[In the essay that follows, McAlindon examines the ominous significance of the numbers four and eight in Julius Caesar, and contends that the more alert members of Shakespeare's contemporary audience would have noticed this numerology and would have been aware of the "ironic implications " it has for the characters in the play.]

Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep'st so sound.

(JC, II.i.231-3)

I

A remarkable feature of Julius Caesar is the extent to which it focuses on the act of interpretation. Incidents of a conventionally ominous character occasion the most obvious instances of hermeneutic activity.¹ But so tense and uncertain is the playworld of this tragedy that mundane phenomena habitually assume an ominous quality, so that actions, speeches, writings "obscurely penned" (I.ii.316), and even manners, gestures, physiognomy, dress, shouts, distant scenes, and unexpected movements are all subjected to interpretive inquiry.² Thus the tribunes' show of puzzlement at the holiday attire and equivocal talk of the commoners is a major element in the expository plan of the opening scene: "What meanest thou by that?" (1.17). Indeed the word "mean," denoting both significance and intention, is arguably the play's key word.

We can account for this emphasis on interpretation by reference to Shakespeare's broad conception of the tragic world—a conception inherited from Kyd—as a place of violent change in which it seems as if "Chaos is come again": where bonds are shattered, the war of the opposites is renewed, and the mind is confronted with "a mere confusion" in which significant distinctions are obliterated.³ But we must further recognize that Shakespeare's method in Julius Caesar is meta-historical: that he is dramatizing the problems he himself is acutely conscious of in his attempts to make sense of historical events and personages. In terms of chronicle and history play, this procedure constituted an artistic revolution in 1599; but what makes Julius Caesar so richly innovative—what in fact prepares the way for Hamlet—is that Shakespeare involves the audience itself in hermeneutic problems and difficulties. Undoubtedly we perceive more of the truth than do the dramatis personae; unlike Cassius, for example, we all know in the end that the shouting horsemen who surrounded Titinius were jubilant friends and not triumphant enemies (V.iii. 10-71). But only the observant minority in an audience new to the play will penetrate the prejudice of Casca to perceive that the increasingly feeble manner in which Caesar "put by" the coronet could be ascribed not just to reluctance, but also (or solely) to the oncoming of an epileptic seizure (or fainting fit induced by the "stinking" populace: we do not know which caused the fall). Or to move closer to the heart of the tragedy, only a few will recognize that Brutus could have killed his friend not out of love for Rome but because he loved the idea of himself as a lover of Rome.

My primary concern, however, is not with larger issues of interpretation such as the intentions and motives of Caesar and Brutus; indeed given the present climate of critical opinion, it is with something much less respectable as well as less substantial. What I wish to argue is that number symbolism forms part of the semantic material designed by Shakespeare to engage his audience in a conscious search for meaning, and that it has a special significance there. The numbers differ from all other signs in the play in that they stand for a changeless and significant pattern which patient historical hindsight can discover behind the turbulent flux in which the living struggle to understand and control their destiny. Shakespeare's number symbolism is thus consistent with the Pythagorean-Platonic idea of number as a hidden system of cosmic signs, existing beyond mutability and error, through which the diligent observer can have access to universal principles.⁴ It is distinctive, however, in that it functions ironically, exposing the blindness of tragic characters to the hieroglyphics of fate and to certain simple, enduring truths on which fate so often depends.⁵

Although I would hope that my opening emphasis on the play's semiotic and hermeneutic self-consciousness has helped to show that this claim does have an inherent logic to it, I must concede that on purely theatrical grounds it might seem to lack plausibility. Even if Shakespeare had been disposed to use number symbolism in this particular play, would his audience, engrossed in the developing action, have been able to recognize it without the kind of overt guidance that all of us would have seen by now? This is a major objection, and one which demands to be answered in terms of the verbal and nonverbal strategies of the text. But I think that the question of plausibility can also be answered in general terms by a combined appeal to Elizabethan dramatic practice and to historiographie tradition.

Although subtly elaborated and unfolded, the number symbolism used in Julius Caesar is in essence very simple, being based entirely on the numbers four and eight. Four, of course, was the constitutive number in Pythagorean numerology, and its symbolic significance was common knowledge. The world was held to be a spatio-temporal cosmos of quadripartite design, four being the number of the elements, the humors, the seasons, the ages of man, and the cardinal points of the compass. Four was thus the number of opposites reconciled and of natural unity; in ethical terms it signified amity (also justice).⁶ Before the composition of Julius Caesar, the tetrad had been employed for emblematic purposes on the stage by Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare himself. In Tamburlaine the Great, the invincible Scythian army is represented by a leader and three lieutenants who, in their first stage appearance together, solemnize a bond of unshakeable martial amity which is implicitly compared to the union of the four elements.⁷ In The Spanish Tragedy by contrast, quadruple character grouping gives metaphysical resonance to the sudden destruction of a promised unity, the murderous playlet celebrating the marriage of Spain and Portugal being performed by four "friends" whose interaction therein mirrors the unchecked strife of the elements.⁸ Shakespeare seems to be remembering Marlowe in Henry VI, Pt. I when Talbot (with a quibble that anticipates Caesar) warns the besieged inhabitants of Bordeaux that if they reject his offer of peace they will "tempt the fury of my three attendants, / Lean famine, quartering steel, and climbing fire" (IV.ii.10-11). But it is mainly Kyd who is remembered in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II; here, scenes of actual or promised violence in which the ideas of reconciliation, love, and peace have been earnestly but vainly invoked acquire paradigmatic intensity through the combined use of quadruple character grouping and elemental imagery.⁹

The second of the two numbers fundamental to the design of Caesar was primarily the number of justice in numerological tradition. But because of the seven days of the week, and the connection between ideas of justice and redemption, it also signified regeneration, resurrection, a new beginning. The octad, therefore, was closely associated with the rites of baptism (hence the octagonal shape of the old baptismal fonts) and of marriage.¹⁰ Shakespeare's familiarity with this tradition is made fully apparent at the close of As You Like It when Touchstone's talk about a quarrel that seven justices could not "take up" modulates into the dance of four pairs of lovers ("Here's eight that must take hands") and Hymen's pronouncement that "earthly things made even / Atone together" (V.iv.85-105, 122). As we shall see, this ending parallels the conclusion of Julius Caesar, written at approximately the same time.

Historiographic traditions relating to the death of Caesar and the rise of Octavius provide evidence to suggest that the educated among Shakespeare's audience would have been responsive to the use of a basic number symbolism in the dramatic treatment of such material. Plutarch, Appian, Florus, Carion, and Fulbecke all see the killing of Caesar as the logical culmination of over one hundred years of internal strife and moral decline among the Romans; but they also see it as the means by which Fortune and divine power restored unity to Rome and bestowed upon it and the world a "time of universal peace" (AC, IV.vi.4).¹¹ These conceptions seem almost to invite symbolic expression in terms of four and eight; and in fact the ever-popular Florus, and after him Carion and Fulbecke, are much given to quadruple patterns which mirror their preoccupation with division and unity, mutability and stability. It is claimed that Roman history falls into four periods corresponding to the four ages of man, the third or mature period culminating in the reign of Augustus;¹² that there have been four successive monarchical periods in world history, of which the last and greatest began with Julius Caesar;¹³ that before the civil wars broke out, Rome was an organic unity of four different peoples "compacted . . . as a bodie of diuerse elements";¹⁴ and that the rule of Augustus brought the nations of the four parts of the world—"all the West and the South . . . and Northward also . . . as likewise in the East" into "an entire and continual either peace or compaction."¹⁵

Since I am concerned with the interaction of meta-historical and numerological method in Julius Caesar, mention must also be made here of the historical philosophy of Jean Bodin. The two works for which Bodin was best known in England in the sixteenth century, his De la Republique (1577) and Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566), contend that in times of great instability, and among peoples with a native dislike of authority, the only bulwark against the forces of destructive change is strong rule by one man. That Julius Caesar could be said to endorse this view is a point of some importance; but the really significant fact is that in the Method for the Easy Comprehension of History Bodin's consciousness of the tide of mutability with which all nations must contend is balanced by a belief that mutability follows a cyclical pattern, and that to some extent the pattern is intelligible and therefore predictable in the light of Pythagorean numerology.¹⁶ It has to be admitted that Bodin's attempts at the numerological interpretation of history are of a complexity that no sane dramatist would dare emulate.

On the other hand, such was the impact of the Methodus—it "was probably read by most serious students of history between 1580 and 1625"¹⁷—that any dramatist who employed a basic number symbolism in dealing with a subject such as the fall of Julius Caesar would have had very little difficulty in alerting the judicious among his audience to its presence.

II

The play has many explicit references to number and to the acts of counting and dividing, as well as a series of covert numerological puns on such words as "quarter" ("slaughter," "encamp"), "part" ("depart," "say farewell") and "forth." Two incidents which function as ironic parallels provide what are perhaps the most illuminating of all the explicit references to number. One is when Brutus begins to "construe . . . the charactery" of his sad brows (I.ii.44, II.i.307-8), assuring an anxious Cassius that this unfriendly manner has been misinterpreted and that his feelings towards his old friends are unchanged: "let not therefore my good friends be griev'd / (Among which number, Cassius, be you one)" (I.ii.42-3). The other incident is when Cassius, confused by Antony's affirmative comments on both the conspirators and their victim, seeks to discover his actual intentions (i.e., true meaning): "what compact mean you to have with us? / Will you be prick'd in number of our friends, / Or shall we on, and not depend on you?" (III.i.215-17). These two incidents have a double value in Shakespeare's symbolic strategy. They conjoin the idea of number with that of meaning and interpretation; and they draw attention to the fact that the chief source of interpretive uncertainty and error is friendship—who is a friend and who is not? what is true love?

Which is to say that the key number in the play is four, the number of unity and friendship (amity). We are made imaginatively receptive to its presence and significance by widespread use of elemental imagery. The importance of such imagery to the conceptual and symbolic patterns of the play seems to be underlined by that resounding and explicit reference to the elements in Antony's panegyric on Brutus at the very end. Antony construes the dead Brutus as a man of inspiring natural integrity, one in whom the elements were so well mixed that he was able to impose unity on an assortment of envious individualists: "He only . . . made one of them" (V.v.71-2). The speech, however, is deeply ironic, being undercut (though not disqualified) by our memories of Brutus' extreme melancholy and consequent moral confusion, and, less obviously, by the fact that Brutus failed to "make one" of the conspirators for more than a few hours (a point I shall return to later). Moreover this final appeal to the idea of elemental harmony is quite at odds with the effect created by a number of very powerful speeches in which elemental imagery has been conspicuous. In the joint-speech of the tribunes to the citizens (I.i.34-62), in Cassius' tirade against Caesar (I.ii.89-130), in Casca's description of the storm (I.iii.3-10), and in Antony's oration to the citizens (III.ii.73ff), the impression conveyed by the imagery is one of turbulent conflict wherein bounds and bonds are broken and transformation is the norm: water invades earth, wind "incenses" water, and earth, water, and wind are finally subsumed in a river of blood-red fire.¹⁸

Pointing more directly, though less insistently, at the play's key number are a few explicit expressions (some literal, some punning) of the idea that unity and therefore life itself is quadripartite. Cassius, for example, remarks that "three parts" of Brutus have been won over to the conspiracy and that "the man entire / Upon the next encounter yields him ours" (I.iii. 154-6). Antony predicts that infants will be "quarter'd with the hands of war" in "all the parts of Italy" (III.i.264-8). And when Lucilius announces near the beginning of Act IV that Cassius and his army "mean . . . to be quarter'd" at Sardis, "the greater part" having arrived already (IV.ii.28-9), we are surely intended to suspect, an ominous pun. For not only do "part" and "mean" serve as cues; there is also the fact that only seventy lines earlier we have heard Antony and Octavius abandon their idea of "the three-fold world divided," decide to get rid of their triumviral partner, and confirm their joint intention of opposing Brutus and Cassius: "Therefore let our alliance be combin'd" (IV.i.14, 43).

Like the personal friendships and the marriages of the leading Romans, this alliance is evidence that the bonds which "incorporate and make us one" (II.i.273) are always binary conjunctions to begin with. Nevertheless the whole imaginative thrust of the play is to suggest that binary relationships are secured by quadruple groupings and that division and disintegration is a process of quartering. The death of the titular hero at the half-way point mirrors a shattering of unity which is cunningly written in tetradic outline into character grouping, staging, and even characterization. Like The Spanish Tragedy, this is not a play about "one man . . . but one man . . . but only one man." (I.ii.151-5). It might well have been called The Roman Tragedy, for it is a play about a national community and its leaders which shows with deep conviction that the integrity and destiny of the "single self (I.i.93) are deeply dependent on its relations with other selves. Accordingly it is denied a single hero in the conventional sense but given a collective hero riven by the spirit of strife: as the Arden editor (to name but one critic) has remarked, it is dominated by "four fully developed characters of absorbing interest . . . Caesar himself, Brutus, Cassius, and Antony" (Julius Caesar, p. xxvi). Thoroughly individual though they are, these men are representative figures. They are "the breed of noble bloods" (I.i. 149), the natural leadership of Rome; and the intimation is that Rome's fall is indistinguishable from their inability to "close / In terms of friendship" and "stand fast together" (III.i.87, 202-3).

The representative nature of the four leading Romans is underscored by the fact that they are broadly identifiable with the four humoral types which comprise humanity—Brutus is melancholic, Cassius choleric, Caesar phlegmatic, and Antony sanguine. (The relatively frequent use of such terms as "temper," "complexion," and "humor," overt reference to the humoral disposition of Cassius, and the tendency of the dramatis personae to set themselves up as shrewd psychologists, would all have combined in prompting an Elizabethan audience to make these simple identifications.) It is indicated, moreover, that the humors of the four leaders have become "ill-temper'd" (IV.iii.l 14, 115) and excessive and so have contributed to the "falling sickness" that afflicts all Rome: Cassius' choleric urge to "strike fire" in men like "gentle Brutus" and "dull Casca" begins a Roman fever; Brutus' black depression darkens his reason and makes him "suck up the humours" and "unpurged air" of the conspirators' night (II.i.262-6); Caesar's insistence on being always Caesar, always beyond change, motion, and emotion, merely feeds his falling sickness (since "security gives way to conspiracy"); and Antony's warm nature and consequent ability to "stir men's blood" (III.ii.225) turns the Tiber into a crimson torrent—violent phlebotomy for a sick body politic. The humoral conception of the four characters corresponds with their actions and interactions in another way too. The wholly contrarius nature of choler (hot and dry, corresponding to fire) and of phlegm (cold and moist, corresponding to water) is reflected in the profound mutual antipathy of Cassius and Caesar; and it is figured in Cassius' fiery account of how he pulled Caesar ("a man of such feeble temper") from a watery death, much as Aeneas pulled Anchises from the flames of Troy (I.ii.99-114). The total contrariety of melancholy (cold and dry, like earth) and blood (warm and moist, like air) is echoed in the oratorical styles of Brutus' and Antony's struggle for the hearts of the citizens. All this, however, is not to imply that the four leading characters are fully intelligible in terms of humoral psychology. My point is simply that each is given, especially at the outset, a general resemblance to one of the four psychological types and that this is done for more than psychological reasons.¹⁹

Quadruple grouping is not confined to these characters. The bonds which "incorporate and make us one" are exemplified in two structurally balanced and strongly contrasted marriages which are visibly affected by the divisiveness emanating from the "bond" of "secret Romans" (II.i.124-5). The well-known passage in which Thomas Platter records his visit in 1599 to a performance of what was almost certainly Shakespeare's "tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar" is surely relevant here. After the performance, notes Platter, the actors "danced . . . most gracefully, two in men's clothing, two in women's clothing, wonderfully with one another."²⁰ Although a concession to popular taste, this dance harmonized perfectly with the theme and method of the preceding tragedy, marriage and dance being traditional symbols for the concordant contrariety of the four elements and the natural order.²¹

But there are more conspicuous examples of quadruple grouping than the two marriages. We have been induced by modern productions (and critical commentary) to expect a crowd in the scene where Brutus and Antony contend for the hearts of the Roman people. According to the text, however, the people are represented by the First, the Second, the Third, and the Fourth Plebeian (presumably there were eight at the start of the scene, Brutus having instructed Cassius to "part the numbers" and go with his half into "the other street" [III.ii.3-4]). The text also makes clear that Cinna the poet meets his fate at the hands of four plebeians in the next scene: no doubt the same ones.

The failure of the triumvirate, too, entails a reassertion of quadruple grouping among the Roman leaders and their various followers. This begins with two stage images of republican concord, pointedly placed just after the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius and before the appearance of Caesar's ghost and the prebattle parley. Both of these little tableaux are located in Brutus' tent; and since this was probably represented on Shakespeare's stage by means of a scaffold, if not by one of those structures known as "mansions," their emblematic effect could have been quite pronounced.²² In one, Messala and Titinius join the two reconciled friends and are warmly invited by Brutus to sit with them round the candle-lit table ("Now sit we close about this taper" [IV.iii. 163]). In the other, Lucius plays his sleepy tune, and he, Varro, Claudius, and Brutus—servant and master, sentries and general—seek "good repose" in a spirit of affection and mutual respect in the one confined space. The significance of these two stage images, however, is that what harmony there is among the republicans is of its very nature transient if not illusory—the light fails ("How ill this taper burns"), and "the strings, my lord, are false" (IV.iii.274, 290).

This idea is recapitulated in the more complex and expressive staging of Act V, Scene i. The first part of the scene presents a stark image of division and incipient disintegration, with Brutus and Cassius at the head of one Roman army, and Antony and Octavius at the head of another, meeting symmetrically at the center of the stage to parley together like stinging bees (V.i.34-9). The conspicuous absence here of Lepidus the triumvir, the fact that Octavius is now addressed as Caesar for the first time (the ghost of his namesake has just left the stage), and the suggestion of a pun in Antony's oddly phrased invitation to Octavius to step forward and complete the group ("Make forth" [V.i.25]) all combine to create a powerful reminder of the old quadruple unity that failed. In the second half of the scene, the symbolic impact of tetradic grouping is greatly sharpened by means of antithetical contrast and ironically disclosed analogy. After Antony and Octavius take their leave with words of contempt and defiance (V.i.64-6), "Lucilius and Messala stand forth" immediately (Folio s.d.) to partner Brutus and Cassius. Hands are joined, the talk is mostly of love and friendship, and the scene ends with a ceremonious farewell. But this formal display of friendship serves to gloss over a serious flaw in the relationship between Brutus and Cassius (see V.i.74-6), and it simultaneously bodes eternal division: "this parting was well made" (V.i.119, 122).

Indeed the play ends with a comment on Brutus' dream of republican unity which is terrifyingly ironic, if strangely consoling. A brief but eloquently symbolic stage direction introduces us to the fact that Brutus' surviving followers have been befriended by the opposition and become parts of a new Rome: "Enter Antony, Octavius, Messala, Lucilius, and the army" (V.v.52; italics added). And then Caesar rounds off Antony's panegyric on the man in whom the elements were once well mixed, and who "made one" of the factious, by announcing that "Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie, / Most like a soldier, order'd honourably" (V.v.78-9). The waste is irreparable, yet out of strife comes unity.

III

Although the number of justice, regeneration, and new beginnings is used less insistently than that of unity and friendship, it figures extensively and is deployed in a wonderfully subtle manner. It comes to notice first after Brutus and his friends solemnly shake hands ("one by one" [II.i.112]) in a bond aimed at restoring justice and reviving a Rome which purportedly has lost "the sparks of life" (I.iii.57).²³ The number of the conspirators at this point is seven; but when Brutus appoints a few moments later that Caesar will be "fetched" at the eighth hour (II.i.213), Metellus immediately remarks that Ligarius has unaccountably been omitted from the conspiracy, and in this nicely cued manner the "knot" of eight liberators (III.i.117) is nominally completed and tied. Shakespeare enhances the effectiveness of his cue by making Ligarius rather than anyone else the eighth man, since his name is so obviously formed from the verb ligare, meaning literally "to bind" or "to tie" and figuratively "to bind together" or "unite" (as in a compact). In Plutarch, it will be noted, the number of conspirators far exceeds eight, and Ligarius is by no means the last recruit.²⁴

The character of the eighth man, briefly sketched though it is, combines neatly with the meanings of his name and numerical position to cast an ironical light on the whole conception of the conspiracy as a band of patriots devoted to unity, love, justice, and the revival of Rome. Ligarius' untimely knock on the door forces Brutus to bring his tender spiritual reunion with his wife to an unceremonious conclusion ("Leave me with haste" [II.i.309]). Ligarius, moreover, commits himself to the conspiracy without even asking what its purpose is; and he himself is feeble and sick. He does however refer to his physical condition in such a way as to flatter the regenerative conception of the assassination, saying to Brutus: "Thou, like an exorcist, has conjur'd up / My mortified spirit. Now bid me run" (II.i.323-4). But his regeneration is short-lived at best, and he proves in the end to have been a weak link in the chain. We observe him at Caesar's house when Caesar, on the audible stroke of eight o'clock, graciously acknowledges his sick presence (II.ii. l11-15), and we are reminded of him again when his name comes last on the list of eight read out by Artemidorus in the next scene ("There is but one mind in all these men, and it is bent against Caesar" [II.iii.4-5]). However when Antony takes the red hands of the conspirators one by one—"First, Marcus Brutus . . . next . . . now . . . now . . . yours . . . yours . . . last" (III.i. 184-9)—it suddenly becomes clear that Ligarius did not come to the Capitol to support his friends. Indeed in the hopeful eyes of the other seven conspirators Antony is now replacing him as the eighth man. "Will you be prick'd in number of our friends, / Or shall we on, and not depend on you?", asks Cassius; to which the reply is: "Therefore I took your hands. . . . Friends am I with you all, and love you all" (III.i.216-20).

The ironies of this situation are greatly compounded by the fact that within minutes Antony will join hands (III.i.297) with the servant of the conspirators' inevitable enemy: a man who "lies to-night within seven leagues of Rome" (III.i.286) and whose name, heard now for the first time in the play, rings like Nemesis. Himself the eighth man (octavus), Octavius is the authentic figure of justice and regeneration. Without doubt he is coldly ruthless; yet his acceptance of Antony's proposal that the triumvirate should become a duumvirate (IV.i. 13-28), and the opening and closing remarks of this, his first scene—

These many then shall die; their names are prick'd.

(IV.i.l; my emphasis)

Let us do so: for we are at the stake,
And bay'd about with many enemies;
And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear,
Millions of mischiefs.

(IV.i.48-51)

—suggest that this ruthlessness is a prerequisite for reducing the many to the one: which is a Pythagorean-Platonic definition of reducing chaos to cosmos (the unlimited to the limited). At any rate, when the duumvirate itself is ended, and all Romans—in Cassius' bitter phrase—"stand under one man's awe" (II.i.52), Rome itself will be reborn.

IV

It seems possible that Shakespeare's symbolic imagination was stimulated by the fact that Julius Caesar and Augustus gave their names to the seventh and eighth months of the year; for temporal number, denoting both chronology and frequency, contributes a good deal to the numerical symbolism of the play. In general, it helps to articulate the pervasive themes of unity, amity, justice, and regeneration. But it has the more specific function of defining time as the ordered movement of a cosmos which exacts retribution on man's tragic restlessness and impatience, his inability to follow the law of life as regulated motion within a confined space.

Ideas of circular motion and of containing circularity are quite frequent in the play and strongly affect its imaginative coloring: they are reflected in the structure, in reported and enacted action, and in references to the sun, the clock, and the calendar. Their essential function as ironic reminders of human limitation could hardly be missed. However an appreciation of their full significance requires some awareness that in Pythagorean-Platonic tradition the circle expresses the perfection of the cosmic tetrad, its unified multeity and stable motion in both the four elements (described by La Primaudaye as "a round daunce") and the four seasons of the circling year ("annus" was said to derive from "annulus," meaning "ring").²⁵ Thus when the Fourth Plebeian cries out, "A ring! Stand round" (III.ii.166), and Antony immediately recalls that "summer's evening" when Caesar wore his stabbed cloak for "the first time" (III.ii.173-4); or when Titinius is "enclosed round about / With horsemen," and Cassius simultaneously concludes that he himself will end where he began, "Time" having "come round" (V.iii.24-9): then we know we are in an intellectual environment where space and time are held to be correspondent cosmoi, constructed on the same principles, governed by the same laws.

The first victim of Time's retributive action is Caesar himself. Triumphant in civil war, Caesar has cut short the natural life of fellow Romans; now, his "wisdom consum'd in confidence," he refuses to acknowledge that his own time of danger has arrived and even claims to be beyond motion and so beyond Time. The way in which Shakespeare alters Plutarch's chronology seems designed to suggest that Caesar's death, sudden and untimely though it is, is really an assertion of Time's order: since the feast of the Lupercal fell on the fifteenth day of February, and the Ides of March on the fifteenth day also, Caesar's fall at the base of Pompey's statue takes place exactly one month—four weeks to the day—after his entry "in triumph over Pompey's blood" (I.i.51).²⁶ Of course the element of justice in Caesar's death does not mean that the conspirators themselves are justified. Unlike Flavius and Marullus, they are not concerned with what Caesar did to Pompey; they are obsessed rather with the crimes he might commit if given time. Thus although they refer to "the time's abuse" (II.i.l15), and speak vaguely about redressing wrongs and making Caesar "bleed for justice' sake" (IV.iii.19), the dramatic emphasis rests firmly on the fact that they deny Caesar the opportunity to prove their fears wrong or right: they "prevent" his future, abridge "His time of fearing death" (II.i.28, III.i.105). Reference to the number of times Caesar was offered the crown delicately gives shape to this idea of an unnatural truncation. On the feast of the Lupercal, and yet again on the day of his death, it is reported with emphasis that he was "thrice presented . . . a kingly crown, / Which he did thrice refuse" (III.ii.97-9, I.ii.235-40). The significance of the fact that the crown was offered three times (it was offered twice in Plutarch's Life of Caesar, and many times in his Life of Antony) relates to the rumor that it was to be offered again on the Ides of March, this time by the Senate. The rumor gives urgency to the conspirator's plot to kill Caesar; but they do not wait to see if it will materialize, or what Caesar will do if there is a fourth time.

The numerical pattern of the kingship offers is reinforced by a remarkable series of puns on the word "forth" in the dialogue between Caesar and his wife and servant on the morning of the Ides of March. Perhaps it is coincidental that there are eight puns and that the first of them occurs in the eighth line of the scene. But unless we are to indict Shakespeare of extreme insensitivity in the use of words, we must at least grant that a continuous if covert pun on this adverb (and verb) of motion is intended. The eight puns are all concentrated within the first fifty lines of the scene and are rhetorically signalled with great deliberation. Thus the scene opens with Caesar soliloquizing to the effect that Calphurnia "thrice" cried out in her sleep, "Help, ho! they murther Caesar!" (II.ii.2-3), and within seconds she herself enters to ask: "What mean you Caesar? Think you to walk forth?" (II.ii.8). Again, when he twice assures her that "Caesar shall forth" (II.ii.10, 28), and she warns him that "the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes" (II.ii.31), he responds numerically: "Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once" (II.ii.32-3). His response to the servant's message from the augurers—"They would not have you stir forth today. / Plucking the entrails of an offering forth, / They could not find a heart within the beast" (II.ii.38-40)—shows an even more conspicuous use of the same kind of cueing:

No, Caesar shall not ["stay at home"]. 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,
And Caesar shall go forth.

(II.ii.44-8)

The fatal refrain is heard for the last time in the scene when Calphurnia goes on her knees to plead, "Do not go forth to-day" (II.ii.50), and he agrees to stay at home "for thy humour" (II.ii.56). It is at this point that the conspirators begin to arrive, with the glib-tongued Decius in the van; so that at eight o'clock (II.ii.114) Caesar is moved to change his mind once more and go forth with his "good friends" (II.ii.126). One of the arguments used by Decius to persuade him is that the senators have decided to offer him the crown today and that if he absents himself because of his wife's dreams they might be disinclined to offer it at "another time" (II.ii.98). Caesar of course shows no sign of being moved to impatient desire by this argument: it is the fear of being thought fearful which seems to sway him. But the argument serves to turn the conspirators' refusal to accept Caesar's decision not to go forth today into an ironic anticipation of their own impatient refusal to wait for his reaction to the fourth offer.

Shakespeare's conception of the central deed as a violation of Time's order is buttressed by the treatment accorded almost all the other actions of the conspirators. When Cassius first attempts to "move" him against Caesar, Brutus gravely remarks on the need to move only as time, patience, and opportunity dictate: he seems committed for the moment to the normative principle of regulated change (I.ii.160-73; cf. IV.iii.212-23). Almost immediately, however, he plunges with Cassius and the others into a realm of "phantasma or hideous dream" where a hectic, confused present is engulfed by spectres of the future and ghosts of the past. Appropriately, the conspirators' alienation from Time's peaceful cycle is signalled in the garden or orchard scene where the temptation of Brutus is successfully completed and the conspirators effectively seal their own as well as Caesar's fall. Time and place, it should be noted, are mutually supportive in the complex symbolic setting of this action. The garden suggests nature's recreative, temporal cycle as well as the archetypal Fall which brought change and death into the world. The night symbolizes the sinister nature of the secret bond and the blindness of the conspirators to its true nature. But as in Macbeth and Othello (and most other tragedies of the period), being active and abroad at night is seen here as a departure from Time's order—a confusion of temporal opposites—which is unnatural and ominous in itself.

The scene opens with Brutus expressing uncertainty as to the time and calling Lucius from "the honey-heavy dew of slumber" (II.i.230) on the assumption that day is near. As he recognizes by the time the boy arrives (he has soliloquized in the interim on the need to kill Caesar "in the shell"), this assumption is mistaken. But he is uncertain also about the date, so before the boy can return to bed he has to consult the calendar and report to his master that "March is wasted fifteen days" (Il.i. .59). Similar uncertainties afflict some of the muffled men whom Lucius admits before he finally retires. Decius and Cinna presume day is near because they see a light in what they take to be the east; but Casca disagrees, and in the manner of one who has access to the best chronologist of the day lectures them on the sun's position in relation to the seasons, the points of the compass, and the months (II.ii. 102-11). The easy naturalism with which these two pieces of dialogue on time and place are managed, together with the dramatist's tactful refusal to overdirect his audience, has helped to conceal the superbly significant irony they are designed to effect in the context. The irony is that these men are planning to murder a leader whose greatest and most enduring achievement during his one year as dictator was to reform the republican calendar—a calendar regularly interfered with for political reasons and hopelessly at variance with the solar revolutions. Plutarch himself, no lover of dictators or of Caesar, seems to have felt that the solar or Julian calendar was the clearest sign that Caesar was the "one only absolute governor" that the factious state of Rome then needed.²⁷ In striking at this one man, then, the conspirators are striking at the one representative, imperfect and aging though he is, of Time's rule.

And Time replies in kind. The great movement of ironic reversal which constitutes the second half of the play is initiated and brought to its conclusion by a series of untimely acts which Time assimilates to the economy of its own law: the untimely is rendered timely and Fortune's wheel made one with the sun and the stars, the clock and the compass. Brutus begins the movement when he makes the characteristic mistake of speaking to the citizens before Antony ("I will myself into the pulpit first" [III.i.236]), and hastens it to its conclusion when he insists on "coming down" from the "upper regions" and giving "the word [of battle] too early" (V.i.2-6, V.iii.5). Cassius' mistake is to conclude that the successful Brutus has been captured, order Pindarus to "come down" from his observation post (V.iii.33), and anticipate the end by committing suicide. His death thus replicates the "preventive" murder of Caesar; but so too does that of Brutus, for in taking his own life Brutus abandons his belief that one should face the worst armed "with patience / To stay the providence of some high powers that govern us below" and never "for fear of what might fall . . . prevent / The time of life" (V.i.105-8).

There are quiet but unmistakeable indications that these untimely deaths are the fulfilment of Time's design. Cassius' deathday is also his birthday: "Time is come round, / And where I did begin, there shall I end. / My life is run his compass" (V.iii.23-5). It is three o'clock in the day when his body is discovered by a Brutus who readies himself to "try fortune in a second fight" (V.iii. 109-10), just as it was three o'clock in the night when Caesar's hour of misfortune was determined. And in contrast to their uncertainties about where and when the sun would rise, the republicans now watch his progress, know exactly when night will fall (V.iii.60-5, 109), and recognize that their "hour is come" (V.v.20). This final resolution of the untimely into the timely is also one of violence into peace. It is a peace which comes not only from exhaustion and defeat but also from the reconciliation of opposites, the completion of a cycle, and the sense of a spatio-temporal cosmos whose encompassing law binds all. It helps, if only a little, to compensate for the tragic inability of the two friends to perceive the full meaning of those words which were uttered by Brutus himself in the dark garden: "Peace! count the clock!" (II.i. 192).

V

In Julius Caesar, then, Shakespeare makes use of a numerology which is in essence very simple and close to traditional modes of thought and expression. There are no more than two number symbols of importance in the play, and they are tied to the dominant themes—unity, amity, justice, and regeneration (and their opposites)—in a manner which fully deploys their traditional meanings. My analysis has also indicated that Shakespeare uses all the resources of his art—nonverbal and verbal, visual and auditory—to awaken the imagination to the symbolic importance of number. This is a point which I would like to emphasize and amplify by way of conclusion.

Iteration of a steady but largely oblique and unemphatic kind is Shakespeare's guiding principle in the dramatic art of numerological suggestion. We do not see the four main characters alone on stage together like the four quarrelling friends of A Midsummer Night's Dream; but we do see that they are the men who matter, and we see Brutus, Cassius, Antony, and the new Caesar face to face in bitter contention. We see also the four representative plebeians, the three displays of four-fold unity in the republican camp, and the four reconciled enemies at the head of one Roman army; and if we had been present at the Globe in 1599 we would have watched the dance of two men and two women and been reminded at the end not merely of the two marriages that vanished in the middle but of all the other quadruple patterns and "partings" as well. On the first of the four occasions when we learn the time of day, we are in effect required by the dramatist to join with the conspirators in listening to and even counting the clock. And although the number is three, it resolves instantly into the higher number; Cassius says, "The clock hath stricken three," Trebonius remarks, "'Tis time to part," and Cassius continues, "But it is doubtful yet / Whether Caesar will come forth today or no" (II.i. 192-4). On the second occasion there is no such calculated blurring (or delicate nudging): says Brutus, "Caesar, 'tis strucken eight" (II.ii.114).

What is of prime importance here about these two notations on four and eight is that they quickly become reverberative. The remark about Caesar's doubtful coming forth is picked up at the beginning of the next scene in the eightfold pun. Moreover, it is echoed both visually and verbally in the brief and sharply patterned scene which follows the removal of Caesar's body from the stage. In the third and fourth lines of his four-line opening speech, the poet Cinna stumbles on the key pun: "I have no will to wander forth of doors, / Yet something leads me forth" (III.iii.3-4). He is immediately confronted by the four plebeians from whom come, in rapid succession, four questions (name? destination? abode? marital status?) and four demands (answer directly, briefly, wisely, truly). Cinna then parodies this double-four catechism with an imprudent air of amusement (III.iii.13-16), proceeds to answer each of the four questions in the manner demanded, and is finally rewarded for his humorous tribute to the tetrad by being torn to pieces (he is the first innocent to be "quarter'd"—after Caesar's murder—in any of "the parts of Italy"). The sentence, "Caesar, 'tis strucken eight," is also echoed both visually and verbally. In the succeeding scene, eight men are grouped about Caesar's body, he is compared to "a deer, strucken by many princes" (III.i.209), and the servant who helps remove his body announces that Octavius lies seven leagues from Rome, awaiting his moment. It is an uncannily reverberant dramatic context rather than explicit signposting that draws attention to the patterns of number.

For a variety of reasons, the tentativeness of Shakespeare's symbolic method is artistically right. In the first place, symbolic specificity would have destroyed the impressive blend of the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic that Shakespeare was beginning to achieve at this point in his career. The tentative method too accords with the accepted notion that nature's numerical designs do not always declare themselves openly but are a form of "mystical Mathematicks" that require patient observation and interpretation.²⁸ Above all, however, Shakespeare's respect for the reticence of universal number serves to enhance the ironic implications of his tragedy and to strengthen the connection which it establishes between the experience of the audience and that of the dramatis personae and the historical dramatist. In seeking to construe the numbers which tantalize both eye and ear, the observant minority in Shakespeare's audience at the Globe would have been keenly aware that men can be everywhere surrounded by the signs of fate to no avail, that meaning is mockingly elusive, and that "hateful Error" (V.iii.67) is a universal enemy.

Notes

¹Julius Caesar, e d. T. S. Dorsch, The Arden Shakespeare (London, 1955), I.iii.1-78; II.ii.1-105; IV.iii.274-302; V.i.78-90. Dorsch's edition of Caesar is used throughout this essay; in other Shakespearean references the text used is that of The Tudor Shakespeare, ed. Peter Alexander (London and Glasgow, 1951).

² I.iii.31-50, 78-9, 130-2, 161, 180-285; II.i.2-3, 42-58, 72-5, 234-308; III.i.15-26; IV.ii.15-27; V.i.1-12; V.iii. 15-35, 80-4.

³The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards, The Revels Plays (London, 1959), IV.i.180.

⁴ Plato, Timaeus, 31-2, 37-9, 47; Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis, II.viii.80, II.xvi.l71; Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, I.m.2, De Arithmetica, I.ii; Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, bk. II; Pierce de La Primaudaye, The French Académie, tr. T. Bowes et al. (London, 1618), p. 727; Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 387. See also Christopher Butler, Number Symbolism (London, 1970), pp. 25, 52-3; Russell A. Peck, "Number as Cosmic Language," in By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Ottawa, 1979), pp. 47-80; S. K. Heninger, Jr., Touches of Sweet Harmony, Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, Calif., 1974), pp. 71-146, The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe (San Marino, Calif., 1977), pp. 81-144, 164-71.

⁵ Perhaps I exaggerate its distinctiveness a little. In her first address to the imprisoned Boethius, Philosophy remarks that the depression caused by worldly misfortunes can deprive the well-trained mind of its "proper clernesse," so that one who could hitherto "teilen the diuerse causes of nature," having "compehended al this by nombres," is "driven without mesure" into "foreyne darknesses" (Chaucer's translation; italics added).

⁶ Plato, Timaeus, 32, ("out of such elements which are in number four, the body of the world was created, and it was harmonized by proportion, and therefore has the spirit of friendship," trans. Benjamin Jowett); Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans. William Harris Stahl, Records of Civilization, XLVIII (New York, 1952), pp. 98, 103-16; Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French Academie, p. 727. See also Butler, Number Symbolism, pp. 7-9; Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, pp. 151-74, The Cosmographical Glass, pp. 102-20, 165-71.

⁷ Ed. C. F. Tucket Brooke, The Works of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 1910), I.ii.227-43.

⁸ The organizing symbol in Kyd's opening description of the war between the two neighbor countries is that of primal Chaos and the strife of the elements (I.ii.43-8). Throughout the play as a whole the depiction of psychological and social disorder relies heavily on elemental imagery (see III.vii. 1-18, III.x.29-33, 70-6, III.xi.1-29, III.xii.1-19, III.xiii.103-23, etc.).

⁹MND, III.ii.l22-344(cf. II.i.81-117); Rj, III.i.54-131; RII, I.i.

¹⁰ Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. Stahl, p. 98; Vincent Foster Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism (New York, 1938), pp. 77-8, 101, 112, 114; Russell A. Peck, "Number as Cosmic Language," p. 78; Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time, (London, 1964), p. 53, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 151-4.

¹¹Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. T.J.B. Spencer (Harmondsworth, 1964), pp. 32, 49-50, 76-7; Plutarch, "The Fortune of the Romans," in Moralia, ed. Frank Cole, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), vol. IV, pp. 341-2, 363; Shakespeare's Appian, ed. Ernest Schanzer (Liverpool, 1956), pp. 5-9; Lucius Julius Florus, The Roman Histories, trans. E. M. B. [olton] (London, 1619), pp. 439, 448-9; John Carion, The thre bokes of Cronicles, trans. Walter Lynne (London, 1550), fols, lxxiv-lxxxvii; William Fulbecke, An Historical Collection of the Continual Factions, Tumults, and Massacres of the Romans and the Italians during the Space of one hundred and twentie yeares next before the peaceable Empire of Augustus Caesar (London, 1601), pp. 13, 18, 209. (Fulbecke's work was completed in 1584 and "of others some times read," "Preface.") The idea that Fortune and divine power collaborated in making Rome a source of stability in a world of change did not originate with Plutarch but can be found in earlier historians: see C. P. Jones. Plutarch and Rome (Oxford, 1971), pp. 67-71. The idea is also enshrined in Ovid's panegyric address to Augustus at the end of the Metamorphoses—a fact of enormous importance in any consideration of Renaissance attitudes to Octavius and the events which brought him to power.

¹² Florus, Roman Histories, Preface, B2.

¹³ Carion, Cronicles, Preface, fol. lxxxv.

¹⁴ Fulbecke, Historicall Collection, pp. 6-7, Cf. Florus, p. 341.

¹⁵ Florus, p. 501.

¹⁶Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, 1945), pp. 147-52, 222-36, 316-19.

¹⁷ L. F. Dean, "Bodin's Methodus in England before 1625," SP, XXXIX (1942), 166.

¹⁸ The imagery of fire and blood has been discussed by G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London, 1931), pp. 48-51, and by Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 48-64. Several critics have noted that the civil war in Brutus is echoed by the tempests that precede the assassination of Caesar: see, for example, Ernest Schanzer, Shakespeare's Problem Plays (London, 1963), pp. 49-50.

¹⁹ Shakespeare picked up the suggestion for his humoral pattern from Plutarch, who describes Cassius as choleric and Brutus as melancholic: see Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. Spencer, pp. 109, 139, 150. Shakespeare's portrayal of the four leading characters directly or indirectly accommodates the following points, all made in standard descriptions of the humors and humoral types: (1) the melancholy man suffers from fear and sleeplessness, aggravates his distemperature by exposing himself to the unhealthy night air, shuns all company (even of those nearest to him), seeks out deserted places such as gardens and orchards, and walks moodily with his arms crossed; (2) the choleric man is lean, shrewd, envious, eloquently bitter in his speech, "by nature hot and burning, like to fire" (La Primaudaye), impatient, and vengeful; (3) the sanguine is amiable, magnanimous, cheerful, fond of music—although when corrupt, his humor is the most dangerous of all; (4) the phlegmatic is often fat and subject to palsies and feebleness of the limbs; he is sluggish and "not. . . easily mooued" (La Primaudaye), and since his humor has the nature of water, "he dreameth and hath sodain appearances of waters and rain, and of. . . swimming in cold water" (Batman). Phlegm is usually dominant in age. See Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, tr. Thomas Newton (London, 1581), fols. 65, 99, 143; Batman uppon Bartholome His Booke De Proprietatibus (London, 1582), fols. 29-33; La Primaudaye, The French Academie, pp. 457, 524; Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholy (London, 1586), pp. 33-8, 132, 214; Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London, 1932; rept. 1961), I. 9, 237-62, 395-6. See also John W. Draper, The Humors and Shakespeare's Characters (Durham, N.C., 1945); Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: a Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing, 1951).

²⁰ The relevant section of Platter's account of his visit to England is reprinted (from Anglia XXII [1899], 458) in the Arden edition of the play, p. 166.

²¹ Plato, Timaeus, 40; Alanus de Insulis, De Planctu Naturae, pr. 3, 4; La Primaudaye, The French Academie, p. 728.

²² T. S. Dorsch, ed. Julius Caesar, p. lxxx; Bernard Beckermann, Shakespeare at the Globe (New York, 1962), p. 95; Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), pp. 98-100.

²³ For the justice motive, see I.iii.89-120, II.i.47, 57, 115-25, IV.iii. 19-21. For regeneration, see further Lii.148-59, 253, II.i.320-5.

²⁴ See Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. Spencer, pp. 111-16. Appian names fifteen conspirators (of whom Ligarius is the sixth), and Suetonius speaks of "more than three-score." See Shakespeare's Appian, ed. Schanzer, p. 17; Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. V. (New York, 1964), p. 152.

²⁵The French Academie, p. 728; Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, V.xxxv. On the circle and tetrad, see Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony, pp. 114-15, 220.

²⁶ For Plutarch's chronology of these events, see Shakespeare's Plutarch, pp. 76, 82, 87. Cf. Dorsch, ed. Julius Caesar, p. 7, note on I.i.67.

²⁷Shakespeare's Plutarch, p. 165. Concerning the reformation of the republican calendar, Plutarch says (p. 80):

But the ordinance of the calendar and the reformation of the year, to take away all confusion of time, being exactly calculated by the mathematicians and brought to perfection, was a great commodity unto all men. For the Romans, using then the ancient computation of the year, had not only such uncertainty and alteration of the months and times that the sacrifices and yearly feasts came by little and little to seasons contrary for the purpose they were ordained; but also in the revolution of the sun (which is called annus Solaris) no other nation agreed with them in account; and, of the Romans themselves, only the priests understood it. And therefore, when they listed, they suddenly (no man being able to control them) did thrust in a month above their ordinary number. . . . But Caesar, committing this matter unto the philosophers and best expert mathematicians at that time, did set forth an excellent calendar, more exactly calculated than any that was before; the which the Romans do use until this present day, and do nothing err as others in the difference of time.

Appian (ed. Schanzer, p. 52) and Carion (Cronicles, fol. lxxxiv) also highlight the achievement of the calendar, Carion introducing it in such a way as to emphasize the criminal folly of the assassination.

²⁸ "For it is extremely important to remember (especially when we look for evidence of numerological influence on works of art) that the Pythagorean doctrines were secret ones." Butler, Number Symbolism, p. 52.