[In the following excerpt, Garber observes that the source of the tragedy in Julius Caesar is the repeated and sometimes willful misinterpretation of omens and dreams.]

Dream and Interpretation: Julius Caesar

In the final act of Julius Caesar, Cassius, fearful of defeat at Philippi, dispatches Titinius to discover whether the surrounding troops are friends or enemies. He posts another soldier to observe, and when the soldier sees Titinius encircled by horsemen and reports that he is taken, Cassius runs on his sword and dies. Shortly afterward, Titinius reenters the scene bearing a "wreath of victory" from Brutus. When he sees the dead body, he at once understands Cassius's tragic mistake. "Alas, thou has misconstrued everything!" (V.iii.84), he cries out, and he too runs on Cassius's sword.

That one cry, "thou hast misconstrued everything!", might well serve as an epigraph for the whole of Julius Caesar. The play is full of omens and portents, augury and dream, and almost without exception these omens are misinterpreted. Calpumia's dream, the dream of Cinna the poet, the advice of the augurers, all suggest one course of action and produce its opposite. The compelling dream imagery of the play, which should, had it been rightly interpreted, have persuaded Caesar to avoid the Capitol and Cinna not to go forth, is deflected by the characters of men, making tragedy inevitable. For Julius Caesar is not only a political play, but also a play of character. Its imagery of dream and sign, an imagery so powerful that it enters the plot on the level of action, is a means of examining character and consciousness.

Much of the plot of Julius Caesar, like that of Richard III, is shaped by the device of the predictive dream or sign. The two plays also have another point of similarity, not unrelated to the device of dream: each divides men into two camps, those who attempt to control dream and destiny and those who are controlled by it. In Richard III only Gloucester thinks himself able to master dream and turn it to his own purposes; Edward, Clarence, and Hastings are its helpless victims. Julius Caesar, on the other hand, presents a number of characters who declare themselves indifferent to dream or contemptuous of its power: Cassius, who so firmly places the fault not in our stars but in ourselves; Decius Brutus, who deliberately misinterprets Calpumia's prophetic dream to serve his own ends; Octavius, in whom the whole dimension of emotion seems lacking; and Caesar himself. Caesar's conviction, however, is notably wavering as the play begins. As Cassius points out to the conspirators,

he is superstitious grown of late,
Quite from the main opinion he held once
Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies.

[II.i.195-97]

Caesar struggles against this tendency, repeatedly invoking his public persona to quell his private fears: "Danger knows full well," he boasts, "That Caesar is more dangerous than he" (II.ii.44-45). Yet he protests too much.

In his susceptibility to dream and introspection he stands midway between the coldness of Decius Brutus and the blind self-preoccupation of Brutus. For Brutus is in a way the least self-aware of all these characters, because he thinks of himself as a supremely rational man. Again and again he confronts his situation and misinterprets it, secure in his own erroneous sense of self. His frequent solitary ruminations have a certain poignancy about them; they approach a truth and reject it through lack of self-knowledge. Thus he meditates,

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

[II.i.63-69]

Yet in the next moment he turns his back on this foreboding and welcomes the conspirators to his house. It is Brutus who sees the ghost of Caesar and is indifferent to him; Brutus who is afflicted with a revealing insomnia: "Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar," he says, "I have not slept" (II.i.61-62). Like Gloucester, Macbeth, and Henry IV, all similarly blind to self, he bears his crime on his conscience and cannot sleep, though he is visited by an apparition which seems to come from the dream state. There is a poignant moment after the ghost's first appearance, when he tries in vain to convince his servants and soldiers that they have cried out in the night:

Brutus: Didst thou dream, Lucius, that thou so criedst out?

Lucius: My lord, I do not know that I did cry.

Brutus: Yes, that thou didst. Didst thou see anything?

Lucius: Nothing, my lord.

Brutus: Sleep again, Lucius. Sirrah Claudius!
(To Varrò). Fellow thou, awake!

Varro: My lord?

Claudius: My lord?

Brutus: Why did you so cry out, sirs, in your sleep?

Both: Did we, my lord?

Brutus: Ay. Saw you anything?

Varro: No, my lord, I saw nothing.

Claudius: Nor I, my lord.

[IV.iii.291-301]

Nowhere is the quintessential loneliness of the conscience-stricken man more forcefully portrayed. "Nothing, my lord." Brutus, too, has misconstrued everything, and his tragedy is that he suspects it. Trapped by his high-minded vanity and his inability to function in the world of action—trapped, that is, by his own character—he sees the Rome he tried to rescue in ruins as a result of his act.

Caesar's ghost appears to Brutus in the source for Julius Caesar, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Its presence is also related to the Senecan theatrical tradition we have discussed above. Psychologically, it can be seen as an extension of Brutus's guilt feelings; like Richard Ill's Bosworth dream or the appearance of Banquo's ghost, the apparition here presents itself to one man only and is not sensed by the others present. Such visionary dream figures are found in Shakespeare only in plays which are directly concerned with the psychological condition of the characters; the disappearance of the ghost as a type in the plays following Macbeth is a sign, not merely of dramaturgical sophistication, but also of a shift in emphasis. For Julius Caesar is, in a way, the last play of its kind. The uses of dream, vision, and omen will change sharply in the plays that follow.

The motif of the misinterpreted dream in this play becomes a main factor in the dramatic action, demonstrating, always, some crucial fact about the interpreter. In the second scene of the play the soothsayer's warning goes unheeded, though in the same scene Caesar betrays his superstitious cast of mind. The contrast is adeptly managed: Antony is reminded to touch Calpurnia in the course of his race on the Lupercal, to remove her "sterile curse" (I.ii.9). But when the soothsayer cautions Caesar to "beware the ides of March" (18), he rejects the intended warning out of hand;

He is a dreamer, let us leave him. Pass.

[I.ii.24]

The inference is that dreams, like omens, are of no value; "dreamer" is a pejorative dismissal, akin to "madman." Calpurnia may have need of supernatural aid, but not the public Caesar. Already in this early scene we see him assuming a position closer to that of gods than men, a thoughtless hubris which is in itself dangerous. The omen, intrinsically a kind of dramatic device, is chiefly significant because it indicates his lack of self-knowledge.

The next scene, like much of the play, is in part at least a landscape of the mind. Casca, who is to be one of the conspirators, apprehensively reports to Cicero the strange events of the day. The heavens are "dropping fire" (I.iii.10), a slave's hand flames but does not burn, a lion walks in the Capitol, an owl sits in the marketplace at noon. These omens are all reported by Plutarch,¹⁰ but Shakespeare turns them to dramatic purpose, making them mirror the conspirators' mood. "When these prodigies / Do so conjointly meet," says Casca,

let not men say,
"These are their reasons, they are natural,"
For I believe they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.

[I.iii.28-32]

To this superstitious view Cicero has a wise and moderate reply.

Indeed, it is a strange-disposèd time:
But men may construe things after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

[33-35]

This is Titinius's lament: "Thou hast misconstrued everything." Like all the quasi-oracular pronouncements in this play, it is two-edged. Men may construe things as they like for their own purposes; just so Cassius plays on Brutus's fears of monarchy to enlist his help. And men may also misconstrue through error; so Caesar misreads the signs which might have kept him from death. But if Cicero's answer is apposite, it is also bloodless and dispassionate. What he does not consider is the element of humanity, the energy of men's passions inflamed by supposed signs. He is outside the tragedy, a choric figure who does not reenter the drama.

More and more it becomes evident that signs and dreams are morally neutral elements, incapable of effect without interpretation. By structuring his play around them, Shakespeare invites us to scrutinize the men who read the signs—to witness the tragedy of misconstruction. The two senses of Cicero's maxim, the willful deceiver and the willingly deceived, are the controllers of dream and the controlled. Decius Brutus, perhaps the coldest in a play replete with cold men, states the position of the former unequivocally. No matter how superstitious Caesar has lately become, he, Decius Brutus, is confident of his ability to manipulate him.

I can o'ersway him; for he loves to hear
That unicorns may be betrayed with trees,
And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
Lions with toils, and men with flatterers;
But when I tell him he hates flatterers;
He says he does, being then most flattered.
Let me work;
For I can give his humor the true bent,
And I will bring him to the Capitol.

[II.i.203-11]

Willful misconstruction is his purpose and his art. And, fulfilling his promise, it is Decius Brutus who artfully misinterprets Calpurnia's dream and coaxes Caesar to the scene of his death.

Calpurnia's dream is one of the play's cruxes. By this time in the course of the drama an internal convention has been established regarding dreams and omens: whatever their source, they are true, and it is dangerous to disregard them. Shakespeare's audience would certainly have been familiar with the story of Julius Caesar, and such a collection of portents and premonitions would have seemed to them, as it does to us, to be infallibly leading to the moment of murder. Calpurnia herself adds to the catalogue of unnatural events:

A lioness hath whelped in the streets,
And graves have yawned, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.

[II.ii. 17-24]

This is in fact an apocalypse of sorts, the last judgment of Rome. Unlike the events narrated by Casca, those reported by Calpurnia are not specified in Plutarch; it is noteworthy how much more Shakespearean they are, and how economically chosen to foreshadow, metaphorically, the later events of the play. The lioness is Wrath, and from her loins will spring forth "ranks and squadrons and right form of war," while the ghost of Caesar appears solemnly in the streets. Shakespeare was to remember this moment soon again, upon the appearance of the most majestic of all his ghosts.

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.

[Ham. I.i.113-16]

Calpurnia's bona fides as a prophetess is thus firmly established by the time we hear her dream, and so too is the blind obstinacy of Caesar. He willfully misinterprets a message from his augurers, who advise him to stay away from the Capitol, alarmed by the sacrifice of a beast in which they found no heart. "Caesar should be a beast without a heart," he declares, "If he should stay at home today for fear" (II.ii.42-43), thus completely reversing the message of the haruspices. In this mood he is interrupted by Decius Brutus, whose wiliness outlasts his own more heedless cunning. Caesar is one of those elder statesmen who visibly enjoys causing discomfort to his underlings; it is partially for this reason that he now abruptly changes his mind upon the entrance of Decius and declares "I will not come" (71). We have not yet heard the dream; Shakespeare leaves it for Caesar himself to recount, as he does now to Decius.

She dreamt tonight she saw my statue,
Which, like a fountain with an hundred spouts,
Did run pure blood, and many lusty Romans
Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it.
And these does she apply for warnings and portents
And evils imminent, and on her knee
Hath begged that I will stay at home today.

[II.ii.76-82]

We may notice that here, as in our interpretation of Romeo's last dream, the dead man becomes a statue; this is a recurrent conceit in Shakespearean dreams, and in The Winter's Tale, as we will see, the dream action becomes plot as Hermione "dies," becomes a "statue," and is reborn. In Calpurnia's dream the latent dream thoughts are not far removed from the manifest content. She interprets the statue as the body of Caesar and also his funerary monument, and the gushing forth of blood she reads as death. As a prophetic dream this is both an accurate and a curiously lyrical one, graceful in its imagery. It forecasts directly the assassination before the Capitol.

Decius, however, is prepared for the event, and he begins immediately to discredit Calpurnia's prediction. He commences with what is by now a familiar note: "This dream is all amiss interpreted," and offers instead his own "interpretation":

It was a vision fair and fortunate:
Your statue spouting blood in many pipes,
In which so many smiling Romans bathed,
Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck
Reviving blood, and that great men shall press
For tinctures, stains, relics and cognizance.
This by Calpurnia's dream is signified.

[83-90]

It is the dissimulator now who cries, "thou hast misconstrued everything." He takes the manifest content of Calpurnia's dream and attributes to it a clever if wholly fabricated set of latent thoughts, which are the more impressive for their psychological insight. Caesar is flattered, as Decius had predicted, and resolves to go to the Capitol. His last doubts are abruptly erased when Decius suggests that he will be offered a crown and warns that refusal to go will seem like uxoriousness:

it were a mock
Apt to be rendered, for someone to say
"Break up the Senate till another time,
When Caesar's wife shall meet with better dreams."

[II.ii.96-99]

This is a thrust well calculated to strike home. But there is a curious ambiguity about Calpurnia's dream, and the real irony of the situation is that Decius's spurious interpretation of it is as true in its way as Calpurnia's.

The content of her dream, it may be pointed out, does not itself appear in Plutarch. "She dreamed," he writes, "that Caesar was slain, and that she had him in her arms," and he also tells us that "Titus Livius writeth, that it was in this sort. The Senate having set upon the top of Caesar's house, for an ornament and setting forth of the same, a certain pinnacle, Calpurnia dreamed that she saw it broken down."¹¹ But the dream as we have it, the spouting statue and the smiling Romans, is a Shakespearean interpolation. Like Romeo's last dream, which we have already examined, it is chiefly remarkable for the fact that it permits two opposite interpretations, the one literal and the other metaphorical. For Decius's flattery,

that from you great Rome shall suck
Reviving blood, and that great men shall press
For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance

is also a truth. Antony's funeral oration turns on precisely this point, elevating the slain Caesar to the status of a saint or a demigod, exhibiting the bloody wounds to win the hearts of the crowd. And at the play's end Antony shares hegemony—however uneasily—with the novus homo Octavius, literal descendant of Caesar's "blood."

The presence of Calpurnia's dream at this crucial point in the plot is thus trebly determined: (1) it has Plutarchan authority and is thus an original element in the story; (2) it acts as a functional device to further the action, showing the deliberate blindness of Caesar to a warning which would have saved his life and demonstrating the cold-blooded manipulation of the conspirators; (3) it symbolically foreshadows events to come, supporting the theme of "all amiss interpreted" which is central to the play's meaning. Interestingly, the accustomed tension between the men who aspire to control dream and those who are controlled by it is diminished in this episode; Decius, who means to assert control, is in a larger sense controlled, since he does not see that his interpretation is true.

For all its richness, however, the scene of Calpurnia's dream is rivaled in significance by a much more tangential scene, which seems at first glance oddly out of place in the plot. The scene of Cinna the poet is in many ways the most symbolically instructive of the whole play: it demonstrates in action the same theme of misinterpretation with which we have been so much concerned. Cinna the poet, a character unrelated to his namesake Cinna the conspirator, appears only in this scene, which may be seen as a kind of emblem for the entire meaning of Julius Caesar. We encounter him as he makes his way along a Roman street, and his opening lines describe his dream.

I dreamt tonight that I did feast with Caesar,
And things unluckily charge my fantasy.
I have no will to wander forth of doors,
Yet something leads me forth.

[III.iii.1-4]

To "feast with Caesar" here means to share his fate—we may remember Brutus's "Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods" (II.i.173). Cinna admits that he has had a premonition of danger, but that he has chosen to disregard it; "something"—misconstruction again—leads him forth. He is set on by a group of plebians, their emotions raised to fever pitch by Antony's oration, and they rapidly catechize him on his identity and purpose.

Third Plebian: Your name sir, truly.

Cinna: Truly, my name is Cinna.

First Plebian: Tear him to pieces! He's a conspirator.

Cinna: I am Cinna the poet! I am Cinna the poet!

Fourth Plebian: Tear him for his bad verses! Tear him for his bad verses!

Cinna: I am not Cinna the conspirator.

Fourth Plebian: It is no matter, his name's Cinna; pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

[III.iii.27-37]

The scene is a perfect illustration of Cicero's verdict: "Men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves." The taking of the name for the man—a thematically important element throughout this play, where Caesar is at once a private man and a public title—is symbolic of the overt confusion manifest in much of the action. Cinna's dream is a legitimate cause for anxiety, which he chooses to ignore at peril to himself. Plutarch supplied him with a practical motive: "When he heard that they carried Caesar's body to burial, being ashamed not to accompany his funerals: he went out of his house";¹² in Shakespeare's version the cause is deliberately less exact, more psychological than circumstantial. The warning is given and ignored; the plebians do not care that they attack the wrong man. In one short scene of less than forty lines the whole myth of the play is concisely expressed.

Julius Caesar is a complex and ambiguous play, which does not concern itself principally with political theory, but rather with the strange blindness of the rational mind—in politics and elsewhere—to the great irrational powers which flow through life and control it. The significance attached to the theme of "thou hast miscontrued everything" clearly depends to a large extent upon the reading—or misreading—of the play's many dreams. Here, in the last of his plays to use dreams and omens primarily as devices of plot, Shakespeare again demonstrates the great symbolic power which resides in the dream, together with its remarkable capacity for elucidating aspects of the play which otherwise remain in shadow.

Notes

¹⁰ "The Life of Julius Caesar," trans. Thomas North (1579), in Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke (New York: Haskell House, 1966) II, 95-96.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 97.

¹² "The Life of Marcus Brutus," in Brooke, Shakespeare's Plutarch, II, 139.