n.s., 10 (1931): 136ff. 12. Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare’s Roman Worlds (London: Routledge, 1989), 60. 13. Edwin Wilson, ed., Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961), 112–13. 14. Anthony Brennan, Onstage and Offstage Worlds in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 1989), 262ff.

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CHAPTER

17

Orson Welles and After Julius Caesar and Twentieth Century Totalitarianism MICHAEL ANDEREGG

“On 6 November 1937, at his fledging Mercury Theatre, Orson Welles dragged [ Julius] Caesar with traumatic abruptness into the twentieth century, accompanied by a degree of controversy unknown in its history.” So John Ripley writes in his otherwise sober “Julius Caesar” on Stage.1 The somewhat overheated tone is worthy of Welles himself, but Ripley’s assessment is not far off the mark. Few productions of a Shakespeare play have aroused as much interest, and have been as well remembered, as the socalled “Fascist” Julius Caesar. Set on “a bare stage, the brick walls of which are crimson and naked,”2 emphasizing to the full the sculptural as well as melodramatic possibilities of lighting, and employing carefully choreographed crowd movement, the production was seen as “pure theatre; vibrant, unashamed and enormously effective.”3 Although best remembered for its “Fascist” accouterments—modern military uniforms, straight-armed salutes, “Nuremberg” lighting—Welles’s Caesar was at least as notable for the speed and simplicity of its staging, which brought to mind the “format of a radio or film script with episodes fading one into another, punctuated only by light, darkness, and sound effects.”4 Welles’s Caesar—subtitled Death of a Dictator—impressed critics and audiences of the time for its combination of a stylized simplicity and a thrilling evocation of contemporary political realities. The two worked in tandem—a modernist anti-realism combined with an urgency that grew out of the “Living Newspaper” format of the Works Progress Administration’s 295

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Federal Theater, resulting in a style “compact, authoritative, fluid, and enormously absorbing.”5 “Shakespeare has written so timely and provocative a piece”—Heywood Broun wrote in The New Republic—“that the critics were actually arguing whether he favored fascism or communism or was perhaps a Trotskyite.”6 But, according to Joseph Wood Krutch, “there is no forcing of the parallel and no distortion of Shakespeare’s play to point a modern moral . . . If this ‘Julius Caesar’ is not precisely that of the Elizabethans it emphasizes nothing which any modern reader of the play could well avoid seeing in it.”7 “The tragedy of the Globe Theatre across the Thames,” Brooks Atkinson wrote, “becomes the melodramatic tragedy of modern times just a few doors east of Broadway.”8 The Mercury production, as several of the reviewers were quick to note, thoroughly streamlined and simplified Shakespeare’s play. Welles virtually eliminated two of the five acts, creating a more or less modern play on the bare skeletal outline of his original. He re-arranged scenes and altered the identity of speakers. The second movement of the play, the revenge of Caesar, was, perhaps necessarily, curtailed in a production that stressed the evils of dictatorship (“the text was viciously hacked,” John Ripley somewhat melodramatically claims, “to underline the political motif ”).9 Theatre Arts missed “the stir of the opposing battle scenes” and complained that “most of Antony [had been] excised to keep the character of Brutus always as the focus of the action.”10 Other directors, however, have discovered that the final two acts, apart from the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, lack the dramatic urgency of the first three. Additionally, multiple battle scenes are difficult to stage convincingly. Welles’s cuts, nonetheless, were drastic by any standard. On the other hand, the brief scene (3.3) in which the poet Cinna is mistaken for the conspirator with the same name, traditionally omitted in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century productions, became the highlight of the Mercury Caesar. In the words of one critic, “Not even the Group Theater in all their frenzy against dictators ever devised a more overwhelming scene than that in which the poet, Cinna, is swallowed up by an angry mob.”11 Norman Lloyd, who played Cinna, has well described the effect: “I played a very gentle, diffident man with a great deal of pantomimic comedy; the terror came out of the comedy, which becomes very moving in the theatre.” Unable to convince his listeners that he is not Cinna the conspirator, he is pressed all around by the mob. “As the gang surrounded me, I disappeared from the view of the audience save for one raised hand, with one last scream, ‘The Poet!’ The mob rushed me down the ramp at the back of the set out of sight of the audience, as if I were being devoured by an animal.”12 “[F]or power and sinister meaning,” Grenville Vernon wrote, this scene “has never been surpassed in the American theatre.”13

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The critics, for the most part, were impressed as well by the way the main actors interpreted their roles. The twenty-two year old Orson Welles played Brutus as “a baffled, somewhat bewildered liberal, not the man of action of the great actors who have played it in the past, but primarily a dreamer, noble in his ideals, intellectual, introspective”;14 Time called him “an introspective idealist in a blue serge suit.”15 Although his performance was generally praised, Martin Gabel’s Cassius and George Colouris’s Antony received at least as much attention. “Cassius who was held up to us in school as a scheming villain now seems to me the only man among the conspirators who stands out as realistic in his point of view,” Heywood Broun observed.16 Though in no way lean and hungry, Gabel’s Cassius was a “spleeny agitator, surrounded by grim adherents in modern mufti, slouch hats pluck’d about their ears.”17 It is perhaps harder to imagine Colouris as Antony. A steely, “dry” actor (he was to play Thatcher, the banker, in Welles’s Citizen Kane), he would seem to have lacked the “Asiatic” qualities—“florid, indulgent, extravagant”—that Plutarch attributes to Antony and to which Shakespeare several times alludes. On the other hand, Colouris was undoubtedly convincing as the “Fascist” Antony of act 3 and beyond—cold, calculating, and ruthless. (Colouris, interestingly, would soon play an archetypal Fascist on stage and screen in Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine.) We can partially reconstruct elements of Welles’s production from photographs and, perhaps more vividly still, by listening to the radio abridgment of Caesar he presented on his Mercury Theatre on the Air (11 September 1938). Although much of what made his modern dress production memorable on stage—costuming and lighting especially—could not, of course, be reproduced on the radio, Welles nonetheless found an ingenious way of modernizing Caesar by employing a narration by the CBS news reporter, H. V. Kaltenborn, well-known to radio listeners for his bulletins from Europe. Mark Blitzstein’s modernist score, adapted from the stage production, and appropriate sound effects (marching feet, crowd noises, etc.) completed the illusion of immediacy Welles was after. The radio Caesar is particularly useful in giving us a sense of how Welles handled the crowd scenes. In place of a loud, boisterous mob (or the illusion of such provided by a few extras), Welles choreographs a handful of individual voices who sometimes shout, sometimes whisper, modulating rapidly from one register to the other. When Antony reveals Caesar’s wounds—“Look you here,/Here is himself, marred as you see with traitors” (3.2.194–95)—one voice from the crowd shouts “oh, villains,” another voice, “oh, traitors.” And then, after a moment of total silence, a voice whispers, “revenge.” Several voices repeat the word, quietly but urgently, with a few variations: “we’ll be revenged, vengeance.” The next voice cries out

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“vengeance,” and is immediately cut off by Antony’s “stay, good countrymen.” Near the conclusion of Antony’s speech, we hear a whispered “we’ll mutiny.” Then, in a normal speaking voice, “we’ll burn the house of Brutus,” followed by a series of quietly spoken imperatives, “about, seek, burn, kill, slay,” until Antony, once again, picks up the thread, certain now that he has the crowd completely under his control: a chilling demonstration of demagoguery and mass hysteria. Having introduced the broadcast as “the personal tragedy of a great liberal,” Welles goes on to give a diffident, low-key reading of Brutus. He is, throughout, tentative and self-conscious, in sharp contrast to the forceful, bitter, insinuating manner of Martin Gabel’s Cassius. In the so-called “Tent Scene,” which features a fierce argument between Brutus and Cassius, Welles sounds pompous, giving the impression that Brutus, not Cassius, is in the wrong. One suspects that playing “a great liberal” did not, as a performer, interest him all that much, and that Brutus is not nearly as compelling or as accessible to him as the manipulator Cassius or the opportunist Mark Antony: when the play was recorded for Columbia Records in 1938, Welles chose to play the latter two roles. The Mercury Caesar drew its most immediate inspiration from the political events taking place in Germany, Italy, Spain, and, indeed, much of Europe, but it would not have been possible without specific theatrical models as well. Welles and his partner John Houseman only had to look at the production of Julius Caesar in Modern Clothes staged months earlier by the Delaware Federal Theatre. Although in no way as imaginative as the Mercury production—the Fascist parallels appear to have been primarily a matter of costuming; the text followed nineteenth century promptbook traditions—this was probably the first production of the play to make unambiguous connections between Rome and contemporary Italy. “[A]s far as is known,” the critic for the Wilmington Morning News observed, “this presentation of ‘Julius Caesar’ is the first of its kind since the days of Shakespeare, when all plays, historic or not, were costumed in the ordinary garb of the times.”18 If this were not inspiration enough, the playwright Sidney Howard, in a letter to Houseman dated 9 February 1937, had suggested that the Mercury stage Julius Caesar as a modern play about Fascism.19 Welles was pre-empted as well by a remarkable production of Caesar (of which he was probably not aware) staged in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in the summer of 1936, directed by Jiri Frejka and designed by Frantisek Troster. Though not in modern dress, it was certainly in modern style, demonstrating that even in togas, the actors of Shakespeare’s Roman drama participated in the politics of their own time. In this production, “the megalomania of the play, so frighteningly appropriate to the time, was incarnated by absurdly monumental statuary” including “a titanic head of the emperor on

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an upright pedestal.”20 After Caesar’s murder, the colossal head fell and shattered, its pieces lying among broken columns. As Dennis Kennedy writes, “[i]t was as if the threatened war had arrived not in the Roman Empire but in Prague.”21 A courageous political act, the Frejka/Troster Julius Caesar, with its clearly signaled abhorrence of dictatorships, led to attacks in the right-wing press, heralding the end to a bold artistic collaboration. There were precedents, too, for Welles’s simplified and stylized staging methods. The Mercury production (and the Delaware production before it) was undeniably influenced by the success of a number of “modern dress” versions of Shakespeare’s plays in England and elsewhere in the twenties and thirties. Welles, furthermore, had absorbed many of the lessons of the so-called “New Stagecraft.” His production depended for its effects primarily on expressive employment of lighting: “the giant backwall shadow of Antony, speaking over Caesar’s body; a cross-hatching of light and shadow high up in the loft, unintentionally giving the impression of crossed fasces”; and, at the climax, “vertical shafts of light stabbing up through the darkness as background for the eulogy to the noblest Roman of them all.”22 In a school edition of Julius Caesar the teen-aged Welles had co-edited in 1934, he had asserted that scenery was not essential for the staging of Shakespeare. He had even provided a sketch for a permanent set which in its simplicity and flexibility prefigures the Mercury production: a minimalist combination of steps and platforms on an otherwise bare stage. Here, too, a specific precedent can be cited: in Harcourt Williams’s 1930 production of Julius Caesar at the Old Vic, “Columns, steps, and rostrum blocks placed in front of curtains constituted the only scenic elements.”23 In employing a small cast, no traditional scenery, and few props, Welles was, in one way, going with the flow: Thornton Wilder was preparing to do precisely the same thing with Our Town, produced the following year. Furthermore, Welles and Houseman, albeit under duress, had notoriously produced The Cradle Will Rock without scenery only a few months earlier. The difference, of course, is that Shakespeare, particularly to American critics and audiences, had long been thought to require elaborate scenography. Life magazine welcomed the change: “steam pipes, fire hoses and radiators formed a fitting setting for turbulent midnight conspiracies against an incipient Roman dictator.”24 The boldness of Welles’s enterprise stood out with particular force when contrasted to the dismal failure of Antony and Cleopatra, starring Tallulah Bankhead and staged with traditional elaborate settings at a cost of $100,000, which had opened the previous evening—10 November 1937—to scathing reviews (“Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra—and sank”),25 only to close five days later. Not everyone was pleased with the Mercury Caesar, of course. Stark Young, in The New Republic, was disappointed: “So much time filled with

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badly dressed men, holding their hands down to their sides, clipping, when they spoke, the basic form and glow of the lines, often resulted in mere drabness.”26 V. F. Calverton, in Current History, while praising many aspect of the production, complained that “the character of Julius Caesar as envisioned by Shakespeare suffered considerable distortion and mutilation.”27 For the most part, however, critics agreed that the production, taken on its own terms, was a success, and most seemed to agree with Richard Watts: “Here, splendidly acted and thrillingly produced is what must certainly be the great Julius Caesar of our time.”28 More recently, the critical tendency has been to denigrate Welles’s production. “Modern attempts to confront [ . . . Julius Caesar] have sometimes taken it away from Rome,” David Daniell writes in the latest Arden Edition of the play, “as if the only way now to make sense of it were to make Caesar a modern Fascist dictator and Brutus and Cassius the leaders of a popular front . . . such simplification offers us Shakespeare’s play shorn of mysteries and resonances.”29 Comments like these partly disguise an unease with any interpretation of Julius Caesar critical of its titular figure. Whereas the stage history of Julius Caesar, particularly in nineteenth century America, has generally favored Brutus over Caesar, taking the former very much at his own valuation, the critical history of the play in the twentieth century has been governed by an essentially conservative point of view. While paying lip service to the belief that Shakespeare did not take sides in his delineation of the major characters (itself a dubious proposition), editors and critics often find it necessary to downgrade Brutus and puff up Caesar at every opportunity. Daniell, for example, provides the reader of his Arden text with a running discourse on the virtues of Caesar and the weakness, perfidy, and folly of Brutus. Daniell even undercuts Brutus’s memorable “There is a tide in the affairs of men” speech, describing it as “a sermon on a worn adage about opportunity” which Brutus makes stand “for practical and detailed discussion with Cassius.”30 Shakespeare, evidently, needs considerable help in making his (conservative) politics clear. A “Fascist” setting, in any case, does not necessarily simplify the complexities of Shakespeare’s play. Welles’s production, as much as it may have employed Hitler and Albert Speer’s “Nuremberg” lighting, is clearly meant to allude to Italian Fascism—we are still in Rome, Caesar is, more or less, Mussolini, and Mussolini is not Hitler. In 1937, even a progressive would have been able to make distinctions between Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini. Welles’s casting of Joseph Holland as Caesar, and the manner in which Holland performed the role, was intended to remind audiences of Il Duce, a man with very human, larger than life virtues (like personal courage) and flaws. Whatever we may think of Mussolini today, in the mid-1930s he was still capable of appealing to a range of political sensibilities. There was, at

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the very least, an ambiguity about his character and motives that provides a convincing analogy to Shakespeare’s portrait of Caesar, a figure at once noble and ridiculous, vainglorious and brave. To have made Caesar into Hitler would have made nonsense of Shakespeare’s play; to make Caesar resemble Mussolini is another thing altogether. Although Welles’s Mercury production has come to be known as the “Fascist” Julius Caesar, a genuinely Fascist Caesar was produced at the Staatstheater in Berlin in 1941, directed by Jürgen Fehling and starring, in the title role, the brilliant and notorious Werner Krauss, who that same year appeared in Jud Süss, “one of the most vicious anti-Semitic films ever made.”31 Recent research has shown that Nazi theater, for a variety of interconnected reasons, was freer from official interference than might have been expected.32 One would nevertheless think that Julius Caesar was a dangerous play to put on in a dictatorship. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising to learn that Fehling did “everything in his power to enhance the role of Caesar and mark him out as the man of the future.”33 Caesar’s fall, in this production, was a “historical catastrophe, and his murder a crime of mythic proportion.”34 Brutus lacked conviction, and failed “deservedly because of his adherence to dead ideas of liberal individualism comparable to the ones that had been current in the Weimar republic,”35 whereas Mark Antony was “the warm, open-hearted friend, unsuspecting and generous, dragged into politics almost against his will but, once involved, an unstoppable force.”36 Certainly, “[I]t would be difficult to claim that such a production was an invitation to tyrannicide,”37 and yet one cannot help but wonder if audiences would have seen only what Fehling intended them to see. The theatrical history of Julius Caesar subsequent to World War II has inevitably reverberated with echoes of the Mercury production. Though directors would not necessarily follow Welles’s lead in constructing a specific Fascist context, few Caesars would be entirely free of the ghost of Mussolini. Almost any modern-dress production could be seen as alluding to the Mercury Caesar, of course. One of the first to follow Welles’s chronologically was staged in 1930s costuming in May of 1938 at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge; according to John Ripley, however, “there was no overt attempt to force a contemporary political parallel.”38 Interestingly, both the first British (BBC, 24 July 1938) and the first U. S. (CBS, 12 March 1949) television productions of Julius Caesar were in modern dress, perhaps a bow to the modernity of television itself. The BBC production directly alluded to Welles’s, Italian uniforms and all, with some more elaborate updatings: “In the battle scenes, tanks, gas-masks, and dugouts were commonplace; and revolvers served as the instruments of death.”39 Another nearly immediate response to the Mercury Caesar was staged by Henry Cass at the Embassy Theatre, London (29 November 1939). A

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fussy, somewhat cluttered production, it nevertheless compelled interest by making direct connections with Fascism. “Unlike Welles,” Ripley writes, “[ . . . Cass] cut the text very little, and relied upon contemporary costumes, novel business, and colloquial speaking to point his anti-Fascist moral.”40 The updating, according to The Times, does not illuminate the “spiritual tragedy of Brutus . . . yet it may well be argued that the problem of the superman from which that tragedy takes its shape is now so real to us that we should be sure in any case to translate Shakespeare’s treatment of it into terms of contemporary life.”41 If this production shed no new light on the play, the pressures of the moment—one reviewer thought the production “well worth the trouble of getting [to the theatre] in the blackout”42—undoubtedly gave London audiences a special insight into Shakespeare’s intentions and methods. The CBS “Studio One” Caesar, produced by Worthington Miner, reminded Jack Gould, the New York Times television critic, of “the memorable Orson Welles modernization.”43 “In each case,” Gould noted, “the text was edited to a swiftly moving documentary on revolution that none the less retained its substance as a social document and theatre classic.”44 Military uniforms, Fascist salutes, and modern street clothes highlighted the production’s mise en scene. Although some of directorial touches may have been crude—after Antony describes Brutus as “the noblest Roman of them all,” the camera reveals his foot, rolling Brutus’s body into the street—the production as a whole, fusing “movement, word and lighting into a creative imagery that vividly thrust [the] audience into the midst of the turmoil in Rome,”45 was a notable one in the history of televised Shakespeare. Directors continue to modernize Julius Caesar without necessarily invoking 1930s style Fascism. A number of American productions have provided exotic locales and more or less modern dress as ways to bring Julius Caesar up-to-date: Latin America both at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 1969 and at Stratford, Connecticut, in 1979; a specifically Cuban setting at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1982. Several notable British productions have modernized the play through generalized reference to twentiethcentury totalitarianism. Trevor Nunn’s 1972 Royal Shakespeare Company’s Caesar was set in a police state, complete with raised-armed salutes and “black-armoured soldiers to enforce the law,”46 and a monumental statue of Caesar (an effect prefigured in the 1936 Prague production mentioned earlier). Mark Dignam played Caesar, the Financial Times reviewer noted, like “some timeless Mussolini.”47 At least one observer felt that the Fascistic accouterments effectively overwhelmed “the hidden nuances of the text.”48 One of the more notable Caesars in the last few decades was David Thacker’s modern-dress promenade production staged at Stratford’s Other Place in 1992. “Without employing all the available paraphernalia of modern

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politics and communications,” Russell Jackson observed, “the production superimposed the archetypal patterns of the play’s fable on a recognizably modern political world.”49 Peter Holland’s “hesitations about the production’s contemporaneity” (Caesar was made up and costumed to resemble Boris Yeltsin) echoed the reservations of some critics about the Mercury Caesar: “if Julius Caesar celebrates, as we are celebrating, the overthrow of dictatorships like those of Eastern Europe, it is also a play far more uneasy about the manipulability of the mass of the people than I would like to be about the fall of Ceaucescu or the events of Tiananmen Square.”50 The ultimate power of this production, however, was not in its global politics as much as it was in its depiction of “male bonding in a fiercely patriarchal society.”51 At various points in his subsequent filmmaking career, Orson Welles announced plans for a cinematic version of Julius Caesar. He was able to make Shakespearean films based on Macbeth, Othello, and the Falstaff plays, but his ambitions for Caesar were never realized. It might be argued, however, that the 1953 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film produced by his Mercury partner John Houseman owes more than a little to the 1937 Caesar. “Without ever deliberately exploiting the historic parallels,” John Houseman would later write, “there were certain emotional patterns arising from political events of the immediate past that we were eager to evoke.”52 Though set in ancient Rome, various elements of the Joseph Mankiewicz-directed film at least allude to recent history, including the Albert Speer-like architecture, underlined by the “cold” black and white photography, and the performance of Marlon Brando, who portrays Antony as a charismatic but cynical manipulator. The Forum scene visually echoes moments from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935): all steps and massive blocks, with Mark Antony an isolated figure whose demagoguery is inevitably reminiscent of both Hitler and Mussolini. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is, almost to the exclusion of any other categorical description, a political play. As such, it necessarily opens itself to theatrical interpretations that may have little or nothing to do with either the specifics of pre-imperial Roman history or the politics of the Elizabethan monarchy. Though no production of Julius Caesar has, to my knowledge, aroused the same kinds of passions as have several productions of the more inflammatory Coriolanus, playgoers, readers, directors, and critics could hardly ignore the words spoken by Cassius after the assassination of Caesar: “How many ages hence/Shall this our lofty scene be acted over/In states unborn and accents yet unknown?” (3.1.111–13). Shakespeare may here be thinking as much of the hoped-for theatrical afterlife of his play as of the fall of tyrants, but his words certainly invite future audiences to seek for parallels in the political turmoil of their own times. The Mercury Caesar,

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both in itself and for the effect it has had on subsequent productions of Shakespeare’s play, remains one of the most compelling and timely responses to that invitation.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

John Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 222. The correct date is 11 November 1937. See, in addition to Ripley’s account of the Mercury Production, John Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 285–324; Richard France, The Theatre of Orson Welles (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997), 106–12, together with the slightly different account he published as “Orson Welles’s Modern Dress Production of ‘Julius Caesar,’” Theatre Quarterly 5 (1975): 55–66; and John S. O’Connor, “But Was It ‘Shakespeare?’: Welles’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar,” Theatre Journal 32 (1980): 337–48. I have borrowed and reworked some paragraphs from my Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). A version of Welles’s playscript is reproduced in Richard France, ed., Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The W. P. A. and Mercury Theatre Playscripts (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 108–68. John Mason Brown, New York Post, 12 November 1937; cited in Houseman, Run-Through, 314. Brown, cited ibid., 315. Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 223. The New Masses, n.p., n.d. (Orson Welles Clipping File, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center). The New Republic, 29 December 1937, 225. The Nation, 27 November 1937, 595. The New York Times, 28 November 1937, 2: 1. Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 222. Edith Issacs, “When Good Men Get Together,” Theatre Arts Monthly 22 (1938): 20. Euphemia Van Rensselaer Wyatt, “The Drama,” Catholic World 146 (1938): 466. Norman Lloyd, Stages: Norman Lloyd, interviewed by Francine Parker (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990), 49. Grenville Vernon, The Commonweal, 3 December 1937, 160. Subsequent productions would attempt to meet the challenge Welles posed in staging this scene. Of Steven Pimlott’s 1991 production at the RSC, Peter Holland wrote that the murder of Cinna the poet “was an exercise in stage violence of such extreme brutality and thuggery, such graphic detail, that I felt physically sick” (“Shakespeare Performances in England 1990–1,” Shakespeare Survey 45 [1992]: 121). Vernon, The Commonweal, 3 December 1937, 160. Time, 22 November 1937, 43. The New Republic, 29 December 1937, 225. Time, 22 November 1937, 43. For an illustration from the Delaware production, see Ruth B. Kerns, “Color and Music and Movement,” Performing Arts Annual 47 (1987): 52–77; the illustration is on p. 56, the citation from the newspaper review is on p. 58. Sidney Howard to John Houseman, Lilly Library (Bloomington), Welles Correspondence, Box 1. Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 100, 102. Ibid., 103. Time, 22 November 1937, 43. Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 236. Life, 28 February 1937, 27. John Mason Brown, New York Post, 11 November 1937; cited in Gerald Boardman, American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama 1930–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 158.

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Orson Welles and After • 305 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

The New Republic, 1 December 1937, 101. “Cultural Barometer,” Current History 48 (1938): 55. New York Herald Tribune, 12 November 1937 (Orson Welles Clipping File, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center). David Daniell, “Introduction” to the Arden Edition of Julius Caesar, 4. Ibid., 143. William R. Elwood, “Werner Krauß and the Third Reich,” in Theatre in the Third Reich, the Prewar Years: Essays on Theatre in Nazi Germany, ed. Glen W. Gadberry (Greenwood Press: Westport, CT, 1995), 95. See Werner Habicht, “Shakespeare and Theatre Politics in the Third Reich,” in The Play Out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, ed. Hannah Scolnicov and Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 110–20; and Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 143–44. Ibid. Ibid., 144. Habicht, “Shakespeare and Theatre Politics,” 115. Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage, 146. Ibid., 145. Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 243. Ibid. Ibid. The Times, 30 November 1939, 6. The New Statesman and Nation, 9 December 1939, 821. The New York Times, 13 March 1949, 2: 11. Ibid. Ibid. Peter Thomson, “The Royal Shakespeare Season 1972 Reviewed,” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973): 145. Cited in Arthur Humphreys, ed., Julius Caesar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 69– 70. Sally Beauman, The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 317. “Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1993–94,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 340. Peter Holland, “Shakespeare Performances in England, 1992–1993,” Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 194. Ibid., 195. John Houseman, Entertainers and the Entertained (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 87.

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CHAPTER

18

Royal Caesar TOM MATHESON

To perform Shakespeare’s tragedy of Julius Caesar in a theater under the title and patronage of a hereditary monarchy—the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre became the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Company in 1961—is either an admission that the play no longer matters or a deliberately subversive political intervention in a continuing debate about whether it is ever justified to assassinate a ruling head of state. Surely what Cassius calls the “acting over” of Caesar’s death can never be a merely aesthetic gesture? In recent times stage productions of the play have hardly ever achieved the unqualified critical and public approval its reputation seems to demand. Certainly, fifty years and eleven productions of Julius Caesar on the various stages of Stratford-upon-Avon—although never at the play’s patently obvious home in the Elizabethan-style Swan Theatre—have not.1 It may be that the combination of highly politicized content and elevated tragic formality in the play have made it uncongenial to sceptical and antiheroic British opinion in the second half of the twentieth century. Equally, the play’s almost universal familiarity as a literary classic and its status as a standard school text in the educational curriculum seem to have proved both an initial attraction and an eventual liability to British stage companies, influenced as they inevitably are by current theatrical theory and practice; by the prevailing cultural climate; and sometimes by specific modern events—although Julius Caesar always seems to have more bearing on the rise of Fascism in the thirties than it does on the collapse of Communism in the eighties. Ripley argues that a successful production of the play has three essential prerequisites: an uncut text, fluid stagecraft, and actors of heroic power.2 307

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But there are others. Julius Caesar is primarily, although not exclusively, a play of discussion, argument, and persuasion, in which speech acts have bloody consequences. The differences between Brutus and Cassius, between Brutus and Mark Antony, or between Antony and Octavius are as much ideological as personal. A production needs to capture this essentially dialectical energy. Further, the political contest among the three main characters in the play is matched by an inevitable theatrical contest among three leading actors, who compete for stage primacy as well as for audience attention and sympathy. This may be why some of the greatest modern Shakespearean actors—including Laurence Olivier and Paul Scofield—have never appeared in the play. It has been customary, since the various revolutions of the 1960s, to stress the importance of ensemble playing, collaboration, and teamwork in a company such as the RSC; but it is equally important not to sentimentally disguise the sometimes Darwinian competition for center stage which is built into many of Shakespeare’s plays, of which Julius Caesar is one example, and Othello and Richard II others. Traditionally, the actor playing Brutus has gained both the moral and the theatrical ascendancy. But in modern times, actors playing either Cassius (for example, John Gielgud in 1950) or Antony (Richard Johnson in 1957) have usurped his place on the rostrum. Any successful production must also capture and communicate the uninterrupted forward momentum of the first three acts, culminating in the physically shocking act of assassination itself and the immediate total reversal of its anticipated effects by Mark Antony’s Forum speech. It must subsequently overcome the potentially dying fall of the last two acts for both audience and performers—particularly if an interval is introduced after the death of Cinna the poet. Actor concentration and audience attention are difficult to sustain after the exhilaration of what is normally the first half. False solutions have included the abolition of any interval and the telescoping of the battles and suicides of the last act. Since 1960, when Peter Hall became its artistic director, the seasonal Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and its company have been transformed. Hall sought to create a large semipermanent national company, producing plays on a repertory basis, in both Stratford and London (initially at the Aldwych Theatre, later at the Barbican Theatre). Under his influence, and that of his colleague John Barton, the retitled Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Company has transformed the speaking of Shakespearean verse; has encouraged innovative modern interpretations of the plays; and has given directors more freedom and control over the process of production. Since it initiated and encouraged the radical reexamination of Shakespeare’s cultural status and significance in the 1960s—with productions such as Peter

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Brook’s King Lear (1962) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970), Peter Hall and John Barton’s The Wars of the Roses (1963), and Peter Hall’s Hamlet (1965)—highly conceptualized directorial interventions have become the norm in Shakespearean production, both at Stratford and elsewhere. After 1960, the theater in Stratford, like so many others in London and elsewhere, became a laboratory susceptible to international influence. It was not quite so experimental as Jerzy Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre” in Poland, but as highly conscious of his theories as of the earlier and occasionally incompatible “Cruel Theatre” of Antonin Artaud and the “Epic Theatre” of Bertolt Brecht. Peter Brook was often the mediator and agent of experimentation, with some cross-fertilization from critics with an international perspective, such as the Polish Jan Kott.3 No single theatrical ideology prevailed: eclecticism, however illogical and inconsistent, often matched the general cultural confusion in society at large. Britain was entering a continuous period of social upheaval and industrial unrest, which subsided (or was repressed) only when a right-wing Conservative, Margaret Thatcher, became Prime Minister in 1979. Theatrically, the visit of the Berliner Ensemble to London in 1956 had been a decisive influence on many radical non-Shakespeare RSC productions, including Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade (1964), the experimental Theatre of Cruelty season (1965), and the powerful anti–Vietnam War documentary play US (1966). Before the revolution, directors fulfilled a role more like that of facilitator, bringing together a carefully selected team of independent experts—designers, composers, actors—who would collaborate over a relatively short rehearsal period to allow an essentially stable and coherent text to speak with its own traditionally accepted voice. For Julius Caesar, Antony Quayle and Michael Langham (1950) and Glen Byam Shaw (1957) represented just such a distinguished but orthodox tradition. Perhaps John Blatchley’s 1963 production of Julius Caesar was the first to respond to the newly perceived zeitgeist. Blatchley’s was a resolutely unheroic production of the play at Stratford. John Bury’s muted color scheme for both set and costumes—of grey, brown, and black monochrome—rejected the spectacle so long associated with the play. The visually dominating Caesar (Roy Dotrice) wore white. Other costumes displayed the timeless anachronisms which have remained fashionable ever since: togas over World War I uniforms, motorcycle jackets with robes, some jackboots—the trappings of universal significance. The play ran for three-and-a-quarter hours, in a virtually full text, with great attention to the delivery of sense in the verse. But the moral status of all three main characters (Tom Fleming as Brutus, Cyril Cusack as Cassius, and Kenneth Haigh—John Osborne’s 1956 Jimmy Porter—as Antony) was diminished as politics was presented as the cynical and self-seeking pursuit of power.

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310 • Tom Matheson

John Barton in 1968 continued the sceptical and unromantic revisionism of the time. Barton’s scrupulous attention to the lines has become legendary and he cast one of the most imposing survivors of his 1963 The Wars of the Roses, Brewster Mason (formerly Warwick the Kingmaker), as Caesar. Physically dominating, with a deeply resonant delivery, Mason seemed to embody the archetypal strongman of authoritarian politics, a true dictator, defiant and menacing. Later productions have emphasized Caesar’s failing powers, his age and sickness, the distance between his public image and his private, fallible self. But even an aging Mason represented a true and present menace to the discontented of Rome, both patrician and plebeian (although the characteristically muted color scheme and historically eclectic costumes did something to distance the play from its historical origins). His “Et tu, Brute?” was presented and perceived not as a recriminatory lament, but an indomitable taunt. As a Ghost, Caesar appeared not only in Brutus’s tent before the battle, but also after the farewell between Brutus and Cassius and as Brutus lay dead; his bloody mantle, flourished as a banner on the battlefield, finally becoming a shroud for Brutus’s corpse. (These untextual reappearances of the Ghost have now almost achieved the status of stage tradition.) Some reviewers felt that the conspirators were insignificant and puny in comparison with the “colossus” of Caesar; but that was part of the point. Brutus (Barrie Ingham) was a vulnerable self-deceiver; and Ian Richardson, as Cassius, offered an early example of his later career trademark, as a highly intelligent, devious, manipulative, envious, unreliable traitor. This was a production in which, as so often, the initial casting seemed almost the most crucial decision to be made by the director. Probably the most ambitious and well-received production of the modern era in Stratford was that of Trevor Nunn (with Buzz Goodbody and Euan Smith) in 1972, as part of a season devoted to the “Romans,” a cycle including all four Roman plays, under a team of directors. The stage of the Stratford main house was redesigned for the season, with a huge forestage apron (with sloping suspended ceiling) in front of the proscenium. Behind the proscenium, huge wing blocks (textured to resemble rough white marble) were inset at an angle. Hydraulic lifts and revolves, as well as the tilting apron, gave an unusual flexibility to the physical playing space. Christopher Morley’s design (with Ann Curtis) created a stark, brightly lit white box, and this, together with an interpolated overture to the first scene, and the processional entry of Caesar (played by Mark Dignam) on a red carpet, created an atmosphere of Fascist tyranny, making the conspiracy against him fully explicable. An abundance of visible blood, as well as what some perceived as the insatiable fury of Cassius (played by Patrick Stewart), marked the assassination itself, staining the white gowns of the conspirators, spurting from

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Caesar’s artery onto the face of Brutus (played by John Woods). Woods gave a subtle and complex reading of the part, thought by some to be too emotional and even neurotic, but called by John Mortimer the complete “intellectual revolutionary.”4 Richard Johnson, fifteen years after his charismatic appearance in the same role for Glen Byam Shaw, was now maturely bearded, clearly on the verge of his role in Antony and Cleopatra. The main house production of 1983 (by Ron Daniels) also attempted to conflate ancient Rome with an unspecified modern totalitarian state. Some details of the patrician costumes signaled the original historical period, but in general indications of any specific time or place were avoided. Caesar (Joseph O’Conor) entered in front of a huge personal image, projected onto a rear stage screen. Three TV cameras were used to photograph the speeches in the Forum, their close-up images projected instantly onto a screen over the protagonists, giving two simultaneous perspectives on the action—a technology clearly up to the minute in its associations. (Later in the production’s run these devices seem to have been abandoned.) This was a serious, and even severe production, with a strong cast (including Peter McEnery as Brutus and Emrys James as Cassius) although not perhaps from quite the glittering ranks of its immediate predecessors. Not surprisingly, as always, the technical innovations totally divided reviewers. Judith Cook found it “the most compulsive production of this play I have ever seen,”5 while John Barber wrote of “foolish gimmickry [which] distracts and confuses the mind.”6 Its panoply of waving banners, dry-ice smoke, and swords clashing in slow motion were inherited from earlier historical cycles and became the stock-in-trade—almost clichéd—of many subsequent Shakespearean battles. Terry Hands’s 1987 version of the play (designed by Farrah, with music by Guy Woolfenden) was not obviously political in orientation, concentrating instead on visual spectacle to reveal the themes of the play and on the intensity of personal relations within an unexpectedly young, male peer group. The action took place on a huge empty stage, enclosed by high red brick walls and floor, with columns of white light, streaked and slashed with red, on the rear wall. A bare light bulb illuminated a golden statue, draped with red ribbons, at the start. Later Caesar adopted the same statuesque posture; and later still, a silhouette was cut on the back wall. Strong thematically related colors were visible: predominantly red, in the brick of the walls, as blood on Portia’s hand, on the hands of the conspirators, on the assassinated Caesar’s robes, in the thunderstorm, in the red pinnacled tent at Sardis, and in the red fields of battle; white, as white tunics were overlaid by white robes for both Senate and Forum; and black, marking the conspirators. There were many memorable details: Caesar (Joseph O’Conor again and later David Waller) delivered his “lean and hungry” speech directly to Cassius (Sean Baker); the conspirators marched in line, brass and drums playing, to

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the Capitol; the assassination itself, with long swords, was accompanied by Woolfenden’s powerful score; Caesar’s bloody corpse was held vertically aloft in the coffin; Mark Antony (Nicholas Farrell) turned his back to the audience, in weeping for the dead Caesar; the Quarrel scene was full of physical tenderness and intimacy, Brutus (Roger Allam) and Cassius embracing like a couple; Brutus burned a paper to describe Portia eating fire; Caesar’s Ghost stalked not only the tent, but the battlefield itself. Hands’s renowned sense of visual spectacle, his sensitivity to character, and his sheer professional stagecraft made this one of the most memorable of main house productions. Steven Pimlott in 1991 was directing his first main house Shakespeare in Stratford in a production generally perceived as marred by eccentricities of direction and design (by Tobias Hoheisel). It attracted some venomous reviews, John Peter calling it “dire”: “The delivery of the lines is slow, ponderous, and actorish. When it lurches into speed it is usually at the expense of sense. This is the kind of ghastly, old-fashioned blank verse-bashing which could put you off Shakespeare for life.”7 Yet it was visually splendid, with high plush red walls and gates, fluted with blue piping; a red and blue motif throughout (Caesar vs. the conspirators); a red door left, a blue door right; red wooden spears vs. blue wooden spears in battle; a blue half-curtain drawn on a rail in front of a square rising-and-falling red panel; the red of Caesar’s and Cinna’s blood. The patricians wore ornate Renaissance robes and doge-like Venetian hats; the plebeians were in grey tunics and skirts, shorts, and caps. However, the drab black skirts, dull breastplates, leather shorts, and round tin hats of the soldiers attracted much derision, one reviewer calling them “a hoot.”8 It had too one of the greatest modern Shakespeare actors, Robert Stephens, admittedly at a late and difficult point in his career, in the central role of Caesar. Yet Stephens was to triumph in Stratford as both Falstaff and Lear. His Caesar was admired, even within what John Peter called a “farrago.” The Independent on Sunday reviewer commented that “Stephens caresses words, spits them, bites them off; and every time he takes you by surprise, from his affectionate embrace of the Soothsayer to the accusing pause before he impales himself on Brutus’s sword. Magnificent.”9 This was a production in which, expecting pace and attack, the audience were greeted with long pauses, silences, many static moments, and several tableau-like compositions. The effect was alienating: although it is fair to say that Steven Pimlott seems since to have applied similar techniques to other Shakespeare tragedies, with much greater general approval. It is true that in retrospect many productions seem ahead of their time, attempting effects that seem more appropriate at a distance than they originally did. The music (by Peter Salem)

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was also cool and distancing, consisting of waves of rhythmic clapping, the beating of drums and sticks upon the battleground, eerie disjointed strings and electronic twangs—almost the opposite of the conventional, triumphalist Roman brass. The assassination of Caesar was slow and choreographed, the conspirators circling him, stabbing one by one, as Caesar himself totters about the stage, short sword in hand. There was no blood at first, and then, as Brutus (Jonathan Hyde) rips off his robe, a bloodstained white shift and torso were exposed. The conspirators laughed after killing their victim. An almost static, pictorial frieze of conspirators (hands, arms, and faces stained with blood) accompanied the prophecy by Cassius (David Bradley) of future reenactments of the bloody scene. The murder of Cinna the poet was similarly choreographed: four plebeians, forestage right, first interrogated him; then stole his poems; then beat him up; then stabbed him carefully between the legs; then, like the conspirators, smeared blood on daggers, hands, faces. Throughout, the articulation and movement was very slow, very careful, almost dreamlike—as if the whole action might be a plot by Antony (Owen Teale), seen first crouching, spear in hand, shrouded in black, on the forestage. Every effect seemed calculated, with little illusion of spontaneity, and none of the uproar, disorder, drive, energy, or passion normally associated with the first half of the play. It seemed very abstractly conceived and overly intellectual. Yet the accession of Octavius, an unexpectedly bald eunuch, to Caesar’s gold throne at the end made a striking and disconcerting conclusion to a striking and disconcerting production. Peter Hall’s Julius Caesar in June 1995—returning long after his 1968 official departure from the company—was at first dogged by scenic disaster, when John Gunter’s sets, consisting of massive black walls, marble stairs, large medallions of great men, golden lions, and an eight-foot-high marble head of Caesar, required changing twenty times during a performance of only just over two hours. At several points, performances had to be interrupted—there was no appointed interval—when the complicated hydraulics literally jammed. The first night was postponed when a total cast of seventyfive people (including fifty extras, many of them unpaid locals) could not be marshaled onto a stage only nine yards across. Visible blood provided a recurring motif: it spurted from the joint between Caesar’s neck and shoulder after Caska stabbed him; there was plentiful blood on the hands and swords of the conspirators after the assassination; it spurted from Cinna the Poet after the mob had stabbed and beaten him to death; a bucket of blood was poured down the steps after the mob scene; Caesar’s corpse, on display, was stained red with blood; Octavius’s face, in battle, was streaked with blood; blood streamed down the face of the vast effigy of Caesar at the end of the play.

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John Nettles chose to present a very antiromantic, unsympathetic Brutus, full of arrogance, distance, self-satisfaction, bad thinking, falsely rationalized idealism. This Brutus deliberately alienated the audience, leaving a very bleak play without an emotional center; so much so that Cassius (played by Julian Glover) seemed in most ways nobler and more philosophical than Brutus! It made the persuasive task of a charismatic Mark Antony (Hugh Quarshie) that much easier. But all the actors were struggling not to be overwhelmed by a monumental, and, as it turned out, monumentally misconceived, design concept. (It is fair to say that architectural—and intellectual—monumentalism has threatened many main house RSC productions, perhaps including even those by Terry Hands [1987] and Steven Pimlott [1991], sometimes leaving the impression that the inherent narrative drive and passionate rhetoric of the play could not be trusted.) Perhaps the most radical of latter-day RSC versions of the play has been David Thacker’s in 1993. The smaller scale and studio space of The Other Place allowed an audience of about 150 to move around and follow the players in a promenade production, staged in modern dress: “Not so much Julius Caesar as Nicolae Ceausescu,” as one reviewer described it.10 Interviewed in July 1993 Thacker spoke of “a play about people manipulating or dealing with crowds. I thought it would be theatrically exciting to have people there on stage so they experience being in a large group of people hearing the speeches. I hope it might make them think ‘Would I believe this?’ in a more concrete way than usual.”11 Of course, such an arrangement means that the audience have to be directed as well as the actors, at least so that they will know where to sit or stand. The actors were given the responsibility of colonizing their own territory, hoping that bodies will either scatter before them or follow to an appropriate location (perhaps a platform or scaffold) within the very limited space. Such promenade productions can work very well out of doors—as modern experience with medieval miracle and mystery plays confirms. The main difficulty indoors is that once people are sitting it is difficult to get them up again. On the other hand, if the audience stands, then actors can disappear, unless some kind of ramp or platform can be used. In addition, some scenes—the stabbing of Caesar, the battles—require a far more controlled choreography than others. The degree and nature of eye contact between actors and audience has to be calculated, even in speeches of direct address to the supposed Roman citizens. The silver-haired David Sumner (Caesar), his portrait adorning the walls, was habitually accompanied by a television camera and secret policemen: capturing well the appropriate distance between private weakness and the public facade of an all-powerful demagogue. The production obviously worked better for public scenes, with Barry Lynch (Mark Antony) thrusting

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Caesar’s torn, blood-stained robe under the audience’s noses and, according to Charles Spencer, stimulating real tears by the hypnotic intensity of his oratory.12 But even private scenes, such as the secret hatching of the conspirators’ plot, generated a powerful sense of eavesdropping on a dangerous and illicit event. Projected images of rape and bereaved mothers in modern Bosnia accompanied the final battles. Inevitably, such immediate and direct parallels, in which the forces of good and evil are more sharply distinguished than in the play, distort what Coleridge thought of as the impartiality and evenhandedness of Shakespeare’s politics. Just as inevitably, such a production, with its physical demands, appeals more to a younger than an older audience. But the gain in audience participation, involvement, and identification outweighs any potential simplification. The director of the July 2001 RSC production, 33-year-old Edward Hall, was not even born when his famous father Peter led a reformed Royal Shakespeare Company to some of its greatest artistic triumphs. Edward Hall’s Stratford main house production used the permanent stage designed by Alison Chitty for all the plays in the 2001 season: a large grey empty box, architecturally modernist in design—resembling the interior space of such art galleries as the millennial Tate Modern in London—with vast horizontal distances to be occupied and traversed by sometimes lost and lonely actors; with many large, fully visible, tracked spot- and floodlights, sliding vertically into position for each major lighting change. Lighting (by Ben Ormerod) created the atmosphere and mood of the play, its conspiratorial night scenes, its portentous thunderstorms, its city burning after Caesar’s assassination, its blue-lit Ghost of portly loin-clothed Caesar (Ian Hogg)— appearing not only to Brutus before the battle at Philippi, but reappearing after his suicide and Antony’s final words over the body. Scenery, properties, and accessories were severely restricted, except for an elaborately recreated army camp at night, with flickering flaming lamps, created as a scenic backdrop to the furious Cassius-Brutus confrontation and reconciliation in act 4, scene 3, the so-called tent-scene. Brutus (Greg Hicks), in this and other scenes, was so haggard, agonized, and tortured by conscience, that one felt he might almost change places with a distinctly robust, reasonable, and healthy-looking Cassius (Tim Pigott-Smith). And certainly, no recent production has made Brutus’s idealistic motives seem so ineffective in the world of realpolitik, repeatedly ignoring Cassius’s pragmatic proposals for consolidating the revolution. Hall made some extraordinary decisions (with the encouragement, according to an interview, of his textual adviser, the academic Roger Warren),13 omitting the first scene of tribunes and plebeians altogether, replacing it with an initial tableau in which a reappearing ragged Soothsayer opens a small trap on the forestage to take out and display aloft a bleeding heart,

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presumably the “heart within the beast” which the augurers could not find for Caesar (2.2.40). Later, hung upside down in chains, Cinna the poet’s heart is plucked from his breast by a terrifying Brünhilde figure—apparently the same who has led Caesar in procession onto the stage at the start of act 1, scene 2, with a rousing, sung anthem to the “Res-publica.” The named women of the text made comparatively little impression—as so often in the play. But in this production, woman as Fascist functionary came into her own, on terms of complete equality to her male counterparts. There were effectively no ordinary citizens. Instead we had a company of black-shirted and booted Fascistic functionaries who accompany Caesar with their drums and black banners, beneath falling ticker-tape, at his first entrance; and who later infiltrate the audience in stalls and circle, beating the steps and rails of the auditorium with their truncheons in unison, to form a highly menacing—and not at all disorganized—mob, aroused first to sympathy for the assassination by Brutus, and then immediately turned against him—and to bloody vengeance—by a distinctly restrained and undemonstrative Antony (Tom Mannion). However, the overall visual impression was not as a piece of 1930s political allegory. For the battles of the second half, all the principal contestants donned historically recognizable Roman helmets and armor over their original tunics. Except the battle as such never took place and there was no fighting. There was some marching under falling snow, some thumping of the earth with staves, spears, or pikes, until the victims of a battle taking place elsewhere stumbled and staggered in, crumpling to the ground—to the accompaniment of another sung Latin dirge—smearing the walls with their blood. It was definitely the aftermath. In fact, the effect of the production, though often spectacular and certainly with more sung music (by Simon Slater) than any previous production of Julius Caesar, was always more reflective and elegiac—for the passing of great historical figures under their visually projected slogans of PEACE/ FREEDOM/LIBERTY—than invigorating. Some of these great beasts in the jungle of politics seem to have lost heart—plucked out by history or destiny—even as this latest revival of the play began. Hall, in an interview, referred to the two-hour production as a “strippeddown” Julius Caesar, removing or telescoping the battles of act 5; in which both political and personal issues are combined; and in which Brutus and Cassius, in trying to save the Republic, actually destroy it.14 Its vivid spectacle may have endeared it to some national reviewers and to a general audience,15 but at least one other reviewer felt that the company of black-clad shock troops “club all sense out of the meaning of the play” and that latecomers, confronted by the untextual opening chorus, might feel that they have “wandered into an unholy combination of a TUC rally and Cabaret.”16

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This latest production seemed yet one more example in a long recent history of Stratford productions where a director’s conscious quest for innovation and/or relevance gave experienced and able actors an interpretative mountain to climb in restoring credible characterization to a truncated and highly conceptualized text. After the artistic and ideological revolutions of the 1960s, the opening of The Other Place in 1974 and the Swan in 1986 transformed ideas about the staging of Shakespeare in Stratford, and these more recently established spaces have come to challenge the theatrical viability of even the most popular plays in the much larger and more formal main house. There is also much more intense competition from other theaters in London and the regions. For example, Mark Rylance, as artistic director for the rebuilt Globe Theatre in Southwark, became “Master of Play” for an invigorating and convincing “Elizabethan-style” Julius Caesar to commemorate the fourhundreth anniversary of Shakespeare’s play, 1599–1999. The RSC itself has recently undergone both revolution and counterrevolution. Under the previous incumbent, artistic director Adrian Noble, the Barbican Theatre was abandoned, leaving the RSC without any permanent London showcase for its Stratford productions. There were proposals to demolish and rebuild the listed Elisabeth Scott-designed Stratford theater of 1932 and to convert The Other Place into an academy for young Shakespearean actors. Now, by late 2003, there has been a complete change of regime, with the voluntary departure of not only the former artistic director, but also of the managing director and the chairman of governors— all, to some public relief, without the bloodshed so memorably associated with Shakespeare’s most famous political play.

Notes 1. I will refer to particular productions by the name of the relevant director, partly for convenience, but also to acknowledge the artistic control they now exercise: Antony Quayle and Michael Langham, 1950; Glen Byam Shaw, 1957; John Blatchley, 1963; John Barton, 1968; Trevor Nunn, 1972; Ron Daniels, 1983; Terry Hands, 1987; Steven Pimlott, 1991; David Thacker (at The Other Place), 1993; Peter Hall, 1995; Edward Hall, 2001. The recollections, notes, and eyewitness accounts, including my own, of these productions have been reinforced by materials in the libraries of The Shakespeare Institute and The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford, to whose staff I am grateful, as well as by the longer historical perspective of John Ripley’s “Julius Caesar” on Stage in England and America, 1599-1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 2. Ibid., 275. 3. Kott’s Shakespeare our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (London: Methuen, 1965), with its complimentary preface by Peter Brook, is probably the most widely read and influential general book on Shakespeare in the second half of the twentieth century. 4. Quoted by Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage, 272. 5. The Scotsman, 31 March 1983. 6. The Daily Telegraph, 9 August 1993. 7. The Sunday Times, 3 November 1991.

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318 • Tom Matheson The Independent on Sunday, 3 November 1991. Ibid. Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph, 9 August 1993. The Independent, 28 July 1993. Spencer, The Daily Telegraph, 9 August 1993. Rupert Christiansen, The Daily Telegraph, 12 July 2001. BBC Radio 4, 25 July 2001. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 28 July 2001; John Peter, The Sunday Times, 5 August 2001. 16. Rhoda Koenig, The Independent, 29 July 2001.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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CHAPTER

19

Multicultural and Regendered Romans

Julius Caesar in North America, 1969–2000 MICHAEL L. GREENWALD

Critics of the 1991 Hartford (Canada) Stage Company production of Julius Caesar noted that its director “risked conventionality” by setting the play in ancient Rome.1 That placing Shakespeare’s political drama in its actual historical milieu was considered a “risk” says much about the stage history of the play in the final decades of the twentieth century. The majority of directors took quite literally Cassius’s prediction that Caesar’s assassination would be often reenacted “In states unborn and accents yet unknown” (3.1.113). Typically, modern dress Caesars dominated North American stages, although it was most often Latin America that was depicted. Of the roughly ninety professional productions investigated for this survey (most under the aegis of the hundred-plus Shakespeare festivals in the United States and Canada), one can divide productions of Julius Caesar into two general camps: those Roman and those not. The non-Roman versions also fall into two types: the aforementioned Latin American settings and “others,” including African, corporate American, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and even one futuristic world yet unknown. And in perhaps the most welcome change in productions of both Roman and non-Roman Caesars, nontraditional casting has become the norm, rather than the exception. Women have played virtually every role in the play, while men have enacted Portia and Calphurnia opposite females as Brutus and Caesar. Significant numbers of African Americans and Hispanics came to the forestage in some of the most inventive productions, though curiously few actors of 319

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Asian lineage have been cast in principal roles. And there were no Arianne Mnouchkine-inspired Kabuki or Kathakali Caesars, albeit one found such cross-cultural hybrids a noticeable trend in productions of other plays in the canon. One other generalization can be made from this cursory overview of the North American productions: relatively few “name” actors have been associated with productions of Julius Caesar, and none have distinguished themselves in any of the play’s primary roles in the manner of James Earl Jones’s Othello. Certainly Brian Bedford, a mainstay at the Stratford (Canada) Shakespeare Festival, could be counted on to act (Brutus) in this oftperformed play, and not unexpectedly one finds the names of some noted screen actors in Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival: Al Pacino (Antony, to markedly mixed reviews),2 Martin Sheen (Brutus), and Morgan Freeman (Caska). Richard Dreyfuss played Cassius at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Redgraves—Vanessa (Portia) and brother Corin (Caesar and director)—acted in a 1996 Houston production of Julius Caesar that was primarily a prelude to Vanessa’s tour de force performance in (and direction of) Antony and Cleopatra. These generalizations addressed, consider specific examples of the many approaches to the Roman tragedy. Conventional productions rendered Caesar’s Rome either in its glory or in its decadence. The former, found at both the Alabama and Colorado Shakespeare Festivals in 1991, provided stunning visual images. Colorado director James Symons illustrated that Rome’s grandeur had been forever lost by the assassination: “a large splash of blood appeared on the upstage drop as the first knife entered Caesar, signifying that the previously ‘pristine’ Rome had been forever stained with Caesar’s blood.”3 The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival (1991) also fashioned a setting that suggested “the strength and permanence of Imperial Rome”; as audiences filed out of the Allentown Theatre, a small spotlight continued to illuminate a bust of Caesar, a reminder that “while the players may change and the dramas they play out, Rome will continue to be Rome.”4 One company (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 1991) actually set the action in the pre-Roman Etruscan era and framed it with opening and closing rituals from the ancient civilization that laid the foundation for Rome’s glory. Conversely, a number of productions highlighted Rome’s decay by decorating their stages with shattered statuary, cracked friezes, toppled marble columns, and dirtied togas (a welcome antidote to the “bed-sheet Caesars” that dominated nineteenth-century stages on both sides of the Atlantic). Typical of this approach was the Seattle Shakespeare Festival’s 1998 production, which displayed a landscape of shattered Roman statuary “emblematic of a society in the throes of decay . . . a good place to hide treachery

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that should be unseen or only partly visible.”5 Enormous busts of Caesar frequently dominated both glorious and decadent settings of Rome, perhaps a legacy of Trevor Nunn’s much-photographed production of the play at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1972. Although we think of Roman settings for the play as “conventional,” Shakespeare’s actors presumably performed in Elizabethan clothing on a bare stage covered with straw. Thus a 1981 production at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. may have been the most conventional of them all. Calphurnia appeared in a ruff, looking much like Elizabeth I herself. Thus, Rome’s great history lesson “took on the contemporary relevance and shadowy ambiguities that [ . . . it] may well have had for Shakespeare’s own audience.”6 Less conventionally, there was a predominance of non-Roman productions. Latin American settings of the play proliferated, beginning with Edward Payson Call’s 1969 production at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre. Caesar was portrayed as an “aspiring sun-god in white and gold”7 that ascended a great Mayan pyramid to the strains of indigenous flute music. Others followed, notably a 1979 production by the American Shakespeare Company (Stratford, Connecticut). Gerald Freedman invented a Castroesque world filled with picture-snapping tourists and paparazzi; reporters hounded both loyalists and conspirators, while their pictures were projected upon an enormous television screen (to particularly strong effect during the funeral orations). In 1988 Michael Murray (Philadelphia Drama Guild) staged a similar “banana republic” Julius Caesar with an inventive twist: Cassius was given a love interest as Metellus (now Metella) Cimber was played by a woman, which made their murder-suicide especially poignant. Caesar arrived in a helicopter wearing gun belts, smoking a cigar; Brutus was a briefcase-bearing bureaucrat, while Cassius was a malcontented mestizo and Antony a macho ideologue. A 1991 production at the Jean Cocteau Repertory in New York also suggested a world of juntas that, unfortunately, moved the production “from caricature to cartoon.”8 The most intriguing Latino production—billed as an “adaptation” by director John Briggs and coadapter R. H. Deschamps—could be found at the 1986 Florida Shakespeare Festival. Performed in the Renaissance Gardens at Miami’s Villa Vizcaya and titled Julio Cesar, the play appealed to South Florida’s hugely Hispanic population, including many refugees from Cuba. Cesar, played as a Castro look alike in green fatigues, heavy beard, and cigar clutched between forefinger and thumb, was jefe to “Corba,” a quasi-fictional country beset by economic disasters that fueled a counter-revolution. To establish the immediacy of the play’s politics, images of pre-revolutionary Cuba, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were projected onto the set as the audience assembled; the slide show was accompanied by Latin music and

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the sounds of war. The play opened with a noisy, colorful Caribbean street carnival, cut short by Cesar’s jackbooted thugs. The dictator was approached by an indigenous soothsayer, a Santera (or “healer,” played by a Haitianborn woman) who chanted in Yoruba. Cesar was killed—in a macabre machete ritual—at the base of a statue made from sheaves of sugar cane inscribed with the revolutionary battle cry, “Independecia, Libertad, y Paz.” In Miami, the death of Cesar-Castro “brought the audience to its feet.”9 Havoc was unleashed as the Santera invoked the spirit of Elegua, the Yoruba god of revenge, who haunted the conspirators throughout the remainder of the drama. Though these Latin American transpositions underscored the contemporary relevance of Shakespeare’s timeless historical tragedy, Carey M. Mazur, a respected Shakespearean scholar who reviewed the Philadelphia Drama Guild production, raises some pertinent questions concerning such directorial impositions: • Why, in a society inured to political violence, would a political assassination be viewed as a momentous act, setting the cosmos in disarray? • Why would Brutus compare Caesar’s incipient dictatorship to a serpent’s egg that must be destroyed before it hatches, when Caesar is already a full-fledged dictator in a region accustomed to dictators? Mazur dismisses contemporary Latin American settings of the play as “ultimately ideologically unacceptable,” although he allows that they can be “aesthetically fascinating and suggestive.”10 Such reservations may also be applied to other contemporary “hot spot” productions, notably Jerry Turner’s mostly admired Middle Eastern production for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (1982). Inspired by the then recent assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Turner meticulously created a modern Arab world in which Brutus—in suit, tie, and rimless spectacles—was portrayed as a soft-spoken diplomat forced to intellectualize his bloody deed. Cassius (in a military jacket) and Caesar (fatigues, beret, and sunglasses) were military rivals, while Antony, an athletic jogger in a sweat suit, drank from a pocket flask, especially during his “bleeding piece of earth” speech in act 3, scene 1. Caska was a female gun-toting revolutionary who dealt the first blow to Caesar by plunging a stiletto into his neck. The audience was forced to witness the violent execution as soldiers with machine guns blocked the exit doors. Antony coolly delivered the funeral oration to the audience as other actors looked for responses from the “mob” in the auditorium. The climactic battle was punctuated by sounds from whirling helicopters, grenades, and machine guns as the smell of smoke filled the theater, effects which made the combat “as familiar as six o’clock news footage almost any day of the week.”11

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And, not unexpectedly, there were European jackbooted Caesars à la the Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre production (1937). In 1995 Dennis Delaney (the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival) revisited Welles’s version: military uniforms were markedly like those of the Nazis and Mussolini’s Black Shirts, and soldiers greeted one another with a “Hail, Caesar” that sounded too much like “Heil, Caesar!” The action was played in front of a collage of pictures portraying human skulls and posters with World War II slogans. Caesar’s death was staged, stylized and in slow motion, as “a 1930s movie dance number” in which the dictator “zig-zags slowly down [ . . . a flight of] steps, periodically halting in front of various conspirators.”12 Although there were guns to be had at Philippi, Delaney dispatched Cassius and Brutus with swords. Even more contemporary were several productions that capitalized on the recent political turmoil in Eastern Europe, most notably the 1990 Stratford (Canada) Shakespeare Festival. Richard Monette’s eclectic production (togas and tunics for the patricians, “medieval Japanese trousers” and silk-screened T-shirts for the plebeians) evoked memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as well as political upheavals in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The funeral orations were delivered to a raucous crowd “carrying shielded candles like the students who massed nightly in Wenceslas Square shouting ‘Havel to the Palace!’”13 The crowd stood in the aisles of the Festival Theater to link the action on stage with the audience—most of whom had witnessed the recent European revolutions on television. American political, corporate, and even mobster Machiavellians also inspired more than a few productions of the play. In 1990 Oscar Eustis, who had directed a number of productions of the play (notably at Berkeley in 1988), modernized Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to explore the purported rift between U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Other “Americanized” versions could be found in nonmainstream venues. In 1979, Bekki Jo Schneider drastically cut the play (to 1.45 hours) for a “corporate Caesar” in Louisville (Kentucky): Antony and Lepidus were Caesar’s pallbearers in pinstriped suits. The Next Theatre Company (1993, Evanston, Illinois) set the action in contemporary Washington, D.C., where a black gospel chorus in hooded robes commented on the intrigues involving Caesar (a Las Vegas-style icon) and a female Antony dressed in a strapless gown whose “love” for Caesar transcended politics. Most recently (in 2000), San Francisco’s Guerilla Theatre Company produced a corporate battleground Caesar, a far cry from a 1971 guerilla company at the Champlain (Vermont) Shakespeare Festival that was decidedly antiestablishment (the mob wore Levis, sandals, and long hair as it attacked corporate types). Given its historical and geographical context, Julius Caesar would seem to be among the last Shakespeare plays to feature a predominantly African

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American cast or an African setting, yet in 1979 Joseph Papp inaugurated his Black and Hispanic Theatre Company (a wing of the New York Shakespeare Festival) with a coupling of Caesar and Coriolanus. Although renowned British director Michael Langham incorporated some African tribal rituals in the production, he devised a mostly conventional production (i.e., Roman scenery and costumes). Any “foreignness” derived from the actors’ accents, most notably in Jaime Sanchez’s Mark Antony, the production’s most admired performance. In his speech to Caesar’s bloody corpse, Sanchez brought fresh vigor to the word “butchers,” which “coagulate[d] in his mouth before emerging as a gobbet of hatred, despair and promised vengeance.”14 Earle Hyman and Morgan Freeman, now notable film and television actors, contributed to Papp’s experiment in nontraditional casting. A more memorable African rendering of the play was presented at the 120-seat Nuyorican Poet’s Café in New York City in 1991 (revived in 1998). Adapted by director Rome Neal, who also played Antony, the action was relocated to the West African country of Mali and updated to 1242 AD when Mali and Old Ghana were united. Neal frequently substituted African names for European persons, places, and events. The Lupercal became the Feast of the Yam, and Caesar Kayamaga was warned by a female griot to beware “the Seventh of Odwira.” Caesar—who wore a multicolored agbada (cloak)—defeated Sumanguru (Pompey), and the play’s final battle was fought in the Sahara (Philippi). Neal’s recontextualization even allowed for humor as Caska groused that Cicero’s unfathomable language “was all Yoruba to me.” This production was particularly noted for its ritualistic dances and pantomimes, accompanied by the percussive music of Nigeria’s Oba Tai’ Ye.’ Neal’s inventiveness and a strong ensemble cast combined to make this “African Caesar” one of “extraordinary beauty, dignity, and solemnity, mingled appropriately with exuberance: pure theater serving well its original author.”15 In addition to such African and Hispanic treatments of the play, there have been several notable multicultural productions. Some have merely cast non-Anglo actors in central roles, while others have conspicuously used people of color to create ambience. In 2000, Barry Edelstein’s production for the New York Shakespeare Festival featured a largely Anglo cast dressed in colonial apparel (khaki military shirts, jodhpurs, and knee-high boots). An African priest in bright orange and red robes attended Caesar, whose huge bust hovered over the playing space like “Big Brother.” The arrogant emperor was warned of his impending doom by the Soothsayer, a keening Gujarati Indian woman. Many in the mob wore Indonesian clothing, which conjured images of President Suharto, the dictator du jour; they attacked Cinna the Poet and hung him upside down from a huge crane. The battles were staged as dances reminiscent of the Broadway musical, Stomp. The

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commanders wore World War II African and Indo-Asian campaign clothing, though their soldiers wore a strange amalgam of armor—“some Roman, some Eastern, some space age.”16 As the living soldiers left the battlefield strewn with the dead, the Soothsayer’s otherworldly, anguished cries echoed throughout Central Park. In 1996 Houston’s Alley Theatre presented the play with a multiracial cast of American, British, and West Indian actors (see below) that featured nonwhites as Antony, Cassius, Calphurnia, Octavius, and others. Although no attempt was made to use ethnicity as political statement, Cassius’s declaration that he “was born free as Caesar” assumed “added import spoken by a man of African heritage,”17 especially in a city with a history of racial segregation. Cassius’s “states unborn” also included “some futuristic Sodom and Gomorrah” at the American Globe Theatre (New York, 1993). Sci-fi warriors fought with arms encased in white prosthetic weapons, as their commanders communicated via headsets and microphones; the battles were backed by a score of “squealing . . . laser weapons and guided missiles.” Brutus’s taper in act 4, scene 3 was a glowing neon tube, and messages were sent as holograms encased in plastic tubes. Women played male roles (e.g., the cobbler, Caska), and even the traditionally female roles (Portia, Calphurnia) were played as overtly sexual: Caesar’s lithe young wife wrapped her arms and legs around the emperor in an attempt to seduce him as he tried to leave for the Capitol. For all its futuristic trappings, the production was most admired for its “violent passion.”18 Julius Caesar has been called Shakespeare’s most “womanless” play (Calphurnia and Portia have more or less only a single short scene each), yet the realities of contemporary stage practice demand that directors create roles for women in their companies. Although the Soothsayer is often the first role to be feminized, virtually all other roles have at one time been played by women. In 1993 the Oklahoma Shakespeare Festival director Del McClain cast OSF founder and artistic director Molly Risso as Caesar; Risso’s stature and experience as a veteran Shakespeare actor (at Oregon and Colorado Festivals) made her truly a colossus amidst the mostly young cast (which included a female Caska). New York’s First Theater Company (1993) featured women in traditionally male roles, most notably as the conspirators who were dressed in contemporary business suits. A program note by director Marc Raphael described Cassius as a “seducer,” although the production demonstrated “no hint of eroticism in the physical contact displayed by the actresses playing male parts . . . and while the sight of an older male Caesar being stabbed to death by young women dressed as men may have symbolic resonances, it is never exploited in any comprehensive way.”19 In 1998 director Rita Giomi (Seattle Shakespeare Festival) cast females as Cassius and Cicero in a production in which only eight actors played all the

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roles. The unconventional casting made no statement about sexual politics or any attempts at irony when the text muses on manly virtues; Giomi seemed to aim “at a sexless neutrality, a gender ground-zero, rather than an enriched or subverted reading of ancient history.”20 The boldest cross-gender production of Julius Caesar was created by the Judith Shakespeare Company in New York’s Mint Space (1999, revived 2000). In this modern dress version, all male roles were played by women of various ethnicities (Caesar and Antony were played by African Americans, Octavius an Hispanic), while Calphurnia and Portia were played by men. As conceived by director Joanne Zipay, the production—which retained the masculine pronouns even though they were spoken by and about women playing men—attempted to show that power games are not the property of a single sex. Yet the cross-gender casting reaped dividends: references to “being a man” or appearing “womanish” reverberated with new meanings, “as did the lethal pettiness of the squabbles, especially Antony and Octavius Caesar in 4.1.” The image of males playing females kneeling before their “imperious husbands” was deemed “surprisingly powerful,” particularly as Portia knelt “in a silk dressing gown to the icy Brutus . . . the picture of dignity humbled but not compromised.”21 Though not ostensibly as violent as Titus Andronicus or Macbeth, Julius Caesar offers two spectacular executions (Caesar’s and Cinna the poet’s). Given the graphic bloodletting in contemporary film, directors for the past thirty years have busied themselves inventing theatrically memorable deaths and battle scenes, though a few directors, notably Frank Dunlap at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (1978), dispensed with the battle sequences altogether. Most memorably, Douglas Campbell staged the assassination as a masked ritual at Stratford (Canada) in 1998. The conspirators wore Greek tragic masks (Campbell played Oedipus in Tyrone Guthrie’s ritualized staging of that play at Stratford in 1957) as they repeatedly stabbed the emperor who pulled down a series of burgundy banners dropped from the flies. The great cloths twisted around his body as he tried to escape and flowed like bloody rivers. The masked assassins knelt ritualistically to bathe their hands in great Caesar’s blood; the hands became engulfed in “wormy, dripping masses of stringy entrail-like scarlet yarn [. . . an] abstract but gruesomely powerful impression.”22 In a more modern vein, the Next Theatre Company executed Caesar in a hail of thirty-three bullets fired from handguns drawn from shoulder holsters. Cinna the poet, who is killed for his name, was also murdered in stunning fashion in several productions. At the Hartford (Canada) Stage Company in 1991, Cinna was stripped, beaten, dumped in a sewer, and set afire by a torch. A fiery glow bathed the faces of the mob as the intermission lights came up to send a shocked and silent audience out of the theater. The 2000

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New York Shakespeare Festival production executed the Poet with equal brutality: stripped and beaten, Cinna was tied feet first to a huge crane that had earlier cradled an enormous bust of Caesar; it slowly lifted the battered body above the heads of the mob—and the audience seated in the outdoor Delacourt Theatre. Although the killing of Cinna at the Alley Theatre was not especially gruesome, the image created by director Corin Redgrave underscored the effect of his death: the solitary body lay motionless on the stage floor as reams of paper blew ominously across the landscape. The audience departed for intermission knowing that Rome now had no need for rational discourse, which Redgrave symbolized by the constant specter of a scholar chanting in Latin and a set dominated by an enormous library (its books were burned by Antony’s mob and replaced by coarse revolutionary graffiti).23 Caesar’s Ghost also worked on the imaginary forces of various directors. At San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre (1979) Jerome Kilty placed his intermission after Antony’s line, “Cry havoc” (3.1.273): Caesar’s Ghost rose from the floor at this moment “to provide a sensational ending” for the first half of the play; the Ghost appeared frequently throughout the remainder of the drama.24 At the 1998 Stratford (Canada) Festival Campbell—obeying Brutus’s description of a “monstrous apparition” (4.3.275)—devised a “huge Bread and Puppet Theatre style” Caesar’s Ghost; its enormous arms stretched from an enormous billowing toga, its face covered by a golden mask. As Brutus commanded the figure to “Speak to me what thou art” (4.3.279), the larger-than-life Ghost evaporated, leaving the more worldly Caesar standing before Brutus. The transformation created a “cryptic strangeness [ . . . that was] as disconcerting for the spectator as it was for Brutus.”25 The aforementioned Next Theatre Company had the slain Caesar remain on stage throughout the remainder of its production, seated on a spot-lit throne atop the set. The Ghost barked orders (“left, right, march”) to the triumvirate’s avenging army, and upon the execution or suicide of his antagonists, he raised his pistol and “in sudden blackness, fires his own weapon. In the darkened silence afterward, the shell casing from Caesar’s bullet rolls slowly to the bottom of the ramp with metallic, amplified clarity.”26 And more than a few productions ended with the solitary figure of Caesar’s ghostly specter surveying the havoc wrought by Rome’s most famous assassination. The Next Theatre Company further embellished the moment: Caesar’s Ghost hovered over the body of dead Brutus, his right hand raised in flames “Like twenty torches joined” (1.3.17); the vindicated emperor stared at the audience and suddenly blew out the fire that consumed his hand as the theater plunged into darkness. At the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (1991) Caesar watched the suicide of Cassius as blood dripped down a cyclorama to create “gigantic Rorschach designs.”27

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Other “ghosts” haunted productions of Julius Caesar, most notably in Mark Lamos’s staging for the Hartford Stage Company. The final image patrons saw was that of a single dead soldier, fallen against a toppled marble pillar, “a visible casualty of the egoism of Caesar and Antony, as well as the folly of Cassius and Brutus.”28 The production emphasized that power exacts a terrible price, especially among those without power who are pawns of the powerful. Julius Caesar is perhaps Shakespeare’s least humorous play, the opening banter between the mob and the tribunes notwithstanding. Still there were notable attempts to infuse the play with comedic elements, partly to please audiences, largely to deconstruct the text in the postmodern fashion. In 1979 the Matrix Theatre Company (Los Angeles) portrayed Caesar as “a comic senex figure, infirm of step, voice, and hearing”; his scene with Calphurnia suggested a kind of Henny Youngman influence, as did his reading of the “northern star” speech in the Capitol (3.1.58–73). Director Joan Darling had a method to her madness: the suddenness of the assassination, highlighted by an eerie red light on a tragic mask of Caesar, produced a startling dramatic effect.29 The most ironic—and comic—Julius Caesar could be found at Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1996. The Alley actors teamed with London’s politically committed Moving Theatre Company, which had been founded in 1993 by Vanessa and Corin Redgrave as part of a commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nazi rise to power. The American and British actors performed Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra as an ongoing story (a concept employed twice in 1972: by Trevor Nunn in the RSC’s “Romans season” and by Michael Kahn at the American Shakespeare Festival). Because Antony and Cleopatra was given a most unconventional, ironist reading (e.g., the normally tawny Cleopatra was played by a porcelain-skinned Redgrave, while Antony, the European, was portrayed in both plays by a West Indian black actor, David Harewood), it was incumbent that Caesar be rendered more ironically. The combined productions had a single premise: the great figures of history are human first and mythic giants only in our minds. Fittingly, a large banner hung over the Alley auditorium bearing the Globe Theatre inscription “Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem”— “All the world plays theater”—a fitting coda for productions that consistently portrayed Rome’s leaders as “imperfect actors” on the great stage of history. (Indeed, the majority of productions in this thirty-year span aggressively demythologized Rome’s most famous leaders.) Corin Redgrave played Caesar as a dotty shell of the man who once bestrode the world, a limping, ineffectual leader supported by a cane. As he prepared for his appearance at the Forum he stripped to “Elizabethan skivvies” (the Redgraves used an eclectic mix of Elizabethan and contemporary clothing), and he showed the old fire only as he

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attacked Cimber by “stuffing a document into [ . . . his] mouth before thrusting a dagger at him.”30 The ensuing death of Cinna the poet began as a mad joke that quickly got out of hand. The mob taunted him with light banter, then killed him almost as an afterthought. The murder was performed ineptly—almost comically—and it was the juxtaposition of the grotesquely comic with the serious that made the scene chilling. Redgrave’s most audacious comedic choices were saved for Antony’s famous funeral oration, a speech that challenges actors and directors because it is well known and eagerly anticipated. At the Alley Antony was left alone on stage with a half-dozen men and women whose colorful costumes seemed borrowed from an Italian operetta. The commoners were assigned the duty of dressing Caesar’s corpse as it lay on a large undertaker’s table. They busily ignored Antony, forcing him to beg their attention with the famous opening lines of the speech. The ensuing oration was played as a calculating and even comic utterance buzzed in the ears of individual morticians, decidedly more in the manner of an Iago than Antony. The unorthodox staging made the audience listen to the speech anew, and it may have been among the most audible as there was no noisy crowd to overwhelm Antony’s words. Other directors experimented with Shakespeare’s text, often radically restructuring the script to serve their vision. The 1981 Colorado Shakespeare Festival presented the play, directed by Martin Corbin, as a stylized “nightmare” by Brutus, a concept employed earlier (1972) by British director Jonathan Miller. The events that followed the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius in act 4, scene 3—the apparition of Caesar’s Ghost, the act 5 battles (fought in expressionistic slow-motion), and the suicides—were staged as Brutus’s dreams. The assassin fell asleep in his tent, conjured these horrific visions, and then rose stoically “with the knowledge of what was to ensue.”31 The following year the Camden Shakespeare Company (Maine) used another framing device for the play: director William James Kelly made Cinna the poet a narrator (even after his death!) who guided audiences through the action “as if Shakespeare could not be trusted to tell the story in dramatic terms.”32 Perhaps the most “experimental Caesar” was that staged in 1988 by the noted Irish film actor, Richard Harris, for the University of Scranton (Pennsylvania). Billed as “A Work in Progress” and employing a cast of university actors (save Harris, who played Caesar), the director used the play as a political statement against violence by aligning contemporary martyrs (Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon) and dictators (Hitler, Mussolini) with Shakespeare’s principals. Harris used simulated World War II radio broadcasts to underscore his thesis. At times Harris’s invention overwhelmed the text: a group of young school children wandered aimlessly through a blanket

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of artificial fog while Harris sang Jimmy Webb’s sentimental pop song, “The Yard Goes on Forever,” written to commemorate Robert F. Kennedy’s murder in 1968, an embellishment that was judged “beyond ridiculous, beyond embarrassing.”33 Still, Harris’s experiment provided some provocative moments: Calphurnia’s dream was surrealistically illustrated by hooded dancers who repeatedly knifed a large death mask of Caesar. The assassination was halted in mid-act to allow Brutus, Cassius, and Caesar to walk to the forestage, where—as a monologue in Brutus’s brain—the trio recited pivotal speeches leading up to the murder; the “replay” finally induced the wavering Stoic to plunge a knife deep into the emperor’s stomach. True to the pacifist intentions of the production, no blood was shown here or in any of the play’s most violent moments. Stephen Booth has eloquently argued that Brutus is among the most thankless principal roles in Shakespeare’s canon: “[W]hen did you last hear of an actor noted for his Brutus? It is not a part I have known actors to want to play twice.”34 Much the same could be said of the other primary roles, except Antony (who is saved by the famous funeral oration), largely because the play consists of a series of intellectual discussions and debates. Furthermore, Stoicism is not an especially theatrical virtue. Thus it is not surprising that few actors have been cited for especially enlightened performances. To cite but one example, Booth judged Daniel Davis’s Brutus the “most admirable achievement” in Edward Payson Call’s 1978 production at the American Conservatory Theatre (San Francisco), largely because he gave the role “a special dignity and distinction in purely theatrical terms” by delivering most of his speeches with his back to the audience or partly obscured by Roman citizens: “[O]nly Brutus and the actor playing Brutus were indifferent to the little glories to be had from staging themselves to the crowd.”35 Interesting, but hardly an approach to be emulated. “The crowd” is assuredly as important a character as any of the named roles in Julius Caesar. As a by-product of 1960s theatrical experiments, which tried to demolish the “fourth wall” that separated actors and audiences, many directors sought to make theater patrons extensions of the action on stage. As early as 1972, Earl McCarroll (Shakespeare at Monmouth, Maine) placed his citizens in the audience and had Brutus and Antony deliver the famous funeral orations directly to the audience: “The effect was electric and, as it should be, profoundly disturbing. No huddled group of sheeted Romans on stage, absorbing rhetoric as we look on.”36 Richard Monette (Stratford, Canada, 1988) turned the auditorium into the Senate chamber by seating Rome’s politicos in the first row; as patrons returned to their seats after intermission, dozens of Roman citizens joined them in the aisles, shouting “We must be satisfied.” Thus the audience itself became part of the mob and found itself emotionally caught up in the havoc that swept

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through Rome. In an age of interactive games and entertainments, Monette’s audacity—and that of other directors who employed similar means to acknowledge the central role of “the mob”—reflected the age and body of the time in its interpretation of one of Shakespeare’s most timeless plays.

Notes 1. Dorothy and Wayne Cook, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 9 (Summer 1991): 21. 2. Pacino’s performance (directed without distinction by Stuart Vaughn) was judged “a one note affair” by the New York Times (Frank Rich, 23 March 1988); the Daily News said the actor “grunts the verse in a style so rough and choppy even someone knows it might not understand it” (Howard Kissel, 23 March 1988); New York Newsday, on the other hand, believed Pacino “hangs onto his truth like a pit bull—crazy-eyed and possessed with the taste of avenging Caesar’s death” (Linda Winer, 23 March 1988). 3. Steve Earnest, “Dramaturgy at Work: Colorado Shakespeare Festival, 1991,” On Stage Studies 15 (1992): 107–8. 4. Peter Newman, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 16 (Spring 1988): 24–25. 5. Misha Benson, “This ‘Caesar’ has a Brutus to die for, but . . . ,” Seattle Times, 1 October 1998, C–1. 6. Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Shakespeare in the Nation’s Capital,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 232. RSC director John Barton staged an “Elizabethan Caesar” (complete with Elizabethan dialect) while a student at Cambridge University in 1952. 7. John Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 268. 8. Naomi Conn Liebler, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 9 (Summer 1991): 13. 9. Peggy Goodman Edel, “Julio Cesar, et al.: The 1986 Florida Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 214–17, the quote 215. The review provides a useful synopsis of the complex Briggs-Deschamps plot. 10. Carey M. Mazur, “Julius Caesar ,” Shakespeare Bulletin 6 (v–vi, 1988): 32–33. 11. W. R. Streitberger, “Shakespeare in the Northwest: Ashland and Seattle,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 348. 12. Barbara Ann Lukacs, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 12–13 (Fall 1995): 19–20. 13. Ronald Bryden, “The 1990 Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Ontario,” Shakespeare Yearbook 2 (1991): 225. 14. Richard Eder, “Julius Caesar at the Public Theater,” New York Times, 26 January 1979, D–3. 15. Naomi Conn Liebler, “Julius Caesar Set in Africa,” Shakespeare Bulletin 9 (Summer 1991): 39–40. 16. Patricia Lennox, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 18 (Fall 2000): 8–9. 17. Michael L. Greenwald, “‘An Enterprise of Great Pitch and Moment’: Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra at the Alley Theatre, 1996,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 88. 18. Robert Kole, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 11 (Fall 1993): 20. 19. Kole, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 11 (Summer 1993): 17. 20. Benson, “This ‘Caesar,’” C–1. 21. Lennox, “Julius Caesar ,” 14–15. 22. Daniel Watermeier, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 17 (Spring 1999): 36–37. 23. See Greenwald, “‘An Enterprise of Great Pitch and Moment,’” 88. 24. Joseph H. Stodder and Lillian Wilds, “Shakespeare in Southern California and Visalia,” Shakespeare Quarterly 31 (1979): 273. 25. Watermeier, “Julius Caesar,” 38. 26. Justin Shaltz, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 11 (Summer 1993): 29. 27. Janies Caves McCauley, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 10 (Winter 1992): 28. 28. Cook, “Julius Caesar,” 21. 29. Stodder and Wilds, “Shakespeare in Southern California,” 270. 30. Greenwald, “‘An Enterprise of Great Pitch and Moment,’” 89. 31. Michael Mullin, “Colorado Shakespeare Festival,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 376. 32. H. R. Coursen, “Shakespeare in Maine: Summer 1983,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 469.

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332 • Michael L. Greenwald 33. Geoff Gehman, “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare Bulletin 6 (v–vi, 1988): 32. 34. Stephen Booth, “The Shakespearean Actor As Kamikaze Pilot,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 568. 35. Booth, “Shakespeare in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978): 273. 36. H. R. Coursen, “Shakespeare in Maine: 1972–1973,” Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 421. The author of several books on Shakespearean stage production, Coursen called the Monmouth production “the most brilliantly staged interpretation of that ambiguous play I have ever seen” (ibid.).

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CHAPTER

20

Political Caesar

Julius Caesar on the Italian Stage MARIANGELA TEMPERA

A Checkered History Italian B-movies are an excellent starting point to gauge the popularity of Julius Caesar. Directors who churn out low-budget comedies will not alienate their audiences by weaving into their scripts obscure theatrical references. If they insert parodies or quotations from Shakespeare’s plays—and they occasionally do—they usually stick to the most famous passages from Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, the playwright’s “greatest hits” in Italy. Although not very frequent, comic references to Julius Caesar do occur, and they highlight some of the difficulties that Italian theater companies encounter when performing this Shakespearean tragedy. In the opening scene of La voglia matta (A Mad Desire; director: Luciano Salce, 1962), a wealthy industrialist is allowed to play the role of Caesar during the summer theater season at one of Rome’s most famous archeological sites. In front of an elegant audience that includes all the top management from his firms, the old tycoon, deferentially prompted by the rest of the cast, offers a very poor performance of Caesar’s opening lines in the play. One of the managers (Ugo Tognazzi) decides he has already been seen by all the right people and leaves, dragging along his beautiful date who complains that she wants to know what happens next. The camera lingers on the impressive archeological site whose beauty is at odds both with the inept performances on stage and with the vulgarity of the well-heeled crowd. What on paper has all the makings of a magical evening (a great play performed in its ideal setting) turns into an easy target of ridicule. 333

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Another comedy, Tutto suo padre (His Father’s Portrait; director: Maurizio Lucidi, 1978), starts with an open air performance of Julius Caesar. Enrico Montesano interprets the role of an aspiring actor who nervously awaits his entrance. Cast as a halberd bearer, he is totally focused on the play, knows everybody’s lines by heart, and is completely oblivious to the drabness of his surroundings. A small Roman amphitheater in the middle of nowhere has been turned into a poor man’s version of the ambience presented in La voglia matta. A very small audience, uncomfortably perched on ancient stones, follows the action absentmindedly while being eaten alive by mosquitoes. It is a scene Italian spectators are quite familiar with. As a result of the financial and media success of the great summer festivals (Rome, Taormina, Verona, etc.), there is hardly a pile of ruins left in the country that has not been considered as a possible setting for quickly assembled open air performances. Producers struggling with the small budgets of provincial festivals know that selecting a Roman play for a Roman amphitheater allows for substantial economies in terms of set and costumes (and cannot be faulted in terms of cultural standards). The complete stage history of Julius Caesar in Italy would comprise many such productions— indifferently directed and acted, utterly uninteresting as interpretations of the text. Bad directors yield easily to the producers’ line of reasoning, but major directors are often reluctant to use the natural sets offered by Roman ruins for such plays as Julius Caesar. They find that the setting overpowers the action and limits their options. Even when staging the play indoors, they tend to shun close reminders of Roman antiquities in favor of stylized allusions or complete updatings. Barring open air performances, there are far fewer Italian productions of Julius Caesar than one could expect. Again, parody can offer pointers that help understand why. Il mattatore (The Star Actor; director: Dino Risi, 1960) is a vehicle for Italy’s most famous Shakespearean actor of the 1950s, Vittorio Gassman. After gaining nation-wide fame with his Hamlet and Othello, he started alternating comic roles in the cinema with tragic roles on stage. In this film, he portrays an unsuccessful actor and small time crook who ends up in prison and entertains the other inmates with a spirited rendering of Antony’s speech over Caesar’s body. Gassman pulls all the stops; he shouts, postures, swoons. At first bewildered, the inmates end up spellbound and ready to concede that Brutus was a “real son-of-a-bitch.” Although the role of Antony at this point in the play is a mattatore’s dream, the Italian actor most suited to perform it in the theater never did, limiting himself to occasional “concert” performances of Antony’s “romanza” in recitals. Gassman’s lack of interest for the complete play is probably due to the fact that, fascinating though its protagonists are, Julius Caesar simply has not got a big enough role to appeal to the star actor. And Italian

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companies were, and sometimes still are, created around the mattatore who had the final word in the choice of scripts. Even today, the sort of strong ensemble work that is demanded by Julius Caesar is seldom available in Italian companies where secondary roles are haphazardly filled by barely competent or utterly incompetent actors. While all Italian directors staging Shakespeare’s plays are beleaguered by the same casting problems, those who select Julius Caesar face unique difficulties. Before deciding whether to portray Brutus as a “real son-of-a-bitch,” a freedom fighter, or a combination of both, they need to carefully assess the political climate. Twentieth-century Italy has known violent upheavals that have affected every aspect of public life, theater included. The appropriation of Roman symbols by the Fascist party has permanently tainted them in the eyes of many postwar Italians. Terrorist attacks in the 1970s and 1980s have made the people wary of the actions of well-meaning idealists. A failure to take all these elements into account can result in unwelcome responses from reviewers and audiences alike.

Julius Caesar and Rome In 1884, Ernesto Rossi, one of the Italian Shakespeareans who had enjoyed great success throughout Europe with his performances of Hamlet and Othello, decided that the time had come to introduce his countrymen to the play. His project was very ambitious: he planned to invite leading actors from different companies to fill the major roles and insisted on a lavish and accurate reproduction of ancient Rome in the setting and costumes because “only a small step divides the sublime from the ridiculous and stopping short of it is as difficult as it is imperative.”1 He would, of course, be the star of the show. The project collapsed, but Rossi finally succeeded in staging Julius Caesar. Rossi’s preoccupation with the setting was shared by Edoardo Boutet and Ferruccio Garavaglia who codirected the next production of the play in Rome in 1905. The play was to be “an homage to the city of Rome through the celebration of a moment of its past.”2 It echoed on stage the grandeur of the ruins admired all over Rome, but it failed to make the play popular with Italian audiences. It would be another thirty years before Julius Caesar was performed again, at the height of the Fascist period. The regime encouraged theater-going and, while promoting its own playwrights, did not discourage the staging of Shakespeare’s plays, mostly the Italian comedies. The strong emphasis on the symbolic continuity between Fascism and Imperial Rome did not result in a flurry of productions of Julius Caesar. It is the rare dictator, after all, who approves of plays about assassination. The tragedy was staged only once, in 1935. The director, Nando

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Tamberlani, was allowed to use a most striking theatrical space, the Basilica of Maxentius, whose majestic Roman ruins were not normally made available for open air performances. It may very well have been a deliberate attempt at creating “a connection between the contemporary historical moment and the period that was represented: the Colosseum in the background, the Capitol opposite must have immediately evoked a glorious past, thus neutralizing the subversive content of the play.”3 The vast space, with its arches and flights of steps, allowed for mass scenes of cinematographic quality. A clever use of lighting focused the spectators’ attention on small portions of the monumental setting for such key moments as the assassination: “isolated by the lights in the central arch, it must have looked awesome, thus distracting the attention from the implications of the tyrannicide.”4 For stagings of Shakespeare’s tragedy that openly connected it to Fascism, one had, of course, to look outside Italy. In 1937, Orson Welles presented his Julius Caesar: Death of a Dictator, a modern-dress production which portrayed Caesar as an “arrogantly self-controlled Dictator, in the military dress affected by Mussolini and Hitler.”5 The living model for Welles’s hugely successful portrait of a dictator had his own views on Julius Caesar. Benito Mussolini was fascinated by the role in history of the man he considered his predecessor and was haunted by his violent death. Well aware of the importance of the theater as a propaganda vehicle, he coauthored Cesare with Gioacchino Forzano, who did most of the actual writing. Their joint effort left absolutely no room for the ambiguities that made Shakespeare’s version so politically objectionable in Fascist Italy and so open to such extreme readings as Welles’s. With more than a hint of self-complacency, Il Duce defined his predecessor as “victorious/over continents and seas/in fifteen wars/irresistible in action/motivator with his example and his words . . . ”6 The play itself portrays a Caesar who, at the height of his power and secure of the love of his people, commits the fatal mistake of dismissing his personal guard. “But in the shadows, the losers of the old order . . . the nostalgics of profiteering democracy gather around Brutus to decide the murder of the Father of the Country. And at the Ides of March, while the settlers were leaving the shores of Ostia to go plough the lands of the Mare Nostrum, Caesar falls under the parricidal daggers of the traitors.”7 The play premiered, with easily predictable success, in 1939. The events of the following years guaranteed that it would not supersede Shakespeare’s tragedy on the Italian scene.

Postwar Italian Politics and Julius Caesar Mussolini’s life was taken by the “nostalgics of profiteering democracy” in Milan, and in Milan Giorgio Strehler directed Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

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in 1953. It was the first indoor performance of the play in nearly fifty years,8 and the young director who was to become one of the leading figures in European theater brilliantly met the challenge of staging it at the aptly named “Piccolo Teatro.” To an audience for whom Roman eagles and Roman salutes were a painful and embarrassing reminder of a still too recent past, Strehler presented a Julius Caesar that downplayed the outward signs of Imperial Rome and laid the ground for his Brechtian Coriolanus. On a stage so small that it could barely contain the mass scenes, the setting was neither overnaturalistic nor totally abstract. It consisted of a fixed structure resembling an amphitheater in front of which a smaller semi-circle of columned doors and windows could be superimposed to facilitate the contrast between the incidents leading up the main action [?] (with the conspirators, for instance, meeting in darkened niches) and the key events taking part on the main stage.9 The colors were black and white throughout with dashes of steel grey that evoked the blades of the daggers. The plebeians—the few extras who could find space on stage—were made anonymous by uniformly dusty costumes. The pace of the action was very slow up to Antony’s speech, which moved these Romans so much that they charged toward Brutus’s house carrying Caesar’s body on their shoulders. After this climactic moment, the pace got faster and faster, as the action hastened toward the inevitable ending. Strehler carefully avoided any overt parallel between Caesarism and Fascism, but made a strong political statement more subtly. He played down the female parts to emphasize that he considered Julius Caesar to be a play about men faced with difficult choices, about “the great theme of friendship that one ‘must’ betray as sometimes one betrays love for reasons greater than love.”10 In a country that had been torn apart by civil war only a few years earlier, for spectators who still had vivid memories of difficult choices between old allegiances and “doing the right thing,” this reading was especially topical. By downplaying the outward signs of Roman antiquity, Strehler succeeded, for the first time on the Italian stage, in presenting Julius Caesar as the work of an Elizabethan who had acquired his knowledge of Rome via Plutarch. He recreated for his audience a reality “whose sense could not and should not be ambiguous, outside of its time and of the boundaries the poet had established for it.”11 It was a Rome more “true” than that evoked by the most stunning backdrop of authentic ruins, because it was a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s theatrical creation. Once again, Strehler’s insistence on ensemble work paid off handsomely. “We have finally seen ‘Romans’ instead of ‘tenors,’”12 was the enthusiastic comment of a critic faced with the minor miracle of a production where mannerisms were kept to the minimum and even the minor roles were sensibly cast.

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In the 1960s, televised performances introduced Shakespeare’s plays to an audience much wider and more varied than could ever be reached by a theater director. In 1965, Sandro Bolchi adapted for television the production of Julius Caesar that he had directed in Verona’s Roman theater in 1959. In his words, the new medium was worth exploring because it allowed the director to isolate details, thus making it possible for the spectator to grasp “shreds, shards of the text, that in the theater, in the context of global vision, can get lost.”13 His enthusiasm for close-ups allowed the spectators to appreciate the fine acting of each member of the star-studded cast, but reduced the tragedy to a clash of individuals. It was an interpretation that left little room for the role of the Roman mob and severely weakened the director’s reading of the last part of the tragedy. Here, the scene of the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius overshadowed everything else. The childish quality of some of their exchanges carried over to the shouting match between opposing armies (a very modest affair involving the main characters against a background of stony extras). Bolchi closed his Julius Caesar on Antony’s eulogy of Brutus, thus underlying that, in his view, the play centered on the clash between Antony (a subtly dangerous Raoul Grassilli) and Brutus. Luigi Vannucchi fully explored the Hamlet-like traits of a conspirator torn between love for his victim and love for his country, but was given very little scope to convey Brutus’s qualities of leadership. In a TV studio Bolchi’s toga-clad Romans acted against a conventional setting of pillars and arches. At key points (the assassination, for example), they struck collective poses that were inspired by nineteenth century paintings, but most of the time they were isolated in close-ups. In the sleepy prosperity of the mid-sixties, Bolchi’s extras could, somewhat self-consciously, greet Caesar with Roman salutes without triggering unwanted memories. One would have said that, from that moment onward, Julius Caesar could finally be appreciated in all its complexity, without any further need, on the part of the director, to fully embrace either Antony’s or Brutus’s world view. How wrong one would have been. The student unrest of 1968–1969 triggered a period of heightened political feelings which resulted in violent clashes in almost all fields of public life. In 1971, to celebrate its reopening and the Centenary of Rome as capital of Italy, the Teatro Argentina commissioned a production of Julius Caesar from the “Compagnia dei Giovani,” a highly regarded, privately run company directed by Giorgio De Lullo. The budget for eighteen performances was extremely high. Memories of the 1905 production and the Roman theme had probably been more relevant to the selection of this particular play than its politics, but the opposition did not see it this way. The Communist Party branded the project as an attempt at stamping the Centenary with “the seal of Romanness and of all the rhetoric, also Fascist rhetoric, that has

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flourished around it.”14 Enraged actors, students, and workers threatened to storm the theater in order to halt the shameful waste of public money for this production. The rehearsals continued under police protection, and the opening night was a tense affair: “Taking his bow, De Lullo waved generously to the upper balconies in gratitude. Presumably he was thanking the scores of sleepy-eyed plainclothes policemen who had sat through three hours of Shakespeare and were trying to look as if they had enjoyed themselves.”15 The setting was completely stylized, free from any element that might have provoked hostile reactions, the acting was ritualistic, the Roman mob tamed into a Chorus. In attempt to avoid all the political pitfalls, the director went to the opposite extreme: “De Lullo constantly aim[ed] at giving more weight to the sentimental motivations of characters and action than to ideological and political reasons” at the risk of reducing the play to “a family’s struggle over the corpse of a friend.”16 Meanwhile in Genoa, Luigi Squarzina was pressing ahead with his Julius Caesar. He embraced the parallels with contemporary issues as eagerly as De Lullo had shunned them. He combined the symbols of the Roman Empire (faceless statues, sedan chairs, Caesar’s throne, etc.) with the paraphernalia of a TV studio and made ample use of stills of modern individuals and crowds to accompany such moments as the two orations, which were simultaneously recited and projected on large screens. Caesar was heard but not seen, constantly hidden behind curtains or high-backed chairs; he materialized only when Brutus stabbed him. At times awkward (especially during the domestic scenes with Calphurnia), Squarzina’s choice to reduce Caesar to a threatening, disembodied voice was nonetheless effective in forcing the spectators to “understand, or remember, what dictatorship is, in all its overwhelming power but also in its grotesque pettiness.”17 The increasingly violent seventies left little room for stagings of Julius Caesar that did not portray Brutus as a wholly positive folk hero and Antony as a corrupt politician. In 1978, Maurizio Scaparro’s production focused on the manipulation of popular consent that can be achieved by a skillful public speaker. His Antony (Pino Micol) interprets the oration “as if he was trying it out in front of a mirror, rehearsing the gesture that he would eventually reproduce, appropriating all the words (including the crowd’s) in view of a manipulation of public opinion which is only apparently hidden.”18 In 1978, the Red Brigade kidnapped and eventually assassinated the Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro. The shocking photographs of his bullet-ridden body encouraged parallels with Caesar’s death, and put an end, for the time being, to any oversimplified interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy. In the following years, with left wing extremists engaging in more knee-cappings and killings and right wing extremists planting bombs in public places, no mainstream director would have touched Julius Caesar with a barge pole.

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The next major Italian production was directed by a Pole, Krzysztof Zanussi, in 1987. As a foreigner, he could express views on the play that would have been hotly challenged if coming from an Italian: the play is about “good intentions that produce negative effects—violence begets violence, crime another crime. Tyranny begets terrorism, which kills freedom just as surely as tyranny did.”19 He did not find deliberate anachronisms necessary to highlight the points of contact between Shakespeare’s play and today’s world: “I will not dress Brutus as a Robespierre or a Dzierzynskij (the Polish founder of the Soviet security forces), or as a contemporary terrorist, although I see analogies among all those characters and have no sympathy for any of them.”20 Against a traditional set of Roman arches and of pedestals without statues, Zanussi’s toga-clad conspirators were portrayed with more than a touch of Conrad. Their flamboyant words were in sharp contrast with their body language (Brutus, for example, had a tendency to huddle under a pedestal in moments of stress.) Chance seemed to play a larger than usual role in this Caesar’s death. Stopped in front of the Senate by a group of very uncertain conspirators, he brushed them aside and crossed the threshold to safety only to be called back by the sharp cry of the Soothsayer who thus became instrumental in making his own prediction come true. Zanussi’s production was plagued by inadequate acting and by some quirky choices (having the actor freeze when starting a monologue, while the audience heard his recorded voice, for example). It counterbalanced previous readings, but it was not very successful. By the mid-1990s, the wave of terrorism had abated and directors were finally ready to come to terms with the political (and mob-related) assassinations of the previous years. In 1996 Gigi Dall’ Aglio directed a Julius Caesar that, like Squarzina’s twenty-five years earlier, heavily relied on televised images. On an anonymous space covered by a red carpet, Caesar was presented as a soft-spoken politician engaged in games of chess with his assistant, Antony. From the beginning, the scene of his death was repeatedly “prefigured, rehearsed, dreamt of and finally enacted with ferocious gusto and bloody-minded enthusiasm.”21 But these conspirators, “half-way between a Red Brigade cell and a splinter group of Dostoevskijan demons,”22 were better at imagining assassination than at carrying it out. As in the actions of real-life terrorist groups, the actual ambush did not have any sort of terrible beauty but was a sloppy act of butchery. Through their televised orations, Brutus and Antony vied for the favor of an audience represented by a grotesque middle-class couple watching “breaking news” from the comfort of their living room. The second half was again geared to the taste of a TV audience with Cinna’s killing turned into a cabaret routine that was very much praised by critics and the alliance between Antony and Octavius

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being given comic overtones that contrasted with the conventionally tragic handling of the ends of Brutus and Cassius. In an interview, Maurizio Donatoni (Antony) said that the show reminded him of the Moro affair and that he played Antony as a kind of socialist (practically an insult in Italy of the 1990s). He saw him as a pleasant chap whom everybody underestimates until he uses public opinion as his power base. While the conspirators were unable to explain their motivations, Antony knew “how to abandon rhetoric and look straight into the camera, how to pierce the screen and elicit real emotions . . . ”23 All of a sudden, mainstream theater managers could choose from at least three productions of Julius Caesar (a fourth, which never became a complete show, was a dramatized reading by Claudio Morganti, a sort of “musical score of the essence of the tragedy”). 24 Ninni Bruschetta and his Compagnia del Teatro di Messina offered a version of the tragedy that combined daggers and guns, Shakespearean verse and Apocalypse Now. Like Dall’ Aglio, Bruschetta connected Caesar’s death with Aldo Moro’s, but, being based in Sicily, he also stressed similarities between Caesar and those Sicilian “defenders of the state” who had been killed by the Mafia after being “abandoned or betrayed . . . by those who should have protected and supported them.”25 Not without sympathy, he portrayed Brutus as a man whose noble intentions had disastrous consequences. Once again, a group of enthusiastic but inadequately trained actors marred the success of the production. Of the three 1997 versions of Julius Caesar, only one made headlines in Italy and abroad—and not entirely for its artistic merits.

“This is not an actor” The “Societas Raffaello Sanzio” is an experimental company whose very name pays tribute to Raffaello’s formal perfection and to the Latin roots of Italian culture. Wanting to explore the power of rhetoric, the director, Romeo Castellucci, found a perfect vehicle in the play that contains the most famous oration in Western drama. His script drastically cut down Shakespeare’s lines and combined what was left with materials from the works of famous Roman rhetoricians. A comprehensive study of Roman statues provided the basis for the antinaturalistic gestures of the actors, while the theatricality of Caesar’s death and its aftermath were enhanced by the presence on stage of “ . . . vskij” (Stanislavskij), a sort of internal director at odds with the action. The setting too contributed to reminding spectators that they were attending a performance: the director chose the front of Pompey’s theater for the assassination (following Suetonius’s version of the historical episode), and a dilapidated theater for the last scenes. The cast of

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Shakespeare’s tragedy was reduced to Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, and Antony; the plebeians being represented by worn-out shoes that showered down from the sky at the beginning and were gathered in a pile at the end. Since the power of public rhetoric largely depends on delivery, the production foregrounded the human voice in all its aspects. It opened with “ . . . vskij” speaking Flavius’s first lines with an endoscope up his nose which projected the image of his vocal chords on screen; it went on to show a hugely obese Cicero advising public speakers in a flat monotone and getting stuck like a broken record. Brutus delivered his defense in a high-pitched, child-like voice artificially achieved by inhaling helium; then a laryngectomized actor playing Antony stepped on a pedestal, struck a suitably statuary pose, and launched into his speech with his metallic, disembodied voice. Deprived of inflection by necessity rather than choice, his words still sounded oddly convincing. The bodies that the director selected as containers of the all-important voices defied theatrical conventions. In a complete rejection of Stanislavskij’s theories, the interpreters of his productions, often nonprofessional, are chosen exclusively because their bodies fit the director’s design. Here, Caesar was an extremely fragile old man who allowed his assassins to strip him naked and ceremonially tie him down as a Christ-like figure, while Cicero, a sort of massive eunuch finally reduced to silence, turned his back to the scene. In the second part, the bodies came under the harshest scrutiny. Brutus and Cassius played their endgame in a gutted theater reminiscent of the fires which had recently destroyed two famous Italian theaters. Gone were the signs of Roman power, and with them the healthy bodies of the actors. Their roles were now played by two anorexic women who exposed their skeletal bodies to the audience while painstakingly making their way across the stage. In the director’s words, in the first part of Shakespeare’s play, Brutus and Cassius “are the bearers of the substance of rhetoric, of a public word, an idea of the city. . . . It is a men’s world.” But on the battlefields “all this is erased. It’s a sort of tabula rasa that obliterates even people’s sex. So I thought of anorexic bodies, where I detect both toughness and melancholy, both giving up and fighting.”26 The two interpreters engaged in childish routines that left Cassius dead, his/her body covered by a Magrittean note reading “This is not an actor,” and Brutus alone, unable to commit suicide even after “ . . . vskij” had shown him/her how the final scene should be acted and had got shot for his pains. Predictably, this visually riveting, deeply disturbing show was better received in France (“a rare taste for games, and an exceptional sense of staging”)27 than in England (“If you enjoy sick theatre, then this is a must”).28 It is unlikely that other companies will go even further down the same route,

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Political Caesar • 343

but they may be inspired to break away from the tradition of interpreting Julius Caesar in the light of Italian politics.

Notes 1. Ernesto Rossi, Quarant’ anni di vita artistica (Firenze: Niccolai, 1887), 246. All translations in this essay are my own ones. 2. Marisa Sestito, “Julius Caesar” in Italia (1726–1974) (Bari: Adriatica, 1978), 112. 3. Ibid., 127–28. All the information about the 1935 Julius Caesar comes from this book. 4. Ibid., 128. 5. John Ripley, “Julius Caesar” on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 226. 6. Giovacchino Forzano, Mussolini autore drammatico (Firenze: Barbera, 1954), xxxvi. These words were added by Mussolini himself to the script as part of Caesar’s epitaph for the ending of a film version of the play which never materialized. 7. Annuario del teatro italiano 4 (1939); quoted in: Gianfranco Pedullà, Il teatro italiano nel tempo del fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 216. 8. Gustavo Salvini directed an open-air performance in Verona in 1949. 9. David Hirst, Giorgio Strehler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 66. 10. Giorgio Strehler, “Inscenare Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare e Jonson: Il teatro elisabettiano oggi, ed. Agostino Lombardo (Roma: Officina, 1979), 293. 11. Ettore Gaipa, Giorgio Strehler (Bologna: Cappelli, 1959), 98. 12. O. V., “Giulio Cesare di Shakespeare,” Corriere d’ informazione, 21 November 1954. 13. Daniela Guardamagna, “Shakespeare e la televisione,” Studi inglesi 2 (1975): 488. 14. Quoted in Sestito, “Julius Caesar,” 150. 15. Francis Lane, “Thumbs Down Verdict on Julius Caesar,” Daily American, 4 May 1971. 16. Agostino Lombardo, “Giulio Cesare,” Sipario 301, June 1971. 17. Lombardo, “Giulio Cesare,” Sipario 306, November 1971. 18. Giuseppe Liotta, “Giulio Cesare,” Sipario 389, October 1978. 19. Krzysztof Zanussi, “Shakespeare visto da una prospettiva mitteleuropea,” in Mettere in scena Shakespeare, ed. Alessandro Serpieri and Keir Elam (Parma: Pratiche, 1987), 10. 20. Ibid., 12. 21. Franco Quadri, “Cesare via monitor: la storia impazzisce,” La Repubblica, 2 December 1996. 22. Gianni Manzella, “Il Giulio Cesare in doppiopetto,” Il Manifesto, 24 December 1996. 23. Massimo Marino, “La diretta tv su quel delitto,” Romagna Mattina, 19 November 1996. 24. Rossella Battisti, “Il Giulio Cesare secondo Morganti: Partitura tragica per voce recitante,” L’ Unità, 21 August 1997. 25. Aggeo Savioli, “Giulio Cesare o Aldo Moro?,” L’ Unità, 13 March 1999. 26. Cristina Piccino, “Romeo Castellucci, i miei appunti su Shakespeare,” Il Manifesto, 9 March 1997. 27. Jean-Louis Perrier, “La Violence de Castellucci,” Le Monde, 15 July 1998. 28. Robert Gore-Langton, “Freak or unique?,” The Express , 29 May 1999.

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Index A Absolutism, 34 Action brotherly concord, 184 Brutus, 187–188 African American cast, 323–324 African setting, 323–324 Agency, 190–193 Agon, 271–272 Alexander, Sir William, 79 Allusions, audience, 92 Ambiguity, 5, 300–301 determinacy, 265–267 Ambition, 146, 187 Caesar, 275–278 ladder, 275–278 Ambivalence, 5, 27, 94, 220–221 Brutus, 223–224 defined, 215 America Brutus as liberating hero, 34–35 first recorded Julius Caesar production, 17 Julius Caesar stage performances, 35–36, 38–39 Anachronism, 242–246 Analogy, appropriation as, 250–252 Anti-intellectualism, 261–265 Antike, 28–29 Antithetical motives, 27 Antithetical theme, 27 Antony, 106 constructions, 157, 222–223 cowardice, 172 demagogue, 9 emotional dimensions, 134–135 epitaph, 8 Forum speech, 105–106 friendship, 9

funeral oration, 146–148, 234–235 language, 231–232 loyalty, 9 metaphor, 146 number of lines, 6 Octavius, relationship, 135–136 populace, 168–169 Post-Marxism, 207 presentation, 172–173 as protagonist, 36–37 psychoanalytic criticism, 216–217 psychological action, 134–135 quasi-monarchical demagogues, 203 restitutional hero, 190 rhetoric, 170, 234–236 rhetorical register shift, 233 Roman Republic, 174 takes Caesar’s place as Brutus’s nemesis, 133 theatricality, 147 visual domain, 174 will, 157 Antony and Cleopatra, 113, 299 triumvirates, 120–121 Appian, 73, 97 Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral, 105 Appropriation, 242 as analogy, 250–252 Arrogance, Caesar (historical figure), 64 Assassination Brutus (Marcus Brutus) (historical figure), 103 Caesar (historical figure), 103–104 conflation of events, 100 feminizes Caesar, 223 justification, 307 murder as purification, 132–133 Plutarch, 103–104

345

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346 • Index Assassination (continued) poorly planned, 65 populace, 104–105 Senators, 104–105 vs. murder, 14–15 Ate, goddess of chaos, 170 Atkins, Robert, 37–38 Audience active spectators vs. passive auditors, 246– 247 allusions, 92 heterogeneous, 247 Augustan Age, Julius Caesar stage performances, 34 Augustus, 106, 174 relationship with Antony, 135–136 Authority, 117–118 authoritative rule assumptions, 60 production of, 257–258 untrustworthiness, 237 Autocracy, 26, 34 Caesar (historical figure), 66 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 32 Battle scenes, Julius Caesar stage performances, 288 Benson, Frank, 37 Berliner Ensemble, London visit in 1956, 309 Betterton, Thomas, 34 Bible, as literal history, 99 Blood, 92, 103, 132, 242, 310–311 act of naming, 145–146 bloody hands, 11 feminist approach, 30–31 gender approach, 30–31 imagery, 29 psychoanalytic criticism, 222 Bonjour, Adrien, 27 Booth, Edwin, 36 Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, 44 Bradley, A.C., 22–23, 155–156 Brecht, Bertolt, 59, 227–231, 232, 239 English Renaissance theater, 229 influences, 227, 236 legacy, 236 mob of gangsters, 238–239 model of epic theater, 229 Bridges-Adams, William, 37 British politics Back to Basics, 260 John Major, cultural materialism, 259–268 Julius Caesar cultural materialism, 259–268 Brook, Peter, 309 Brotherhood, 148–150, 182–184 Brutus, see also Brutus (Marcus Brutus)(historical figure), 21, 106 action, 187–188

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346

ambivalence, 223–224 assassination of Antony rejected, 103 and Cassius, 298 on money, 204–205 quarrel scene between, 148–149 relationship, 136, 137 casting, 35, 330 constructions, 157, 222–223 death, 137 death scene, 8, 9, 161–162 defends assassination, 104 discontinuity, 160 emulation, 272 epitaph, 8 farewell speeches, 150–151 Forum speech, 102 funeral orations, 146–148 as Hamlet precursor, 24 honor, 141 idealism, 8, 21 “in-between” character, 192 Julius Caesar stage performances, 34 ladder, 275–278 liberator vs. murderer, 5 love, 183–184 Macbeth, 25 metaphors, 142–145 misinterpretation, 223–224 naïveté, 8 names, 141, 149–150 nobility, 9 Orson Welles as, 297, 298 performative utterance, 142–143 populace, 168–169 Portia, relationship, 131–132 Post-Marxism, 207 praxis of public oratory, 169 as principal character, 291 psychoanalytic criticism, 30, 216 reflection, 218–219 rhetoric, 170 self-knowledge, 8 soliloquy, 18 Stoicism, 8, 159–160 suicide, 151 thankless principal role, 330 Brutus (Marcus Brutus) (historical figure) assassination, 103 assassination of Antony rejected, 103 battle of Pharsalia, 102 Caesar (historical figure), relationship, 102 character, 102 importance, 94 mentor, 102 as orator, 102 Plutarch on, 102 Burge, Steven, 42–43

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Index • 347 C Caesar, see also Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar; historical figure) ambition, 275–278 Antony’s presentation, 172–173 autocratic inflexibility, 222 body, 244–245 centrality of, 234–235 emblematic quality of, 105 as sacred object, 174 as signifier of multiple meanings, 235 Calphurnia, 131–132, 221 caste, 203 character, 18–19, 84 characteristics, 83–84 commodified, 174 contradictory images, 221–222 contradictory parts in bipartite action, 157 death, 189–190, 232 historicization, 245 textualization, 245 fall of, 148 ghost, 12, 44, 136–137, 145, 157–158, 310 in psychoanalytic criticism, 223 in stage performances, 289, 327–328 imaged based on Julius Caesar, 4 lost plays about, 79 monarchical politics, 84 names, 140–141 as non-orator, 142 number of lines, 6 objectification, 157 performative nature, 142 pivotal figure in drama, 40 primacy of public duty over private interest, 103 as principal character, 291–292 private vs. public, 7 psychoanalytic criticism, 215, 216 quasi-monarchical demagogues, 203 reflection, 218–219 self-knowledge, 8 Shakespeare’s allusions to, 4 signifier, 141 spirit, 6 sterility, 188 swimming match, 273–275 transformative power, 99 tyrant vs. martyr, 5 as villain, 291–292 vs. historical Caesar, 4 will, 105, 157 Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar; historical figure), 71, 236–237 ancient references, 72–73 arrogance, 64 assassination, 103–104

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347

autocracy, 66 battle of Pharsalia, 102 Brutus (Marcus Brutus; historical figure), relationship, 102 Caesar’s laws, 61 campaign against Parthians, 62 changing image, 59 charismatic rule, 63 Cicero, 83–84 civil war, 60 differentiated ambivalent image, 62 dramatized, 72 drive, 75 early career, 61 early importance, 61 egomaniac honor orientation, 62 fame, 71 family, 75 first Consulate, 61 foreigners, 75 German-speaking historians, 60 idealized image, 59 importance, 94 intentions, 61 Jesus Christ, compared, 71 as judged by his contemporaries, 60 literary and scientific talents, 75 lost plays, 72 medieval comments, 72 Montaigne, 75, 76 motivation, 75 motives of conspirators, 63–64 narrow-minded behavior of opponents, 62 nature, 75 own works read, 72 personal traits, 75 physically, 75 politicians compared, 76 positive assessments, 65–66 predominance of financial exchange over material production, 208 qualities most upsetting to ancient Romans, 84 reforms, 61 Renaissance views of character, 72, 73–74 Roman Republic, 60–61 Senators, 63, 66 as statesman, 61 war against Parthians, 64 will, 105 youth, 61 Caesar (opera), 43–44 Caesar and Pompey: The Tragedy of Caesar’s Revenge, 77, 78–79 Calendar reform, 98–99, 243 Call, Edward Payson, 39 Calphurnia, 7 loyalty, 10

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348 • Index Calphurnia (continued) relationship with Caesar, 131–132, 221 traditional woman’s role, 10 Capitalist society, 201 Carlyle, Thomas, 19–20 Carnival, 47 populace, 237–238 Carpenter, 118, 172, 202 Caska, 14, 142, 156–157 textual signs of revision, 159 Cassius, 8–9, 66 Brutus, 298 on money, 204–205 quarrel scene between, 148–149 relationship, 136, 137 casting, 35 death, 137 emulation, 272 envy, 9 farewell scene, 9 farewell speeches, 150–151 human mirror, 218–219 John Gielgud, 39–40 love, 162, 183–184 misinterpretation of fall, 223–224 names, 149–150 newly discovered importance, 39–40 number of lines, 6 psychoanalytic criticism, 215–216 reflection, 218–219 Rome, 186–187 suicide, 9, 151 swimming match, 273–275 Cassius Dio Cocceianus, 96 Casting, 308–316, 323–326 Brutus, 35, 330 Cassius, 35 Julius Caesar stage performances, 335 major roles, 289–292 non-name actors, 320 nontraditional, 319, 323–326 Orson Welles’s production, 297, 298 populace, 330–331 women playing male roles, 325–326 Catiline, 82–83 Cato, 16 Cato, 86–87, 102 Change crowning, 158 performing “I,” 158 Chapman, George, 83–87 Caesar’s character, 84–87 Prince Henry, 84 Character analysis, Bradleyan tradition, 22– 23 Characters, see also Political character, 17– 20 Caesar, 18–19

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348

construction, 155–163 Elizabethan, 155 as expression of poetic vision, 25 modernity, 155 psychoanalytic criticism, 30 psychological analyses, 20 sources, 27 textual means, 155–163 Cicero, 139, 140, 258 Caesar (historical figure), 83–84 gender, 258 including as conspirator, 257 as legitimating cultural authority, 257 psychoanalytic criticism, 217 recruitment, 120 Roman values, 95–96 Cinna the poet, 134, 249–250, 296 violence, 326–327 Civil war, 62, 121 Caesar (historical figure), 60 Caesar’s position of negotiation, 63 following Caesar’s murder, 65 Class loyalty, 202 Class system, Rome, 201–202 Classical texts, 28 Clemency, 86 Cleopatra, 82 Clock, 242–246 Closure, 136 Cobbler, 118, 172, 206–207, 213 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18 Collective violence, 10, 238 Comedic elements, 328–329 Comic misprision, populace, 206–207 Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Gallic Wars), 95 Common people, see The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Populace Conflation of events, assassination, 100 Conflation of time, 99–100 Conjuration, 151 Conservative politics (in Britain), cultural materialism, 259–268 Conspirators, 64–65 brotherhood of love, 183 Constancy, 158–159 Constative utterances, 140 Constructions, 11–12, 173 Antony, 157, 222–223 Brutus, 157, 222–223 populace, 222–223 Construing objects, 218 self, 218 Contradictions, textual signs of revision, 159 Coriolanus, 113, 115 speech-act play, 140 Cornelia, 77–78

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Index • 349 Corruption, 204 Costumes, 40–41, 42 Elizabethan clothing, 321 modern dress, 38, 302–303, 319 Courage, 75 Cowardice Antonius, 172 Lepidus, 172 Cross-gender production, 325–326 Crowning, 100–101 change, 158 refusal, 146 Cultural Materialism, 29, 30, 31–32, 257–268 Conservative British politics, 259–268 John Major, 259–268 Cyclical time, 182 D Davenport, Edward Loomis, 36 Death Brutus, 161–162 Caesar, 189–190 love, 280–282 Deconstruction, 30 Decontextualization, 265–267 Demagogue, Antony, 9 Democracy, 116–117 tyranny, relationship, 116–117, 120 Determinacy, ambiguity, 265–267 Dialectical energy, 308 Dialogism, 33 Die Ermordung Cäsars, 44 Discontinuity Brutus, 160 theory of revision, 159–160 Discourse, hermeneutically open, 184 Discursive persuasion, Post-Marxism, 207 Disorder, 181 Divine authorization, 190 Double time, 99 Dramatic language, 29 Dramatic poems, 29 Dreams, 12 interpretation, 221 psychoanalytic criticism, 221 Dryden, John, 13 Duke of Buckingham, (John Sheffield), 14 Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s Company Forum speech, 290 Julius Caesar stage performances, 36 E Economic criticism, 208 Economic determinists, see Material Marxism Economic tropes, Julius Caesar, 208–209 Economy, language, 208 Eedes, Richard, 74

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349

Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 250–251 Elizabethan Age Elizabethan-Roman class conflict compared, 202 Roman history, 28 Elizabethan theater, 165 Brecht’s study, 227, 236 conjunction of politics, performance, and marketplace, 176–177 as creation of plebeian cluture, 165 geopolitical domain, 173 liminal location, 173 subversive potential, 32 Elizabethan values, 10, 11 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 73 Emulation, 10–11, 74, 85 Brutus, 272 Cassius, 272 defined, 214–215, 271 historical background, 271–272 rivalry, 272 suicide, 281 England, colonialism, 80–81 English Renaissance theater, 71–87 Bertolt Brecht, 229 Ensemble playing, 308 Envy, 87 Cassius, 9 Epilogue, restitutional hero, 192 Epistemological issues, 11–12 Epitaph Antony, 8 Brutus, 8 Eroticism, as emulation, 271 Eutropius, 96–97 Exorcism, 151 Exterior spaces, 132–134 F The False One, 81–82 Family background, 272–273 Family connections, 93 Farewell speeches Brutus, 150–151 Cassius, 9, 150–151 “Fascist” Julius Caesar, 295–304 Fashion (verb), 93 Fealty, 182 Fear, 84 Feast of Lupercal, 6–7 Plutarch, 101 Female roles, 9–10 Feminine, 30 Feminist approach, 30 blood, 30–31 feminist criticism, 47 Feminization, 274 Feudal duty, 193

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350 • Index Feudal economy, 201 Flavius, 128 Foreigners, 75 Forum speech, 29, 308 Meiningen production, 290 Foucault, Michel, 32 Freud, Sigmund, 23 fable of “primal horde,” 214, 217 Friendship, 128, 135–136, 274–275 Antony, 9 Full text, 43 Funeral orations, 133 Antony, 146–148 Brutus, 146–148 honor, 146 performative language, 146 Funeral rites, 175–176, 234 G Gangster mob, 227–231, 232 Garnier, Robert, 77–78 Gassman, Vittorio, 334–335 Gaze, 30 Gender issues, 30, 47, 274 blood, 30–31 Cicero, 258 German criticism, 22 influence of English, 19–20 Gervinus, G.G., 20 Gestures, Roman, 28 Gielgud, John, 39–40 Globe Theatre Company, 3, 156–157 audience, 171–172 first of Shakespeare’s plays, 156 first play at, 3 Julius Caesar first performance, 246 legally contested property, 248–249 motto, 247 reconstructed, 3 Goethe, Johann W. von, 19 unity of ideas, 19 Gramsci, Antonio, 205–206 Granville-Barker, Harley, 24–25 Great Britain, see also England education, 261–265 Greet, Ben, 37 Gregorian calendar reform, 98–99 Greville, Fulke, 112 H Hall, Peter, 308–309 Hamlet ghosts, 223 multivocality, 163 Harris, Richard, 329–330 Hazlitt, William, 18–19 Hegel, Georg W.F., 199 Henry V

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Chorus, 246 plot construction, 127 Historicism Caesar’s death, 245 Julius Caesar anticipates, 242–252 Historiography, 59–66 History historical events, 6–7 historical sites, 7 populace as producers of, 166 refashioning events, 92 reinterpretations, 42–43 shaping and making, 92 as unifying factor in Julius Caesar, 20 Homosexual-homosocial continuum, 279 Honor, 10–11, 215 Brutus, 141 funeral orations, 146 love, 278–282 Hudson, H.N., 20 Human nature, 17 Humility, 86 I Idealism, Brutus, 8, 21 Identification, defined, 214 Ideological appropriability, 242 Idiolects, 94 Idolatry Post-Marxism, 210 Puritanism, 210 Illocutionary intentions, 250 Imagery, see also Specific type, 10, 25–26, 29, 46 blood, 29 Images, Roman, 28 Imagination, 17 Imperialism, 71–72, 77–78, 80, 81–82 originary myths, 151 Incorporation, defined, 214 Ingratitude, 101, 105, 106, 148 Injustice, 121 Interior spaces, 134–135 Interpretations, 173 Intertextuality, 107 characterized, 95 inherent volatility of texts, 95 Plutarch, 101 sources, 95 J Jacobean theater Brecht’s study, 227, 236 conjunction of politics, performance, and marketplace, 176–177 James I, King of England, 32 Jesus Christ, Caesar (historical figure) compared, 71

350

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Index • 351 Johnson, Samuel, 16, 17, 244–245 Jonson, Ben, 12–13, 82–83, 246–248, 249 concern for textual and interpretive ownership, 252 Julian calendar, 92, 98–99, 243 Julius Caesar, see Caesar Julius Caesar, 113 alternative versions, 14–15 during Augustan Age, 14–16 basic plotless structure, 186 central irony, 6 comic strip, 45 cultural value, 224 early modern subject, 181–193 early psychoanalytic reading, 214 economic tropes, 208–209 during 18th century, 17 epistemic reliability of restitutional imaginary, 192–193 experimental tragedy, 181–193 “Fascist,” 295–304 focus on rhetoric, 139 functions, 59 history as unifying, 20 ideological appropriation, 242 illustrations, 44–45 individual action, 191 ineluctable subjectivity, 191 linear movement, 6 metadramatic co-optation, 249–250 metadramatic nature, 95 metadramatic quality, 140 in music, 43 opening scene, 101 in opera, 43–44 other plays compared, 3 paintings of, 44 as palimpsest, 95 parallels with Jesus Christ, 4–5 parallels with Plato, 117 Plutarch, first two scenes, 100 polarized critics, 5 populace, 117 politically volatile crowds, 166–167 schools boycott in South Africa, 166– 167 popularity, 4 reasons for, 287 in Shakespeare’s time, 12–13 popular liberating tendencies, 32 post-war Italian politics, 336–341 pre-20th century, 12–22 as problem play, 5 providentialist belief, 191 public style, 272–273 restitutional pattern, 191 during Restoration, 13 during Romantic period, 17

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351

spatial structure, 7 subtext, 98–100 triumvirates, 120–121 as turning point, 3–4 20th-century critical approaches, 22–23 during Victorian Age, 17–21 Julius Caesar on film, 41–42, 43 BBC 1959, 42 Burge 1970, 42–43 early, 41 in Italian B-movies, 333–334 Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1953 film, 42, 288, 303 Julius Caesar on television, 41–42 animation, 45 BBC 1959, 42 BBC 1979, 43 CBS “Studio One” Caesar, 302 early, 41–42 on Italian television, 338 Julius Caesar plot construction, 127–137 compared with Henry V, 127 exterior space, 132–134 five “movements,” 127–128 interior spaces, 134–135 pattern, 181–184 period of time, 7 Philippi, 135–137 plot in spatial terms, 185–188 plot pattern, 181–184 prelude, 128–129 of restitution, 182 storm, 129–132 thematic intention, 127 Julius Caesar stage performances, 33–41 absence of star role, 36, 37 almost all-male cast, 33 America, 35–36, 38–39 American Globe Theatre (New York, 1993), 325 “Americanized” versions, 323 Augustan Age, 34 battle scenes, 288 Ben Greet’s version, 37 Brutus, 34 Caesar’s ghost, 289, 327–328 casting, 34, 335 comedic elements, 328–329 company of Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, 36, 290 as contestation for populace’s soul, 166– 177 conventional productions, 319, 320 critical and public approval, 307 cross-gender production, 325–326 cross-gender versions, 39 David Thacker, 302–303, 314–315 decline, 34–35

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352 • Index Julius Caesar stage performances (continued) directed by Jiri Frejka in Prague, 298–299 directed by Jürgen Fehling, 301 disintegrationist theory, 287 dramatic deficiencies, 33 Dryden/Davenant version, 290 Edward Hall in 2001, 315–317 Edwin Booth’s 1871 production, 36 Elizabethan and Jacobean popularity, 34 Elizabethan clothing, 321 first 20th century American, 38 Florida Shakespeare Festival 1986, 321–322 Folger Shakespeare Library 1981 production, 321 400th anniversary production, 3 four major roles, 33 full text, 37–38 Gigi Dall’ Aglio’s, 340–341 Giorgio Strehler in 1953, 336–338 Henry C. Jarrett’s/Henry D. Palmer’s 1875 production, 36 Henry Cass at Embassy Theatre, London, 301–302 Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1898 production, 36–37 Houston’s Alley Theatre in 1996, 328–329 imbalance, 287 Italian stage, 333–343 John Barton in 1968, 310 John Blatchley’s 1963 production, 309 John Philip Kemble, 35 Krzysztof Zanussi, 340 landmark 1870 New York production, 36 Latin American settings, 39 Luigi Squarzina’s, 339 major roles, 289–292 Mercury Theatre production, 295–304 casting, 297 Cinna, 296 crowd scenes, 297–298 inspiration, 298 populace, 297–298 precedents, 299 radio abridgment, 297 recent critical tendency, 300 reception, 299–300 streamlined, 296 Tent Scene, 298 Middle Eastern production for Oregon Shakespeare Festival (1982), 322 modern dress, 38, 302–303, 319 modernized, 302 monumentalism, 314 most experimental, 329–330 multicultural productions, 324–325 New Jersey Shakespeare Festival revisited Welles’s version, 323 New York Shakespeare Festival, 39

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352

from 1969 to 2000, 39 non-Roman productions, 319, 321 Nuyorican Poet’s Café, 324 Old Vic, 37–38, 40 Orson Welles’s “Fascist” version, 33, 38– 39, 295–304, 336 Peter Hall in 1995, 313–314 populace, 316, 330–331 post-war Britain, 39–40 proscription scene, 37 realistic Roman, 36 realistic staging practices, 19 Restoration period, 34 revived, 35 in Rome, 335–336 Rome’s decay, 320–321 Ron Daniels of 1983, 311 Royal Shakespeare Company, 40, 290 Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, 39 Shakespeare Festival in Stratford CT, 39 as site of contestation, 165 Societas Raffaello Sanzio, 341–343 spectacle of opposing armies, 289 Steven Pimlott in 1991, 312–313 subsequent to World War II, 301 successful production prerequisites, 307– 308 Teatro Argentina, 338–339 terrorism, 339–340 Terry Hands’s 1987 version, 311–312 text cutting, 288, 329 theatrical drawbacks, 287 theatrical ideology, 309 Trevor Nunn in 1972, 310–311 20th century, 37 Justice, retributive, 136 K Kahn, Coppélia, 30 Kemble, John Philip, 35 King Lear, Royal Shakespeare Company’s film version, 171 Knight, G. Wilson, 24, 25 Kyd, Thomas, 77–78 L Lacan, Jacques, 155 Ladder ambition, 275–278 Brutus, 275–278 Lamb, Charles, 19 Language, 29, 105–106 Antony, 231–232 as catalyst to action, 166 as central concern in Julius Caesar, 139 divine vs. human, 152 economy, 208

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Index • 353 functions, 10 government’s doctrinaire and punitive view, 261 instability, 140 political impact of theater, 168 Post-Marxist, 206 potential for misconception, 140 power, 29 process of construing and misconstruing, 151 psychoanalytic criticism, 217–219 reduction, 92 The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 229–230 Lanquet, Thomas, 80 Latin American settings, 321–322 Lawlessness, 121 Titus Andronicus, 122 Leadership, 115 Lepidus, 134, 148 cowardice, 172 Liberty, 26 Life of Brutus, 102, 106 Ligarius, 145 Lighting, 39 Literature government’s doctrinaire and punitive view, 261 ideological appropriation, 242 Livy, 96 Love brotherhood, 148–150, 182–184 Brutus, 183–184 Brutus and Cassius, 150 Cassius, 162, 183–184 context of, 278–282 death, 280–282 honor, 278–282 love theme, 25–26 Loyalty, 121, 128 Antony, 9 Calphurnia, 10 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), 72–73, 96 Lucrece, violated female, 121–122 M Macbeth, 25, 171 MacCallum, M.W., 24 Macready, William Charles, 35–36 Major, John, cultural materialism, 259–268 Major roles, 5–6, 21, 29, 33, 36–37, 40, 289– 292, 308, 330 casting, 289–292 Julius Caesar stage performances, 289–292 Malapropism, populace, 206–207 Mansfield, Richard, 38 Mantle, 147–148 Market economy, 207

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353

Marketplace, theater, reciprocal metaphors, 172–173 Martius, 115–117 Marx, Karl, intellectually formative years, 199–200 Marxism, 26 author’s own class-position, 200 class-positions of characters, 200 consciousness, 200 economic circumstances of text’s production, 200 human ideas produced by material activity, 200 materialism, 200 orthodox, 199 populace, 30 Post-Marxism dialectical synthesis, 208 distinction between, 199 rhetoric, 208–209 upper-class characters, 30 Masculine, 30 Materialism, 200 Materialist Marxism, 201 limitations, 205 Post-Marxism, difference between, 210 Il Mattatore, 334–335 Meaning, characterized, 213 Mercury Theatre production, Julius Caesar stage performances, 295–304 casting, 297 Cinna, 296 crowd scenes, 297–298 inspiration, 298 populace, 297–298 precedents, 299 radio abridgment, 297 recent critical tendency, 300 reception, 299–300 streamlined, 296 Tent Scene, 298 Metamorphosis, 105 Metaphors Antony, 146 Brutus, 142–145 theater as marketplace, 172–173 Meta-theatrical aspects, 11, 12 Metellus Cimber, 257–258 Middle classes, 26 Minor characters, creative vandalism, 32 Miola, Robert S., 28, 29 Misconstructions, 12, 151, 173 Misinterpretation Brutus, 223–224 Cassius fall, 223–224 Mistrust, 151 Modern dress, 319 Mommsen, Theodor, 59

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354 • Index Monarchy, 26, 62 factors, 63 Montaigne, Michel de, 83 Caesar (historical figure), 75, 76 Morning, 130–132 Moro, Aldo, parallels with Caesar’s death, 339 Motivation Caesar (historical figure), 75 historical aspects, 64–65 structural role, 27 Moulton, Richard G., 21–22 Movies, see Julius Caesar on film Multivocality, Hamlet, 163 Murder vs. assassination, 14–15 Murellus, 128, 204 Muret, Marc Antoine, 77 Music, 316 N Naïveté, Brutus, 8 Names blood, 145–146 Brutus, 141, 149–150 Caesar, 140–141 Cassius, 149–150 coconspirators, 145–146 Natural order, 119 Neoclassical poetics, 13–14 New Criticism, 24, 25 New economic criticism, post-Marxist approaches, relationship, 31 New historicism, 29, 31–32, 242 Julius Caesar anticipates, 242–252 New York Shakespeare Festival, Julius Caesar stage performances, 39 Night, 129–132 Nobility, Brutus, 9 O Old Vic, Julius Caesar stage performances, 37–38, 40 Ontological issues, 11–12 Order, 181, 182 Rome, 184 Organic unity, 17–18 The Other Place, 317 P The Parallel Lives of the Most Noble Greeks and Romans, 97 Paster, Gail Kern, 30–31 Paternal wisdom, 224 Patience, 161 Patricians, 116–117 Pearls, 83 Performative language, 140 funeral orations, 146 Performative nature, Caesar, 142

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354

Performative utterances, 140 Brutus, 142–143 Performing “I,” 158 change, 158 Persuasion, 308 rhetoric, relationship, 231 Philippi, 7, 135–137 Phillips, James Emerson, 26 Plato, 111 Plato’s Republic, 111 hierarchically ordered classes, 112 monarchic collapse prelude to civil war, 112–113 perversions of rulership, 113 Shakespeare’s knowledge of, 122 soul, 112–113 Playhouses, metaphors of city, 168 Plays within play, 11 Plebeians, see Populace Plutarch, 4, 27, 28, 73–74, 92, 93, 97, 106 Artemidorus’s warning, 103 assassination, 103–104 Caesar’s character, 73–74 character studies, 93 description of Antony’s oration, 97 effect, 93–94 Feast of Lupercal, 101 first two scenes, 100 historical account compression, 101 intertextuality, 101 North’s translation, 97 populace, 101 Rome’s atmosphere, 93 Poetical justice, 14–15 Political aspects, 31–33 character, 19 Elizabethan political conceptions, 29 orthodox political doctrines, 26 politics-theater parallels, 11 Renaissance political conceptions, 26 theatrical nature of politics, 11 The Politics, 111–112 Pompey, 274–275 Pompey’s statue, 209 Pope, Alexander, 14 Populace, 10, 26, 117, 297–298 Antony, 168–169 assassination, 104–105 beginning of play, 169, 170 Brutus, 168–169 Caesar’s servile flattery, 118 Caesar’s tyranny paralleled, 119 carnival, 237–238 casting, 330–331 comic misprision, 206–207 constructions, 222–223 Coriolanus, 165, 169, 171 deferral to, 119–120

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Index • 355 Globe audience, 171–172 images of plebeian culture, 166 Julius Caesar stage performances, 316, 330–331 legislation against London’s public stages, 248 malapropism, 206–207 manipulated, 148 Marxist criticism, 30 mechanisms of persuasion, 169 mob supremacy, 116–117 mutability, 115, 116–117 opening sequence, 128 patrician class, 203–204 Plutarch, 101 post-assassination devolution, 170, 171 principal characters’ appeal to, 168 representation, 166 rhetoric, 236–237 second scene, 170–171 seditiousness, 115, 116–117 seen as potent force, 168 vocal presence, 170 will, 147, 174–175 Portia, 102, 158–159 Brutus, relationship, 131–132 death, 159 male characteristics, 9–10 revision, 159 suicide, 10, 106 Post-colonialism, 33, 47 Post-Marxism, 205–207 ability to totalize, 211 Antony, 207 Brutus, 207 development, 205–206 discursive persuasion, 207 distinguished, 211 exclusion from privileged discourse, 205– 206 idolatry, 210 language, 206 Marxism dialectical synthesis, 208 distinction between, 199 materialist Marxism, difference between, 210 new economic criticism, relationship, 31 rhetoric, 207 subjugation of “mechanicals,” 206 true provenance of Marx’s own thought, 210–211 Postmodern economy, 208 Postmodern semiotics, 208 Power, 72 language, 29 production of, 257–258 remorse from, 189

Zander-RT5075_Index.pmd

355

symbology, 28–29 Presentational imagery, 29 Proscription scene, 37 Protagonist, 21 debate, 5–6 Psychoanalytic criticism, 23, 213–224 Antony, 216–217 blood, 222 Brutus, 30, 216 Caesar, 215, 216 Caesar’s ghost, 223 Cassius, 215–216 characters, 30 Cicero, 217 dreams, 221 language, 217–219 by Shakespearean scholars, 30 Puritanism, idolatry, 210 Q Quarrel scene, 13–14, 18 R The Rape of Lucrece, 113–114 violated female, 113–114 Rationalization, 220–221 Reception theory, 21–22 Redgrave, Corin, 320, 327, 328–329 Reflection Brutus, 218–219 Caesar, 218–219 Cassius, 218–219 Relative autonomy of the superstructure, 206 Relativism, 30 Relics, 174 Renaissance dual goal of Mars and Ars, 85 English stage, 71–87 Republicanism, multiple sovereignty, 112 Republic of Plato, see Plato’s Republic The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 227–231, 232, 239 episodic scene structure, 228 Hitler parallels, 227–229 Julius Caesar cited, 228, 230 Julius Caesar parallels, 227–229 language, 229–230 literary link with Richard III, 228, 229 Mark Antony’s speech, 230–231 rhetoric, 229–230 structure of historical analogy, 228–229 Restitution, 181–193 subjectivity, 191–192 Rhetoric, 29 Antony, 170, 234–236 Brutus, 170 of marketplace, 166

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356 • Index Rhetoric (continued) Marxism, 208–209 negative perspective, 139 persuasion, relationship, 231 populace, 236–237 Post-Marxism, 207 Rome, 139 shift in rhetorical register, 233 as voice of mob, 238 Richard II, 250–251 Richard III, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, 228, 229 Rivalry, emulation, 272 Roman history Elizabethan Age, 28 interpretations, 28 Roman-Elizabethan class conflict compared, 202 Roman plays, 28, 111–123 Brutus in, 122–123 constitutional decline, 111 historical vs. compositional sequence, 113 vernacular, 98 Roman Republic Antony, 174 Caesar (historical figure), 60–61 collapse, 63 decline, 66 overthrow, 61, 62–63 perils of monarchic collapse, 112 reformatory potential, 63 Roman wife, 158–159 ruling class, 63 Roman rituals, 11 Roman values, 10–11, 28, 74, 107, 111, 127 Cicero, 95–96 Rome, 201, 236–237 atmosphere, 101 Cassius, 186–187 class system, 201–202 historical aspects, 201 homoerotic atmosphere, 26 illness of, 25 order, 184 pagan world, 162 political history, 272–273 as political theater, 94–95 as protagonist of Julius Caesar, 29 rhetoric, 139 Roman setting, 42, 43 Royal Shakespeare Company, Julius Caesar stage performances, 40, 290 Royal Shakespeare Theatre and Company, 308–309, 311–317 Ruling class accepting Caesar’s position, 64 Caesar insulted, 63 competitive nature, 273–274

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356

Marxist criticism, 30 Roman Republic, 63, 202 Rylance, Mark, 3 Rymer, Thomas, 13–14 S Sacrifice, 238 Schücking, Levin L., 23 Self-knowledge, 8 Self-mutilation, 158–159 Semiotics, 30, 208 Senators assassination, 104–105 Caesar (historical figure), 63, 66 quasi-monarchical demagogues, 203 Servants, 232–233 Sets, 38, 39, 40, 42 Settings, 320–325 Shakespeare John, 200–201 William ancient sources, 92–97 ancient sources impact, 98 appropriation, 33 authorship debate, 20–21 biographical background, 20, 21 characters, 3–4 characters’ class positions, 201–205 compulsory tests, 264–267 conception of Globe, 246–248 as English national dramatist, 16 formal education, 24 growth, 3–4 impact of Roman plays on, 98 international reputation, 17 intrapsychic process, 219–220 models of private thought, 219–220 monumental productions, 241–242 own class-position, 200–201 Plutarch atmosphere of Rome, 93 character studies, 93 effect, 93–94 reading vs. performing, 19 Roman works, 111–123 subject matter, 3–4 transhistorical truth and transcultural value, 263 translation, 93 unpolished gem, 14 Westminster Abbey monument, 241 Shakespearean Tragedy, 155–156 Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Julius Caesar stage performances, 39 Shakespeare Festival in Stratford CT, Julius Caesar stage performances, 39 Shakespeare industry, 27 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, 307, 308

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Index • 357 Shakespeare Visionen, 44 Shaw, George Bernard, 22 Sibling rivalry, 215, 216 Sickness, 118–119 Significance, 213 instability, 221 Silencing, 92, 105–106 Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Julius Caesar stage performances, 341–343 Socrates, 118 justice equated with health and wellbeing, 119 Sohmer, Steve, 98–100 Soothsayer’s warning, 129 Soul, Plato’s Republic, 112–113 Sources, 24, 28–29, 78, 91–107, 234 authentic data, 92 defined, 92–93 intertextuality, 95 Montaigne’s essays, 77 Plutarch, 92, 93–94 Spencer, T.J.B., 28 Spirit, 25 Sterility, Caesar, 188 Stirling, Brents, 26–27 Stoicism, 28, 135, 161 Brutus, 159–160 distinction, 233 Structural imagery, 27 Structuralism, 27 Structure, 47 Stuart court, 237 Style, 29 Subjectivity, restitution, 191–192 Subversion and containment debate, 32 Suicide, 155, 161 Cassius, 9 emulation, 281 Portia, 10 Sumptuary laws, 202, 213 Supernatural, 12 Swimming match, 273–275 T Tarquin, 113–114, 115 Teatro Argentina, Julius Caesar stage performances, 338–339 Television, see Julius Caesar on television Terrorism, Julius Caesar stage performances, 339–340 Text cutting, Julius Caesar stage performances, 329 Textualization, Caesar’s death, 245 Theater as marketplace, 165, 166, 172–173 political nature, 11 political parallels, 11 Third person, 7

Zander-RT5075_Index.pmd

357

Time clock, 242–245 conflation of time, 99–100 cyclical, 182 time markers, 98–100 time of day, 129–132 unity of time, 14 Titinius, encomium, 151 Title, 14, 24 Titus Andronicus fictional milieu, 121 lawlessness, 122 rulerless interregnum, 121 violated female, 121–122 Tolstoy, Leo, 22 The Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey, or Caesar’s Revenge, 98 Tragedy of Julius Caesar, 79 Transformation, 95 Caesar’s body, 105 Transformative, “Et tu Brute?–Then fall, Caesar,” 104 Transformative power of words, 92 Translation, Caesar’s body, 174 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 36–37 Triumvirates Antony and Cleopatra, 120–121 Julius Caesar, 120–121 proscriptions, 7 Troilus and Cressida, 214–215 Truth, constructed by powerful men, 258 Tudor state originary myths, 151 Tudor court, 237 Tyrannicide, precedence, 72 Tyranny, 26, 71–72, 113, 116–117 democracy, relationship, 116–117, 120 Plato’s view, 117 U Ulrici, Hermann, 20 Ulysses, 111 Uncertainty, 92–93, 107 Unity of action, 14 Unity of ideas, Goethe, 19 Unity of place, 14 Unity of time, 14 Unity of work, 20 Untrustworthiness, 237 V Victimhood, 249 Violence, 326 Cinna, 326–327 executions, 326 Virtue, 10–11 Vulnerability, 7–8

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358 • Index W Walpole, Horace, 16, 17 Welles, Orson, 33, 38–39, 336, see also Mercury Theater Production as Brutus, 297, 298 Julius Caesar stage performances, 295– 304, 336 New Jersey Shakespeare Festival revisited Welles’ version, 323 Westall, Richard, 44 Will Antony, 157 Caesar, 157 populace, 147

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358

progression from metaphoric to real legacy, 175 reading, 175–176 Williams, Harcourt, 38 Wilson, John Dover, 26 Words, Lacan, 155 Working classes, see Populace World symbolic model, 30 syntagmatic model, 30 union of brothers, 184 Y Young Hegelians, 199

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