SOURCE: "Politics, Rhetoric, and Will-Power in Julius Caesar," in Myriad-Minded Shakespeare: Essays Chiefly on the Tragedies and Problem Comedies, Macmillan Press, 1989, pp. 21-42.

[In the essay that follows, Honigmann contrasts Shakespeare's use of rhetoric in Julius Caesar and in other plays.]

All of Shakespeare's history-plays and most of his tragedies deal with political problems, yet his critics, until quite recent times, have refused to take his politics seriously. I am particularly irritated by those who assume that in Julius Caesar the political implications are obvious, and are exactly the same as the politics in Shakespeare's other works. The dramatist, we have read often enough, supported the 'Elizabethan settlement', a strong central government that promises the best chance of political order in unsettled times, and would have seen Julius Caesar as a regal figure, the Roman equivalent of Queen Elizabeth. To assassinate Queen Elizabeth would be manifestly wicked, we are told, in the eyes of all right-thinking Englishmen, therefore the murder of Julius Caesar is wicked, therefore all the political and moral questions raised by the play admit of straightforward solutions. Brutus and Cassius should not have done it; Rome needed Caesar, as England needed Elizabeth—is that really what Shakespeare thinks in this penetratingly political play?

Two objections immediately suggest themselves. First, the Caesar-Elizabeth, Rome-England parallels are not as clear-cut as has been suggested. True, the Pope had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, attempts to assassinate her were frequent in her last thirty years, and rumoured and suspected attempts on her life were even more numerous. The two political parties in Julius Caesar loosely reflect the division of Shakespeare's England: Queen Elizabeth suppressed the 'old faith', establishing Tudor Protestantism with herself as head of Church and State, and Caesar threatened the old republicanism, replacing it with a new form of government, which he headed as perpetual dictator. In Rome, as in Elizabeth's England, the old 'order' and the new were indeed locked in battle; Caesar, however, is presented in the play as a dangerous innovator, whereas Elizabeth was hailed as her country's innovating saviour. Caesar and Elizabeth stood for entirely different political values, and so, despite superficial similarities, their political positions are not the same. Even if it was wicked to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, the moral and political implications of a plot against a perpetual dictator are not so easily resolved.

Second: is it likely that someone as brilliantly original as was Shakespeare, in his understanding of individual human beings, would have no new ideas when he analyses groups of human beings, in their political relationships? The notion that Shakespeare simply and unquestioningly accepted the politics of his Tudor masters, and had no political ideas of his own, was once widespread; T. S. Eliot spoke for many others when he said that Shakespeare, like Dante, adopted the political-intellectual framework of his age. 'I can see no reason', said Eliot, 'for believing that either Dante or Shakespeare did any thinking on his own.… Neither Shakespeare nor Dante did any real thinking—that was not their job.' I shall assume, on the contrary, that 'real thinking' is the job of a writer, and that one as alert as Shakespeare might also develop in his thinking. The moral and political implications of Julius Caesar may resemble those of Shakespeare's other plays, yet must be examined separately, and will probably turn out to be unique—as all important features of a Shakespearian play always prove to be unique, the more closely we look at them.

When Shakespeare set out to write Julius Caesar, in 1599, at the age of thirty-five, a new phase began in his writing-career, whether or not he knew it at the time. Hitherto he had specialised in comedy, and in English history-plays; Julius Caesar was not only his first mature tragedy, it was also his first mature play with a consciously non-Christian background: which affects the play's treatment of husbands and wives, masters and servants, suicide, the supernatural—and politics. We can be sure, I think, that the decision to move off in these new directions was not taken lightly. In addition, though, there is another reason for regarding Julius Caesar as a very special departure. Shakespeare had been publicly chastised, some years earlier, as an 'upstart crow' who dared to compete with his betters—with the 'university wits', Oxford and Cambridge graduates who flaunted their classical know-how in their plays and poetry. Now, for the first time, Shakespeare himself, though not a graduate, undertook to write a play about classical Rome, aware that any theatre-goer who had been to grammar-school would certainly know about the age of Caesar (the age of Livy, Horace, Virgil), whereas his previous historical plays would not have been subjected to the same expert scrutiny (since English history was not on the curriculum in English schools). So it behoved him to be on his guard: a second public attack on him as an upstart, muscling in on classical territory in which he was not really at home, would have been most unfortunate. Moreover, a new young dramatist had recently appeared on the literary scene, a 'pestilent fellow' with a sharply critical tongue, a bricklayer's son (as his enemies alleged) who had studied the classics more intensively than Shakespeare, and was later to refer to Shakespeare's 'small Latin and less Greek'. Ben Jonson, and others, could be expected to look for faults in Shakespeare's play—and indeed we know that Jonson pounced on Julius Caesar. Many times, according to Jonson, Shakespeare 'fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter; as when he said, in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, "Caesar, thou dost me wrong", he replied. "Caesar did never wrong without just cause"—and such like; which were ridiculous.'

Writing a play about Julius Caesar therefore involved several kinds of risk. The man from provincial Stratford, who was rumoured to have been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country (Jonson once remarked contemptuously that a schoolmaster 'sweeps his living from the posteriors of little children')—the 'upstart crow', it would be said, was trying to get above himself. And Shakespeare must have anticipated this reaction. How, then, did he prepare for it and try to outflank it?

For those who think they know the story of Julius Caesar the play is full of surprises. First and foremost there is the portrait of Caesar himself, falling apart physically and mentally—deaf in one ear, superstitious, childishly proud of his shrewd judgement, easy game for flatterers (weaknesses largely invented by Shakespeare). This in itself is a warning to us that the dramatist was not afraid of pedantic fault-finders, such as Jonson, and interprets and rearranges history freely, as in the English history-plays. Shakespeare's Cicero, Cassius, and Antony are also surprising—for example, Antony's subservient, almost servile, relationship with Caesar in the first half of the play.

Caesar.      Antonius!
Antony. Caesar, my lord!
Caesar. Forget not in your speed, Antonius,
  To touch Calphurnia; for our elders say
  The barren, touched in this holy chase,
  Shake off their sterile curse.
Antony.                     I shall remember.
  When Caesar says 'Do this', it is perform'd.
                                                       (1.2.4)

According to Plutarch, Antony had already reached high political office, second only to Caesar; Shakespeare transforms Antony into something close to a lackey. It follows that he was not trying to impress classicists by painting historically unimpeachable portraits of the principal characters.

As many commentators have said, Shakespeare's special effort went into the language of Julius Caesar. Apart from the poets and prose-writers that I have already mentioned (Livy, Horace, Virgil), the Rome of Julius Caesar bred orators, such as Cicero, trained in the schools—and Shakespeare's unique achievement was that he recreated a world dedicated to speech-making and the arts of persuasion. Deciding to go 'extra-territorial' and to compete with dramatists who could boast a finished classical education, the 'upstart crow' invites his audience to attend to a new rhetoric—loosely based on Latin models in its self-conscious artistry, its sheer professionalism. I suspect that Ben Jonson perceived that this was the special achievement of Julius Caesar, and thought he would go one better in his own two Roman plays by offering more authentic speeches—those interminable orations that crush the life out of his Sejanus and Catiline.

Of course, Shakespeare had written many plays before Julius Caesar in which 'speech-making' is important, notably Henry V . I am not sure why Julius Caesar seems more 'classical' in this respect than its predecessors—partly, no doubt, the feeling is influenced by the high concentration of 'Roman allusions'.

Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he
 home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?
You blocks, you stones, you worse than
 senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey?
                                   (I.1.33)

This, the first 'big speech', centres on Pompey; Cassius's 'Well, honour is the subject of my story', on Caesar; and Portia's appeal to Brutus climaxes in another name with historic associations.

I grant I am a woman; but withal
A woman well reputed, Cato's daughter.
Think you I am no stronger than my sex
Being so father'd and so husbanded?
                                       (II. 1.294)

Pompey, Caesar, Cato—magic names. These, and the many allusions to Roman landmarks and customs, help to create the impression that we are listening to 'Roman' oratory. But the rhetoric of Julius Caesar differs from that of Shakespeare's earlier plays in at least one other point: again and again the big speeches exhort stage-listeners to abandon their purposes, to change their minds. Compare Henry V, the nearest rival to Julius Caesar in speech-making, and you find the very opposite: Henry wants to go to war, and the Archbishop of Canterbury encourages him; his men are there to fight, at Harfleur and Agincourt, and Henry cheers them on; at the end, everyone wants peace, and Burgundy speaks for all. These orations, like the chorus-speeches, lift the listeners by reinforcing a wish or a mood already present in them. In Julius Caesar the orator swims against the tide, not with it, quells the mood of his listeners, and changes the course of events. The tribune Marullus subdues the skylarking of the plebeians in Act I scene 1, till they creep away, 'tongue-tied in their guiltiness'; Cassius talks to an unwilling Brutus, pushing him in a direction he had not intended to go; Portia also compels Brutus to do what he had not wished. These are forensic speeches, moving from point to point with a professional expertise till they reach an irresistible conclusion, which is followed, as often as not, by a kind of surrender from the listener.

     O ye gods,
Render me worthy of this noble wife!
                                  (II.1.302)

This is Brutus's polite way of saying, as many a husband has said since, 'O God, what a wife!' (He doesn't quite say 'O God, she's got round me again!') And these speeches all lead up to Antony's 'Friends, Romans, countrymen', where, again, the rhetoric totally changes the mood of the listeners and drives them to actions they had not contemplated.

It is, therefore, the professionalism of its rhetoric that so sharply distinguishes Julius Caesar from earlier histories and tragedies. The speakers, when they want to persuade, know exactly how to go about their business, because they belong to a tradition—a Roman tradition—of oratory. One senses this professionalism when the speaker plays his acecard to maximum effect, as a last resort, as when Portia suddenly reveals her wound, or Antony at last spells out the provisions of Caesar's will—namely, that the whole thing was planned, step by step, by one who anticipated and shaped an inevitable response. I feel it, too, when the speaker, having finished, congratulates himself on a job well done—

Well, Brutus, thou art noble; yet, I see,
Thy honourable metal may be wrought
From that it is dispos'd.
                                (III.2.261)

Similarly, Antony rubs his hands at the end of the Forumscene.

Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt.
                                         (III.2.261)

These, again, are signals to us that the speaker has not drifted aimlessly but has fulfilled a conscious purpose.

Having observed the technical proficiency of those who resort to rhetoric in Julius Caesar, and how effortlessly men and women in this Roman world, in public and private situations, switch on the arts of persuasion, we must next note that a failure to speak effectively becomes all the more meaningful. Julius Caesar, at home 'in his night-gown', is not only superstitious and pompous, he is positively garrulous—a tendency already visible when he protests too much that he does not fear Cassius.

Would he were fatter! But I fear him not.
Yet if my name were liable to fear
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius.…
I rather tell thee what is to be fear'd
Than what I fear: for always I am Caesar.
                                  (I.2.198)

Such uncontrolled, 'give-away' speaking is all the more remarkable set beside the highly wrought rhetoric of this play. Similarly, when the uncouth Casca explains how Caesar was offered a crown, and the scene's verse gives way to stumbling prose, a point is made about the standards one could expect from an educated Roman.

I can as well be hanged as tell the manner of it: it was mere foolery; I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown—yet 'twas not a crown neither, 'twas one of these coronets—and, as I told you, he put it by once; but for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again.… (I.2.234)

He pours it all out, drawing from Brutus the remark

What a blunt fellow is this grown to be!
He was quick mettle when he went to school.
                                      (294)

Brutus refers disparagingly to one who does not know how to express himself properly, though he would have been told how in elegant lectures 'when he went to school'.

Even more significant than the gap between careless and careful speakers is the contrast between different kinds of competence exhibited by a single speaker. Brutus's Forum-speech proves him to be highly skilled in oratory (many critics have condemned it as weak and ineffective but, as Granville-Barker observed, 'it is certainly not meant to be ineffective, for it attains its end in convincing the crowd'). When the conspirators meet at his house, Brutus also speaks fluently. All the more surprising, therefore, that so practised a speaker seems so helpless when Portia sets about him, that he wards off her rhetorical flow with short phrases totally devoid of rhetorical art—

I am not well in health, and that is all.
                                            (II. 1.257)

She persists—

Brutus is wise, and, were he not in health,
He would embrace the means to come by it.

He shrugs—

Why, so I do. Good Portia, go to bed.

Portia finds her second wind—as wives sometimes do, in these domestic situations—and sails off into another beautifully measured speech, and he avoids answering, saying simply, 'Kneel not, gentle Portia.' Now, when Cassius had appealed to him in Act I with similar emotionalism, Brutus did not refuse to engage with him rhetorically—quite the opposite. The turn of his sentences, their deliberate patterning, matches Cassius's verbal artistry, warding him off, as it were, with his own weapon—and the same speech, or one very like it, could have been made to Portia.

That you do love me, I am nothing jealous;
What you would work me to, I have some
 aim;
How I have thought of this, and of these
 times,
I shall recount hereafter. For this present
I would not, so with love I might entreat you,
Be any further mov'd.
                                    (I.2.162)

Why does Brutus not silence Portia's pleading with a similar speech? I believe that, although his short replies to Portia are sometimes spoken as if he is only half-listening to her (a typical husband?), a more likely explanation is that he is overwhelmed by her vehemence. For a while the skilled orator is speechless.

Brutus's feeblest speech, in my view, comes at the end of the quarrel-scene, when he plucks up courage to address that 'monstrous apparition', the Ghost of Caesar.

Brutos. Speak to me what thou art.
Ghost. Thy evil spirit, Brutus.
Brutus.                  Why com'st thou?
Ghost. To tell thee thou shalt see me at
  Philippi.
Brutos. Well; then I shall see thee again?
Ghost. Ay, at Philippi.
Brutus. Why, I will see thee at Philippi then.
  [Exit GHOST.]
                                     (IV.3.279)

This is an extraordinary example of not knowing what to say: 'Why, I will see thee at Philippi then—if you say. so.' The fact that in Plutarch almost the same words are used would be no excuse for such a feeble line—except that feebleness is right at this moment, expressing Brutus's shock and confusion, which he admits in the very next line: 'Now I have taken heart thou vanishest.'

In this play, then, we find a complete rhetorical range, from formal orations and other long speeches that set out to persuade down to mumbled excuses and near-helpless echoing of what another has said. Perpetually switching from speech-making to talk, from one register to another, Shakespeare draws attention to rhetoric as a basic fact of Roman life, a mental discipline that he has woven into the fabric of this studiously Roman play, just as he very deliberately threads in allusions to Roman history and topography. I want to give one more example, from the scene that contemporaries seem to have admired above all—the quarrel-scene. It is one of the master-strokes of this great scene that it dips so suddenly from Brutus's high-toned

Remember March, the ides of March
 remember:
Did not great Julius bleed for justice sake?
                                       (IV.3.18)

down to exchanges that sound like the wrangling of five-year-olds:

1—Go to; you are not, Cassius.
 —I am.
 —I say you are not.
2—Did I say 'better'?
 —If you did, I care not.
3—I denied you not.
 —You did.
 —I did not.

Lifted out of context, these exchanges sound almost laughable. Yet they are absolutely natural in a quarrel (and intimate, among other things, that Brutus and Cassius, who call each other 'brother', have probably known each other since childhood, and can relapse into the speech-habits of earlier years); and, in addition, they make us all the more conscious of other ups and downs, of the scene's rhetorical texturing.

So far I have argued that in Julius Caesar Shakespeare presents a Roman world highly conscious of the powers of rhetoric, one where the skilled orator uses words as weapons that can change the course of events. The tribune Marullus and Cassius in Act I; Portia in Act II, and Decius Brutus, persuading Caesar to go to his death; Mark Antony in Act III—these are some of the prize exhibits of what rhetoric can actually achieve. But Shakespeare was not so naïve as to believe that the best argument, or the best speech, always wins, in a political situation. The very opposite is often true. This very 'political' play shows, again and again, that crucial decisions are made because one person imposes his will on others; Shakespeare rewrites history to prove that the man who can dominate others by force of personality, rather than force of argument, must rise to the top. The 'man of destiny', the Napoleonic man, the Thatcher phenomenon, may employ argument, but wins political battles because he or she is the dominant baboon in a wilderness of monkeys—he is 'constant as the northern star' to the conviction that he is always right, 'for always I am Caesar'. As Napoleon put it, 'Wherever I am not, there is chaos'—expressing the supreme self-confidence that is both the strength and the fatal flaw of every Caesar or Thatcher in history.

Shakespeare underlines this point most unmistakable in dramatising Brutus's ascendancy over his fellow conspirators. In Act II, Cassius makes several proposals and Brutus, every time, immediately makes counterproposals—and anyone who knows the story knows that Brutus's are errors of judgement. If only Cicero had been brought into the conspiracy, as Cassius wished, Cicero—the greatest orator of his generation—could have presented the case for the murder of Caesar so much more convincingly than Brutus that Antony would not have dared to turn the tide of opinion. If only Antony had been killed with Caesar, or had been forbidden to speak at Caesar's funeral, the course of history might have been different. Shakespeare draws attention to the fact that something other than reason prevails when Brutus compels Cassius, against his better judgement, to march to Philippi.

Brutus.       What do you think
  Of marching to Philippi presently?
Cassius. I do not think it good.
Brutus.             Your reason?
Cassius. This it is:
 Tis better that the enemy seek us;
 So shall he waste his means, weary his
 soldiers.…
                                (IV.3.194)

But Brutus, having just won the clash of wills in the quarrel-scene, loftily insists that he knows best. 'Good reasons must, of force, give place to better.' Cassius still objects, Brutus remains arrogantly overbearing, and at last Cassius submits. 'Then, with your will, go on.' A curious phrase, 'Then, with your will, go on.' How many times, one wonders, have cabinet ministers, Pyms and Priors, mumbled their submission, against their better judgement, in similar words? 'Then, with your will, go on, Prime Minister.'

Not only in the clashes of Brutus and Cassius but in many other scenes Shakespeare is concerned, in Julius Caesar, with the triumph of will over reason. Whatever powers the aging Julius Caesar of the play has lost—and the commentators are agreed that Shakespeare chose to depict the great Roman in decline—we are left in no doubt that Caesar believes himself to be pre-eminent because he sees himself as a man of irresistible will.

And tell them that I will not come to-day.
Cannot, is false; and that I dare not, falser;
I will not come to-day. Tell them so, Decius.

The cause is in my will: I will not come.
                                           (II.2.61)

The play shows, of course, that one's strength of will can decline, as do other mental and physical abilities, but Caesar's vision of himself as the man of unshakable purpose, even if grotesquely untrue of the man he has become, reveals what he was, or believed himself to be, when he rose to the top as 'the noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times'. You may outlive yourself, and lose your decisiveness (as Napoleon did) but you remember what it was that lifted you above the common pack of men.

I could be well mov'd, if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move
 me;
But I am constant as the northern star,

Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
                                                (III.1.58)

Shakespeare shows that a leader of men, whether Caesar or Brutus, may misunderstand people, arguments, and even the very situation in which he finds himself, and yet can dominate others, who see more clearly, by sheer force of will. This shocking political insight—so very different from the dear old 'Elizabethan World Picture'—emerges as the 'philosophy of history' in Julius Caesar, if I may use so grand a phrase. For the play undeniably suggests that the next 'man of destiny', though neither outstanding as a general nor as a thinker, possesses the one gift that matters.

Antony. Octavius, lead your battle softly on,
  Upon the left hand of the even field.
Octavius. Upon the right hand I: keep thou the
  left.
Antony. Why do you cross me in this exigent?
Octavius. I do not cross you; but I will do so.
                                      (V.1.16)

Shakespeare's thesis, that sheer will-power is the decisive political factor and overcomes almost all opposition, surfaces in many ways.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.…
                                 (1.3.93)

Brutus's interview with Portia is another example. It begins as quiet pleading, and ends as a fearful clash of wills, when Portia discloses the 'great gash' in her thigh. The fact that she was able to bide her time, while the blood was flowing beneath her robes, until the psychological moment when the sight of her wound will destroy Brutus's resistance, proves her 'strength of spirit', her will to succeed. Not her eloquence, but this exercise of pure will, overcomes Brutus. And in her case Shakespeare shows, I think, that devotees of will-power may conquer others but, in the end, overthrow themselves as well. The strength that inflicted her 'great gash' must be connected with that even more extraordinary exploit, her suicide by 'swallowing fire'. Caesar's determination also contributes indirectly to his death, in so far as he insists on remaining 'constant as the northern star' when surrounded by opposing wills: his 'constancy' blunts his perception. As for Brutus, whenever he forces Cassius and the rest in a direction they do not wish to follow, we feel each time that his need to dominate blinds his reason and hurries him to his destruction.

A. C. Bradley once remarked that the quarrel-scene in Julius Caesar 'can hardly be defended on strictly dramatic grounds'. Perhaps we can defend it by saying that it presents the play's most exciting clash of wills, bringing to a head one of its central interests, which, we may add, explains Shakespeare's rearrangement of some of the incidents of the Forum-scene. In Plutarch's Life of Marcus Brutus these are described as follows:

[The conspirators] came to talk of Caesar's will and testament, and of his funerals and tomb. Then Antonius, thinking good his testament should be read openly, and also that his body should be honourably buried, … Cassius stoutly spake against it. But Brutus went with the motion, and agreed unto it.… When Caesar's testament was openly read among them, whereby it appeared that he bequeathed unto every citizen of Rome 75 drachmas a man, and that he left his gardens and arbours unto the people.… The people then loved him, and were marvellous sorry for him. Afterwards, when Caesar's body was brought into the market-place, Antonius, making his funeral oration in praise of the dead, … framed his eloquence to make their hearts yearn the more.…

Closely as the play appears to follow this narrative, there is some significant retouching of detail. In Plutarch, the contents of Caesar's testament are published before Antony's funeral oration; in Shakespeare, we hear almost invariably of Caesar's will, and its contents are revealed later, as the climax of Antony's oration; the plebeians are kept dangling, so to speak, to give maximum repetition to an ominous word that has already caught our attention.

—We'll hear the will. Read it, Mark Antony!
—The will, the will! We will hear Caesar's
 will! …
—The will! Read the will!
—You will compel me then to read the will?

—Why, friends, you go to do you know not
 what.
Wherein hath Caesar thus deserv'd your
 loves?
Alas, you know not: I must tell you then.
You have forgot the will I told you of.
—Most true. The will! Let's stay and hear the
 will!
                   (III.2.139-40, 155-6, 236-40)

Not only has Shakespeare given greater emphasis to 'the will' by making Antony's oration circle round it, and by verbal repetition. He also contrives to suggest that the man who had dominated Rome by his will ('The cause is in my will: I will not come') somehow wills the mischief and mutiny that follow from the reading of his testament.

Caesar's will survives him as a political force, and, like his 'spirit, ranging for revenge', continues to dominate the Roman world—a point also underlined for us by a stage-direction in Act IV: 'Enter the Ghost of Caesar. ' In Plutarch there is no hint that this 'wonderful strange and monstrous shape' appears in the likeness of Caesar; 'I am thy evil spirit, Brutus', it explains (in the Life of Marcus Brutus), or, alternatively, 'I am thy ill angel, Brutus' (in the Life of Caesar). Even without the Folio's stage-direction, though, we might well have guessed that the play's ghost ought to take the shape of Caesar, after what Brutus had said earlier about 'the spirit of Caesar'.

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!
                                 (II. 1.167)

The spirit of Caesar and the will of Caesar are just about identical in the play: the Ghost appears as a dismembered, menacing will, and does not even have to explain its reason for coming. Brutus knows—

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails!
                                      (V.3.94)

Reading Julius Caesar as a political play, in which the author contrasts 'strength of spirit' and rhetoric as mighty opposites, the two political forces that really matter, one wonders about Shakespeare's own assessment of the rights and wrongs of the Roman political situation. It has been said that he 'makes it abundantly clear that the rule of the single master-mind is the only admissible solution' for the problems of Rome. I am not so sure. Shakespeare demonstrates, I think, that the so-called master-mind has outlived itself, and has become a mere husk of itself: the 'master-mind' is a prey to superstition, flattery, a neurotic wife, and megalo-mania. Under Caesar, the political system appears to work, but does it? The senate is treated by him with contempt, and he himself is manipulated by other men, and is portrayed by Shakespeare as an amalgam of rigid prejudices and an almost unbelievable capacity for dithering. Caesar has in effect destroyed the political institutions of Rome; Antony, a consul at the time of the Feast of Lupercal, actually offers his political master a crown, but he lacks the will to take it; the tribunes 'Marullus and Flavius, for pulling scarfs off Caesar's images, are put to silence' (I.2.280). What does it mean, 'put to silence'? They would know in a police-state, where people are dragged from their homes in the small hours, and are never seen again. Caesar's Rome is a fascist state, which began its rule with the murder of Pompey, where opponents are 'put to silence' or banished, where mob-rule is the ultimate source of power. (We are not told with what honeyed words Antony offered the crown to Caesar, but clearly this was an appeal to the mob, as was Antony's later funeral-oration.) Caesar and his gang have highjacked the government of Rome, much like the generals who have seized power of late in many parts of the world; and Shakespeare seems to me to have very little sympathy with General Caesar's political methods or aspirations.

Antony prophesies that after the death of Caesar

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.
                                        (III. 1.264)

Shakespeare, however, retouched the historical picture in many ways to suggest that the political system had already broken down before Caesar's death, which, I think, makes the conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius more understandable, and perhaps justifiable.

Shakespeare's play presents a political jungle, in which one man has temporarily gained control. Yet the dramatist no more commits himself to the view that Rome needs Caesar than to any other political solution: Caesar simply follows Pompey as the next cowboy who thinks he can ride the political bronco, and gets thrown like Pompey. Shakespeare's attitude is fairly cynical where politicians are concerned, as in most of his other plays. He makes it clear that Caesar has not solved Rome's problems, and, accentuating Caesar's weaknesses, more than hints that with such a leader things must fall apart, the centre cannot hold. He also rewrites history to suggest that Caesar's chief opponent, Brutus, lacks the political instinct to be a successful leader of men, turning Brutus into Cassius's dupe, which he was not in Plutarch. The play's Cassius decides

       I will this night,
In several hands, in at his windows throw,
As if they came from several citizens,
Writings, all tending to the great opinion
That Rome holds of his name.…
                                      (I.2.314)

Plutarch's Brutus receives genuine letters, not fakes, from his 'friends and countrymen'. It is surely significant that, in Shakespeare's account, the two principal figures, Caesar and Brutus, are both intellectually down-graded: both are made the dupes of other men, both suffer from an inflated sense of their own importance, and both speak pompously of themselves, in the third person.

       Danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he.
We are two lions litter'd in one day
And I the elder and more terrible.…
                                   (II.2.44)

It is sheer fantasy. A man who believes that will believe anything—and Caesar seems to believe it. Brutus, too, fantasises about himself—

My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.
                                   (V.5.34)

After Brutus's treachery to Caesar, his sense of his own honour and truth becomes less and less plausible, as Antony helps us to understand: 'For Brutus is an honourable man.' Shakespeare, of course, invented the special way Caesar and Brutus speak and fantasise about themselves, and thus intimates that these leading politicians are dangerously out of touch with reality.

Politics can only be as good as the politicians. Shakespeare seems to have set out to prove that the supposedly great men of Caesar's Rome, despite all their talk about high principles, have been ridiculously overrated—a cynical reappraisal that affects not only Caesar and Brutus but also secondary figures. Cicero, who battled courageously against Caesar's ambitions, becomes an ineffectual bystander in the play. 'Did Cicero say anything?' asks Cassius, after Caesar was offered the crown. 'Ay, he spoke Greek.… Those that understood him smiled at one another, and shook their heads'—a glimpse of the man added by Shakespeare that subtly degrades him. Strange, too, that in a play containing such memorable orations, Cicero is given nothing memorable to say.

Shakespeare's cynicism about the heroic figures of the classical past must have astounded his contemporaries, such as Ben Jonson; at times the play reads like a deliberate exercise in debunking, in the manner of Troilus and Cressida. His cool rewriting of history is evident not only in his portraits of individuals but in many incidental touches—for example, the six lines that begin Act IV scene 1, where Antony and Octavius and Lepidus haggle over the lives of a brother and nephew.

Antony. These many, then, shall die; their
  names are prick'd.
Octavius. Your brother too must die. Consent
  you, Lepidus?
Lepidus. I do consent.
Octavius.        Prick him down, Antony.
Lepidus. Upon condition Publius shall not live,
  Who is your sister's son, Mark Antony.
Antony. He shall not live; look, with a spot I
  damn him.

Plutarch thought this proscription quite outrageous. 'In my opinion,' he wrote, 'there was never a more horrible, unnatural, and crueller [ex]change than this was. For thus [exchanging murder for murder, they did as well kill those whom they did forsake and leave unto others, as those also which others left unto them to kill.' Shakespeare, however, made it an even blacker incident by omitting all signs of reluctance, whereas, according to Plutarch, 'they could hardly agree whom they would put to death: for every one of them would kill their enemies, and save their kinsmen and friends'. Shakespeare turns it into a kind of poker-game, a test of nerves where no one flinches and every man watches the others for signs of weakness. On the surface, all is harmony and restraint—but, introducing slight pauses, the actors can signal to us that this is not a rational discussion at all; it is, quite simply, a clash of wills:

—Your brother too must die. Consent you,
 Lepidus?
—I … do consent.

The scene develops in masterly fashion to expose the basest political opportunism. 'Lepidus, go you to Caesar's house', says Antony;

Fetch the will hither, and we shall determine
How to cut off some charge in legacies.

Just two lines are needed to demonstrate Antony's total unscrupulousness. The next forty lines continue the poker-game, as Antony tries to persuade Octavius that Lepidus is 'a slight, unmeritable man', and Octavius pretends not to believe him. On the surface they argue about Lepidus; the real issue is different: which one will win an ascendancy over the other? Antony places himself in the weaker position by talking down to Octavius ('Octavius, I have seen more days than you'), only to find that the younger man turns the tables on him—by giving him permission to do as he chooses.

               You may do your will;
But he's a tried and valiant soldier.

Antony then makes the mistake of appealing to Octavius—

So is my horse, Octavius, and for that
I do appoint him store of provender.

Trying to justify himself when Octavius has already given his consent, Antony proves himself the weaker man—and such small verbal advantages can lead to larger victories, as when Octavius refuses to accept Antony's orders at Philippi; and to the overthrow of empires.

Julius Caesar is a play that hums with 'political' implications. Even in private or domestic conversation the participants jockey for advantage, and Shakespeare expects us to know enough about Roman history to understand how private clashes can affect the larger political scene. In the fifth act, however, the play's wonderful coherence, its simultaneous exploration of the outer and the inner world, seems to me to be succeeded by writing of a lower order—a change that has long puzzled me. In the few minutes that remain I want to consider the purpose of Act V, and how it connects with what went before.

At one time my simple-minded solution to this problem was that Shakespeare, exhausted by the Forum-scene and the quarrel-scene, those twin glories of the play, lost interest in the story and hurried with indecent haste to the end—perhaps because he was already pondering his next work, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. To accuse Shakespeare of such irresponsibility is always dangerous, and I have to admit that the loss of power in Act V is less evident in the theatre than in the study. Nevertheless, the switch to battle-scenes, the absence of 'big' speeches, the general sense of diminuendo, demands an explanation. What did Shakespeare think he was doing in this very strange fifth act?

It may be that we can answer this question by considering the prominence given to Cassius's birthday.

    Messala,
This is my birth-day; as this very day
Was Cassius born. Give me thy hand,
 Messala.
                                 (V.1.70)

Here Shakespeare dramatises, without comment, a sentence from Plutarch:

Messala writeth that Cassius, having spoken these last words … he bade him farewell and willed him to come to supper to him the next night following, because it was his birthday.

Shakespeare, however, returned to the fact that Cassius died on his birthday (which, incidentally, seems to have been Shakespeare's own fate as well)—and made Cassius comment as follows:

This day I breathed first: time is come round,
And where I did begin, there shall I end;
My life is run his compass.
                                      (V.3.23)

It suited Shakespeare to make this point about the circularity of life because, when you think about it, the fifth act as a whole seems to make the same point about history, and the events of the play. That is, although the fifth act appears to cobble together the final, confused events in the lives of the principal conspirators, Brutus and Cassius, below the surface it re-traverses the ground of the first four acts, and suggests that history keeps on repeating itself. Cassius asks Pindarus to kill him with the very sword that killed Caesar—

      with this good sword.
That ran through Caesar's bowels, search this
 bosom.
                                            (V.3.41)

Cassius covers his face before Pindarus stabs him, and no doubt Brutus also does so before his death, exactly repeating Caesar's gesture as described by Antony—

      Then burst his mighty heart;
And in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey's statua,
Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar
 fell.
                                      (III.2.186)

History repeats itself, since Caesar was in effect responsible for Pompey's death, and dies 'at the base of Pompey's statua'; then Brutus and Cassius kill Caesar, and later kill themselves with the same swords, and, it seems, with the very same dying gesture. History also repeats itself in so far as Caesar was hunted to death—

   Here wast thou bay'd, brave hart;
Here didst thou fall; and here thy hunters
 stand
                                     (III. 1.205)

—and the 'low alarums' that close in on Brutus in the final scene repeat this image: a pack of pursuers hunting a doomed man to death.

The use of déjà vu being so important, we must remember that it could be reinforced by production-methods that have disappeared from the text. As I have already mentioned, Shakespeare remodelled Brutus in the likeness of Caesar, giving him similar speech-habits, and a similar sense of being a very special person; and both men, of course, are similarly hero-worshipped by their followers. The irony that the two men, Caesar and Brutus, who take it upon themselves to set Rome to rights, both have to pay the price with their lives, could be underlined choreographically—by making the survivors flow away from, or tip-toe towards, the bodies, so as to remind the audience that it has seen some-thing like it before.

I feel, too, that the unexpected appearance of young Cato, about a hundred lines before the end of the play, needs a similar explanation.

I am the son of Marcus Cato, ho!
A foe to tyrants, and my country's friend.
I am the son of Marcus Cato, ho!
                                             (V.4.4)

He speaks five lines, and is immediately killed. What is the point of it? Being the son of Cato, he is the brother of Portia—and, since it is stressed that he is young to be a soldier, he might well have been played by the very boy-actor who had taken the part of Portia. Thus, again, the producer can bring out that history repeats itself—that Portia's passionate spirit lives on in another, and again tries to protect Brutus.

The idea that history repeats itself has been present from the beginning of the play. Brutus feels obliged to resist Caesar's ambitions because his 'ancestors did from the streets of Rome/The Tarquàn drive, when he was call'd a king' (II. 1.53). In the fifth act Shakespeare powerfully reactivates this idea—suggesting that those who think they are in control of their own destiny, and who think they can control the destiny of nations, are in the grip of invisible forces that bring about Caesar's death 'at the base of Pompey's statua', and Cassius's death on his birthday, with the very sword that killed Caesar, and so on. Despite all the intense political activity of the human actors, a higher force seems to have willed and prearranged the outcome, imposing a beautiful symmetry that, in effect, mocks the efforts of mere mortals to take charge of the world themselves. The confusion and misunderstanding of the battle-scenes mirror the political events of the first four acts, and bring out unmistakably that the leading figures have all misunderstood themselves, and the situations in which they exercised their political talents. Shakespeare's disenchanted comment on the great events of the play is heard, I think, in Titinius's despairing cry when he discovers the body of Cassius—

Alas! thou hast misconstrued everything!
                                           (V.3.84)

It is a line that reaches into all parts of the play, wonderfully right about Cassius, and equally relevant to Caesar, Brutus and Antony, the play's leading politicians—

Alas! thou hast misconstrued everything!

It is a magical if one-sided summing-up line for this cynical play, but, I have to admit it, it is also a slightly unfortunate summing-up line at the end of a lecture.