Julius Caesar —William Shakespeare

With friends like these...

A different point of view

Probably everyone has read Julius Caesar. Probably I did too. But if so, I read it back in public high school, just for fun, to help me better appreciate Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the translation project of my freshman Latin class. I often did extra work on my own just to make schoolwork more fun. I vividly recall listening over and over again to Respighi’s Feste Romane while I struggled with Latin—call me a humanities nerd. Confiteor. Anyway, this week, I decided to take a stab at reading Julius Caesar as part of the Decade Project, approaching it with an almost complete naivety about the play’s content, but with a better grasp of literature than I had in high school.

The first surprise comes when the conspirators knock off Caesar in the beginning of Act III, right around the halfway point of the play. It has the same effect on me as does the shower scene in Psycho, when the main character dies before the halfway point. When I started reading Julius Caesar, I expected the plot to focus on his final days, so when he dies too soon I felt directionless, seeking a new principle of unity for what followed. I had to rethink the play, as I had to rethink Psycho, in order to make sense of it. (Did Hitchcock steal from Shakespeare the idea of killing off the main character so early? Surely both knew how disoriented it would make their audiences. Did Hitchcock mean for the shower curtain to remind us of a toga?)

First, though, let me summarize all five acts. In the first act, we learn that Caesar has gently refused to let the adoring citizens of Rome crown him their ruler. We also see Cassius and the conspirators hatching their murder plot and discussing how to legitimize the deed by involving Brutus. In the second act, we see Caesar at home with his wife, Calpurnia, and Brutus at home with his wife, Portia. Both wives show more wisdom than their husbands. Both men reject the prudent course in order to take a place in history. In the third act, the killers pounce and then try to deal with the ensuing chaos. Brutus naively trusts Marc Antony to join them as a fait accompli and naively trusts the crowd to approve his motives. Antony, though, has other plans; by his brilliant eulogy to Caesar he whips the crowd into a frenzy and they go on a rampage. In the fourth act, the factions have assembled into two armies, one led by Marc Antony and the other by Brutus, and they prepare to fight. We witness some internal squabbling in both camps: Octavius, Caesar’s heir and adopted son, overrules Marc Antony’s orders, while Brutus almost comes to blows with Cassius. Finally, when all have settled in for the night, Caesar’s ghost appears to Brutus saying he will see him at Philippi. In the fifth and final act, the armies clash at Philippi, and in the fog of war, Brutus, mistakenly thinking his army has lost, kills himself rather than let Antony take him prisoner.

In retrospect, I should have seen early on that the play’s main tragedy belongs to Brutus not to Caesar. In two separate monologues Brutus rationalizes the deed he will perform, even before Cassius approaches him to join the plot. Brutus loves Caesar dearly, but his loyalty to Rome and his duty to preserve the Republic overrides his personal loyalty and friendship. In his speech to the crowd after the murder, he puts it succinctly, if not convincingly:

Brutus: … If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I lov’d Caesar less, but that I lov’d Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar lov’d me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honor him; but—as he was ambitious, I slew him. … [Act III, Scene 2]

The other conspirators seem motivated by less noble sentiments, and so have little to trouble them other than how to get away with their own skins intact.

Even as I read the play, it struck me how Shakespeare had left a lot of room for interpretation. We hear what the characters say and see what they do, but we must wonder how they arrive at those words and actions. For example, we hear from more than one source that Brutus loves Caesar. Fair enough, but we must surely also see their bond as an extraordinary one. Caesar’s dying words, “Et tu, Brute?—Then fall, Caesar!” seem to express a helpless, stunned resignation at a deeply personal betrayal. But why that reaction? Why not outrage, or fear, or contempt? Shakespeare does not give us enough information to fully explain this bond between them, which appears far stronger than normal friendship. What gives?

It has always struck me as odd whenever people speculate on the motivations of a fictional character. Of course one naturally wonders about the motivations of a real person, but how can it even make sense to wonder about what goes on in the “mind” of the fictional Brutus? To explain Brutus in terms of a modern theory of psychology of which Shakespeare knew nothing seems wrong. The character, Brutus, did what he did because Shakespeare wrote the play the way that he wrote it, not because some fictional being had a childhood trauma outside of the play. Please study the following illustration, which fully explains the problem as I see it.

Three Brutuses

A work of fiction contains words and only words. The words don’t think or feel. But yet, something happens when a thinking, feeling person reads those words. I have suggested elsewhere that I see fiction as a set of instructions for the audience to follow, sort of like a recipe for the imagination. When I follow the recipe that Shakespeare has provided in the dialogue, I imaginatively create my own, personal Brutus, but the Brutus I create has hidden sides to him. Oddly enough, other readers have produced their own results and have had a similar experience as they have tried to imagine Brutus. I don’t take these omissions as mistakes in Shakespeare’s writing, but as necessary points of departure for those who try to follow his recipe. We may see Brutus as a hero, a fool, a self-righteous politician, a mere instrument of Fate, or a man with an Oedipal complex, to mention a few possibilities permitted by the text. Each member of the audience must conspire with Shakespeare to imagine a Brutus robust enough to justify wondering what he does in his spare time. Harold Bloom¹ speaks of how Shakespeare “foregrounds” certain characters, and I think by that he means this very invitation to puzzlement. He puts it this way.

Shakespeare calls upon the audience to surmise just how Falstaff and Hamlet and Edmund got to be the way they are, by which I mean their gifts, their obsessions, their concerns. […] Shakespeare’s literary art, the highest art we ever will know, is as much an art of omission as it is of surpassing richness. The plays are greatest where they are the most elliptical. […] What are Antony and Cleopatra like when they are alone together? Why are Macbeth and his fierce lady childless? …

The play I read last week, As You Like It, presents us with no such problems. A certain background, which Shakespeare establishes early on, gives us all we need for understanding what motivates the characters. Then, at the end of the play, we expect all the newlyweds to go back to the city and live happily ever after. If we think about it too much, we realize their lives after leaving the forest must deteriorate. But the play does not encourage us to think about it so hard because Shakespeare has backgrounded the characters rather than foregrounded them. He gives us everything we need to know about them, leaving us with few puzzles.

Shakespeare’s carefully chosen words convince us that a history of each character must have preceded the play’s first lines, and great tumult will follow the final lines. We long to know more. Even within the play, he forces us to imagine a bigger world than what we see on stage by having important events take place offstage, such as the crowd’s shouting in Act I and the soldiers’ cheering in Act V. The time and place of the world prescribed by Julius Caesar overflows the stage. And the characters overflow their lines.

I don’t know enough about theater to know if anyone before Shakespeare had created characters who forced audiences to recognize them as more than words recited on a stage. But I do see such characters in this play, and I know they appear with a vengeance, so to speak, in plays such as Hamlet. While I promise to get to that play eventually, next week I want to chase after one of the characters in Julius Caesar by reading Antony and Cleopatra.

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Thank you for reading these reflections on great works of literature. If you have subscribed, thank you so much for your interest and support. If you have not subscribed, please consider doing so. A free subscription will put each new reflection in your in-box as soon as it comes out (I shoot for one of these per week). A paid subscription, on the other hand, will actually justify my splurging on another volume or two.

Works mentioned in this reflection:

Bellum Gallicum, by Julius Caesar

Feste Romane (1928), composed by Ottorino Respighi

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

As You Like It, by William Shakespeare

Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom

Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Julius Caesar (1953), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

1. In “A Word at the End: Foregrounding,” in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human