SOURCE: “Julius Caesar and ‘Dramatic Coquetry,’” in Shakespeare and the Mannerist Tradition: A Reading of Five Problem Plays, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 72-86.

[In the following essay, Maquerlot evaluates Julius Caesar as a Mannerist drama fraught with ambiguity, and contends that Shakespeare constantly altered audience sympathies toward Caesar.]

In the second volume of his book on Shakespeare's histories, Professor Paul Bacquet rightly insists on the pedagogical function of the Chorus in Henry V. The role of the Chorus, he argues, is more systematically developed in this play than in any other of the same period, and serves to guide the spectators through the play's various episodes and also to encourage them to perform an act of ‘collective imagination’ without which there would be no dramatic illusion.¹

It seems to me that the Chorus' repeated plea to the audience to compensate mentally for the material limitations of stage production serves another equally indispensable, if less obvious, purpose, which is to secure the audience's adherence to the play's ideological message. In Shakespeare's view, the people assembled in the playhouse would be all the more willing to accept that a few square metres of boards in the centre of that wooden ‘O’ might represent the battlefield of Agincourt if they could be made to feel party to the glorious national epic that was being played out before them, for them and, up to a point, thanks to them. Whatever their social rank, cultural origin and religious or political allegiance, the members of the audience—possibly viewed by the dramatist as the epitome of British society or perhaps a peace-time reflection of the King's army—were urged to unite in a shared feeling of patriotic fervour. The special theatrical strategy geared to such an uncommon goal was to enlist them in the actual making of the show so that this rare moment of dramatic experience might also be one of ideological consensus.²

1599 is also, in all probability, the year of Julius Caesar, another history play but one with no Chorus to sustain the audience. Here the spectators are left to themselves and it is up to them alone to construe the meaning of what they see and hear on stage, not such an easy task, as we shall see. British history is no longer at stake. However decisive the murder of Caesar may have been in changing the face of the planet, this momentous event still concerns the ancient world. Ideologically, the play does not require the same emotional commitment from the audience and its progress does not depend on the same type of dramaturgic collaboration. It is enough for the audience to behave ‘normally’—to consent to the usual suspension of disbelief expected at the theatre—to preserve the chances of minimal dramatic illusion.

Like Richard II, Julius Caesar is the story of a conspiracy undertaken in the name of the common weal. But Richard was king, a sacred figure, and his deposition and murder were impious acts. Like Richard's, Caesar's power is legitimate, but, contrary to what he would have the citizens of Rome believe, it is not of divine origin. His murder, therefore, is not technically a sacrilege, except in the minds of those who made him into a god in his own lifetime. Richard was an unworthy ruler and his replacement by Bolingbroke could appear as a measure of public salvation, a morally reprehensible but politically desirable usurpation despite the civil disorder it was bound to kindle. The answer to the question of whether the kingdom gained or lost from this change in dynasty is long in coming: the problem of monarchical legitimacy in the face of reasons of State and the dilemma between the sacred and the political haunt the end of Richard II, the whole of Henry IV (Parts 1 and 2) and occasionally surface again in Henry V. It is only the latter play that turns the scales in favour of the house of Lancaster. As to whether the violent overthrow of Caesar proved beneficial or detrimental to Rome, neither Julius Caesar nor Antony and Cleopatra—the sequel to the former play inasmuch as it dramatizes events subsequent to Caesar's death—offers the least clue. Though the Elizabethans knew, as well as we do, that the fall of Caesar was to give rise to the empire heralded by Octavius' glorious principate, Shakespeare remains conspicuously silent about this, focusing instead upon the convulsions attendant upon the murder, iniquitous proscriptions, the rivalry within the triumvirate, the war against the conspirators and the discords between Brutus and Cassius. Neither in Octavius' final speech nor elsewhere in the play is there a hint that good may eventually come from evil. The crucial issue of whether Caesar's blood was shed for the good or the ill of Rome is deliberately left pending. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare highlights the event and its immediate consequences, thus enclosing the action within the impassable boundaries of an intensely dramatized present. Thus isolated from past and future, the facts confronting us cannot be fitted into a long-range vision that would give them meaning and relevance in terms of a country's destiny. Ideologically, the spectators of the play are well and truly alone.

Following close upon Henry V, Julius Caesar is yet another exploration of the hero figure. That Shakespeare was turning to Plutarch (via Sir Thomas North) after he had just brought to an epic finale the cycle of plays devoted to national history shows clearly that the theme of the great man still interested him. If antiquity was to supply a hero as prestigious as Henry, the choice naturally lay between Alexander and Caesar.³ The circumstances of Caesar's assassination, the ensuing civil war and the conspirators' defeat offered excellent material for yet another history play structured around three dramatic moments: the hatching of a conspiracy, the execution of a murder and the meting out of retribution to the guilty. Not only could Shakespeare once again furnish the stage with vivid tableaux such as Caesar amid his court, Brutus deliberating with his conscience, Caesar stabbed to death at the foot of Pompey's statue, Brutus' and Antony's celebrated speeches at the market-place or the conspirators' suicide at Philippi, but he could also easily work these spectacular scenes into a unified drama, patterned on the old, still successful formula of the revenge tragedy.

More decisively, perhaps, Shakespeare's preference for the story of Caesar's life accorded well with the direction he was working in after the completion of his two historical tetralogies, namely towards a more curious probing into the complexities of the human mind and soul and a more realistic rendering of the often chaotic life of consciousness together with a more critical appraisal of man's ‘greatness and nobility’, a trend that Hamlet and the dark comedies were soon to exemplify. Shakespeare knew how controversial and enigmatic Caesar had appeared, both to his contemporaries and to succeeding generations. Borrowing from Roman antiquity, he no doubt felt free from the ideological constraints that inevitably impinge on the representation of national history. Furthermore, the story of Julius Caesar offered the advantage of including not one but two heroes in whom greatness and weakness intermingle, thus providing the dramatist with the exciting possibility of counterpointing two forms of heroism, each one marred with its own shortcomings: in Caesar, the glory of the conqueror and statesman tarnished by excessive pride; in Brutus, the integrity of the true republican led astray by political blindness. This dualistic vision, sanctioned by Renaissance historiography, whereby assessment of both personages could only be a qualified one, fitted exactly with Shakespeare's project. In many respects, the subject of Caesar's downfall at the hands of patriots who were diversely (and some of whom were dubiously) motivated carried enough ambiguity to lend itself to Mannerist treatment.

There was yet another advantage which, from a non-Mannerist perspective, would have seemed more like a drawback: no episode of ancient history was better known and more loaded with moral and political glosses than Caesar's rise and fall. His destiny had long been food for thought on the vagaries of Fortune and the ironic proximity of the Capitol to the Tarpeian Rock, revealing the dark face of greatness and the often conflicting demands of civic duty and friendship. Reflecting upon his choice, Shakespeare may well have felt that he was coming too late and that all had been said on the subject. Telling the story of Julius Caesar and of Brutus and his associates could only be a retelling. Substantially altering the facts of history was out of the question, and therefore innovation had to be confined to matters of form. It was as if, from the start, Shakespeare found himself in the position of a composer having to write variations on a canonical theme, a situation of relative constraint or conditional freedom most favourable to a Mannerist approach. When an artist has no other choice but to reproduce what C. G. Dubois calls ‘une thématique magistrale’ (a set of themes sanctioned by the authority of masters) he or she must gear his or her inspiration to ‘the multiplying of forms and proliferating of variations’.⁴ This incidentally sheds light on the old concept of refurbishing erstwhile successes according to current fashion; what has perhaps too often been taken for sheer opportunism on the part of authors in need of popularity may well evince—in some cases at least—a Mannerist propensity for subversive allegiance. Is it by accident that Hamlet (which is regarded by many as a Mannerist play, if not the epitome of Mannerist dramatic art) proceeds from an Ur-Hamlet? If this theory holds true, Hamlet can be seen as Shakespeare's personal variation upon the traditional formula of the revenge tragedy. Whether Julius Caesar was inspired by an existing play or not is of little importance. Because of the exceptional popularity of the fable, it is History itself, as constituted by the gradual sedimentation of the commentaries, which serves as reference or model. Addressing a subject like this with its compulsory figures (almost in the choreographic sense of the term), Shakespeare was practically forced to seek originality of treatment. More specifically, it is in the Mannerist presentation of the characters that Shakespeare's art is most innovative.

What I designate here as a Mannerist trait, Ernest Schanzer calls ‘dramatic coquetry’. This facetious and telling expression denotes the method whereby the dramatist manipulates our response to the main characters ‘playing fast and loose with our affections for them, engaging and alienating them in turn’.⁵ Though a similar technique is at work in several other plays, it is never more systematically used than in Julius Caesar. Schanzer has studied in great detail how a succession of images, in turn positive and negative, disconcerts the spectator to the extent that he or she can no longer situate the characters on a scale of moral values. Since Caesar and the conspirators can gain our sympathy or antipathy only transiently and incompletely, the murder itself appears in an ambiguous light. If it is true that Caesar's murder was indeed a political error, was it also a morally reprehensible act? According to Schanzer, this is the central question posed by the play, one that Shakespeare is careful not to answer.

The presence of Mannerism is indicated not by Caesar, Brutus, Cassius and Antony (to mention only the major characters) being alloys of good and evil: this ambivalence is supported by history and can be thought of as inherent to all credible portrayals of human nature. This might even be another example of rhetorical formalism with characteristic effects of binary opposition and symmetrical balancing. That each character should view himself and others from an angle entirely his own is not particularly relevant to Mannerism either. It is not surprising that Caesar as seen by Cassius should not be a faithful mirror image of Caesar as seen by Brutus, even less so by Antony, not to mention Caesar seen by himself or by the audience. All plays and novels containing several characters consist of such sets of mirrors in which images are thus reflected and interconnected. It is through such reverberations that identities are formed. But Mannerist art has the particularity of thwarting this image-making process by maintaining the characters on this side of a true identity. Mannerism discourages us from ever being able to organize into a viable entity—that is, a coherent and credible whole—the pieces of the puzzle scattered before our eyes. Mannerism strives hard to preclude the possibility of a global, unified perception.

Why, when looking at a Mannerist bronze by Giovanni Bologna, are we seized with a desire to inspect it from all angles? As we cannot turn it this way and that, why are we tempted to walk around it as if to discover yet another hitherto unsuspected angle? How is it that having to stand in front of Pontormo's Deposition or Michelangelo's Last Judgement, we commission our gaze, as it were vicariously, to wander over the composition? The answer is that in a Mannerist work where everything attracts the eye, nothing arrests it. No standpoint imposes itself as decisive in procuring the most satisfying vision, which hopefully might best reveal to us the work's ‘truth’. What reasons are there to prefer confronting the statue frontally rather than obliquely? Each point of view appeals to our eye and momentarily frustrates it from the pleasure of discovering what the next point of view would disclose. Unlike classical characters, collected in almost all of their actions and speeches, at all times coextensive with themselves, their Mannerist counterparts are always presented incomplete; they sharpen our curiosity and direct it towards a hypothetical ‘elsewhere’, the hidden face of their being, in the illusory expectation of a revelation of the whole self.

Something analogous to this wandering gaze occurs in Julius Caesar. I shall not restate Schanzer's excellent analyses showing how the characters are split into successive images, either flattering or derogatory, but equally credible. Dramatic coquetry is a dynamics of ambiguity, in that it arouses excitement and disappointment in turn: we believe we grasp the ‘truth’ about a character (on which the meaning of his action depends), only to realize immediately afterwards that it was premature to stop at what was only an aspect, a facet among others. When Caesar dies, we still do not know what we should ‘really’ think about this immensely proud character who swings from the grotesque:

          Danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he.
We are two lions litter'd in one day,
And I the elder and more terrible.

II, ii, 44-7

To the sublime:

          constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.

III, i, 60-2

Caesar is warm with his friends:

Good friends, go in, and taste some wine with me;
And we, like friends, will straightway go together.

II, ii, 126-7

His irresolution verges on caricature:

Caesar shall forth. The things that threaten'd me
Ne'er look'd but on my back.

II, ii, 10-11

Mark Antony shall say I am not well,
And for thy humour I will stay at home.

II, ii, 55-6

Give me my robe, for I will go.

II, ii, 107

But he is stoical at the thought of his own death:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

II, ii, 32-7

His self-centredness is exorbitant:

Decius, go tell them Caesar will not come.
Dec. Most mighty Caesar, let me know some cause,
Lest I be laugh'd at when I tell them so.
Caes. The cause is in my will: I will not come;
That is enough to satisfy the Senate.

II, ii, 68-72

But it is matched by equally uncompromising self-abnegation:

What touches us ourself shall be last serv'd.

III, i, 8

Caesar is superstitious:

Forget not, in your speed, Antonius,
To touch Calphurnia; for our elders say,
The barren, touched in this holy chase,
Shake off their sterile curse.

I, ii, 6-9

Except however when he himself is concerned:

What say'st thou to me now? Speak once again.
Sooth. Beware the ides of March.
Caes. He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass.

I, ii, 22-4

His grasp of human psychology is remarkable and likely, one would think, to caution him against ‘dangerous’ persons:

I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much,
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music.
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mock'd himself, and scorn'd his spirit
That could be mov'd to smile at any thing.
Such men as he be never at heart's ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.

I, ii, 197-207

Yet his superhuman stature—notwithstanding his physical disabilities—puts him above the fears of common mortals:

I rather tell thee what is to be fear'd
Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf.

I, ii, 208-10

In addition to the images Caesar projects of himself there are those given by the receivers, namely the characters who look at him and judge him. Brutus, like the Plebeian Tribunes, sees in Caesar a potential tyrant:

          a serpent's egg,
Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous.

II, i, 32-3

The one difference is that Brutus loves Caesar (‘I love him well’, I, ii, 81). Though Brutus detects in Caesar a weakness for honours (‘He would be crown'd’, II, i, 12), he sees him above all as a reasonable man in control of his passions:

I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason.

II, i, 20-1

For Cassius, on the other hand, Caesar is a clay-footed giant:

A man no mightier than thyself, or me,
In personal action, yet prodigious grown,
And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.

I, iii, 76-8

A ‘colossus’ who destroys all hope of honour in his fellow citizens:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

I, ii, 133-6

His tyranny, more moral than political, teaches the Romans servility in defiance of their ancestral values:

          our fathers' minds are dead,
And we are govern'd with our mothers' spirits;
Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish.

I, iii, 82-4

The one fleeting image of Caesar given by Antony while the former is alive is that of an authoritarian father figure who knows how to be obeyed:

When Caesar says, ‘Do this’, it is perform'd.

I, ii, 10

Yet he is someone to whom Antony can freely express his disagreement:

Fear him not, Caesar, he's not dangerous.

I, ii, 193

After the death of Caesar, Antony's words depict him as a man who could inspire the strongest friendship:

That I did love thee, Caesar, O, 'tis true!
If then thy spirit look upon us now,
Shall it not grieve thee dearer than thy death,
To see thy Antony making his peace,
Shaking the bloody fingers of thy foes.

III, i, 194-8

He is one whose nobility was incomparable:

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.

III, i, 256-7

His loss is felt with pain:

          for mine eyes,
Seeing those beads of sorrow stand in thine,
Began to water.

III, i, 283-5

Such effusiveness, the sincerity of which cannot be doubted (unlike Antony's carefully studied posturing during his speech to the citizens at the market-place), evokes the figure of a friend, an aspect authenticated by Brutus himself:

I slew my best lover for the good of Rome.

III, ii, 46

On the negative side of things, the toadying of Caesar's entourage corroborates Cassius' claim that the Romans are overshadowed by Caesar and have abdicated all republican pride. So even Cassius' discourse on Caesar, biased as it is, and dictated, as we know it to be, by hatred and envy, holds elements of truth.

Of all the images that Caesar reflects, and they are diverse and numerous since no one is exposed to the others' gaze as much as Caesar, none is conclusive. The ‘truth’ about Caesar cannot be obtained by sorting out the true and false images, those which apparently bring us closer to the ‘real’ Caesar and those which do not. The truth about Caesar is to be found in every single reflection from these multifaceted mirrors. This helps to understand why the Mannerist method renders obsolete the traditional and rhetorical opposition between appearance and reality, between the mask of the public figure and the face of the private person. As Raymond Willems has neatly written:

It would be vain to look for the ‘true’ Caesar behind the mask of the mythical Caesar. Caesar is not an impostor. He plays a role, of course, but it is his own role. He simply tries to be himself, not to give an embellished image of himself. His play-acting does not therefore tend towards duplicity, but towards the unity of his self. When he proclaims ‘I am Caesar’, it is not vain boasting. The phrase is the expression of the terrible effort he must make to stick to his character. Hence his almost incantory repetition of his own name which has become like a talisman.⁶

Why introduce this notion of tending towards ‘the unity of the self’? It is because the self is not of the order of the given, but the ever-receding horizon of a never-ending quest, the forever disappointed promise of an illusory cohesion between disparate images.

After this dizzying kaleidoscopic review of the most telling images relating to Caesar, I hesitate to extend it to other characters. Suffice it to say that dramatic coquetry is not confined to Caesar alone. It is a deliberate stand on dramaturgy, a departure in the art of drawing characters and bringing them to life on stage. Shakespeare is Mannerist in so far as he constantly eludes the spectator's expectation of characters clustered around a key image. Like Mannerist painters or sculptors, he repudiates all sense of hierarchy in viewpoints, thus holding up disparity and off-centredness as the structural principles underlying his treatment of characters.

The corollary of this is that the actions themselves are irremediably ambiguous, the best example being the murder of Caesar. Shakespeare does not choose between the two conflicting images of the murder: Brutus' image of murder as sacrifice and Antony's image of butchery. History chooses for him and gives Antony the advantage over Brutus in the contest between images. It is clear that Antony has carried the day when the sacrificial and emblematic blood in which the conspirators have ritually bathed their hands and swords becomes the blood of the massacre, which murderous envy has caused to flow:

Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Cassius made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd;
And as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar follow'd it,
As rushing out of doors, to be resolv'd
If Brutus so unkindly knock'd or no.

III, ii, 176-82

Henceforth Antony's image of Caesar's death has supplanted Brutus' in the eyes of the citizens. Shakespeare had no other choice but to ratify the verdict of history, but this does not mean he had to justify it. It is not because the image propagated by Antony proves more credible to ‘the masses who make history’ and more profitable to those who are its privileged actors that Brutus' contrary image is invalidated. In an attempt to make ethics coincide with politics, it has been argued that Brutus' staged ceremony following the assassination of Caesar is a murderer's contrivance, designed to shelter his sensitivity from the unbearable horror of the collective crime, a ritual seen as the dressing up of bad faith.⁷ I do not share this view. Here Willems is worth quoting again:

To take appearances in hand is not necessarily to use them to deceive. Brutus is concerned about controlling them because he knows they are misleading. He wants to prevent his act from being misunderstood. From this perspective ‘this shall make / Our purpose necessary’ is only apparently paradoxical. According to Brutus' logic, it is the manner of killing Caesar which will give his act its true meaning. If he can convince the other conspirators to consider the murder as a sacrifice, then it will indeed be a sacrifice.⁸

In the ontological world of Mannerism, truth is a useless hypothesis, only representation matters. The Mannerist artist does not conceive of his or her work differently from the way Brutus looks upon his act: only the manner carries meaning.

If truth is reducible to a vertiginous parade of images which correct, contradict and complement but in no way cancel each other out, what is more tempting than to give oneself over to the impressions of the moment, since each moment expresses a truth? Mildred E. Hartsock thinks that the play is constructed in such a way as to place the spectator in a situation analogous to that of the Roman crowd at the market-place: ‘We are fully committed at every point in the play to someone. Ironically, we have something in common with the Roman mob: we believe what we hear as we hear it, only to be involved in one emotional or intellectual partisanship after another.’⁹ This opinion should be qualified, or the Mannerist game of dramatic coquetry will be over-simplified. Shakespeare is more subtle, more authentically Mannerist, less of a crude hoaxer than Hartsock supposes. We know that he is careful to ensure that no image can be purely and simply accepted or rejected. Coquetry or flirtatiousness is the art of not taking advances or rebuffs too far, lest the game come to a halt. This is why no character in the play inspires either love or hatred. The Mannerist artist takes care not to play on extremes of emotion, his or her range is voluntarily limited. He or she expects connivance more than participation from the audience, an attitude that is more playful than sentimental, more intellectual than emotional. Baroque characters—say Othello, Lear or Macbeth—violently catch hold of us for better or worse: Mannerist characters intrigue the audience more than inflame them. Even when the Mannerist hero is endowed with a strong presence both textually and scenically (as is the case with Caesar and Hamlet), he is always held at a distance, like an object of curiosity meant to be considered with a careful and critical eye. This is why the pleasure obtained from a Mannerist work always has a streak of narcissism about it, as if much of the enjoyment comes from detecting the irony of the message.

At two decisive moments—before his departure to the Senate and before the murder—Caesar indulges in a fit of self-aggrandizement, almost disowning his human nature, first through an animal metaphor (the image of the two lions already mentioned), and then through a cosmic simile which develops into a whole tirade:

But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks,
They are all fire, and every one doth shine;
But there's but one in all doth hold his place.
So in the world: 'tis furnis'd well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshak'd of motion; and that I am he,
Let me a little show it, even in this,
That I was constant Cimber should be banish'd,
And constant do remain to keep him so.

III, i, 60-73

T. S. Dorsch rightly sees in this speech an outburst of pride caused by the servility of Metellus and Cassius, come to plead the cause of Publius Cimber. But such arrogance, he claims, triggers so much antipathy among Caesar's entourage and the audience that the forthcoming murder appears almost justifiable.¹⁰ I do not find this psychological interpretation of causes and effects entirely convincing. If this be pride, it is the legitimate pride of a monarch, something that an Elizabethan audience would not consider as grossly ‘extravagant’ as we do today. Shakespeare is not trying to justify the murder beforehand by making Caesar especially odious. A more plausible explanation that does justice to Caesar's self-coined image of superhuman infallibility is that Shakespeare is here presenting the murder as a truly political option rather than the outcome of accumulated personal grudges or resentments. Richard Marienstras' comment on this episode is very much to the point: ‘this political murder, this sacrifice, the fall of this star, for one moment appears as an attempt to replace an inhuman cosmic order by an order of another nature, governed by the will of men and by social ethics founded purely on contract’.¹¹ The irony, therefore, is not exactly where Dorsch believes it to be found. It stems from the fact that it is Caesar himself, in his use of cosmic imagery to illustrate his ‘constancy’, who confirms the need for the conspirators to rid themselves of that inhuman authority of superterrestrial nature. In a pagan context, where the monarch's power does not proceed from God (meaning the Judaeo-Christian God), it is by no means impious to prefer a contract to an order founded on transcendence, which, in any case, is not of divine essence. By comparing himself to the pole star, the fixed point par excellence and keystone of the cosmos, Caesar had no notion of the extent to which he was playing into the conspirators' hands: this concept was precisely what they wanted to destroy.

As for the mini-parable of the two lions, through which Caesar expresses his contempt of danger, it shows almost in caricature how arrogance can sink into ridicule; danger is first the object of an unspecified personification (‘Danger knows full well …’), then what might pass as a fairly bad flash of wit (‘Caesar is more dangerous than’ Danger itself) becomes a grotesque metaphor—Caesar and Danger are two lions ‘litter'd in one day’, but Caesar is ‘the elder and more terrible’ of the two. Calphurnia is right: excessive self-confidence causes her husband to rave. When Caesar presents himself as a fierce, invulnerable being, he only succeeds in prefiguring what could appear as a form of senility. When he proclaims himself as ‘constant’ as the pole star, he unveils the inanity of such pretensions when they are embodied in a mortal being. A few stabs will suffice—and what conspirator does not think of this when listening to Caesar—to turn this figure of immortality into a ‘bleeding piece of earth’. Similarly, it is when Brutus professes honesty most vehemently that he is the least convincing:

There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats;
For I am arm'd so strong in honesty
That they pass by me as the idle wind,
Which I respect not.

IV, iii, 66-9

Such Caesar-like grandiloquence sounds strained and suggests that Brutus, like Caesar, has to struggle to live up to his own legend. These characters are engaged in the construction of their own myths. In everything they say and do, in the day-after-day management of the images they wish to convey of themselves, they have to take into account what history and legend have already made of them.

But in this play that is fraught with ambiguity, are there any moments when we are tempted to commit ourselves unreservedly to a character, if only for the time he speaks? At the market-place, before the crowd, Brutus expounds his reasons for having killed Caesar, with the vigorous clarity of his Lacedaemonian style. We might almost be convinced, thus imitating the citizens, as Hartsock would have it. Unlike Antony's succeeding oration, Brutus' speech strikes us as being basically honest, the opposite of manipulation. Yet one sentence at the end throws everything into doubt:

The question of his death is enroll'd in the Capitol; his glory not extenuated, wherein he was worthy; nor his offences enforc'd, for which he suffered death.

III, ii, 38-41

Brutus blames Caesar for errors already committed and turns the murder into a punishment, in blatant contradiction to the preventive murder theory he had developed in Act II:

          And since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities.

II, i, 28-31

What can justify this double language? Why does Brutus change from sacrificer to avenger or righter of wrongs? Is there a version of the murder for private use, his own and his associates', and another for public use, that of the Plebeians, whom the first version had no chance of convincing? What spectators would want to identify with this credulous, changeable and over-emotional crowd who is debarred from knowing the ins and outs of the affair?

The market scene is placed right in the middle of the play; it does indeed have an emblematic value, though not perhaps the one suggested by Hartsock. My hypothesis is that Brutus' and Antony's orations are theatrical pieces; the tribune is their stage and the Roman citizens are their spectators, a feverish, fascinated and easily manipulated audience, the very opposite of the sort of audience that Shakespeare would have wished for his own play. Through an act of negative symbolization strategically performed at the very core of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare treats his own audience to a show of irony aimed at a category of spectators he esteems incapable of reacting suitably to the subtleties of Mannerist theatre, and this brings me back to my starting-point which was the playwright's attitude to his audience. In Henry V, Shakespeare expected from them a sustained collaboration in the drama; he asked them to provide thought-out and voluntary support from the heart and mind, unlike the irrational, inconstant, follow-the-leader attitude of the Plebeians enslaved to their urges of the moment. Conversely, it is a totally receptive, totally free, totally critical audience that is needed for Julius Caesar, where ambiguity reigns, where dramatic coquetry feeds theatrical pleasure. But what use is to be made of such liberty and lucidity? To indulge without illusion in the Mannerist game of engagement and disengagement and to eschew the trap of images no further than the game requires, Shakespeare wants his audience to be astute enough to appreciate the ambivalence of words and situations, civilized enough both to understand the value of poetry and, unlike the Roman frenzied mob, not to kill the poet.

Notes

1. Paul Bacquet, Les pièces historiques de Shakespeare, 2 vols., Paris, 1979, vol. II, p. 156.

2. I do not find anything in the text to substantiate the view held by Bacquet and some other critics that the Epilogue spoken by the Chorus invites the audience to look back upon the King as an ultimately ineffectual warmonger, because France came to be lost under the next king. It seems to me that Henry remains ‘this star of England’ to the very end of the play, though Shakespeare's portrayal of him throughout the play is often touched with irony. The Chorus insists that Henry's valour is not to be ascribed to his personal merits only, but also to Fortune (‘Fortune made his sword’), and as expected Fortune turns her wheel against Henry VI, his successor. In fact, the Chorus' last speech serves to put the glorious reign of Henry V in a double perspective: the unfolding of history, which is pre-eminently the site of Fortune's whimsical doings, and the sequence of the Histories ‘which oft our stage hath shown’. It is part of the Chorus' pedagogical function to conclude the play on such a relativistic note.

3. See the Prologue to Act v in Henry V, in which the Chorus likens Henry's return to London from his wars in France to Caesar's return to Rome from his wars in Gaul. In Act v, scene vii, Fluellen and Gower compare Henry with Alexander the Great.

4. C. G. Dubois, Le maniérisme, Paris, 1979, p. 38.

5. E. Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare, London, 1951, p. 70.

6. R. Willems, ‘Ambiguïté et identité dans Julius Caesar’, in Aspects du théâtre anglosaxon, Publication de l'Université de Rouen, 1981, p. 79.

7. This is the opinion notably of Brents Sterling in Unity in Shakespearean Tragedy, New York, 1956.

8. Willems, ‘Ambiguïté et identité dans Julius Caesar’, p. 82.

9. Mildred E. Hartsock, ‘The Complexity of Julius Caesar’, PMLA, 81, March 1966, p. 61.

10. T. S. Dorsch (ed.), Julius Caesar (Arden edn), London, 1955; 1977 edn, pp. xix-xx.

11. R. Marienstras, Le proche et le lointain, Paris, 1981, p. 92 (my translation). The book has been published in English under the title New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, Cambridge, 1985; the passage quoted is p. 60.