Caesar, Julius | Richard Henze (essay date 1970)
Richard Henze (essay date 1970)
SOURCE: "Power and Spirit in Julius Caesar," in University Review, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, June, 1970, pp. 307-14.
[In the following essay, Henze identifies the primary power struggle in the play as the conflict between Caesarism and Republicanism.]
In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Brutus tells the other conspirators that they will "stand up against the spirit of Caesar, / And in the spirit of men there is no blood" (The Complete Works of Shakespeare, George Lyman Kittredge, ed., 1936, II.i. 167-168). Then Brutus kills Caesar in order to get at that spirit, but the spirit survives the onslaught, inflames the mob, brings on civil war, and finally enters Brutus's tent at Sardis, and says it has become Brutus's "evil spirit." Caesar's spirit becomes Brutus's evil spirit—it changes its abode—but it does not change in symbolic value. The ghost, I suggest, represents power, the major force in...
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