SOURCE: "Authority and Violence," in William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, Northcote House, 1998, pp. 12-20.

[Below, Hamer suggests that Caesar's triumph, his assassination, and the imminent destruction of the Roman republic are reflected in the tribunes' anxiety and their subsequent wish to enforce order on the plebeian class.]

'Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!' (1.1.1). How angry and hectoring are the words which open the play. But Murellus and Flavius, the speakers, are tribunes of the people; that is, magistrates that the people have elected to protect their interests. As he takes the first step into the world which is moving towards the crisis of Caesar's death, Shakespeare chooses to invite us to make our own entrance, with him, at a point of collision. We are thrown immediately off-balance into confusion. Wanting to extricate ourselves from that, we might be tempted to suppress what as educated people we might be expected to know: that the tribunes are meant to be on the people's side. On the other hand these words might be a cue to us, as audience, to listen carefully, to be alert to the difference between what we see for ourselves and the official version of events. The magistrates are not protecting but attacking the commoners. It is sometimes argued that fear of the Elizabethan mob is what Shakespeare is dramatizing here in the clash between the tribunes and the common men who speak from the crowd. I suspect that to say this means that you have already aligned yourselves with the authorities and turned away from the common people in the scene. Let us try keeping a more open mind as we move forward into the world of the play.

What we are shown is a battle carried on in terms of language: the men of Rome are already fighting each other when the play begins. If it is a battle, since only one side is really on the attack. The tribunes are harrying the men that they have met with just for being out in the street. Who has a right to speak, what happens when people are silenced? These are questions that Shakespeare did not take from his source in Plutarch, just as he found no original there for his opening scene.' Cobblers, tapsters, or suchlike base mechanical people' (JC 164) was a phrase dismissively used by Cassius in Plutarch's Life of Marcus Brutus: on reading it perhaps Shakespeare balked. Out of that resistance, his refusal to recapitulate the casual disdain of that description, he may have forged his play.

The clash between tribunes and workmen is Shakespeare's invention: it is his decision also to make the quarrel one that takes place over language and what is sometimes known as signifying practice. 'Where is thy leather apron and thy rule?' (1.1.7). If they're out at all, the tribunes say, the workmen should be carrying the tools of their trade, as a sign of who they're supposed to be, or rather as a sign that simply identifies them with their work and with their inferior place as workers or plebeians in Rome. For Shakespeare's first audience this might have had a familiar ring, for their own government repeatedly passed laws that were intended to make their appearance reflect a particular social hierarchy. Sumptuary legislation under Elizabeth as it has been said 'dealt with every rung of the social ladder'.¹ It might be more accurate to say that sumptuary laws were an attempt to make English subjects believe in those rungs, those differences of status, and behave as if they were true. The story of Caesar tunes Shakespeare's imagination to the problems that hierarchy as a form of social organization entails. If by the same impulse he finds himself drawn to think about religious observance, this is not entirely a coincidence, for what else does the term hierarchy come from, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, but Greek words that mean the rule of priests?

It's as if the tribunes wanted to turn the workmen into images or signs without a voice. 'You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!' Murellus scolds (1.1.34). He is comparing them to the statues in the great religious shrines, which had been a focus of devotional feeling until Henry VIII ordered that they should be destroyed after he took control of religion as head of the Church. Or rather, Shakespeare is striking a rhetorical note that his first audience would have recognized: he is echoing the regulatory voice of authority under its religious guise. The phrase 'blocks and stones', or more often 'stocks and stones', was used as the OED reminds us, in written texts to refer contemptuously to the old images of Mary and the saints. It is the ranting of religious authority, not its particular doctrines, that Shakespeare wants to reproduce here. This may seem to be Rome, he suggests, but you may find that it reminds you of what we have to put up with closer to home.

The tribune's voice, with its distinctive tone of authority, one that is at once insulting and intimate—notice how he uses the familiar form, calling the workmen 'thou'—is one that some of us may remember hearing from teachers at school. 'Don't you know that you're not allowed to do that?' they said. That may be where Shakespeare first heard it himself, at the grammar school in Stratford, where he learned his Latin. Shakespeare knew about the link between the Latin word 'magister' meaning teacher and the English word 'magistrate'. It's an everyday kind of brainwashing that we observe, as Murellus, the magistrate who is supposed to support the commoners, humiliates them. It is done by rounding on their open, enthusiastic response and mocking it as irrational. The magistrates would like to put a stop to the life of impulse and replace self-respect in the commoners with a mechanical sense of themselves as inferior beings.

The tribunes don't seem to like spoken language or even to be competent in it themselves: the cobbler's quick replies baffle them 'What means't thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow?' (1.1.18). You would almost think that in the presence of the play of language the tribunes feel afraid. They suspect that they can't quite follow what is going on. You do wonder yourself, when you hear the way that the tribunes use language when they want to persuade rather that to issue commands. It may be the day of Caesar's triumph, as the cobbler tells us, but we discover that the tribunes are hostile to Caesar as well as to the crowd. Does this suggest that it's the pleasure taken in Caesar that they want to destroy? The proper rules for a Roman triumph have not been observed they say. Perhaps the tribunes sense that a triumph mounted to celebrate the defeat of a Roman might put a spanner in the works, ruin the ideological effect, but this is not how they choose to frame their complaint. Instead they speak of the absence of foreign prisoners:

Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?

(1.1.31-3)

To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels? Where do you begin arguing with a phrase like that? This is a speaker, or a member, as they say, of a speech community who seem to have decided to numb themselves. They do not feel the disjunction between the image of men in chains and the word 'grace', the language of religion or aesthetics. 'Grace' is not a term that most people would choose to apply to a man who is suffering. Most people find pain, whether in themselves or in others, hard to tolerate and neither holy nor beautiful; that is, unless they believe, like the Roman Catholic nuns who educated me, in meditating on the Passion of Christ. The artists of Christian Europe for centuries found inspiration in the suffering of Jesus, too. How many composers besides Handel wrote settings for The Seven Last Words of Christ? There may be more continuity and more sympathy between the order of Christianity and the order of ancient Rome than first appears.

In the lexicon of ancient Rome, as the tribunes are demonstrating, the dynamic that usually orders language does not apply. We sometimes speak of putting our feelings into words: in Rome, it seems, or in the official language of Rome, words are not found by paying attention to the way experience is registered within or to the resonances set up in the body by it. Shakespeare's habitual poetic unit, the iambic pentameter, has its source in the rhythms of the body: the time it takes to speak a pentameter is matched to the duration of a breath. But Murellus and Flavius don't use the sensitive pulse of their human response to pace their speech but a hammering mechanical beat that deadens the hearers as well. This makes it possible for Roman men to construct a new world, one that exists only in language and does not vibrate with reminders of the world of experience. With this denatured language it is easy to confuse and to lie and to construct a public world, a political world that is based in lies. Shakespeare opens his play by identifying the language of Roman officials as a problem and by offering that as the frame for the political crisis at hand. It might encourage us as his audience to wonder about patrician men and their refusal to connect the inner world with the outer one by means of language. What part will that refusal play in dividing Roman men against each other and against themselves?

Religion is supposed to hold a society together; the word comes from Latin, either from lego, meaning gather, collect, or from ligo, meaning 'bind'. One way of doing this might be through weaving language into poems or histories or stories, either with the voice or in writing, making what we call a text. That word also comes from a Latin root, meaning 'tie'. But what the Romans bound together, famously, was a bundle of rods, in the symbol known as the fasces, that is the sign of the right to punish. Religion is already an issue as the play opens. It is in the name of religion that the workmen are told to get out of the public street:

Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.

(1.1.52-4)

they are urged, in a speech that echoes the Act for the Uniformity of Common Prayer of 1559. Printed as the first item in the Prayer Book that members of Shakespeare's first audience used every week in church, this Act of Parliament spoke of 'evils and plagues wherewith Almighty God may justly punish his people' if they did not obey the queen's ordinance and present themselves every Sunday for worship.

The workmen are not to believe in themselves, as we have just learned; now we are told that they are to go in fear, a fear that the tribunes are also subject to, in their degree. The tribunes would like to remove all evidence of Caesar's popularity, and this would mean removing the offerings hung on his statues: 'Disrobe the images/If you do find them decked with ceremonies' (1.1.64), says Flavius. It makes Murellus hesitate, for there are laws about what you do with statues, it seems. Plutarch had said that diadems, broad metal bands worn by kings, had been hung on Caesar's statues but Shakespeare refuses that cue. Hanging the statues at shrines with votive gifts had been an important part of English religious practice: as Shakespeare's audience would have known, those old statues would have been hung with wax crutches, or other symbols of the healing that the sick came to find there; that audience might have picked up too a familiar word in the phrase 'decked with ceremonies'.² If we find the phrase awkward as modern readers and notice as we go on that the word 'ceremonies' is made prominent twice more in the play—Caesar has come to rely on 'ceremonies' (2.1.197), Calpurnia never stood on ceremonies' (2.2.13)—it could be that we are picking up a trial that has been deliberately laid.

Arguments about religion in England in the sixteenth century centre on what are acceptable 'ceremonies' as much as they do on matters of doctrine: Elizabeth's Prayer Book was prefaced by a note 'Of ceremonies, why some be abolished and some retained'. It was with threats of punishment, of plague sent by God or fines from the crown that Elizabeth used that Prayer Book to impose herself as ruler, to control and standardize her subjects' experience. Behind the figure of the magistrate/teacher, that we have already identified in the tribunes, does there lurk a priest? With its spies and its censorship Elizabeth's England was close to being a police state: historians agree that independence of thought was extremely dangerous. Shakespeare had need to be cautious, for there were heavy penalties for any criticism of the Prayer Book or of its provisions, whether made in 'any interludes, plays, songs rhymes or by other open words'.³ Shakespeare is writing about a world of fear but he knows enough to keep himself out of danger: without ever putting a Roman priest, much less a cleric of the Church of England, on the stage, he prepares to encourage his audience to share his scepticism about the state and about the religion that it sponsors.

There is something furtive about the tribunes, something that we might almost call conspiratorial, as they plan to sabotage the celebration of Caesar's triumph. Their language has shifted out of the official register of 1.1.30-59, with its remorseless pounding, into something more fluid, more like the way the workmen spoke. But what has made these officers so afraid that they turn to each other in private to share their fear, to plot and even to reach for a language that will give the fear a name? Shakespeare creates a form of speech for Flavius as a Roman that he will return to again in this play, the voice of a man speaking in private who is able to indicate his desire, in this case the will to make Caesar appear less exceptional, without naming it directly or being able to resist justifying his wish.

These growing feathers plucked from Caesar's wing
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,
Who else would soar above the view of men
And keep us all in servile fearfulness.

(1.1.71-5)

he argues. Paradoxically, it seems to be envy that has made these Roman magistrates sound more human. It makes Flavius feel as humiliated as one of the workmen to be so outclassed. No wonder audiences find Julius Caesar a puzzling play if they come expecting to admire Roman heroes.

When modern scholars write about the man who was Julius Caesar, they may situate him with other able young aristocrats in Rome, like Sulla and Catiline, who had the intelligence to observe those weaknesses in the political system which offered them the opportunity of gaining power for themselves (HWC). But even those who are consciously avoiding adulation acknowledge that Caesar's clear vision, his energy and his decisiveness really were quite out of the ordinary. By the time of his death, though, Caesar had aggregated power to himself in defiance of the Roman constitution: in the words of Jasper Griffin, 'accepting unheard of titles, unconstitutional magistracies, the right to wear extraordinary dress, the right to nominate the consuls, statues everywhere, an ivory image to be paraded with those of the gods . . . ' (HWC 18). The Greeks had a word for it, as we say; they would have condemned this as hubris, the desire to see oneself as more than human, not governed by the limitations shared by other human beings. That desire doesn't seem to have been conceptualized as a risky one in Rome. The tension between these public assertions of greatness and the frailty of Caesar as merely human will be put by Shakespeare under deliberate strain in his play. There is a madness, a nonsense at the centre of the public stage in Rome, which other leading men cannot help but perceive, though they may lack the words to name what is disturbing them. In their confusion, where will they resort but to violence?

Julius Caesar himself does not appear on the stage until the play has already signalled the death of language and the demand for obedience in Rome. When he does make his entrance, at the head of a train, it is clear that his is the voice of supreme authority. The first word that Caesar utters on this very public occasion is the name of his wife, Calpurnia. Caesar has instructions to give Calpurnia, or is it an order? She answers to her name like a schoolchild at roll-call: 'Here, my lord' (1.2.2).

Stand you directly in Antonio's way
When he doth run his course. Antonio.

(1.2.3-4)

Caesar doesn't even devote a complete breath to his wife but passes on to his friend before the line finishes. When Lear wanted to make public proof of his daughters' obedience he was lucky enough to find one who would offer him resistance, but Lear was not living in a Roman world; there is no such bracing opposition for Caesar, 'When Caesar says "Do this", it is performed' (1.2.10), Antony emphasizes flatteringly. Or should we in the audience be taking Shakespeare's cue and calling him 'Antonio', thinking of him as a seventeenth-century Roman, not an ancient one? As spectators we may already be wondering about Shakespeare's choice. Why present Caesar exercising authority over his wife while showing him at the same time in interaction with his friend?

It is difficult to say whether it is Caesar's weakness or his power that is more emphasized by Shakespeare in this scene. There is more than a suggestion of personal vulnerability in the way that he is presented. Casca has to call for silence when he speaks, which implies to us that Caesar's own voice is not strong. Nobody calls for silence so that Lear can be heard. And Caesar's own hearing is poor, he doesn't catch the voice of the Soothsayer at first. 'Ha? Who calls?' (1.2.13) he asks and Casca is obliged to ask for silence a second time. It was Plutarch, following the historical record, who reported that Caesar was deaf but it was Shakespeare the playwright who chose to make a prominent feature of this disability. When the actor says 'Speak, Caesar is turned to hear' (1.2.17), he is obliged to mime with his whole body, in turning towards the source of sound, the action of a man whose sight and hearing are weak, the action of a man who has trouble, perhaps, in following what is going on.

'Beware', is the message of the Soothsayer: in Rome it is proper to be afraid. For Caesar too? Even for Caesar himself? But Caesar is blank at the suggestion that there might be a place for fear. 'He is a dreamer' (1.2.24), he dismisses the Soothsayer and sweeps on. It would be easy to label this moment as 'dramatic irony' and by doing so to risk blurring its specific effect. Let's not make that move: instead, let us register that virtually every time this scene is played the entire audience knows that the Soothsayer is correct, that his warning is exact and timely. This also means that each audience observes that Caesar turns his back on clarity and exposes himself to danger. Haven't we met other senior Romans in this play who have trouble picking up what's said to them? The tribunes are one with Caesar in this respect. Some people might think that Caesar's rebuff to the Soothsayer means that he is brave in a special dignified Roman way, but Shakespeare's play does not support such a simple endorsement. By making Caesar deaf, both literally and figuratively to the voice of warning, Shakespeare's dramatic framing suggests that there is danger, danger and foolhardiness in the ways of Rome.

Nothing is more open to question than the way her husband treated Calpurnia at the start of the scene. Though as we shall see later, in Act 3, Caesar is not a specially unkind or distant husband in private, when it comes to his public relations with Calpurnia he assumes indifference to her feelings, as if they did not exist. Many readers have followed the play using the same model. Such readers will ignore Calpurnia's feelings too. They will explain that Shakespeare intended to indicate by this scene in Act 1 that Caesar wanted a son in order to establish a dynasty; they will say that the playwright was offering evidence that Caesar wanted to be king. The temptation to 'prove' that Caesar deserved to die, to join the party of the conspirators, as it were, is one to resist in my view.

It seems more responsive to what Shakespeare actually chooses to show us, to note that in this scene Calpurnia is isolated and subjected to public disgrace, when her infertility is paraded in the street, a disgrace that is presented as routine and associated with a religious ceremony. Shakespeare places this scene right up front at the start of the action, where it cannot be missed. Does he want us to start thinking about marriage and the way that Roman men, or even contemporary ones, treat their wives? Julius Caesar does not end with the assassination of a single hero; that takes place only halfway through. The action of this play makes a connection between that one carefully justified killing and the confused violence of warfare in which the men who argued for Caesar's death are swept away. Though Julius Caesar apparently concerns itself so little with women—it's such a male play, as is often said—from the moment that Caesar is actually on stage our attention as audience is directed to the figure of a woman, standing silent at the hub of Rome. None of us, least of all her husband, knows what she is thinking. What would happen if she brought her voice into the conspiracies of Rome?

Notes

¹ Frances Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore, 1926), 245.

² Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1977), 204.

³ The Act of Uniformity, from which I quote here, was printed as a preface to Elizabeth's Prayer Book. It has never been repealed and continues to this day, like the note on ceremonies, to be printed in the Preface to copies of the Prayer Book of the Church of England.