Significantly, every act of writing in Julius Caesar draws blood. In the broadsheets Cassius writes "in several hands," "wherein obscurely Caesar's ambition shall be glanced at" (1.2.316, 319-20); in the anonymous notes Cinna the conspirator throws in Brutus' way (1.3.145); and in the proscription list on which Antony damns lives with spots of ink (4.1.6), the injury textually inflicted seems to correspond with the author's intention. And yet the conspirators, as we have seen, involuntarily involve themselves in their own plot the moment they script it and declare it finished. Antony in turn loses sole authorship of his counterplot as it becomes the collaborative product of the other triumvirs. Having judged the proscription list complete, he is forced by Octavius to add the name of Lepidus' brother, a revision Lepidus makes contingent upon the inclusion of Antony's nephew. Similarly, once a text is composed in this play, it is subject to politicized readings beyond the author's control, and of this pervasive process the poet's death once again provides a central, emblematic image. Culminating a scene in which he amplifies the plebeians' outrage by gradually undressing Caesar's torn corpse, Antony publicly reads the dead man's will as a last incitement to riot (3.2.240-52). Just two scenes later, however, Caesar's will is figuratively dismembered as Antony determines "How to cut off some charge in legacies" (4.1.9). The intervening scene of Cinna's murder presents the literal dismemberment of an author whose will counts for nothing and whose audience chooses to misread him. In this scene Shakespeare schematizes the fate of all communication in the play. When the audience is both mobile and prone to action, when spectators become collaborators, when the jury arrogates the dual privilege of constituting meaning and executing its sentence, a speech-act's illocutionary intention dissolves into its perlocutionary effect. From the vantage point of 1601, such an awareness can only appear prophetic, for two years earlier Shakespeare claims for his drama the dangerous power to bestow an Exton on the world to make many Extons.⁶²

But what justification have we for treating Julius Caesar's plebeians as an unflattering, unmitigated representation of the Globe audience's potential? To what extent is Shakespeare's metadramatic antitheatricalism contained by Rome and the play that concerns it? A limited answer lies in recognizing the diachronic transformation of the crowd in Julius Caesar. The plebeians who make their final exit bearing Cinna at the end of Act 3 first took the stage preparing for Caesar's triumph at the beginning of Act 1, and we must include the facts of this metamorphosis in our assessment of Shakespeare's representation of the audience in this play. Instead of a pack of marauding plebeians pursuing a poet, we find in 1.1 "certain commoners" (s.d.) set upon by inquisitorial tribunes; instead of an indistinct rabble seeking blood we find a remarkably individuated cobbler able to pun with the best of Shakespeare's English tradesmen. The line distinguishing sixteenth-century England and ancient Rome in Julius Caesar is never more blurred than in this scene. The Tribunes alternately seem like London aldermen policing sumptuary laws and Puritan antitheatricalists censuring the license, social confusion, and spectacle of the public theater: Flavius and Murellus chastise the keepers of this shoemaker's holiday for doffing "the sign" of their profession and donning their "best attire" (4, 48); and having dispersed the crowd, they set out to "Disrobe the images" decked with Caesar's "ceremonies" (64-65). The "certain Commoners" who cross the stage in 1.1 would appear to have no more objectionable motive than the desire for spectacle, the wish "to see Caesar and rejoice in his triumph" (31). And yet the Tribunes' antitheatrical anxiety in this scene is justified (and, significantly, left unchallenged by a play that does not make them the conventional object of protheatrical satire). Not only do the masquerading commoners range about the liberties dislocated from their social station; they are also interpretive individuals, each capable of construing the meaning of words after his fashion, as the cobbler's relentless punning reveals. When the vulgar can divest themselves of their social signifiers, when the vernacular can be invested with paronomasial significance, the theatrical audience acquires interpretive agency and the theater itself thereby becomes epistemologically open-ended and politically consequential. In 1.1 the plebeians enter as political innocents, and Murellus reproves them for failing to realize that the triumph they yearn to watch "comes . . . over Pompey's blood" (51). In 3.3 the plebeians exit bloodied with the experience of political theater, having demonstrated that to watch in this play is also to act. While in 1.1 they observe a social carnival, in 3.3 they effect political carnage. In 1.1, the cobbler's playfulness with language, his witty misreading of the Tribunes' sense, appears innocuous, whereas in 3.3, the fourth plebeian's wordplay is fatal, his misreading of Cinna a literal pun that tears name from thing. In 1.1, finally, Shakespeare's audience might have recognized itself in the protheatrical image of a harmless, recreational spectatorship; in 3.3 this audience would have seen itself transformed into (or revealed as?) the misconstruing miscreation that elicited Roman theatrical censorship.

Such is the plebeians' metamorphosis from "stones" (1.1.36) to "men" (3.2.142),⁶³ from theatrical naïfs to initiates in the political theater. Like all metamorphoses, it involves less a break than a continuum: the difference between culling out a holiday and killing a man depends only on the degree of the spectators' participation. And like many initiations, it involves a ceremonial rite. If Caesar dies at the hands of republican fellow players unwilling to cede the theater to a single monarchical actor, Cinna dies as a sacrifice to an audience that has taken the stage. It may seem strange for Shakespeare to inaugurate his Globe in these terms, to baptize his audience with the blood of a poet, to figure its interpretive autonomy in a literal act of dismemberment. But dismemberment is his metaphor when, less than a year after Julius Caesar's first performance, he invokes his audience's imaginative collaboration in Henry V: "Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; / Into a thousand parts divide one man" (Prol. 24-25). In the theater of the world every character is subject to synecdochic reading, every act and representation imperfect and unfinished, every text submitted to the cutting room, the deceptively "little room" where spectators, no less than actors, conspire to "force a play." It is as an emblem of this theater's censurable energies and properties that Cinna is dragged offstage.⁶⁴

Notes

¹ Rowland Whyte, describing the interpretive frenzy provoked by a device displayed by Essex at an entertainment for the Queen in 1595, in Letters and Memorials of State . . . Written and Collected by Sir Henry Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Earl of Leicester, and Viscount Lisle, ed. Arthur Collins (1746), 1:362.

² Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), sig. C8v. All references to Gosson's works in this essay appear in Arthur F. Kinney's edition (Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson [Salzburg, 1974]). I have modernized the spelling but retained the punctuation of this edition. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Gosson appear in Playes Confuted in Five Actions.

³ Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York and London, 1973), sig. B4.

⁴ Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, in Prose Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, Eng., 1963), p. 12 (my italics).

⁵An Apology for Poetry, p. 24.

⁶ See Playes Confuted in Five Actions, p. 161.

⁷ Gosson specifically objected to the recent arrival of the public stage, noting that even "modest" and "good" plays are "not fit for every man's diet: neither ought they commonly to be shown" (The Schoole of Abuse, p. 97).

⁸ A (now besieged) formulation of Michel Foucault's subversion-containment model appearing most influentially in Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, 1988), esp. pp. 21-65.

⁹ For an excellent discussion of the state's attempts to control topical references on the Renaissance stage, see Paul Yachnin, "The Powerless Theater," English Literary Renaissance, 21.1 (Winter, 1991), 49-74.

¹⁰The Life of Henry the Fifth, Pro., 12, 19-20. References are to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

¹¹An Apology for Poetry, p. 45.

¹² See Marjorie Garber, "'What's Past Is Prologue': Temporality and Prophecy in Shakespeare's History Plays," in Renaissance Genres, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 301-31. See also Sharon L. Jansen Jaech, "Political Prophecy and Macbeth's 'Sweet Bodements,'" Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), esp. p. 291.

¹³Shakespeare's Holinshed, ed. Richard Hosley (New York, 1968), p. 48 (Chronicles, 1587 ed., p. 180).

¹⁴ Francis Bacon, "Of Prophecies," in Essays, ed. Edwin A. Abbott, 2 vols. (London, 1881), 2:20-21.

¹⁵ Following Garber (p. 311, n. 15), I borrow this term from Hayden White's Metahistory (Baltimore, 1973), pp. 6-7.

¹⁶An Apology for Poetry, p. 68. Plutarch himself refused the title of "historian," choosing instead to relate and evaluate the "lives" and "minds" of his subjects.

¹⁷ Plutarch's Liues of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Sir Thomas North (1579), intro. George Wyndham, 6 vols. (New-York, 1967), 6:69-70, 201.

¹⁸ Gary Taylor, "Bardicide," in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (Newark, Del., 1991), p. 343. We must dismiss as specious Taylor's assertion that the scene also presents "a theatrically impossible dismemberment" (p. 334). The stage directions indicate Cinna is to be dragged offstage for his fate. Moreover, false limbs for such scenes appear in the few extant lists of Elizabethan stage properties, and the illusion of onstage dismemberment seems not to have been impossible in such plays as Doctor Faustus and Titus Andronicus (see Philip Henslowe's inventory of March, 1598, in C. Walter Hodges, The Globe Restored [New York, 1953], pp. 71-72. On pp. 73-74, Hodges demonstrates Elizabethan "stage machinery to produce the illusion of a beheading").

¹⁹ See North's Plutarch, 6:15. In The Life of Brutus no mention is made of Brutus' oration; in The Life of Caesar no mention made of Antony's.

²⁰ Such is at least the ostensible authorial stance in Venus and Adonis, the epigram of which exhorts, "Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua" (from Ovid's Amores, 1.15.35-36). The subsequent dedicatory epistle to Henry Wriothesley also distinguishes between the unimportant censure of "the world" and the all-important pleasure of Shakespeare's patron.

²¹ Arthur F. Marotti remains one of the more vocal proponents of this view. See his "Patronage, Poetry, and Print," Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991), pp. 1-26; and his "Shakespeare's Sonnets as Literary Property," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago, 1990), pp. 143-73.

²² Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), ed. D. C. Allen (Urbana, 1933), p. 283. William Jaggard printed the two sonnets (138 and 144) in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599).

²³ In "The Politics of Astrophil and Stella," Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass reveal that the distinction between literary courtship and public courtiership was often blurred in late sixteenth-century England's "publicly intimate" poetry (Studies in English Literature, 24.1 [Winter, 1984], 53-68). For further demonstrations of the difficulty of maintaining privacy in the Elizabethan and Jacobean patronage systems, see Annabel M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: the Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, 1984); and David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London and Boston, 1984), esp. pp. 109-56, 195-234.

²⁴ Taylor observes this fact only to conflate what I am suggesting are the increasingly divergent roles of the patronage poet and the "theatre-poet" in late sixteenth-century England ("Bardicide," p. 345 n.8).

²⁵ Quoted in J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, 1584-1601, 2 vols. (London, 1965), 2:119.

²⁶ The Queen's comments were recorded by William Lambarde. See the Arden edition of Shakespeare's King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (Cambridge, 1956), pp. lvii-lxii.

²⁷The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, Ok., 1982), p. 3.

²⁸ In one of the best recent readings of Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, Charles Harrison describes its anamorphic effect as an intrusion of historicity upon essentiality: "the carefully achieved illusion of its instantaneity, its 'presentness,' damaged beyond repair by the representation of its contingency" ("On the Surface of Painting," Critical Inquiry, 15:2 [Winter, 1989], 324).

²⁹ Between 1597 and 1599 the Chamberlain's Men probably performed at The Curtain while The Theatre at Shoreditch was being razed and its timber used to build The Globe at Bankside. See Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 1300-1660, 2 vols. (Oxford 1972).

³⁰ See Gary Taylor, "Canon and Chronology," in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), p. 121; and Julius Caesar, in The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. Marvin Spevack (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), pp. 1-5.

³¹ From the postmortem inventory of Sir Thomas Brend (May 16, 1599). Cited by S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford, 1977), p. 209.

³² This and the preceding quotation of Allen appear in C. W. Wallace, The First London Theatre: Materials for a History (Lincoln, 1913), pp. 278-79.

³³ Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), p. 93.

³⁴Poetaster, 1.3.7. Citations are to Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-1952).

³⁵Poetaster, "The Third Sounding," 6, 9. Like other playwrights in the War of the Theaters, Jonson imagines an audience that includes antagonistic playwrights and actors bent upon adulterating his text (see "The Third Sounding," 18-20, and Envy's speech, "After the Second Sounding"). John Michael Archer has shown that "the, paranoid construction of Jonsonian authorship" was also a response to his fear of spies among his own actors and audience (Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance [Stanford, 1993], pp. 94-120). One effect of the theatrical war, then, is to literalize the subjective and deliberately misconstruing audience—the audience-turned-actors—that I argue is a source of concern in Julius Caesar.

³⁶ Thomas Dekker, Satiro-Mastix, ed. Josiah H. Penniman (Boston and London, 1962), "To the World," 15-17.

³⁷ Katharine Maus, Ben Jonson and The Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton, 1984), p. 92.

³⁸ Jonson, "To The No Less Noble, By Virtue Than Blood: Esme, Lord Aubigny," 7-10.

³⁹Sejanus provides many targets for Taylor's program of exposure. The indictment of Cremutius Cordus in Act 3, for instance, presents an untenable claim for the disinterestedness of historiography, a disingenuous denial of contemporary relevance, in a history play judged treasonously topical by the Privy Council in 1603.

⁴⁰ For Jonson's fully articulated desire for a "blind audience," see the Prologue to The Staple of News. For a discussion of the antagonism between spectacle and word that developed with some continuity throughout Jonson's career, see D. J. Gordon, "Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel Between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones," in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley 1975), pp. 77-101.

⁴¹ Just as the play's genre is an early topic of debate, so its earliest stage history is contested by the 1609 preface, which advertises Troilus and Cressida as "a new play, neuer stal'd with the stage, neuer clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger"; by the Stationers' Register, which records its existence in February, 1603; and by the quarto title-page (first state), which advertises the play "As it was acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe."

⁴²A Refutation of the Apology for Actors, by I.G. (1605). Quoted in Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (Toronto, 1967), p. 80. For similar statements, see The Schoole of Abuse, pp. 92-93, and Playes Confuted in Five Actions, pp. 194-95.

⁴³ James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 136. See also his "Appalling Property in Othello," University of Toronto Quarterly, 57:3 (Spring, 1988), 357.

⁴⁴ William Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troy e was just one of Shakespeare's available sources. See also Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London, 1966), 6:83-111.

⁴⁵ Carol Cook considers this same issue, though from a Lacanian perspective, in "Unbodied Figures of Desire," Theatre Journal, 38 (March, 1986), 44-46.

⁴⁶ See esp. Paul Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, 1974), pp. 108-10.

⁴⁷ A similar claim has been made for the earlier Titus Andronicus (1593-1594), in which rape and dismemberment render Lavinia's body an annotated text, a silent emblem submitted to others' reconstructive reading. See Douglas E. Green, "Interpreting 'her martyr'd signs': Gender and Tragedy in Titus Andronicus," Shakespeare Quarterly, 40 (1989), 317-26.

⁴⁸Coriolanus, 3.3.134; 5.3.36; 4.7.42; 5.6.120; 5.2.65-66. Earlier Coriolanus seems to recognize that it is death that submits one to other-fashioning, life that grants the temporary privilege of maintaining one's self-conception: "While I remain above the ground you shall / Hear from me still, and never of me aught / But what is like me formerly" (4.1.51-53).

⁴⁹ David Kaula has found a pattern of eucharistic allusions in the ritual attending Caesar's murder in "'Let Us Be Sacrificers': Religious Motifs in Julius Caesar," Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), 197-214.

⁵⁰ See Mark Rose, "Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599," in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana and Chicago, 1992), p. 264.

⁵¹ Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, 1968), pp. 3-21.

⁵² See Richard Macksey, "Last Words: The Artes Moriendi and a Transtextual Genre," Genre, 16 (Winter, 1983), 508. "Et tu Brute?" appears to have been a not uncommon theatrical tag before Shakespeare's play, and in Every Man Out of His Humour (5.6.79) Jonson would parody it as a cliché.

⁵³ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), p. 46.

⁵⁴ See Alvin Kernan's Shakespeare, The King's Playwright in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 (New Haven, 1995). While Kernan demonstrates aspects of the patronage system in Shakespeare's Stuart drama, his case seems to me overstated and to ignore some of the performative issues considered here.

⁵⁵ Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, 1968), 7:51-52. Alexander Pope also speaks of Shakespeare's original manuscripts being "cut" and "divided" into the "Piecemeal Parts " of the "Prompter's Book" ("Preface to 'The Works of Shakespear," in Eighteenth-Century Essays on Shakespeare, ed. D. Nichol Smith [Oxford, 1963], p. 54).

⁵⁶ See Twelfth Night, 4.2.89. Like Shylock, Malvolio leaves his play less assimilated than "propertied" by the comedy's reestablished social order. Such coercion certainly appears elsewhere in Shakespeare's comedies and romances; but the appropriation of individuals as stage spectacle—as James Calderwood has argued—is essentially a tragic device, a problematic ethos that comedy and romance must finally transcend or absorb. See his "Appalling Property in Othello," pp. 353-75.

⁵⁷ One need only consider the different assessments of Caesar's death in Plutarch, Appian, Dante, Michelangelo, Fulbecke, Sidney, and Milton for a sense of its interpretive possibilities. For a history of political interpretations of Julius Caesar, see John Ripley, "Julius Caesar" on Stage in England and America, 1599-1973 (Cambridge, Eng., 1980).

⁵⁸ Sonnet 81, line 10. In the case of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's prophecy of literary survival was especially appropriate: the committee established to erect his monument in Westminster Abbey initiated this canonization with a commissioned performance of the play at Drury Lane, April 28, 1738 (see David Piper, The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits [Oxford, 1982], pp. 78-82).

⁵⁹ James Calderwood comes very close to ascribing such a reading to Shakespeare elsewhere, arguing that in Titus Andronicus Shakespeare explores a tension between lyric and dramatic genres suggested in the eleventh book of Golding's Ovid (Shakespearean Metadrama, pp. 28-30).

⁶⁰ Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis, "The Triumph and Death of Orpheus in the English Renaissance," Studies in English Literature, 9.1 (Winter, 1969), 63-80. Elizabeth Sewell has claimed that Shakespeare "trusts poetry, if Orpheus is undivided, if poetry and dreams and shadows and the theater are taken as a means toward learning and even toward science." See The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (New Haven, 1960), p. 110.

⁶¹Tamburlaine the Great, Part I (Prologue, 1-8), in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill (Oxford, 1987).

⁶² In his reading of Richard II as a dramatization of "the interpretive efforts of the listener," Keir Elam considers Sir Pierce of Exton's construction of Bolingbroke's ambiguous utterance (5.4.1-2, 7-9) as the nexus between an undetermined illocutionary speech-act and perlocutionary action (The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama [London and New York, 1980], pp. 164-65).

⁶³ The plebeians' transformation from passive spectators to furious actors seems to evoke Ovid's account of the death of Orpheus (though, it should be noted, without tidy correspondence). Murellus calls them "blocks," "stones," "worse than senseless things" for their unreflective devotion to Caesar (1.1.34). In Ovid's account, Orpheus draws the trees, beasts, and stones to follow him, but these same stones become involuntarily "reddened with the blood of the singer" only when the Maenads hurl them at the poet (Ovid's Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries [Bloomington, 1955], p. 259). Antony seems to contrast the plebeians to such passivity, however, when he declares in his funeral oration, "You are not wood, you are not stones" (3.2.142). Here the semi-autonomous plebeians resemble the bloodthirsty Maenads rather than their inanimate instruments. Nor does Julius Caesar clearly designate one particular character as a figure of Orpheus' victimization. The ominous "bird of night" that sits "Even at noon-day upon the market-place / Howting and shrieking" (1.3.26-28), for instance, may recall Ovid's description of the Maenads' attack on Orpheus: "they came thronging / Like birds who see an owl, wandering in daylight" (p. 260); thus the owl in 1.3 may represent an Orphic Caesar, soon to be set upon by the Furious conspirators. But if the conspirators are likened to the Maenads here, then reading the plebeians as "stones" turned against the conspirators by Antony's oration, or as Maenads themselves in the dismemberment of Cinna the poet, seems dubious. Nevertheless, both Caesar and Cinna die like Orpheus, "who stretched out / His hands in supplication, and whose voice / For the first time, moved no one" (p. 260). I would argue that Shakespeare's allusions to the death of Orpheus are in fact overdetermined in Julius Caesar, and that this reflects the play's bifurcation of the tragic victim (Orpheus) into Caesar and Brutus. This bifurcation pivots on the death of Cinna. Thus Antony, the conspirators, and the plebeians are described with reference to the Maenads.

⁶⁴ A version of this paper was presented at the 1996 International Shakespeare Association World Congress. I am grateful to Gordon Braden, Paul Cantor, James Nohrnberg, Herbert Tucker, and especially Katharine Maus for their help.

Source: "Julius Caesar and the Properties of Shakespeare's Globe," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 28, No. 1, Winter, 1998, pp. 18-46.