"Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare

 

A sort of mixture between history and tragedy, whose real hero is not the eponymous Julius but Brutus, the moral man destroyed by his ideals. 

The play revolves around one of the best-recorded events in classical antiquity: the assassination of Julius Caesar which signalled the end of the Roman Republic and began the transition towards Empire. 

The background to the play, which would have been well-known to educated people of the time, is that the Roman Republic was founded after Lucius Junius Brutus overthrew King Tarquin the Proud; the fundamental ethos of the Republic is to distribute power so as to avoid a monarchy; any suggestion of king-making is anathema to the Roman citizens.

So when, in Act One, Caesar, who is the effective ruler of Rome following his defeat of Pompey the Great during civil war, is offered a crown, Marcus Junius Brutus, descendant of the earlier Brutus, is profoundly disturbed. Even though Caesar three times rejects the crown, Brutus believes that Caesar would like to be King. Cassius, a senator who had previously supported Pompey, uses this to persuade Brutus to join a group of conspirators who plan to assassinate Caesar. Cassius needs the support of Brutus so that the Roman citizens, recognising Brutus as a moral idealist, will believe that the motive of the assassins is to liberate Rome from tyranny, rather than just to facilitate regime change.

In Act Two there are repeated references to portents in the weather and unusual occurrences. Caesar's wife has an ominous dream. A soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the ides of March. Brutus has to make a decision: Caesar is one of his best friends but may prove a threat to the Republic. Caesar himself is indecisive, oscillating between the warnings, which frighten him, and his public persona which has to be one of fearlessness. But the conspirators manage to persuade him to go to the Capitol.

The assassination occurs in Act Three. Brutus then speaks to the Roman people and convinces them that killing Caesar was for the public good. But Brutus, idealistically impractical and against the advice of the politically astute Cassius, then allows Caesar's ally, Marc Antony, to speak at Caesar's funeral. This speech, a classic of oratory, making much use of irony in its repeated references to the "honourable" Brutus, turns the crowd against the assassins. It is the midpoint and the principal turning-point of the play. 

Act 4 sees Antony plotting with Octavius, Caesar's nephew, to assassinate their political rivals and to defraud the Roman citizens and to pin the blame on Lepidus, the third member of their triumvirate. The contrast between Antony's high-minded rhetoric at the funeral and this cynical opportunism is immediate. The next scene shows Cassius and Brutus falling out (Brutus, ever the idealist, accuses Cassius of self-interest while at the same time asking him to provide the money that Brutus needs to pay for troops because Brutus himself can't stoop to base means of raising cash). They need one another, however, too much and so they reconcile, deciding to do battle with Antony and Octavius at Philippi (another bad decision made by Brutus). 

Act 5 is the battle. Cassius and Brutus are defeated and commit suicide. Antony calls Brutus "the noblest Roman of them all".

There are four main characters. Brutus is the tragic hero, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons (this was a very renaissance view of Brutus; in the middle ages Brutus was seen as a man who betrayed his friend, a traitor nearly as bad as Judas, consigned to the lowest level of the Inferno by Dante). Cassius acts as the tempter, almost a devil, who works on Brutus much as Iago works on Othello. The antagonist is, in the first half of the play, Caesar, though scarcely glimpsed in the first act, who is ambiguously portrayed both as the ambitious wannabe monarch feared by Brutus and as a frail human. Upon Caesar's death, Marc Antony takes over as a much more cynical and dangerous opponent. 

Themes:

Brutus, the virtuous murderer

In many ways, this play is a tragedy and the tragic hero is Brutus, whose fundamental flaw is his idealism. Cassius and the conspirators recognise that they need Brutus on their side to give the assassination of Caesar the appearance of something that is honourable (the word repeatedly mocked by Mark Antony) so that they can gain the support of the Roman people. But recruiting Brutus means that they are saddled with his impractical idealism which leads him to make mistake after mistake. They recognise that Mark Antony might prove dangerous and propose murdering him as well, but Brutus won't let them. Instead, disastrously, he lets Mark Antony speak at Caesar's funeral. Later it is the hypocritical idealism of Brutus that fuels his fight with Cassius when he reproaches Cassius for failing to provide him with cash for his troops while telling Cassius that it won’t do for a Brutus to be sullied with extracting taxes from the peasantry.

Brutus is saddled with the reputation of his glorious ancestor who gave birth to the Republic of Rome after sending the last of their kings into exile. Brutus believes, or is manipulated into believing, that Caesar seeks to become king and that it is an act of virtue to prevent this. His naive idealism is displayed when he tries to divorce the act of murder from its reality. "Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,/ Not hew him as a carcase fit for hounds." he says in Act 2 Scene 1 (173 - 4), trying to pretend to himself that an act of butchery can be reinterpreted in religious terms. This is more hypocrisy. 

But perhaps his greatest moral failing is that he doesn't condemn his friend Caesar for what he is but for what he might become. Caesar has rejected a crown three times but Brutus believes that Caesar wants to be king. And that "might change his nature" (2.1.13). Brutus tells himself that must think of Caesar "as a serpent’s egg/ Which hatch’d, would, as his kind grow mischievous;/ And kill him in the shell." (2.1.32 - 34) It's a preemptive strike. 

There's more hypocrisy on display within this same speech. Brutus, seeking justifications for killing his friend, muses that"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins/ Remorse from power" (2.1.18-19). He admits that he's never seen this in Caesar ... yet. But the irony is that Brutus himself is planning murder, which is an act of power thoroughly disjoined from remorse.

I suppose it was quite a testament to the renaissance rehabilitation of Brutus for him to appear as a hero at all. In Dante, Brutus is consigned to the lowest level of hell, as a traitor, on a par with Judas.

Selected quotes:

• "I was born as free as Caesar" (1.2.97)
• "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 - 118)
  "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." (1.2.134 - 137)
• "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." (1.2.138 - 140) What's particularly nice about this is the way that Brutus semi-quotes this back to Cassius in act 4 scene 3 when he talks about the "tide in the affairs of men".
• "Let me have men about me that are fat,/ Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights:/ Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;/ He thinks too much: such men are dangerous." (1.2.191-195) One of my father's favourite quotes; he was always a slender man!
• "He reads much." (1.2.200)Another reason for Caesar to be suspicious of Cassius!
• "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/ And the first motion, all the interim is/ Like a phantasma or a hideous dream." (2.1.64 - 66)
• "Cowards die many times before their deaths" (2.2.32)
• "When love begins to sicken and decay,/ It useth an enforced ceremony." (4.2.20 - 21)
• "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 - 219) More irony: Brutus is about to make yet another error.

Other Shakespeare plays reviewed in this blog may be found here.

I saw JC in a superb RSC production at Stratford in March 2017. I was in the front row of the stalls! At one point, Brutus, who was reading a letter, handed it to me; not knowing what to do I nodded wisely and returned it. My wife enjoyed it particularly because Cassius not only had "a lean and hungry look" but also an impressive six-pack and was topless for a large part of the time.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God