SOURCE: "The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar," in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. XLIII, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 75-109.

[In the essay that follows, Rebhorn argues that Julius Caesar is less about regicide than about the self-destruction of the Roman aristocratic, senatorial class through its members' efforts to outdo one another in greatness, and that Shakespeare uses the play as an analogy for the demise of an equally envious and self-destructive aristocracy in Elizabethan England.]

"The purpose of playing . . . is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror
up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image,
and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure"

(Hamlet, 3.2.20-24).¹

In his hagiographic treatment of the life of Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville presents the last events in his hero's existence as constituting a particularly exemplary "tragedy"; he celebrates Sidney's generosity towards a common soldier in need of water, his endurance in suffering pain, and his careful "fashioning" of his soul to meet death when the end appeared inevitable.² In dying, says Greville, Sidney "shewed the world, in a short progress to a long home, passing fair, and well-drawn lines; by the guide of which, all pilgrims of this life may conduct themselves humbly into the heaven of everlasting rest."³ Greville has problems, however, with the causes of that "progress" from this world to the next which he wishes his reader to admire. For instance, he is ambiguous about whether the English leaders'—surely including Sidney's—desperate desire for victory, their misperception, neglect, or audacity was the cause of the decimation of the English troops and the fatal wounding of Sidney when they came under withering fire from the enemy on the walls and in the trenches of Zutphen. Nevertheless, he resists blaming them and instead recounts how "misty" weather brought the English "unawares" before the well fortified defenders of the city, characterizing the events as an "accident," just as he will later lament the "unfortunate hand" that shot Sidney. Thus, he comes close to exonerating Sidney and his fellows of any blame.⁴

Greville has much more difficulty with Sidney's own role in his demise. For after Sidney, following the principles of the "ancient Sages," had armed himself fully for the encounter, he met the Marshall of the Camp, Sir William Pelham, who had removed his thigh armor because of a wound. Sidney likewise removed his, "so, by the secret influence of his destinie, to disarm that part, where God (it seems) had resolved to strike him."⁵ Greville insinuates that God and destiny forced Sidney's hand here, but the rest of his narrative resists such a move, pointing unmistakably to Sidney's free choice in the matter and hence to his personal responsibility for what happened to him. Since Greville tries to put the best face on Sidney's motivation, the result is a singularly ambiguous passage which may be read as condemnatory, even as it exonerates. Sidney, writes Greville, "meeting the Marshall of the Camp lightly armed (whose honour in that art would not suffer this unenvious Themistocles to sleep)[,] the unspotted emulation of his heart, to venture without any inequalitie, made him cast off his Cuisses."⁶ Although determined to praise Sidney here, Greville is actually betrayed into an admission of criticism by the very terms he uses, and in particular, he exposes his hesitations with the qualifiers he seems compelled to supply. Thus he identifies Sidney with the great Athenian general Themistocles in order to praise his hero as being motivated by "honour." However, the passage does not focus simply on Themistocles' accomplishments as leader and warrior, but rather, deliberately recalls an episode from Plutarch who says that Themistocles felt such envy towards Miltiades, one of the heroes of the battle of Marathon, that he could not sleep. Consequently, Greville's insistence that Sidney was unenvious only serves to draw the reader's attention to the possibility that, like Themistocles, Sidney may have been motivated by envy, the very quality Greville is at pains to deny in his hero.

More important, Greville directly identifies Sidney's motive in taking off his thigh armor with a highly charged, intensely ambiguous term: "emulation." This concept really contains two motives that, in pure form, are totally in opposition to one another. In Renaissance rhetorical and educational theory, emulation is classified as a form of imitation, an identification with one's model at the same time that one attempts to surpass it; it is a form of competition that, as Kenneth Burke suggested, can be "better described as men's attempt to out-imitate one another."⁷ On the one hand, then, emulation means identification with another person, a model, or an ideal; it can indicate a form of brotherhood or comradeship or even love. On the other hand, it simultaneously means rivalry; it is a competitive urge that necessarily involves struggle, but which can also, when taken to an extreme, entail feelings of hatred and envy and lead to factionalism and warfare. What Greville wishes to claim in his passage, when he labels Sidney's "emulation" of Sir William Pelham "unspotted," is that the motive is purified of any negative quality and specifically of the destructive envy or jealousy which that adjective might suggest. Emulation should thus be taken to mean a loving identification with a fellow warrior, an equal over whom one wishes no unfair advantage ("without inequalitie") and whose exploits one desires to best; rivalry, the passage implied, is to be expressed not in an attack on the other, but by directing aggression outward at a common enemy. Nevertheless, Greville's need to qualify Sidney's emulation as unspotted in this passage betrays his nervous recognition of the dual, contradictory nature of that motive as an unstable combination of identification and rivalry, love and hate.⁸ Thus, despite all of Greville's efforts at qualification, despite his clear desire to have his audience read Sidney's motivation in going into battle without his "Cuisses" as a loving identification with a fellow aristocrat, his adjective reveals what it ironically tries so hard to conceal: the destructive rivalry that lies at the "heart" of emulation and was surely in Sidney's "heart" as well. In short, then, Greville's narrative shows that Sidney himself, more than God or destiny or bad weather, or—to put it more accurately—Sidney's very definitely "spotted" "emulation of his heart" was responsible for the wound that led to his death.

Sidney's demise at Zutphen could thus be read as the expression of a desire for a wound, a badge of courage, like that possessed by Pelham, indeed as an almost deliberate courting of death in pursuit of chivalric glory. By stripping himself of his defenses as he went into battle, then, Sidney could be seen performing an act that amounts to self-slaughter. Driven by his determination to play to the hilt the role of perfect knight and courtier, to be the ideal aristocrat Greville celebrates in his biography, he is led to commit a kind of unpremeditated, unintended suicide.

In the late summer or autumn of 1599, some thirteen years after the heroic exit of Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare's company brought to the stage the tragedy of Julius Caesar.⁹ Although it is often read as a play about the killing of a king and expressing a real ambivalence on that score, it would be equally productive to see it as depicting a struggle among aristocrats—senators—aimed at preventing one of their number from transcending his place and destroying the system in which they all ruled as a class.¹⁰ In this perspective, then, the assassination is not regicide, but an attempt to restore the status quo ante. The conspirators strike down an individual, Julius Caesar, whose behavior displays and is characterized in terms that could not help but suggest emulation to an Elizabethan. However, the assassination is carried out by individuals whose actions are presented in the play in exactly the same way. In other words, although the motives of the conspirators, and especially those of Brutus, must be distinguished from Caesar's as well as Antony's and Octavius' in many respects, all are nevertheless animated by the same fundamental drive, the drive to excel all others, to "out-imitate" their fellows.

All the Roman senators can thus be read as versions of the same basic character type. Critics have, for instance, commented on the way that Julius Caesar actively deconstructs the opposition between Brutus and Caesar which it simultaneously seems to insist upon: although it invites the spectator to separate the "gentle" Brutus from the pompous Caesar who repeatedly speaks of himself in the third person, it simultaneously yokes the two men together, distinguishing them from all the other characters in the play both by virtue of their similar situations—both have wives and are seen in domestic settings—and, more important, by virtue of their shared character traits: an intolerance of others' opinions, a susceptibility to flattery, an overweening self-confidence.¹¹ Such similarities have been used to qualify Brutus' status as the hero of the play, to identify moral failings in him that constitute his "tragic flaw." I would argue that the play not only undermines—without cancelling—the differences between Brutus and Caesar, but, more important, as it links the pair together, it stresses their resemblances to all the other aristocrats as well and identifies emulation as the common denominator of the entire group.¹²

I would argue that if the play presents the characters and values of Brutus, Cassius, and the others to create an image of ancient Roman civilization, it simultaneously holds "the mirror up to nature" in Shakespeare's own world, showing "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." Just as Hamlet feels a play about a murder in Vienna has application to the world of Denmark, so Elizabethans in general read literature and history with an eye to their topical interest, their application to the present. In his preface to The History of the World (1614), for instance, Sir Walter Ralegh remarks: "It is enough for me . . . to write of the eldest times, wherein also why may it not be said that in speaking of the past I point at the present, and tax the vices of those that are yet living in their persons that are long since dead?"¹³ Even more striking, Elizabeth read herself in Richard II as she condemned the publication of John Hayward's Life and Raigne of Henry IIII in 1599, and the Essex conspirators who had Shakespeare's Richard II staged for them just before their attempted rebellion clearly found topical applications in that particular swath of history.¹⁴ Moreover, because of their classics centered education, Elizabethans were accustomed to comparing contemporaries to figures from the Roman past: Sir Philip Sidney, for instance, was called a "Britane Scipio" by Fulke Greville and was identified with Scipio as well as Hannibal, Cicero, and Petrarch in one of the epitaphs for him which appeared in Spenser's Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595).¹⁵ Even more striking, Elizabethan political writers such as Sir Thomas Smith, in his De Republica Anglorum (written 1562-1565), and William Harrison in The Description of England (published 1587), when describing the contemporary social order, stress the basic analogy between the classes of English society and those of ancient Rome. Thus, it is reasonable to infer that Elizabethans coming to Julius Caesar would have seen in the play not just a re-creation of the revered Roman past but a re-presentation of aspects of their contemporary social and political order.¹⁶

What they would have seen in particular in the play, thanks to the parallels created among Brutus, Cassius, and the rest, is the presentation of the Roman aristocracy as a distinct class that is remarkably similar to the Elizabethan aristocracy and that is defined and defines itself in two basic ways. First, it does so by distinguishing itself from those who are not aristocrats, from the plebeians, who are rebuked by the Tribunes as "blocks" and "stones" (1.1.35) and disparaged by Casca as "rabblement" (1.2.244). But the aristocrats are also defined in the play, as I suggested above, by emulation; they are recognizable not merely because they enjoy a particular position in the social order relative to other groups, but because they possess a shared "character." Such a concern with aristocratic self-definition was of vital interest in Elizabethan culture and was in good measure the result of the dislocations caused by social mobility and the ontological insecurity that mobility produced for Englishmen used to living in a seemingly immutable, intensely hierarchical society. Aristocratic identity was a problem, and writers responded to it with a vast out-pouring of courtesy books, poetry, essays, and even epics such as The Faerie Queene, all concerned with the fashioning—and hence the defining—of the gentleman or the nobleman.¹⁷ These works all participated in the large-scale cultural project of defining aristocratic behavior and values and distinguishing them from what characterized commoners, just as royal proclamations, for instance, tried to impose such distinctions by means of sumptuary restrictions. Thus they sought, in different ways, to reconfirm some version of the stratified, hierarchical social order described by Smith, Harrison, and other political writers.¹⁸Julius Caesar, of course, shares Elizabethans' concern to define aristocratic identity, although the perspective offered by the play is, as I shall argue, hardly that of a Peacham or a Spenser, let alone a Smith or a Harrison.

The historical context to which Julius Caesar refers, then, is both a mass of texts concerned with defining aristocratic behavior and values, and actual gentlemen and aristocrats, many of whom read those texts and to whom those texts referred. Moreover, the relation between the play and this context is far from simple. The play may be said to reflect its context insofar as it is seen as merely presenting the preoccupations of many of Shakespeare's contemporaries. But at the same time, it also participates in the constitution of that context: it defines the shape of Elizabethans' preoccupations for them, in a sense supplying the very language they needed to articulate their fears and desires. In other words, Julius Caesar, like any text, is not a repetition of its context, but a re-presentation of it; it does not simply reiterate what is already known but re-forms it, thereby actually helping to constitute the very context of which it is a part. It is not a mirror but a shaping presence.¹⁹ What is more, as a shaping presence, as a re-presentation, the play must be recognized as having an active, rather than a passive, merely reflective, relation to what it represents as well as to the audience viewing that representation: that is, the play offers a particular perspective on its context, seeking both to define the shape of what it represents and to shape its audience's response to that representation. Consequently, I shall argue that Julius Caesar, although certainly voicing—and hence repeating—its culture's concern with aristocratic identity, goes beyond mere reiteration by defining and clarifying that concern and by articulating its own, distinctive point of view on the problem. To be specific, I shall argue that the heterocosm of the play constitutes an anatomy—a critical analysis and clarification—of what it represents. It aims to show that the behavior and values of its aristocrats, like Sir Philip Sidney's on the battlefield at Zutphen, lead them irrevocably, albeit unintentionally, to self-destruction and specifically to the multiple suicides with which the play concludes.²⁰

The central value that directs the behavior of all the aristocrats in Julius Caesar is emulation in the several, contradictory senses of that word. To focus on one of its aspects: the emulation they all feel appears in the form of their omnipresent rivalry with one another, in their competition for preeminence, in their factionalism that leads to assassination and civil strife. Emulation is explicitly identified as the primary motive behind their slaying of Julius Caesar whose "virtue," according to the minor character Artemidorus who tries to warn him of the conspiracy, "cannot live / Out of the teeth of emulation" (2.3.12-13). Because of his famous "lean and hungry look" (1.2.195), Cassius seems the perfect embodiment of this quality, but as he recounts his "history" of the swimming match with Julius Caesar in the second scene of the play, he reveals that Caesar, who initially proposed the contest, is fully as emulous as he. When Cassius bests his opponent, he winds up carrying the exhausted Caesar on his shoulders in a gesture that he compares to that of the archetypal Roman, Aeneas, carrying his father out of Troy. Shakespeare would use the same motif "straight" in As You Like It, a play written almost contemporaneously with this one, in order to underscore Orlando's filial piety and willingness humbly to serve another. Here, although Cassius uses it for purposes of self-celebration, Shakespeare employs it ironically as indicating the triumph of one man over another, not as humble service to an acknowledged superior and moral authority. This "history" thus reveals that Julius Caesar is certainly right in being wary of Cassius because of his "lean and hungry" look, but it also reveals that what Julius Caesar sees in Cassius is at least in part a projection of qualities he himself possesses.

Cassius' behavior in "saving" Caesar typifies the play's conception of heroism that no longer means the service to the "patria" for which "pius Aeneas" was known from antiquity to the Renaissance.²¹ Rather, heroism has degenerated into competition within the patria, as the members of the ruling class jockey for positions of dominance over their fellows. Significantly, the Roman senators in Julius Caesar are presented as participating in a political struggle rather than military conquest directed at a common enemy or aiming to extend the bounds of the empire. Even Caesar is characterized in terms of his rivalry with other senators rather than as the conqueror of the Gauls or the Britons. Indeed, there is virtually no mention in the play of his past victories or triumphs; instead, the stress falls on his present physical weaknesses and other defects: his epileptic fainting fit at the stadium, his deafness in one ear, perhaps even his superstitiousness. Moreover, not only does Julius Caesar reveal that the Roman aristocrats no longer seek to serve the interests of the patria, but it suggests that their behavior, which is still defined in ideal terms as that of warriors and heroes, actually opposes them to it. The emulation at the roots of their being pits them against each other in destructive, internecine combat, and it generates contests, such as the swimming match Caesar proposed to Cassius, which needlessly expose them to danger and even destruction and which serve no military end whatsoever. Such contests are willful, gratuitous forms of risk-taking that purchase identity at the price of potential personal extinction and that are carried forward without a thought for the good of the state. Indeed, so little do these Roman aristocrats resemble "pius Aeneas" that they seem much more like his opponents or like those defective heroes in the Aeneid, Nisus and Euryalus, whose willful pursuit of personal glory interferes with service to the patria and leads to their deaths.

Shakespeare's aristocrats in Julius Caesar share a conception of identity which might well be called that of the "imperial self." They possess an urge to personal aggrandizement, a will to extend the terrain of] the self until it entirely dominates the human landscape, like the Colossus Caesar under whose giant legs Cassius claims he and his fellow aristocrats, "petty men," walk about in search of graves (1.2.135-38). In a recent study of Senecanism, Gordon Braden relates the drama of Shakespeare's age to that of the Roman Silver Age, arguing that both articulate this notion of the imperial self.²² Braden sees the competitive ethos of the ancient world, its celebration of heroic self-assertion, as reaching a logical conclusion in the Silver Age in the symbolic figure of Nero: all serious heroic rivals having been eliminated thanks to the emasculation of the Roman aristocracy, the deranged emperor, halving almost no one left with whom to compete, unleashes an orgy of destruction and self-destruction in a desperate, paradoxical effort at self-affirmation. Seneca's plays reflect this world that is reduced only to conquerors and victims, and they offer a definition of the imperial self, one that is fashioned through violent competition in radical isolation from the community. Initially, Senecan Stoicism seems the opposite of such a conception, but upon closer inspection it actually turns into its Doppelgä nger, for Stoicism is a philosophy of will in which the wise man, like the warrior, becomes a hero, in this case by conquering the self. Filled with anger at the world, the Stoic consciously masters this feeling and retreats inside the self where he replicates classical heroism in his triumph over himself, a triumph that finds its final expression and validation in the act of suicide that allows him to garner glory in the form of recognition in the eyes of others as well as eternal survival in history.

According to Braden, the Renaissance turned to Seneca less as a source of stylistic tricks and purple passages than because it shared a similar set of ideals linking the urge to master the world with the Stoic's desire for self-mastery. Although it felt Christian reservations about those urges, it still read and imitated Seneca, and its imitation of him helped determine its distinctive style of emulation. Admittedly, Julius Caesar is set well before the start of the Silver Age and the orgies of destruction associated with Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, but it nevertheless presents a Renaissance vision of the imperial self whose drive for mastery during the chaos unleashed by the Civil War in Rome has been turned away from the vast expanse of the empire and inward towards the ruling class itself.²³

Shakespeare's aristocrats see in the "room enough" (1.2.156) of Rome a competitive arena in which to achieve mastery, to erect colossal statues to their own memory, or to put on the play of assassination so that future ages may celebrate them (3.1.111-19). Characteristically, they come together not as a community, but as factions (for instance, 2.1.77) organized about Caesar and Brutus, factions that are, because of the emulation inspiring them, necessarily factious and labile.²⁴ Indeed, as the play opens it recalls the rift between Caesar and Pompey; it then depicts the many tensions besetting the association of Brutus and his friends; and it not only shows the impermanence of the Second Triumvirate of Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus, in that the first two plot the elimination of the third almost from the inception of their association, but it hints as well at the ultimate breach between Octavius and Antony. True to the pattern Braden analyzes in his book, Shakespeare's aristocrats also tend to be Stoics in their philosophical orientation, valuing self-mastery as Caesar does when he reproves himself for having been momentarily swayed by Calpurnia's fears and as Brutus does more memorably when he refuses to betray any emotion to Cassius over Portia's death. Brutus, Cassius, and Titinius also reveal their Stoicism when at the end they play the "Roman's part" (5.3.89) and slay themselves, suicides that Brutus presents as the supreme form of conquest: by killing himself, he says, "I shall have glory by this losing day / More than Octavius and Mark Antony / By this vile conquest shall attain unto" (5.5.36-38). Suicide thus becomes a final flexion of the imperial will, an act not of self-annihilation but of self-assertion and self-definition, of "glory." It trumpets human beings' conviction that they can shape their own identities and control their destinies by a supreme gesture of denial.²⁵

Propelling everyone forward in an endless quest for glory, the emulation at the heart of the imperial self essentially makes human relationships into a "zerosum game." That is, it makes characters act as though the status they could accrue were a fixed commodity in limited supply so that one man's rise must literally entail another's fall, or alternatively, each man sees the rise of another as an impairment of his personal status and importance, as a degradation or loss of rank even when such a loss has not actually occurred. This fear of personal degradation lies at the heart of Caesar's analysis of Cassius' inability to stand anyone greater than himself (1.2.204-5). Honor for Cassius is a matter of total equality with Caesar: "I had as lief not be as live to be / In awe of such a thing as I myself (1.2.95-96). The fear of degradation is even more clearly seen in the consistent hostility of Shakespeare's Roman senators to Caesar because of his successful manipulation of the populace. In Cassius' mind, if Caesar becomes a "Colossus," then the rest of them necessarily are—or feel they are—as good as dead, "petty men" who "Walk under his huge legs and peep about / To find ourselves dishonorable graves" (136-38). Cassius, however, is not the only aristocrat filled with this fear and repulsion. Cicero, when he returns from the stadium in the second scene of the play, is said to have fiery eyes (180), apparently deeply offended by the offering of the crown to Caesar. Later, Brutus says they should not add Cicero to the conspiracy despite the propaganda advantage involved because he would want to have thought it all up himself (2.1.145); Brutus thus judges Cicero to be as emulous as any of them, and the play provides no grounds for doubting his assessment. Casca epitomizes aristocratic attitudes when he mocks Caesar's performance in the stadium as "foolery" (1.2.236), a ridiculous spectacle that lessens Caesar's own dignity, thus making him a fool before the populace he courts, but that also makes fools of all the others, the aristocrats included, insofar as Caesar's elevation may be felt to deprive them of power and importance, reducing them to the status of being his fools. Even the Tribunes who appear at the very start of the play ironically behave like the senators whose interests they were theoretically supposed to have resisted in the name of the plebeians. Using quite suggestive language, they articulate their disturbance at Julius Caesar's rise, indicating their wish to strip the people from him as feathers from the wing of a bird, lest in his flight above them he keep them in "servile fearfulness" (1.1.74). Clearly for all these Roman aristocrats, then, Caesar's imperial ascent means their personal, degrading fall.

Although Antony singles out Brutus at the end of the drama as "the noblest Roman of them all (5.5.68), someone supposedly free of envy who aimed only at the common good of Rome, this statement, which may be contrived as much to ennoble its speaker as it does the subject of his praise, is a half-truth at best. From the start, Brutus is concerned with honor (1.2.87) and would rather be a "villager" than be subject to the "hard conditions" of the time (172, 174): in other words, he cannot accept the notion of any sort of inferiority to Julius Caesar and yet remain a true" son of Rome" (173). Thus, even though he frames the assassination as a rejection of tyranny, invoking the memory of his ancestor who drove out Tarquin (2.1.65) and later claiming, in his argument with Cassius in Act 4, that justice was always their primary concern (3.20), he, like Cassius, clearly feels a sense of having been degraded by Julius Caesar's rise. In fact, in the soliloquy rationalizing his participation in the conspiracy, Brutus articulates this fear as he imagines Julius Caesar climbing the ladder of ambition and, once he has reached the top, turning his back on everything below, "scorning the base degrees / By which he did ascend" (2.1.26-27). Those "base degrees," the rungs of the ladder, are citizens and senators—and in that group one must presumably place men such as Brutus himself, who had been an adherent to Caesar's faction and instrumental in his rise. Brutus' assessment in his soliloquy of Julius Caesar's character and future behavior may be unclear and self-deceiving, as some critics have argued, but it does rest firmly on a logical perception of character and on an understanding of the emulousness of Roman aristocrats such as Caesar—and Brutus himself.²⁶

As I noted above, critics have observed the striking resemblances between Brutus and Caesar that Shakespeare underscores especially in the parallel first and second scenes of Act 2, focusing in particular on their desire for dominance and their susceptibility to flattery. Like his great opponent, Brutus will brook no rivals in the faction he heads, and accordingly rejects the suggestion that they invite Cicero's adherence, not out of some tactical or propaganda concern, but because Cicero will supposedly never follow another's plans and always wishes to take the credit for every action he engages in (2.1.150-52). Since Brutus is himself rejecting someone else's idea at this very moment, just as he will later reject out of hand Cassius' recommendations about killing Antony and fighting the battle at Philippi, one cannot help but feel that what Brutus says of Cicero could be applied directly to Brutus himself. In some ways half-deaf just like Caesar, Brutus, though a far more sympathetic character, expresses his will to dominate in his sure sense of his own Tightness and superiority and in his conviction that he can easily "fashion" other senators as members of the conspiracy (2.1.220), just as he is sure he can shape the responses of the inferior plebs after the assassination.²⁷ Finally, Brutus embraces a Stoic attitude towards suicide, seeing it as the supreme form of self-possession, the achievement of worldly glory. Though Brutus reproves Cato for having committed suicide, in his own case he sees it as being synonymous with greatness of mind, especially in contrast with the degradation involved in being dragged bound to Rome (5.1.110-12). At the end, faced with the defeat of all his hopes, he tells Volumnius that suicide is consistent with nobility: "Our enemies have beat us to the pit / It is more worthy to leap in ourselves, / Than tarry till they push us" (5.5.23-25). And a few moments later, he insists on the "glory" he gains, not despite, but because of, their "losing day" (36), as though the defeat and anticipated suicide were but the last glorious chapters in his "life's history" (40). Thus, although Brutus does not seek to become king or emperor like Caesar and consciously identifies his personal motives as service to the state and to his class, the emulousness he shares with his fellow aristocrats does lead him to create a faction he seeks utterly to dominate and to envisage suicide as a final triumph over all his rivals on the greatest battlefield, that of history. Clearly, Brutus' self, like those of his great rivals, is imperial and aggrandizing, albeit in a qualified and perhaps "nobler" way.

Just before the killing of Julius Caesar, perhaps because of a need to inspire themselves and overcome any last lingering doubts and hesitations, the conspirators stage an exaggerated, almost parodic show of the total humiliation they feel his rise would entail: they abjectly beg him for favors and eventually kneel about him, physically acting out the degradation which fills them with fear and horror. Moreover, Caesar plays into these feelings by presenting himself as the lofty "northern star" and as mount Olympus (3.1.60, 74), images meant to confirm his integrity and refusal to compromise his principles, but that also dramatize his sense of his superiority, his distance above those who cluster about him. Practically indicting himself and justifying what is about to happen to him, Caesar symbolizes the imperial selfhood in its most extreme form; he is an example of how emulation means unqualified competition and leads to the total elevation of one individual over his nominal equals who are completely degraded and debased as a result.

By killing Caesar, the conspirators may be seen as striving to do two things. First, they seek to correct an imbalance in their political system where one man and his faction have come to power and threaten to turn a republic into a monarchy. Accordingly, all the conspirators view their action as a restoration, a return to the past, rather than an innovation; their action is actually presented as a repetition of ancient heroism to Brutus who is urged at one point to imitate his ancestor of the same name who drove out Tarquin, the last king of Rome (1.2.158-61), thereby inaugurating the present system of republican rule that Caesar's successes threaten to undermine. Second, the conspirators also share a desire to purify the state; they would be participants in a ritual, as Brutus insists, "purgers" (2.1.180) who would offer up Caesar as a sacrifice "fit for the gods" (173). Although this second motive could be read as a variant of the first, it could also be seen as entailing a desire to eliminate the aggressive and destructive component of emulation which they obviously feel has been fully revealed in the behavior of Caesar. The latter thus will serve as their scapegoat whose ritual extermination will seemingly allow them to purify the emulation they share with him, to deny its aggressive, competitive aspect in their own behavior. By killing Caesar, who has merely carried emulation to its logical conclusion, they can thereby suppress awareness of the negative aspects of the identical drive in themselves; they can, to return to Fulke Greville's terms for Sidney, mystify their deed as springing from the "unspotted emulation" of their hearts. With its clear-sighted analysis of aristocratic values and behavior and with its insistence on the parallels between Caesar and the men who kill him, however, Shakespeare's play de-mystifies their deed from the start, revealing that the conspirators' emulation is every bit as spotted as Caesar's. Sharing the very quality they would ascribe to Caesar alone, Brutus and his associates simply cannot turn their opponent into a scapegoat; indeed, as the action of the play unfolds, their attempt to do so turns into miserable failure.

For Shakespeare's Roman senators, assassination is as inevitable as the desire to be king. Both derive from emulation, which leads to factionalism and civil strife, and are the products of the very system of values and actions that, ironically, Caesar's assassins wish not to abolish but merely to restore to a more perfect form by their deed. One should recall in this connection the fact that Brutus' actions are presented as a repetition of what his ancestor did long before with Tarquin; the Roman state—and in particular, its ruling class—is always at odds with itself, continually plagued with emulous factions and sliding towards kingship, ever in need of violent restorative measures. Despite the many mysterious portents and signs accompanying it, the civil war as Shakespeare's play envisages it does not appear some accident visited upon Rome by a malignant fate or the end-product of an historical evolution; rather, it is the most direct expression of the Roman character, or at least of the character of its aristocratic leaders. Nor will emulation, factionalism, and civil strife be absent from the new order brought about by Antony and Octavius. They will simply repeat what Julius Caesar did and take that emulation to its logical conclusion, fighting one another until the aristocracy is effectively destroyed as a class and only a single figure is left on stage to exert his imperial will—a process Shakespeare obviously understood and whose final stages he would depict in the later Antony and Cleopatra. Even in Julius Caesar, however, he knew where the Roman state was heading; he revealed directly how the senators, in killing Caesar because of his emulous ambition, were really striking at the defining principle of their class. To put it most directly: Brutus, Cassius, and other conspirators are Caesar; in assassinating him, they are consequently plunging their swords symbolically into their own vitals even before they would literally do so at Philippi.

If Brutus and his fellow conspirators fail to see themselves and their own emulation mirrored in Julius Caesar, that failure is not due simply to blindness but to the complicated and contradictory nature of emulation itself, for if emulation contains within it impulses to rivalry, struggle, envy, hate, and destruction, it simultaneously contains impulses to identification and even love and brotherhood. After all, if emulation meant nothing but rivalry and competition, then a class that defined itself so centrally by means of such a principle would simply self-destruct at the start. This one has survived, however, for a very long time, specifically because emulation also entails the counter-principles of imitation and identification. While Julius Caesar clearly reveals the negative qualities contained in emulation, it also dramatizes the positive ones as it stresses the class solidarity among the conspirators and repeatedly insists on the love or friendship that binds them together and that generates what G. Wilson Knight long ago characterized as the highly charged erotic atmosphere of the play.²⁸ Despite their professed Stoic attitudes, Shakespeare's Romans are distinctly passionate beings, especially in their commitments to one another; they are bound by ties of fraternal love that are at once both political and personal. Revealingly, when the conspirators kneel to Julius Caesar in the assassination scene, they do so in order to beg the recall of the symbolically significant brother of one of their number. Later, when they attempt to recruit Antony after the assassination, they promise to extend to him, from "hearts / Of brothers' temper," their "kind love" (3.1.176-77), and Antony cunningly replies in the same terms: "Friends am I with you all, and love you all" (221). Note that with practically his first words in the second scene of the play, Cassius complains that he has lost some of Brutus' affection (1.2.32-36), and although the soliloquy at the end of that scene reveals that Cassius is cunningly manipulating Brutus in order to bring him into the conspiracy, the soliloquy identifies his treatment of Brutus as a seduction (312), a word that, albeit meant primarily as a metaphor here, retains a strong suggestion of passionate, if not sexual, involvement.

Passionate love is also the key to the quarrel that breaks out between Brutus and Cassius in the fourth act of the play. That quarrel is meant to be contrasted with the cold calculation of the Triumvirs in Act 4, scene 1, and the brief battle of wills between them in Act 5, scene 1, for Antony and Octavius represent the new order that will triumph as the old aristocracy of Brutus and Cassius goes down to defeat, a new order that will retain the competitiveness involved in emulation but completely dispense with the love. In the quarrel of Act 4, by contrast, although one can read Brutus' anger as an expression of righteous indignation over Cassius' morally compromised proceedings in obtaining money for their armies, a base course that he feels sullies the justice of the assassination and lowers them to the level of peasants and tradesmen, love is really the main issue. Brutus' first move is to accuse Cassius' cool treatment of the messenger he was sent as betokening a sickening and decay of love (4.2.18-21), and in the quarrel that then ensues, matching the ego of one imperial self against that of another, the vehemence of the insults traded points directly to deep feelings of personal betrayal. These feelings emerge directly when Cassius blurts out "You love me not" (4.3.89), and when he later offers his dagger rather melodramatically to Brutus, saying that he welcomes death because he is no longer loved (93-106). After this climactic moment, the breach between them is healed, and with bowls of wine they finally make a lovers' pledge. As Cassius puts it, "My heart is thirsty for that noble pledge. / Fill, Lucius, till the wine o'erswell the cup; / I cannot drink too much of Brutus' love" (159-61).

Significantly, they perform this act of communion and rededication just after Brutus has revealed to Cassius that Portia is dead. This sequence makes sense in the play because it points to the way in which the loving emulation linking these Roman aristocrats together may be read as a displacement, perhaps even a usurpation, of the attachment between man and wife.²⁹ Significantly, all male bonds with women in the play are either depreciated in favor of males' relationships with other males, or they are valuable insofar as they are mediated through other males, albeit the mediation takes on different forms. Thus, Caesar, though temporarily swayed to stay home by Calpurnia's forebodings, is persuaded by Decius Brutus to reject those fears as foolish and to feel ashamed of having yielded to his wife. Then, after having essentially dismissed her and her prophetic dream, he proposes to cement his bond to the other senators, his "friends" (2.2.128), by drinking wine with them just as Cassius and Brutus would do after their quarrel in Act 4. Moreover, Caesar's relationship to Calpurnia as husband to wife is presented as incomplete without the specific mediation of Antony whom Caesar asks to touch her during the race of the Lupercalia in order to remove the "sterile curse" (1.2.9) on her; Caesar inserts his devoted, loving friend (3.1.130ff.) between himself and his wife so that they may have children. Similarly, for Portia to establish a significant relationship with Brutus, to gain his confidence and be treated as a real partner in their marriage, to become truly his other "self," his "half (2.1.274), she correctly concludes that she must abandon her female identity and establish herself as a male. Thus, she wounds herself in the thigh, thereby supposedly providing herself "stronger than my sex" (296), the equal of Roman men, and she emphasizes her link to her father, calling herself "Cato's daughter" (295), as though by evoking Cato she could use his spirit to mediate a relationship of equality with Brutus. Portia's self-wounding uncannily anticipates her own and the conspirators' suicides—even as it recalls the heroic wounds of Pelham and Sidney—and it directly identifies the emulous male aristocratic behavior she unwittingly parodies as a form of self-destruction, more specifically, of self-castration. It also points to the primacy of male aristocrats' erotic bonding in the play whose power she seeks to re-possess by emulating their behavior. Nevertheless, she fails, for despite Brutus' real love for Portia and grief over her demise, he has only one brief scene with her, and the next time we see her, she is alone and desperate in the streets, worrying over her weakness as a woman (2.4.8-10, 39-40), while Brutus and his fellow conspirators are carrying out the assassination. In essence, Brutus' closest relationship is with these men, his "brothers" (3.1.176); they, more than Portia, form his truest family.

To be a Roman aristocrat means to be moved by emulation, and to be moved by emulation means both to want to destroy and to identify with and love the other members of one's class. A paradox, emulation involves simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal drives; it makes for class disintegration as well as class cohesion and places the individual in a state of utter self-contradiction. Twice over, then, the slaying of Julius Caesar could be read as an unwitting suicidal impulse. As has already been shown, it amounts to self-destruction insofar as the killing of Caesar because of his emulation logically entails the destruction of the conspirators who derive their identity from exactly the same principle. And the assassination also leads to self-destruction because it is a negation of love, of the identification involved in imitation, which, as much as competition and rivalry, serves as the basis of aristocratic identity. In this connection, it is significant that the deaths of the conspirators at the end of the play are presented specifically not as responses to their defeat, especially since the outcome of the battle is still uncertain, but as gestures of love. When Cassius kills himself, for example, he does so explicitly because he has supposedly allowed his "best friend" (5.3.35) Titinius to be taken by the enemy right before his eyes, and as he dies on his own sword, he identifies it as the one that killed Caesar. In both of these moments, then, although Cassius' suicide should be read as being already logically contained in the slaying of Julius Caesar, whose emulous competitiveness is really no different than Cassius' own, that suicide may also be taken as a gesture of love as he identifies with his friend and follower Titinius, and he may then well see his act as a guilty compensation for having destroyed the bond of love linking him to Caesar.

Even more than Cassius, Brutus kills himself out of love for Caesar. Brutus' suicide follows those of Titinius and Cassius and could be read as a matter of imitating them, but it is also directly related by Brutus to the assassination. Earlier, in his speech in the forum, Brutus identifies Caesar as his "best lover" (3.2.45), underscoring the passionate and political commitment he felt. For, having been spared by Caesar after the defeat of Pompey, to whom Brutus was initially allied, he attached himself to Caesar's party, and this attachment explains, better than any general scruples over assassination, his initial hesitation in entering into the conspiracy. This attachment likewise informs the aside Brutus delivers at the very end of the scene in Caesar's house when the latter invites the conspirators to share a bowl of wine with him, for in that aside Brutus grieves openly over his anticipated betrayal of his friend (2.2.129-30). Finally, the love bond linking the two men is confirmed by Brutus' holding back at the assassination—he is the last to stab Caesar—and by the latter's pained "Et tu Brute?" (3.1.77) which records his terrible sense of betrayed loyalty. Early in the play Brutus characterizes himself as being at war with himself (2.1.67-69), a statement that may suggest a basic opposition in him between passion and reason. Could it not also be read, in addition, as an implicit recognition that his wish to kill Julius Caesar because of the latter's imperial ambition is really an uneasy, half-conscious wish to kill himself, since he shares that ambition in his own way as part of his aristocratic identity? There is another sense, however, in which Brutus is truly at war with himself: he is split between his Roman imperial will, which cannot accept Caesar's dominance, and his passionate love for and identification with the man. In other words, Brutus experiences within himself the paradoxical opposition lying at the very heart of the emulation that defines him as an aristocrat. Brutus' suicide, then, like Cassius', is a confirmation of the two-fold self-destruction involved in the assassination: Brutus' killing himself is logically entailed in the assassination since in that act he was really destroying a man because of an essential, identity-determining trait he shared with him; and, more simply, he kills himself in order to atone for the love he betrayed. Through suicide he is able to exorcise the ghost that has haunted him since Philippi and which has really been with him since the Ides of March, and he consequently welcomes death with relief: "Caesar now be still. / I kill'd not thee with half so good a will" (5.5.50-51). At this moment of truth, Brutus recognizes that such an end is what his life has been aiming at all along; as he puts it, "my bones would rest, / That have but labor'd to attain this hour" (41-42).

If being a Roman aristocrat, according to Shakespeare's play, means to be emulous, so did being an Elizabethan aristocrat. Emulation was both an essential quality to be cultivated and simultaneously a danger to be avoided.³⁰ On the one hand, it was encouraged in the informal education provided at home, fathers promoting emulation among their sons, a practice to which Francis Bacon strenuously objected in his essay "Of Parents and Children."³¹ Emulation was also central to formal education, since rhetorica' training, which served as the core of that education, was basically a training in imitative, competitive disputation and rivalrous display, and schoolmasters were encouraged to sow among their students "matter of all honest contention and laudable emulation," "honest" and "laudable," like Greville's "unspotted," here being meant to minimize, if not deny, the harshly aggressive and competitive aspects of emulation.³² Characteristically, Sir William Cornwallis, in his essay "Of Aemulation," opens by declaring it "the refined issue of Envy," but he then goes on to qualify this negative assessment by stressing how valuable emulation is as it leads human beings towards virtue, and he concludes by completely reversing his opening move and celebrating what he calls an "honest Aemulation" (26-27). Moreover, not only did one rival one's fellows in argument, but one also sought in history and literature great figures worthy of emulation. For instance, according to Thomas Fiston in his 1596 preface to Caxton's Auncient Historie of the Destruction of Troy (London, 1596), by reading chivalric literature—something that schoolmasters normally disparaged in comparison with ancient texts—youth would be inspired with "an ardent desire of imitating, if not matching or over-going the most glorious attempts of the greatest and most excellent."³³ As Anthony Esler has demonstrated, the generation growing up in the 1580s and 1590s not only had aspiring minds like Tamburlaine's, but developed an ideology of competition, aspiration, and excelling, in short, of emulation.³⁴ All sought sovereignty and honor, and as Bacon shrewdly noted in his essay, "Of Honour and Reputation," honor "that is gained and broken upon another hath the quickest reflection," thus suggesting the indispensable role rivals had in enabling the acquisition of personal glory.³⁵

Although emulation, involving both identification and competition with valued others, was thus regarded as a positive source of identity—and particularly aristocratic identity—in Shakespeare's age, it was also seen as especially difficult to control and dangerous both to the moral character of the individual and to the stability of the state. Often the word was simply used as a synonym for envy, as in the passage from Cornwallis cited above, or in Bacon's defense of himself against the charge that he betrayed his friend Essex at the latter's trial.³⁶ Sir Robert Naunton, describing the nature of Queen Elizabeth's reign in his Fragmenta Regalia, is generally critical when he speaks of emulation, which he sees as the chief motive of Leicester and as something even the queen herself might be conceived to have felt when she refused to allow Sir Philip Sidney to become king of Poland.³⁷ Strikingly, he diagnoses as "a kind of emulation" (53) Essex's insulting of Sir Charles Blount when the latter wore a jewel given to him by the queen, an incident that led to a duel between them in which Essex was wounded. The emulation, obviously most "spotted" indeed, which was felt by Elizabethan aristocrats turned the court into a power keg of rivalry and factionalism; Francis Allen wrote to Anthony Bacon in 1589 that there "was never in court such emulation, such envy, such back-biting, as is now at this time."³⁸ Emulous rivalry among aristocrats was also a problem away from the court. Essex wrote from Zutphen of the private wars occurring among the noble leaders of the English forces, and in one letter he described at length the emulous rivalry between Sir William Pelham and Sir John Norreys.³⁹ Obviously, Sidney was not the only aristocrat to feel the sting of emulation at Zutphen, even if he was the only one to die as a result of it. Naunton acknowledges the problem of emulation and its attendant factionalism at Elizabeth's court, for although he praises her for tightly controlling the aristocratic factions she allowed to arise and through which she ruled, he admits that her success depended on her "starv[ing] . . . all emulations, which are apt to rise and vent into obloquious acrimony (even against the Prince)."⁴⁰ Similarly, Thomas Wilson, in his State of England Anno Dom. 1600, regards emulation negatively and acknowledges its dangers by praising "some good Lawes made to avoid emulacion amongst noblemen and gentlemen and also factions which are tedious to repeat."⁴¹ Bacon, more astute than most, also recognized the dangerous instability caused by emulation and its attendant factionalism, and he opened his essay "Of Faction," which is focused on contemporary factionalism, with the simple assertion that it is not wise for a prince to rule "according to the respect of factions" (211)—something everyone recognized Elizabeth was doing.

For political reasons, Bacon never names Elizabeth and her court in this essay which appeared in the early edition of the Essays in 1597. What he does talk about, however, in analyzing the factionalism produced by emulation and rivalry, is especially pertinent to Julius Caesar: Bacon illustrates the dangers of factionalism, and especially the tendency of factions to split into rival groups, by reference to ancient Rome. Specifically, he mentions the faction of Caesar and Pompey which broke apart after the authority of the Senate was pulled down, and he continues: "The faction or party of Antonius and Octavianus Caesar against Brutus and Cassius held out likewise for a time, but when Brutus and Cassius were overthrown, then soon after Antonius and Octavianus brake and subdivided" (211). Similarly, Sir William Cornwallis in "Of Friendship & Factions," though clearly concerned with contemporary politics, illustrates his points by referring to the Roman "Triumviri" (25). He and Bacon thus reveal a normal tendency in their day to see Elizabethan politics through the lens of ancient Rome.

More important than references in Bacon's works, there is evidence in one of Shakespeare's own plays linking Julius Caesar to the emulous rivalries and intensely factional politics of the present. In the Chorus that begins the fifth act of Henry V, he compares the crowd that welcomed Henry back to England after his victory over the French to the senators and plebeians of Rome going forth to "fetch their conqu'ring Caesar in" (28). Shakespeare then goes on to make another comparison, this time linking both Henry and Caesar to "the general of our gracious Empress" returning from Ireland with "rebellion broached on his sword" (30, 32). This allusion most editors assume is to Essex who was on his last, desperate, heroic campaign in Ireland during 1599, the year in which both Henry V and Julius Caesar were initially performed.⁴² If Shakespeare thinks of Essex as Julius Caesar in Henry V, is it not then most likely he was thinking about him as well, in Julius Caesar, which is so totally preoccupied with the aristocracy?

As the reference to Sir Robert Naunton's Fragmenta Regalia revealed, Essex was certainly seen by his contemporaries as an exemplar of emulation and recognized as the leader of one of the two chief factions in Elizabeth's court during the 1590s. Celebrated as a heroic figure in the popular imagination, Essex was the heir apparent to Sir Philip Sidney, having served with Sidney at Zutphen, received Sidney's best sword as a bequest, and married Frances Walsingham, Sidney's widow.⁴³ Like Sidney, Essex was frequently moved by the "unspotted emulation of his heart" to perform flamboyant, heroic—though also reckless and potentially self-destructive—feats. In 1589, for instance, during the attack on Lisbon, he thrust his pike into the gates of the city, challenging the Spaniards inside to a joust; and at the assault on Cadiz of 1596, he scaled the city walls with his troops and personally led them into the central square. Such actions gained Essex renown, but they also necessitated great personal risk and sometimes involved something closer to dereliction of duty, as when he left his troops leaderless in France and needlessly crossed enemy territory in order to make a splendid entry into the allied camp of Henri IV at Compiègne in 1591. This action prompted an official rebuke from the Privy Council which was speaking on behalf of the queen,⁴⁴ and in another letter she herself reproved him for exposing himself to unnecessary dangers and leading his men to be slaughtered.⁴⁵ At home in the court Essex also revealed his emulousness in his prickly pride, competitiveness, and insistence on preeminence: he fought a duel with Sir Charles Blount; challenged the Lord Admiral Charles Howard to one; and clamored for the Earl Marshall's office which would give him precedence over all other peers at court and which he obtained in 1597. In 1598, he quarreled with the queen herself over the command of the Irish campaign, turned his back on her, and then scandalized everyone by reaching for his sword when she responded to his insulting gesture by boxing his ears. According to Lacey Baldwin Smith, there is in all of Essex's emulous, self-aggrandizing behavior, and especially in his deliberate courting of danger in battle in response to personal setbacks or affronts, an "emotional, almost suicidal, flamboyance."⁴⁶ Indeed, Essex's letters record him responding to setbacks at court and the queen's lack of affection both by withdrawing physically from her presence and by seeking to affirm his identity as a soldier on the battlefield. At Flushing, for instance, he says he seeks "una bella morire"—a heroic end that will rebuke an ungrateful queen—whereas in Ireland he despairingly yearns for death as his campaign there fails.⁴⁷ Granted such statements, Smith's reference to suicidal flamboyance hardly seems an exaggeration.

Fully recognizing how he was "tied to mine own reputation,"⁴⁸ tied to the reputation for heroism he had created for himself, Essex sought out the command of that Irish expedition in 1599 in a last, desperate attempt to repair his faltering fortunes, a suicidal enterprise involving the enormous risk of defeat and disgrace which Essex recognized only too well. That defeat and disgrace were occurring during the summer of 1599 just as Shakespeare's company was, most likely, preparing to put on Julius Caesar. Essex's failures in Ireland and the intense dissatisfaction of the queen with his progress were known outside the immediate circle of the court, as three of John Chamberlain's letters written in June and August of that year make abundantly clear.⁴⁹ Essex's enemies at court were doubtless gloating over the Irish debacle and anticipating his fall from grace. In the most negative construction of the situation, they could be imagined as conspiring to undo him—a view that Shakespeare, on the periphery of the Essex circle, could have encountered and that is most suggestive for the action of Julius Caesar.

Essex not only epitomized the emulation motivating Elizabethan aristocrats, but he was specifically connected with both Roman antiquity in general and Julius Caesar in particular. In fact, Essex not only regarded himself as an ideal knight—Sir Philip Sidney redivivus—but he also viewed himself as a Roman hero. Thus, when warned about the opportunity he was providing his enemies by absenting himself from the court after the Queen boxed his ears in 1598, he replied that he was better off away from it: "when I was in the court," he wrote to the Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton, "I found them [his enemies] absolute: and therefore I had rather they should triumph alone, than they should have me attendant on their chariots."⁵⁰ Anticipating his possible defeat here, Essex clearly thought of him: self as an ancient hero who would be forced to endure the humiliation of a "Roman" triumph staged by his enemies. In the same vein, towards the end of his disastrous Irish campaign, Essex saw others, like so many Roman conquerors, succeeding where he had failed: they would "achieve and finish the work, and live to erect trophies."⁵¹ He even thought of himself at times as Julius Caesar: according to Lacey Baldwin Smith, one of Essex's favorite phrases, which he used after his appointment as Lord Lieutenant over the army being sent to Ireland, was Caesar's famous "The die is cast."⁵²

Moreover, others saw Essex both as a Roman hero and as Julius Caesar. After his triumph at Cadiz in 1596, for example, he was popularly compared to the great soldiers of the ancient world,⁵³ and a Latin poem from that period explicitly identified him with Hercules and, with its play on "Veni, vidi, vici," may have linked him to Julius Caesar as well: "Vere Dux, Deverux, et verior Hercule: Gades / Nam semel hic vidit: vicit ac ille simul" ("True Duke, Devereux, and truer Hercules: For no sooner did he see Cadiz than he conquered it").⁵⁴ Moreover, the passage about factions from Bacon's essay, which was mentioned above, certainly invited contemporaries to compare Caesar and Pompey and the other Romans to Essex and Cecil who were engaged infactional struggles throughout the 1590s. Invoking a different era of Roman history, Greville in his Life of Sidney at one point compared Essex to Remus threatening to leap over the walls of Rome (176-77). Most noteworthy, Sir Robert Naunton directly compared the followers and advisors of Essex during the rebellion to the followers of Julius Caesar: they were "intoxicated with hopes," having sucked in too much nourishment from their great nurse the Queen, "and so like Caesars [followers] would have all or none."⁵⁵ Finally, in a letter written to Essex just before his Irish campaign, Francis Bacon not only warned him of the dangers involved, but paralleled him directly to the Roman hero Scipio and then went on to compare his fight with the "savage" Irish to the Romans' wars with the Germans and Britons, a flattering comparison that certainly evokes the exploits of Julius Caesar.⁵⁶

The comparison between Essex and Caesar must have impressed itself upon the minds of men such as Naunton, Bacon, and Shakespeare because of the many striking parallels one could easily draw between the two figures: both were self-publicizing, heroic warriors and conquerors; both successfully courted the common people and commanded powerful factions among the aristocracy; and both were seen as aspiring to kingship. Thus, Essex remained a heroic figure in the public imagination to the very end, and he was also seen, as his life neared its climax and certainly well before his attempted insurrection in 1601, as seeking popular favor and wishing to place himself at the head of the state. In 1596, for instance, Bacon warned him that his courting of the populace was dangerous because it could be seen as a threat to the sovereignty of the queen, and he consequently advised Essex to speak openly against popularity before her.⁵⁷ William Cecil, in a treatise of fatherly advice written for his son Robert, also clearly identified Essex's image as involving the pursuit of power through "popularity."⁵⁸ And John Chamberlain referred to that same image when he remarked that Essex had "ever lived popularly" and wished to leave a good opinion of himself with the people at the end of his life.⁵⁹ It is note worthy that in a short work written in Latin, Imago Civilis Julii Caesaris, Bacon constructed an image of Caesar that also stressed as one of its major components "studium popularitatis" ("the pursuit of popular favor").⁶⁰

That Essex really did seek and enjoyed popular favor is clear from a variety of sources. He courted public opinion, for instance—and annoyed the queen—by writing a letter to Anthony Bacon and arranging to have it printed in order to defend himself from attacks that he favored war on Spain for purely personal reasons.⁶¹ Bacon not only warned him against such actions but reveals that they apparently succeeded when he warned the queen, after she had placed Essex under house arrest following his return from Ireland, that she ran the risk of alienating the populace because of his great fame among them.⁶² Moreover, a letter written to a Venetian correspondent by Francis Cordle and dated 21 July 1599 also documents Essex's popularity: although Essex "has little grace at Court" because of his failures in Ireland, Cordle writes, the "common people still favour the Earl."⁶³ There were apparently so many popular manifestations of support for Essex after his return from Ireland and placement under house arrest that the Court of Star Chamber eventually had to move to suppress them.⁶⁴ Finally, contemporary reports on Essex's insurrection indicated that the people seemed "to pity his case," and only an official proclamation naming him traitor kept them from rising up on his behalf.⁶⁵

Elizabethans considered the courting of popularity to be virtually identical with the pursuit of political supremacy. Bacon's warning to Essex cited above establishes this connection, as does Sir William Cornwallis' condemnation of popularity: one who pursues it is "a subject engrossing subjects," who usurps the "love of the people, the generalitie and grosse body of which is destinated onely to the Prince" (103). Consequently, despite Essex's insistence at his trial that he did not aim at the crown⁶⁶—an insistence that there is good reason to credit—his courting of popularity alone suggested such a motive to his contemporaries, and it is this motive, of course, on which the "Declaration" condemning him, written largely by Bacon and presented at the trial, insists.⁶⁷ Essex's pursuit of political supremacy by means of popularity may be seen as reaching a kind of public consciousness well before his attempted coup d'etat, for in February of 1599 "John Hayward published and dedicated his Life and Raigne of Henry IIII to the Earl," thus linking him "with the overmighty Bolingbroke who had defied the divinity that 'doth hedge a king' and had set himself up as Henry IV."⁶⁸ Essex's pursuit of rule also comes to a different kind of consciousness in Julius Caesar, for in his play Shakespeare chooses virtually to ignore Caesar's heroism—perhaps one might say that he simply assumes its past existence—and to place, instead, the major emphasis on his other traits—his courting of the plebs, his factional leadership, and his desire for kingship. Looking back over the Essex affair, Sir Robert Naunton in his Fragmenta Regalia implicitly presents it as a tragedy in which the "son of Bellona" (55), infused with the spirit of ambition and glory by his family, friends, and creatures, undid himself and brought about his final "Catastrophe" (54).⁶⁹ In 1599, Shakespeare had, in a sense, already written that tragedy in Julius Caesar, well before it was ever performed on the boards of history.

Shakespeare's play is no simple allegory, however, no pièce à clé, no Tragedie of Essex. If Caesar may be paralleled to Essex, one would be hard pressed to find other correspondences, such as between Brutus and William or Robert Cecil. Moreover, Essex is not deaf in one ear, nor is Caesar the favorite of a reigning queen. In this connection, it is important to remember that Shakespeare's play invites interpretation of Caesar as an extreme case of typical aristocratic behavior. Similarly, contemporaries may have regarded Essex less as an exception than as an extreme version of the rule. After all, he was not the only center of an aristocratic faction during Elizabeth's reign, nor was he the only figure who was regarded as a would-be king. Both of the Cecils, for instance, incurred similar charges, contemporaries accusing William Cecil Lord Burghley of wanting to establish a "Regnum Cecilianum,"⁷⁰ while a popular ballad dating from 1601 ascribed the same motives to his son Robert after Essex's fall: "Little Cecil trips up and down, / He rules both Court and Crown."⁷¹ To be sure, the connections between the Caesar of Shakespeare's play and Essex are far more extensive and powerful than those between Caesar and any other contemporary historical figure. Perhaps Shakespeare crafted it thus because of the charismatic presence of Essex in the minds of his contemporaries, or perhaps because of his own distant and indeterminate relationship, through his sometime patron the Earl of Southampton, to the Essex faction. However, the important point is that the essential connections between Shakespeare's Caesar and Essex are the common features that define them as aristocrats in their respective worlds, rather than the unique, idiosyncratic features that make them individuals. Caesar can thus be read as Essex if both are taken as representative types, illustrations of aristocratic emulation and factionalism that were played out to their logical, tragic conclusions.

The title of this essay is borrowed from Lawrence Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558-1641 (London, 1967). In that classic study, Stone analyzes the transformation of the English aristocracy between the reign of Henry VIII and the Civil War. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the aristocracy was a class of feudal magnates who defined themselves primarily as warriors, commanded troops of loyal retainers and dependents, and enjoyed considerable power in the country. Over the next one hundred years or so, because of the efforts of ever more absolutist monarchs to concentrate power in their own hands, the aristocracy became a class of countiers who often had little or no military experience and who exercised power primarily insofar as those monarchs were willing to grant it to them. These courtiers were placed in often desperate financial straits by the general price rise in the period and by the enormous expenses of life at court and in London, and they became increasingly dependent for honors and financial rewards on kings and queens whose resources, no matter how freely given, were never able to satisfy them sufficiently. Spending more and more of their time in the city away from their estates, they alienated the peasants on those estates, especially after the accession of James I, by jacking up rents in order to meet expenses, and they became associated with courts whose licentiousness scandalized the populace generally and especially that part of it inclined towards Puritanism. Gradually, the aristocracy lost so much of its prestige and influence that, on the eve of the Civil War, it was totally unable to control elections to Parliament as it normally did. This decline, which Stone describes at length, does not tell the whole story, however, for he argues that 1640 marked the nadir, not the end, of the aristocracy. In the later seventeenth century the class, though shaken and transformed, recovered much of the power and influence it had lost. It embraced the new, more privatized conception of individual identity which first appeared among the puritan bourgeoisie, thus eliminating much of the need for costly, arrogant public display that previously depleted its resources. Increasingly well educated, it became the arbiter of taste. And, most important, thanks to more efficient estate management, it regained a financial stability that enabled it to control, through the power of the purse to buy votes, the party politics that developed after the Interregnum. It is this general, almost cyclical development that Stone insists on with the key metaphor in his title: he sees the aristocracy as going through something like a prolonged sickness in the Renaissance and reaching a "crisis" of identity and power that passes with the Civil War, a crisis from which the patient, admittedly much changed by the experience, finally recovers its health.⁷²

What I wish to argue about Julius Caesar is that the play uses Roman history in order to hold a mirror up to the state of Shakespeare's England, and in particular, to reflect and reflect on, to identify and provide terms for imagining, what Stone has called the crisis of the aristocracy. Like Stone, the play suggests that the aristocracy is undergoing a profound change that will eventuate in its ultimate loss as a class of any real power and influence, in its marginalization by increasingly absolutist monarchs who actually saw themselves reflected in the Roman emperors who came to power when Octavius finally triumphed and ended the civil wars whose initial stages Julius Caesar depicts. To be sure, the analytical perspective offered by the play is not Stone's: where the latter emphasizes economics and social history, the former presents the situation in moral terms. Shakespeare's play is analytical, revealing the self-destruction, the suicide, to which an entire class is being impelled by its essential values and mode of self-definition, by its emulation and factionalism.

Like Stone, but in a far less casual manner, Julius Caesar characterizes the aristocracy and the state they inhabit as being sick, from the opening scene with its cobbler's jokes about being a "surgeon to old shoes" (1.1.23-24). through the epilepsy of Caesar, the physical ailment of Caius Ligarius, and the internal insurrection of Brutus that has made him unwell, down to the assassination itself that is imagined as making "whole" men "sick" (2.2.328). The crucial difference between Shakespeare's play and Stone on this score, however, is that the metaphors of Julius Caesar define the moral condition of a society going through an enormous change, identifying that change itself as illness, while Stone's metaphor of crisis is a rhetorical ploy, merely a conceptual instrument used to give shape to the history of the period. Moreover, the play does not benefit from Stone's hindsight. It presents the aristocracy on the way down, in the throes of a moral and social sickness from which it holds out no real hope of a recovery. Aristocratic emulation spells factionalism and civil strife, and it leads inevitably, tragically, to the dead-end of suicide. Lacking the advantage of Stone's longer view, Julius Caesar depicts a sick world in the process of succumbing to centralized, absolutist, one-man rule not because of the exceptional talents of characters such as Caesar and Octavius, but because of the emulation, the imperial will, which animates the behavior of the entire class of aristocrats and leads ineluctably to their unintended, collective self-destruction. Driven by the hunger of emulation to extend endlessly the terrain of the self, they destroy and will keep destroying one another until the stage is bare and only a single imperial will is left. As a character in another play, a play also concerned with emulation and factionalism, sums it up with fitting finality: the appetite driving them on is "an universal wolf; it will "make perforce an universal prey / And last eat up himself (Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.121, 123-24).

Notes

I owe several individuals a debt of gratitude for their help with this essay: Louis Montrose, for commenting thoughtfully on an earlier version of it; Brian Levack, for aiding me with historical materials; and Frank Whigham, who offered many helpful suggestions and did careful readings of several versions of the essay. My greatest debt is owed to Eric Mallin, who generously supplied me with a bibliography of material on Essex and Elizabethan politics when I was in an early stage of my work on this essay and whose splendid chapter on Essex, emulation, and Troilus and Cressida in his 1987 Stanford University dissertation prompted me to begin thinking about Julius Caesar in similar terms.

¹ All references to Shakespeare's plays are to The Complete Works, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, IL, 1980). References are to act, scene, and lines.

² Sir Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, intro. Nowell Smith (Oxford, 1907), 139-40. In keeping with his hagiographic purpose, at the start of his work, Greville says that his tribute to Sidney will make him a "Sea-mark" for his countrymen (3). Later, he declares that Sidney is the kind of man princes would want as a model to encourage the ambition of others, for he drew those around him to imitate him (34). Greville pushes his praise to its highest reaches when he asserts that Sidney would have restored the "ancient vigour" of the world if God had been pleased to allow it (36-37).

³ Ibid., 127-28.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid., 127.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley, 1969), 131. Lowe this reference to my colleague Frank Whigham who has written perceptively on the nature of Renaissance emulation in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, 1984), 78-82. On emulation in Renaissance rhetorical and literary theory, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), 58-59, 78-79, and 182-84.

⁸ Throughout his Life of Sidney, Greville generally uses emulation in a negative sense to mean a destructive form of rivalry and competition. For instance, he summarizes Sidney's argument that the English ought to attack the Spaniards because such an action would not be "subject to emulation of Court" (112). Later, commenting on the commercial prosperity of the Dutch, he remarks that it "would infallibly stir up emulation" in those who saw it (143). By contrast, imitation appears a more neutral, less troubling concept to Greville. Thus he consistently presents Sidney as a trail-blazer for others to follow, as Greville says he himself did when, acquiescing in the queen's command to stay at court, he imitated Sidney and used that time to write: Sidney, being "the exact image of quiet and action . . . , made me think it no small degree of honour to imitate, or tread in the steps of such a Leader" (150). Consequently, it is significant not only that Greville feels compelled to qualify Sidney's emulous response to Sir William Pelham as "unspotted," but that he chooses to use the term "emulation" at all, since the less problematic "imitation" was clearly to hand.

⁹ On the dating, see the Bevington ed., 1622.

¹⁰ For discussions of Julius Caesar as a play about regicide, see, for example: T. J. B. Spencer, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (London, 1963), 20-23; Virgil K. Whitaker, The Mirror Up to Nature: The Technique of Shakespeare's Tragedies (San Marino, CA, 1965), 125-29; James E. Phillips, Jr., The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays (New York, 1940), 179-87; Mildred E. Hartsock, "The Complexity of Julius Caesar," PMLA 81 (1966): 56-62; Douglas Peterson, "'Wisdom Consumed in Confidence': An Examination of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar," Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965): 19-28; and Colbert Kearney, "The Nature of an Insurrection: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar" Studies 63 (1974): 141-52. Several critics have responded to this view by arguing that since Caesar is not actually a king, but merely a would-be one, the play cannot be read as a defense of monarchy nor can Brutus be seen as a regicide; see, for example: Irving Ribner, "Political Issues in Julius Caesar," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 56 (1957): 10-22; and Moody E. Prior, "The Search for a Hero in Julius Caesar," Renaissance Drama n. s. 2 (1966): 81-101.

¹¹ On the parallels between Brutus and Caesar, see: Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), 106-12; Lynn de Gerenday, "Play, Ritualization, and Ambivalence in Julius Caesar," Literature and Psychology 24 (1974): 24-33; and Pierre Spriet, "Amour et politique: le discours de l'autre dans Julius Caesar," in Coriolan: Theatre, ed. Jean-Paul Debax and Yves Peyré, ser. B, 5 (Toulouse, 1984), 227-29.

¹² On the general parallels among all the aristocrats in the play, see R. A. Yoder, "History and the Histories in Julius Caesar," Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973): 309-27; and John W. Velz, "Undular Structure in Julius Caesar" Modern Language Review 66 (1971): 21-30.

¹³ In Herschel Baker, ed., The Later Renaissance in England: Nondramatic Verse and Prose, 1600-1660 (Boston, 1975), 874.

¹⁴ See Lacey Baldwin Smith, Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 268-69.

¹⁵ Greville, 127; Edmund Spenser, Minor Poems, ed. Ernest de Sélincourt (Oxford, 1910), 365.

¹⁶ Many critics have argued that Shakespeare sought to re-create Rome in this play and have praised him for the relative historical accuracy of his depiction. See, among others: T. J. B. Spencer, "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans," Shakespeare Surrey 10 (1957): 27-38; Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire (Ithaca, NY, 1976); and Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare's Rome (Cambridge, 1983).

¹⁷ On social mobility and the cultural response to it, especially in courtesy books, see Whigham. On the complex, problematic nature of Renaissance self-fashioning, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980).

¹⁸ On the ways Elizabethans attempted to define their social order and the problems caused for commentators by social mobility, see David Cressy, "Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England," Literature and History 3 (1976):29-44.

¹⁹ See Louis Montrose, "'Shaping Fantasies': Figura-tions of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," Representations I (1983):61-94. In a footnote Montrose acknowledges his indebtedness to the conceptions of Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY, 1981), 81-82.

²⁰ The play has been related to contemporary political problems by Ribner. Ribner's emphasis is very different from mine, for although he also wishes to connect the play to Essex as I do, he does not attempt to relate it to aristocratic behavior in general in Elizabethan England. William and Barbara Rosen also connect Julius Caesar to Shakespeare's world, but only in the most generalized fashion; see their 'Julius Caesar: 'The Specialty of Rule,'" in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Julius Caesar, ed. Leonard Dean (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968), 109. Lucy de Bruyn relates the play to Essex and factionalism, but nonetheless sees it as being essentially a re-presentation of Tudor ideals of kingship; see her Mob-Rule and Riots: The Present Mirrored in the Past (London, 1981), 219-26, 238. In his James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983), Jonathan Goldberg reads the play in connection with James I and his idea of romanitas, stressing the self-referentiality and the self-destructiveness of the imperial self (164-76). Despite its slightly anachronistic character (Julius Caesar was, after all, put on stage more than three years before James ascended the throne), such a reading should be seen as complementing more than contradicting my own.

²¹ On the irony of Cassius' identification of himself with Aeneas, see Miola, 85, 88.

²²Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege (New Haven, 1985), esp. the first three chapters. Braden's argument about the will and imperial selfhood may be paralleled with what has been said about the idea of "Caesarism," that is, willful self-creation, specifically in connection with Julius Caesar; see J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined (London, 1949), 46-55. It should be noted that the imperial self of the Neronian age and that of the Renaissance are not identical. After all, Nero was an absolute ruler in a way no Renaissance monarch ever could be. Nevertheless, granted the differences involved, it remains the case that the Renaissance itself insisted on its affinity to Roman antiquity and saw in the imperial self dramatized in Seneca's tragedies a model for its own "aspiring minds."

²³ Cf., John R. Kayser and Ronald J. Lettieri, "'The Last of All the Romans': Shakespeare's Commentary on Classical Republicanism," Clio I 9 (1979-80):197-227.

²⁴ R. A. Foakes notes that the play is concerned with factionalism, but does not develop this observation; see his "An Approach to Julius Caesar," Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954):259-70.

²⁵ Stoicism in Julius Caesar has attracted considerable attention and has occasioned debate as to whether its characters should really be considered true Stoics in any technical sense. Since indifference to worldly fortune and a willingness to commit suicide were two of the leading marks of Stoicism in the popular imagination of the Renaissance, as a work like Erasmus' Praise of Folly fully attests, it seems relatively certain that Shakespeare's audience would have seen the characters of the play in that light. On this subject see: Jean M. Auffret, "The Philosophic Background of Julius Caesar," Cahiers Elisabéthains 5 (1963):66-92; Ruth M. Levitsky, "The Elements Were so Mix'd . . . ," PMLA 88 (1973):240-45; Julian C. Rice, "Julius Caesar and the Judgment of the Senses," Studies in English Literature 13 (1973):238-56; Mark Sacharoff," Suicide and Brutus' Philosophy in Julius Caesar," Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1972): 115-22; and Marvin L. Vawter, "'Division 'tween Our Souls': Shakespeare's Stoic Brutus," Shakespeare Studies 1 (1974):173-95, and idem, "'After Their Fashion': Cicero and Brutus in Julius Caesar," ibid., 9 (1976):205-19.

²⁶ For an insightful recent discussion of Brutus' self-deception, see Gayle Greene, '"The Power of Speech to Stir Men's Blood': The Language of Tragedy in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar" Renaissance Drama n. s. 11 (1980):67-93.

²⁷ On the importance of the will for Brutus and his domineering over others, see Gordon Ross Smith, "Brutus, Virtue and Will," Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959):367-79.

²⁸The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies Including the Roman Plays (London, 1931). On the love of Brutus and Cassius, see also: John Roland Dove and Peter Gamble, "'Lovers in Peace,' Brutus and Cassius: A Re-Examination," English Studies 60 (1979):543-54; and Jan H. Blits, "Manliness and Friendship in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar," Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (1981): 155-67. Although I do not agree with every detail of this last article and do not share its author's moralistic approach, I nevertheless found it most useful in my reading of the play.

²⁹ One is tempted to say that what marital love represents is offered by the play as an implicit norm against which the powerful male bonds of the Roman aristocrats need to be measured. However, the stress on male friendship in such plays as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Two Noble Kinsmen, as well as the relationship between Shakespeare and his young patron in the Sonnets, suggest that such a view may be too simple. Strikingly, in the essay "Of Love," by Shakespeare's near contemporary Sir William Cornwallis the Younger (1579-1613), love is defined as a uniting of affections whose primary and ideal—most "celestial"—form involves the agreement of man and man, whereas the relationship of man and woman is secondary and defective because lust affects it too strongly; see his Essayes, ed. Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore, 1946), 20.

³⁰ Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, NC, 1966), 53-54.

³¹The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth, 1985), 80.

³² William Hayne, Certaine Epistles of Tully (1611), B4^V , quoted in L. B. Smith, 112.

³³ Fiston, A3^v , cited in Esler, 110.

³⁴ Esler, 51-86.

³⁵ Bacon, 1985, 219.

³⁶ Francis Bacon, "Apologie . . . Concerning the Late Earle of Essex," in The Letters and the Life, ed. James Spedding (London, 1868), 3:153.

³⁷ Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, Or, Observations on the Late Queen Elizabeth, Her Times, and Favourites, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1870), 28, 35.

³⁸ Cited in Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1754), 1:57.

³⁹ Walter B. Devereux, Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex (London, 1853), 1:180-81.

⁴⁰ Naunton, 16. In his Life of Sidney, Greville also describes how Elizabeth controlled the power of the aristocracy by playing one nobleman off against the others (202), although he insists she did not use factions in doing so (182). Perhaps Greville's reluctance to speak of factions may be explained by his historical situation, since he was writing during James's reign at a time when factions were very much an issue, and he wanted to offer the reign of Elizabeth as a counter-example. Naunton's reference to Elizabeth's "starv[ing]" of factions concerns the dispensing of patronage. Elizabeth is imagined in his treatise as a nurturing mother giving the milk of money and favors to her dependent children-courtiers (51, 55). One method for controlling them, obviously, was to deny them that milk, to starve them. Bacon implies a similar image when he praises Elizabeth for keeping her servants both satisfied and in appetite (1868, I:139), although he stresses just how delicate a balance between dispensing and denying patronage, giving nurture and starving, Elizabeth had to maintain.

⁴¹ Ed. F. J. Fisher (Camden Miscellany, 16 [London, 1936]), 41.

⁴² A minority view holds that the passage in question refers to Lord Mountjoy who was in Ireland between 1600 and 1603 and that the Choruses were added during those years. On this matter, see Shakespeare, 1620.

⁴³ Neville Williams, All the Queen's Men: Elizabeth I and Her Courtiers (London, 1972), 213-19. I have profitted greatly in thinking about Essex from Richard McCoy's "'A dangerous image': the Earl of Essex and Elizabethan Chivalry," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983):313-29, as well as from Eric Mallin's chapter on Essex and Troilus and Cressida cited in the headnote to this essay.

⁴⁴ Devereux, 1:245.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 268.

⁴⁶ L. B. Smith, 203.

⁴⁷ Devereux, 1:188, and 2:68.

⁴⁸ Historical Manuscript Commission, Salisbury MSS 9, 10, cited in L. B. Smith, 226.

⁴⁹ John Chamberlain, letters to Dudley Carleton, no. 20, 28 June 1599; no. 21, 1 August 1599; and no. 23, 23 August 1599, in The Letters, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia, 1939), 1:74, 78, 84.

⁵⁰ L. B. Smith, 221, citing Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth from the Year 1581 till her Death (London, 1754), 2:386.

⁵¹ Devereux, 2:40.

⁵² L. B. Smith, 227. See also Devereux, 2:23.

⁵³ Williams, 229.

⁵⁴ Cited in Devereux, 2:379.

⁵⁵ Naunton, 52.

⁵⁶Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath (London, 1862), 2:131.

⁵⁷ Bacon, 1862, 2:41 and 44.

⁵⁸ Certain Precepts for the Well Ordering of a Man's Life" (ca. 1584), in Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis Osborne, ed. Louis B. Wright (Ithaca, NY, 1962), 13.

⁵⁹ Chamberlain, 1:120.

⁶⁰ Bacon, 1862, 12:32.

⁶¹ Devereux, 1:484-88.

⁶² Bacon, 1862, 3:149-51.

⁶³ Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, 251-52, cited in de Bruyn, 242-43.

⁶⁴ Devereux, 2:89-90.

⁶⁵ Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, 11 February 1601, cited in de Bruyn, 243.

⁶⁶ Devereux, 2:166.

⁶⁷ Bacon, 1862, 2:248-51. On Essex's motives, see L. B. Smith, 268. Smith argues that at the trial the Attorney General Edward Cokes demolished the claim that Essex sought merely to reconcile himself with Elizabeth and to rescue her from evil counselors, insisting that Essex would have treated her just as Henry IV did Richard II. The best that Smith can say for Essex is that he was confused.

⁶⁸ L. B. Smith, 268.

⁶⁹ Similarly, Bacon, in his "Declaration," refers to Essex's failures in Ireland as constituting a tragedy (1862, 2:253, 264). And Essex himself, brooding over that desperate situation, saw himself as fit a subject for plays as for libels (Devereux, 2:99).

⁷⁰ Williams, 231.

⁷¹ Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, 12/278/23, cited in Esler, 134.

⁷² In this summary of Stone's analysis I have necessarily simplified and eliminated nuances and qualifications. The aristocracy was by no means a homogeneous group (it had, for instance, Puritan and Catholic as well as Anglican subdivisions), and many of its members were well educated and good at managing their estates even in the sixteenth century. Stone, of course, recognizes these facts that qualify, but do not disqualify, the schema he proposes.

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