Julius Caesar

New Critical Essays

Horst Zander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135578077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores traditional approaches to the play, which includes an examination of the play in light of current history, in the context of Renaissance England, and in relation to Shakespeare's other Roman plays as well as structural examination of plot, language, character, and source material. Julius Caesar: Critical Essays also examines the current debates concerning the play in Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, queer, and gender contexts.

PART I

Introduction

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 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, such as when he changed Caesar’s recorded twenty-three wounds into thirty-three 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 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 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; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Central Aspects
• Part III: Current Debates
• Part IV: Julius Caesar on Stage
• Contributors
• Index