Caesar, Julius | Gordon Ross Smith (essay date 1959)
Gordon Ross Smith (essay date 1959)
SOURCE: "Brutus, Virtue, and Will," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 3, Summer, 1959, pp. 367-79.
[In the essay, Smith maintains that Brutus's most distinguishing trait is his willfulness, which is strengthened and guided by his self-righteous belief in his own virtue.]
For the last century and a half the most frequent critical comments upon Shakespeare's portrait of Brutus have been that he is imperfectly realized, that Shakespeare himself did not understand him, or that he is too virtuous a person ever to have been alive. Coleridge asked, "What character did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?" E. E. Stoll wrote that the chief thing in Brutus is "the neglect of analysis or motivation.… He is acting from some lofty and solemn sense of duty—he is a reformer, though without a cause or motive—we can see no more.… His conduct … is, as conceived by Shakespeare, unjustified." Granville-Barker...
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