[In the essay that follows, Rose draws a comparison between the political state in England at the time Julius Caesar was written and the political atmosphere of ancient Rome as depicted in the play.]

Julius Caesar opens with Marullus and Flavius rebuking the plebeians for transferring their allegiance from Pompey and making a holiday to celebrate Caesar's triumph. It is commonplace to remark that the plebeians in this scene, the cheeky cobbler who makes puns about mending bad soles and the other workmen, are more Elizabethan than Roman. But it is not usually noted that the tribune Marullus sounds strikingly like an indignant Puritan calling sinners to repent:

O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of
 Rome:
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds

Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way,
That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?
Be gone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.

Besides the emotionalism and rhetorical urgency which were characteristic of the Puritans and their "spiritual" style of preaching, we can note that the imagery of hard hearts, plagues, chariots, and trembling waters recalls that favorite Old Testament story of the reformers, Exodus. In 1599, when Julius Caesar was first performed, similarly styled calls to prayer and repentance might be heard from pulpits all over London.

In the tangled world of Elizabethan England, religion and politics were more often than not indistinguishable, and we need not be surprised to find that Shakespeare, trying to understand the nature of the political contentions of ancient Rome as he found them described in Plutarch's Lives, should think of the contemporary struggle in the church. A crucial point of contention between Anglican conservatives and Puritan reformers was whether a clergyman's authority came from above or from below, from the crown or from the congregation. Anglican clergy maintained the importance of episcopal ordination, and thus also the principle of the monarch as the final reservoir of power. The reformers insisted that authority derived from the inward call of the spirit, confirmed by the outward call of the congregation. The prescribed role of the Roman tribunes of the people—the "tongues o' th' common mouth" as Coriolanus contemptuously calls them—was as spokesmen and defenders of plebeian rights. Furthermore, the tribunes were not appointed but elected by the plebeians themselves. Perhaps then the reformers' claim to an authority derived not from the crown but from God and the congregations of the faithful led Shakespeare to conceive an analogy between the ancient tribunes and the Puritan preachers of his day.

That Shakespeare was in fact making this connection is only speculation of course, but the readiness with which this analogy might come to mind is suggested by the fact that a few years later King James made a similar association. Irritated by the independence of the English parliament, he asserted in 1605 that there were in the House of Commons "some Tribunes of the people, whose mouths could not be stopped, either from the matters of the Puritans, or of the purveyance." Moreover, a number of details in the play suggest that some such analogy might be at work in Shakespeare's mind. Casca reports that "Marullus and Flavius, for pulling scarfs off Caesar's images, are put to silence" (1.2 282-83), a phrase that recalls precisely the action which was commonly taken against a Puritan who had become a thorn in the side of authority. In a well-known episode in 1586, for example, Archbishop Whitgift intervened in the running debate at Temple Church between the orthodox Richard Hooker and his Puritan deputy Walker Travers by prohibiting Travers from further preaching, or in Hooker's phrase, enjoining him to silence. And in 1599 Laurence Barker complained that Londoners would rush to hear any preacher "that will not sticke to reuile them that are in authoritie, that his sectaries may crie he is persecuted, when hee is iustly silenced."

Also suggestive is the exchange at the end of the opening scene when the tribunes go off to "disrobe" the images:

Flavius.                 Disrobe the images,
   If you do find them deck'd with
  ceremonies.
Marullus. May we do so?
   You know it is the feast of Lupercal.
Flavius. It is no matter; let no images
   Be hung with Caesar's trophies.
                                       (1.1.164-69)

The language seems to glance at the controversies over garments and the use of images; in the word "ceremonies"—Plutarch speaks of "diadems"—Flavius employs a term of great contemporary resonance, one containing within itself nearly the entire history of fifty years of passionate struggle. Again and again the Puritans condemned what they called "superstitious" and "filthy" ceremonies, the "chains," as one put it, "whereby we were tied to popish religion." With equal determination, the Anglican establishment insisted on the retention of those ceremonies necessary to maintain, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, "a decente ordre, and godlye discipline" (1599, sig. DI). Over the years the term "ceremony" had been used so often and had acquired so many associations that it had become, as W. Gordon Zeeveld remarks, "a word of extraordinary emotive power with verbal and conceptual values instantly resonant in the theatre."

One form of ceremony that offended the Puritans was the keeping of holidays—the term still carried much of the old sense of holy day—other than those specifically appointed in the Bible. Flavius' dismissive attitude toward the feast of Lupercal may well have sounded Puritanical in the late 1590s when the reformers were making a point of refusing to stop work to celebrate such feasts as saints' days. His comment here recalls the contempt with which he chastises the workmen at the play's start:

Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you
 home:

Is this a holiday? What, know you not,
Being mechanical, you ought not walk
Upon a labouring day without the sign
Of your profession?
                                   (1.1.1-5)

From the first lines of the scene, then, even before Marullus' harangue, a certain aura of Puritanism clings to the tribunes.

The confrontations between the Puritans and the Anglicans often focused on matters of ritual or ceremony, but as the phrase "decent ordre" in the Book of Common Prayer implies, the issues raised were felt to be fundamental and far reaching. The discarding of the symbols of religious authority might lead, as many understood, to the questioning of other images of social authority, and thus to a challenge to the crown itself: no bishop, no king. At stake ultimately was the matter of power in the realm—which is of course also at stake at the opening of Julius Caesar.

II

Although the tribunes themselves do not reappear after the first scene, the opposition between puritanical antiritualism and a more conservative belief in the efficacy of ceremony is at work throughout the play. Caesar's first appearance shows his concern about ceremonies as he enters speaking about the Lupercalian rite and his desire to have Antony touch Calphurnia. "Set on," he commands, "and leave no ceremony out" (1.1.11). Later Cassius remarks to the conspirators that Caesar "is superstitious grown of late, / Quite from the main opinion he held once / of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies" (2.1.195-97). "Ceremonies" here may refer to portents or omens, as it does when Calphurnia comments that although she "never stood on ceremonies" (2.2.13) they now frighten her, but the word's other sense is not lost. We can note, too, Cassius' Puritanical dislike of plays and music, pointed out by Caesar; and in this context Casca's sour dismissal of the ceremony of the offering of the crown as "foolery" may also be suggestive.

In a general way, then, the anti-Caesar parties—both the tribunes and the bitter republicans of the second scene, Cassius and Casca—are associated with anti-ritualism. But Brutus, whom the play carefully distinguishes from the other opponents of Caesar, is no enemy to ceremony as such. Indeed, it is precisely because of his belief in the power of ritual that he comes to the conclusion that Caesar must die. As Frank Kermode observes, anachronistic assumptions about the significance of a coronation ceremony are at work in Brutus' soliloquy in his orchard. For Plutarch, Caesar is already a king de facto. But Brutus, thinking more like an Elizabethan subject than a Roman citizen, attaches great importance to the actual crowning: "He would be crown'd: / How that might change his nature, there's the question" (2.1.12-13). Crown Caesar and he will be put beyond reprisal. The ritual itself is what must be prevented.

From the solemn shaking of hands in 2.1 to the bathing in Caesar's blood, the conspiracy is, under Brutus' direction, carried out in a conspicuously ceremonial manner. As Brents Stirling and others have noted, onstage the ritualistic character of the assassination is clear. One by one the conspirators kneel to Caesar, begging him to repeal Publius Cimber's banishment although they know he will not. By arrangement Casca strikes first, rearing his hand over Caesar's head. Each conspirator then stabs in turn, after which they bathe in the blood. But long before the event, Brutus insists that the assassination must be conducted as a sacrifice. His well-known speech evokes both ritual slaughter and the notion of purging or bleeding a sick commonweal in a medicinal act that he conceives as a kind of exorcism of Caesar's spirit.

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! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it. And, gentle friends,
Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.
And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide 'em. This shall make
Our purpose necessary, and not envious;
Which so appearing to the common eyes,
We shall be call'd purgers, not murderers.
                                         (2.1.166-80)

Interestingly, some of these motifs recur when Caius Ligarius enters dressed like a sick man and explicitly refers to Brutus as an "exorcist" who can give health: "Brave son, deriv'd from honourable loins! / Thou like an exorcist, hast conjur'd up / My mortified spirit" (2.1.321-24).

There is, however, an ambifuity in Caius Ligarius' speech, for in Elizabethan usage "exorcise" can mean to raise a spirit as well as to expel one, and this ambiguity perhaps foreshadows the ironic turn that events in Rome are to take. Is Brutus an exorcist or a conjurer, Rome's doctor or the means by which the spirit of Caesar is permanently established in the state?

Early in the play, Cassius rather sardonically introduces the notion of conjuration when he attempts to move Brutus against Caesar by speaking of the relative power of their names:

Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that
 "Caesar"?
Why should that name be sounded more than
 yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as
 well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with 'em,
"Brutus" will start a spirit as soon as
 "Caesar".
                                                   (1.2.140-45)

Later, in his soliloquy over Caesar's corpse, Antony imagines civil war in Italy with "Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge" (3.1.270). Antony no doubt is only speaking metaphorically, and yet, together with other allusions to exorcism and conjuration, his picture of the ranging spirit invites us to consider the play's action as an attempt at exorcism that turns into a conjuration, two rituals that are dangerously similar in that each involves the demonstration of power over spirits. In any case, the play makes much of Caesar's spirit, and at the end that spirit does literally range the world, manifesting itself to us as well as to Brutus before the battle of Philippi.

III

But to speak of Julius Caesar in terms of spirits and conjuration perhaps seems odd. We may be more accustomed to thinking of this play as a hard-headed political study, one that treats Brutus' attempt to ritualize and purify the assassination with scornful irony. Our approach tends to be in the skeptical vein of Cassius or in that of Antony, who regards the assassination as exactly what Brutus sought to avoid, a butchery. And yet although Antony, the cynical manipulator of the plebeians, may be disenchanted, Julius Caesar, with its ghost, its soothsayer, its prophetic dreams and supernatural prodigies, is not. The world of this play is fundamentally mysterious. Minor mysteries such as Cassius' death falling on his birthday are emphasized, and the play implies that Caesar was right to have grown superstitious, to have changed his opinion about dreams: the portents that prefigure the assassination are not merely daggers of the mind. By the play's end even Cassius has lost some of his enlightened skepticism and come to grant some credit to omens.

Of course we do not need to believe that Shakespeare himself had to be superstitious to write Julius Caesar. The Elizabethan stage was filled with supernatural beings such as witches, fairies, conjurers, and ghosts. Purged from the church by the new enlightenment of the Reformation, magic reappeared in the ostensibly circumscribed and make-believe world of the theater. If sixteenth-century Englishmen could no longer experience the real physical presence of God on the altar in church, they could still experience the pretended physical manifestation of demons and spirits in the theater. We are sometimes inclined to dismiss the Puritan objections to the theater as sour crankiness, but their antagonism can perhaps be sympathetically comprehended as part of their larger campaign against superstition and idolatry. Moreover, there is a real connection between magic, ritual, and drama, and it is some-times hard to say where the boundary lies between attending a play that is about ritual and participating in a ritual.

Julius Caesar is a case in point. The assassination is so conspicuously ritualized—the conspirators kneeling before Caesar, the repeated stabbing, the ceremonial bathing in Caesar's blood, the clasping of purpled hands when Antony enters—that an audience may well feel that it is not only witnessing but participating in a kind of ceremony. Indeed, in its dramatic self-consciousness, the play calls attention to its special quality as a kind of ritual when, immediately after the death, Cassius speaks of it as an event that will provide high drama in future tongues and states:

Cassius. Stoop then, and wash. How many ages
hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn, and accents yet unknown!
Brutus. How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,
That now on Pompey's basis lies along,
No worthier than the dust!
Cassius. So oft as that shall be,
So often shall the knot of us be call'd
The men that gave their country liberty.
                                  (3.1.111-18)

This ritual quality is directly related to the special historical status of this play's subject: for the Elizabethans as for ourselves, the assassination of Julius Caesar was probably the single most famous event in ancient history. It would have been quite possible for Shakespeare to have suppressed our knowledge of this history in the interest of illusionism, of making us forget that we are attending a performance, but in fact he does the opposite. For example, the soothsayer who appears in the second scene and again just before the assassination activates our own retrospective foreknowledge. Again and again, Shakespeare in effect reminds us that the story is famous and the outcome known. What does the night of prodigies signify? What is the meaning of the beast in which Caesar's augurers cannot find a heart? What does Calphurnia's dream portend? For the characters these are riddles, and indeed the difficulty of interpreting becomes an important motif in the play. As Cicero says on the night of prodigies, "men may construe things, after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves" (1.3.34-35). But the audience has no difficulty in construing these signs because we are participating in a reenactment of an event whose most important meanings are already known. Why should the name Caesar be sounded more than any other? Because, as we know, this name will become a title greater even than king. Why should the ghost of Caesar range the world? Because, as we know, the assassination was not the end of Caesarism but effectively the beginning.

A few words about the play's structure as historical drama are necessary. Julius Caesar is built upon a tautology: Caesar becomes Caesar, the past becomes the completed past that we know. Much like ourselves, the Elizabethans seem to have imagined ancient Rome in architectural terms, thinking of pillars, arches, and statues; and Shakespeare's Rome is notably a city of statues: Caesar's images, Junius Brutus' statue, the statue of Pompey the Great. Cassius warns Brutus that Caesar has turned himself into a Colossus, and indeed Caesar, who repeatedly suppresses his private fears in order to play out his historical role as "Caesar," does present himself as a kind of monument. As a historical tragedy, then, Julius Caesar is built upon the tension between the present tense of dramatic reenactment and the past of history, between the ordinary flesh and blood of life and the immobile statues of antiquity. The play insists throughout upon Caesar's fleshly vulnerability: his falling sickness, his deafness, his near drowning in the Tiber, and his fever in Spain. What Shakespeare shows us is—to employ the grotesque imagery of Calphurnia's dream—marble statues spouting blood; or, conversely, it shows us flesh and blood aspiring to monumentality. Ironically, it is precisely because of his aspiration to a monumentality as fixed as the north star that Caesar is vulnerable to the conspirators' plot. "Hence! Wilt thou lift up Olympus?" (3.1.74) he exclaims the moment before the assassination. This is hubris of course, but in the different sense that the play's historical perspective provides, it is true. "Et tu, Brute?" As Caesar leaves behind the frailty of the flesh and enters history, Shakespeare gives him the one Latin line in the play, underscoring the transformation. The vulnerable man has been revealed as the marmoreal figure of history. Caesar has become Caesar.

What I am suggesting is that the play's mystifications, its magical elements, are associated with this tautological design. Couched in terms of prophecies and omens, our knowledge of events is represented in the drama as a magical necessity embedded in history. The result is that dramatic irony is raised to a metaphysical level and presented as fate. In this manner the play creates a feeling of necessity and persuades its audience that in witnessing Caesar's death and the collapse of the republican cause it has witnessed something inevitable.

IV

Why should Caesar's assassination and apotheosis as an immortal spirit be ceremonially repeated on the stage of the Globe? Why should Shakespeare conjure up Caesar? Considered not merely as a play about ritual but as itself a version of ritual, Shakespeare's historical drama becomes a ceremony of sacrifice and transcendence that I would like to term a kind of political Mass. As David Kaula has pointed out, there are Eucharistic overtones in Brutus' ceremonial charge to the conspirators to wash their hands in Caesar's blood, an action that echoes the New Testament invocations of Christ having "washed us from our sins in his blood" (Rev. 1.5). So, too, there are allusions to Christian sacrifice in Decius Brutus' interpretation of Calphurnia's dream, in which he claims that the statue spouting blood signifies that Caesar will be the source of renewal for Rome and that Romans will come to him, as to a saint, for "relics" (2.2.83-90). And there are similar overtones when Mark Antony, speaking over Caesar's body, tells the populace that if they heard Caesar's testament they

  would go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds,
And dip their napkins in his sacred blood,
Yea, beg a hair of him for memory,
And, dying, mention it within their wills,
Bequeathing it as a rich legacy
Unto their issue.
                                  (3.2.134-39)

"Behind all the oblique allusions to Christian sacrifice," Kaula remarks, "lurks the notion that what the conspirators produce is a disastrous imitation of the true redemptive action." The assassination of Caesar is in other words merely a parody of Christian sacrifice. What I want to suggest by speaking of the play as a kind of political mass, however, is an alternative way of understanding these Eucharistie overtones. Brutus may be misguided in his conception of the assassination, Decius Brutus may be trying to flatter Caesar in order to persuade him to go to the Senate House, and Mark Antony may be a demagogue manipulating a crowd; nevertheless, like the mass, Julius Caesar centers upon a sacrificial death that initiates a new era in history, the emergence of imperial Rome. Perhaps the association of Caesar and Christ is not wholly ironic.

Let us recall again the intermingling of religion and politics in the sixteenth century. The struggle within the church, glanced at in the opening scene, represents one aspect of this intermingling. Another is the way the crown penetrated the church. The penetration was literal; in place of the holy rood the royal coat of arms was erected in the chancel arch of English churches. At the same time, religious forms such as the figure of the double nature of the man-god Christ were systematically displaced onto the political sphere. Drained out of the official religion, magic and ceremony reappeared not only on the stage, but in the equally theatrical world of the court, where, for example, something reminiscent of the rejected cult of the Virgin reappeared as the cult of Gloriana with its attendant rites and ceremonies such as the spectacular Accession Day celebrations.

Particularly interesting, given the statues in Julius Caesar, the destruction of "popish idols" was paralleled by the rise of the sacred image of Elizabeth, forever young and beautiful. Shakespeare's Caesar turns himself into a monument of greatness; Shakespeare's Queen did something not altogether different, presenting herself as a living idol to be worshiped. Moreover, the Roman imperial theme had immediate significance in sixteenth-century England where Elizabeth, determined to maintain her independence from the threatening powers of Catholic Europe, dressed herself in the symbolism of an empress, the heir ultimately of the Caesars. Even Caesarian triumphs were part of her style. In 1588 she marked the defeat of the Spanish Armada with an entry into London in the ancient Roman manner, and one of the most famous of her late portraits, the procession picture attributed to Robert Peake, is as we now understand a version of the triumph á l' antigue with affinities to Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar. Probably many in Shakespeare's audience would have been prepared to see parallels between the first Emperor, as Caesar was commonly if erroneously regarded, and the great Queen.

I hardly mean to suggest that Julius Caesar is to be taken as an allegory, although some in Shakespeare's audience may have interpreted it in this way, as they evidently did Richard II a few years later. Nevertheless, the play does have political dimensions, and as a representation of the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Empire, Julius Caesar may be understood as yet another of the many originary myths of the Imperial Tudor State, a fable parallel in its way to that of the descent of true British authority from the ancestral figure of Trojan Brute, or to that of the apocalyptic union of the red rose and the white. Furthermore, by transforming the historical fact of the defeat of Brutus and the republican movement in Rome into a metaphysical confirmation of the inevitability of imperial greatness, Shakespeare's play implicitly confirms the legitimacy of the Tudor state. And yet, even as it does this, Julius Caesar is far from univocal. Shakespeare's Caesar may be great, may even be the greatest man who ever lived in the tide of times, but he is also inflexible and pretentious. Nor is Brutus a foul traitor condemned to the deepest circle of Hell like Dante's Brutus, but rather a patriot and an idealist, albeit a misguided one.

In the last years of the sixteenth century it became increasingly difficult for the old Queen to play the role of Gloriana. Elizabeth was still of course a figure of awe and admiration to her people, most of whom, including Shakespeare, had never known any other ruler; nevertheless, many of her loyal subjects were impatiently looking forward to the end of her reign. Office-seekers were anxious for advancement and for the titles of honor that Elizabeth so rarely bestowed, and the Puritans were waiting for a monarch more disposed to continuing the reformation of the church. To make matters worse, the old Queen obstinately refused to name her heir. Perhaps Julius Caesar incorporates, in significantly displaced form, something of the ambivalence and frustration with which many regarded the resident deity of England in her final years. In any event, a suggestive doubleness inheres in the play, which allows us at once to do away with Caesar and to submit to him.

Drama, like any form of narrative, has as one of its functions the mediation of contradictions that lie too deep in the culture to be resolved or, sometimes, too deep even to be effectively articulated. Two years after Julius Caesar was performed, there was a confused and traumatic revolt in England, the Essex uprising. But this was not a revolution, for no general principles lay behind it, and it was pursued, significantly, in the form of loyalty to the Queen. The last years of Elizabeth's reign are still a long way from the Civil Wars and the public bleeding of King Charles. Nevertheless, the Puritan reformers, however loyal to the person of the Queen they might be as individuals, had made an important step toward the future with their subversive claim to an authority derived not from the crown but from the congregation. No bishop, no king. At stake in the controversy over discarding the ceremonies in the church and the attendant symbols of social legitimation was indeed the matter of power in the realm. In its strategic ambivalence, Shakespeare's play can perhaps be understood as mobilizing some of the contradictory feelings toward the absolute authority of the crown that were beginning to be felt even as early as 1599.