[In the following essay, Scott considers Shakespeare's ironic treatment of self-knowledge in Julius Caesar.]

Terry Eagleton began his early book on Shakespeare and Society by quoting from Ulysses' effort to draw Achilles into action in act 3, scene 3 of Troilus and Cressida; at Ulysses' urging, Achilles remarked on the notion that we see ourselves only by reflection:

The beauty that is borne here in the face
The bearer knows not, but commends itself
To others' eyes …
For speculation turns not to itself
Till it hath travel'd and is mirror'd there
Where it may see itself

and Ulysses continued,

no man is the lord of anything,
Though in and of him there be much consisting,
Till he communicate his parts to others

(3.3.103-11, 115-17)¹

Eagleton read these words as saying that ‘uncommunicated qualities don't have any real existence at all; a man is not simply known to others through communication, he can only know his own experience by putting it in a communicable form’ and that ‘a man who contracts out of public life is contracting out of reality’. He did not discuss the parallel and in some ways more challenging exchange when Cassius tries to recruit Brutus for his conspiracy in act I, scene 2 of Julius Caesar: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?

Cassius. Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
Brutus. No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.
Cassius. 'Tis just.
And it is very much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
That you might see your shadow. I have heard
Where many of the best respect in Rome,
Except immortal Caesar, speaking of Brutus
And groaning underneath this age's yoke,
Have wish'd that noble Brutus had his eyes.

(1.2.51-62)

Though Ulysses certainly has his own purposes in his scene, Cassius is even more obvious in pursuing self-interested objectives, and these call in doubt his claim to speak for society in interpreting Brutus. Thus Cassius' questioning is in turn questionable though it is not cancelled. In the development of modern literary theory too, critiques of both individual experience and social authority have made each seem increasingly complex and unstable; in a revisionary spirit one might now reread into Eagleton's early views something like Mikhail Bakhtin's proclamation of an open-ended polyphony of voices in the novel.² But there were doubts too in Shakespeare's own time about the individual's access to private experience of selfhood that have been overlooked, and in some sort postmodernism may actually stimulate a recovery of the past.

First, though, it is helpful to clarify the occasion of Brutus' and Cassius' dialogue. Brutus has reported the Soothsayer's warning to Caesar about the ides of March and has expressed a desire to withdraw from Caesar's ceremony; Cassius next complains of Brutus' recent pensiveness. The prophecy may be as powerful a stimulus as the witches' greetings to Macbeth, though it is addressed to neither of them and though for the moment Brutus may resemble a Banquo more than a Macbeth. Its eventual impact on Brutus is shown when, having decided on Caesar's death, he checks the calendar (2.1.40). Along with the potentially related question whether to join Caesar in the ritual by which he seeks an heir, the prophecy creates a good moment for Cassius to sound out Brutus.

These are political matters, and Brutus too is doubtless aware of their public nature, which probably underlies the verbal sparring on both sides. But he chooses to define his response as a solely personal one:

                    If I have veil'd my look,
I turn the trouble of my countenance
Merely upon myself. Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself,
Which give some soil, perhaps, to my behaviors.
But let not therefore my good friends be griev'd—
Among which number, Cassius, be you one—
Nor construe any further my neglect,
Than that poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men.

(1.2.37-47)³

Cassius' reply, which depends on the analogy with the eye's inability to see the face in response to Brutus' claim to turn inward, does not so much question the basis of personal qualities in the individual (as Ulysses' and Achilles' discussion does) as it denies the privileged status of Brutus' assertion of self-knowledge. The power to determine what Brutus may become (ironically a similar issue to Brutus' later deliberations about Caesar) resolves first into the power to perceive what he is now.

The claim of a uniquely privileged self-knowledge was by no means secure in Shakespeare's time, despite the impressions we are likely to form from popular moral tags. Evidence lies at hand in some of the most widely read authors, including sources or parallels that have been named for the passages in Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida.⁴ Perhaps the simplest is Cicero's raising of a doubt in his Tusculan Disputations; he interprets the command of Apollo's oracle at Delphi, ‘Know thyself’, to mean ‘Know thy soul’ (l. 52), and reasons as follows:

the soule is not able in this bodye to see him selfe. No more is the eye whyche although he seeth all other thinges, yet (that whiche is one of the leaste) can not discerne his owne shape. But admit that the soule can not consider him selfe: howebeit perhaps he may. His operacions, as quyckenes of inuention, sure remembraunce, continuance and swiftnes of motion, it doth wel ynoughe perceyue. And these be greate, yea heauenlye, yea euerlastinge thinges.

(l.67)⁵

There is a gap here, however Cicero may try to reduce it, between knowledge of the soul directly and knowledge merely through its actions. Human self-knowledge also suffers from comparison with divine self-intuition, as in the Neoplatonic meditations (with citations from Plotinus) of Philippe de Mornay's Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion: the discursively-reasoning human subject has a hard time knowing ‘his owne Soule by the power of his Soule … For the maner of his discourse is but to proceede from kynd to kynd, and to passe from one reason to another. But on the contrary part, his mynd seeth not it selfe, but onely turneth into it selfe. …’ In contrast, God's self-intuition yields ‘a reflexion backe againe to it self, as a face doth in a Lookingglasse. … And whereas wee comprehend not our selves; that commeth of the darknesse and lumpishnesse of our flesh, which maketh us unlike our selves.’⁶ Several difficulties are raised by Marcantonio Zimara, whose Problemata appeared in British editions of the pseudo-Aristotelian work of that name; he questions whether self-knowledge can be attained only by ‘a reflexed action’: ‘to reflect and looke vnto himselfe, is a token that we are separated from the flesh. For he who would know himselfe, should be drawne from sensible affections, and how hard this is, no man is ignorant. Or is it because a man liueth by vnderstanding? But the vnderstanding of a man cannot conceiue himselfe, but after the vnderstanding of another, and this is very hard.’⁷ Showing through the precise philosophical content of these difficulties is the notion that for a variety of reasons the discrepancies between knower and known hinder full self-knowledge; but if self-knowledge is merely of externals, it is only as certain as other knowledge. In Brutus' case an interested party directs the other knowledge and tries to weaken the status of self-knowledge.

The instabilities in Julius Caesar find closer analogues among critiques of self-knowledge that invoke a radical scepticism (even with a fideistic aim) towards all human knowledge. These involve a turning of statements that restrict knowledge back on their own origins to show that the mind is trapped in its own self-limitations and self-descriptions; though the play does not go so far in general statement, we may wish, for a start, to turn Cassius' words back on him and ask what mirror shows him himself, and how accurately. A world made up of selves each determined by all the others would not be simple or stable. Though he does not raise questions of this last sort, Sir John Davies gives a sharp critique in Nosce Teipsum of the problems of reflexive knowledge (however necessary it may be). The stanzas that are usually cited to parallel Shakespeare are these:

Is it because the minde is like the eye,
(Through which it gathers knowledge by degrees)
Whose rayes reflect not, but spread outwardly,
Not seeing it selfe, when other things it sees?
No doubtlesse: for the minde can backward cast
Upon her selfe her understanding light;
But she is so corrupt, and so defac't,
As her owne image doth her selfe affright.(8)

(lines 105-12)

This corruption of the mind is explained better by Davies's retelling of the fall of Adam and Eve: the ‘Spirit of lies’ tempted them by suggesting ‘That they were blind, because they saw not Ill’, and their first act of self-knowledge was of the evil they had just learned to do (lines 13-24) in order to know. Self-knowledge was tainted from the start, and even now we are mocked by Socrates, Democritus, and the Delphic oracle (the devil's continuing triumph):

For this, the wisest of all Moral men,
Said he knew nought, but that he nought did know;
And the great mocking Maister, mockt not then,
When he said, Truth was buried deepe below.
For how may we to other things attaine?
When none of us his owne soule understands?
For which the Divell mockes our curious braine,
When know thy selfe, his oracle commands.

(lines 77-84)

The powers of human and diabolic knowledge combine only to show us how little we know of ourselves and to taunt us with the impossible. In a related passage Du Bartas (who says in another place that ‘as the Eye perceaves / All but it selfe, even so our Soule conceaves / All save her owne selfes Essence’) tells that before the Fall,

Mankind was then a thousand fold more wise
Then now, blind error had not bleard his eyes,
With mists which make th'Athenian Sage suppose
That nought he knows, save this, that nought he knowes.
That even light Pirrhons wavering fantasies
Reave him the skill his unskill to agnize.
And th'Abderite, within a well obscure
As deep as darke, the truth of things immure.(9)

Socrates and Democritus are here joined as critics of the limits of knowledge by Pyrrho, spokesman for a radically sceptical school: he would disallow as being dogmatic even the one point of knowledge claimed by Socrates. But then he would have to refrain from actually asserting universal doubt, because that assertion, too, being a positive statement, would contradict its own principle; thus it is that his ‘fantasies / Reave him the skill his unskill to agnize’ (‘la fantasque inconstance / Luy oste le sçavoir de sçavoir l'ignorance’).¹⁰ The weakened human reason strikes at itself by the very power of language through which it must operate. In the form of a single statement rather than a general philosophical position, a model for such self-undermining would be the liar paradox, ‘This very sentence is false’, which refers to itself so as to seem false if true, and true if false. There is good reason to think that Shakespeare knew this paradox from Thomas Wilson's The Rule of Reason (1553 or later edition).¹¹ Though there is nothing in Julius Caesar like the content of this paradox or these sceptical views, there are major occasions when the text is at war with itself in this fashion (even if the war is undeclared as in Cassius' mirror concept which simply invites other applications). Self-reference generates highly productive conflicts, especially when the reference is to the action as itself a play.

In a play which throws so much open to interpretation—the meaning of dreams, comparison of rhetorical skills to motivate political reactions—it is fitting that Cicero complains that ‘men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves' (1.3.34-5). But it may still be questioned whether things do have a purpose that can be specified as Cicero seems to assume. Though he did not use it in the play, Shakespeare had before him in Plutarch's Life of Brutus a view, propounded by Cassius as Epicurean philosophy, which gives a broad scope to subjectivity:

In our secte, Brutus, we have an opinion, that we doe not alwayes feele, or see, that which we suppose we doe both see and feele: but that our senses beeing credulous, and therefore easily abused (when they are idle and unoccupied in their owne objects) are induced to imagine they see and conjecture that, which they in truth doe not. For, our minde is quicke and cunning to worke (without eyther cause or matter) any thinge in the imagination whatsoever.

But yet there is a further cause of this in you. For you being by nature given to melancholick discoursing, and of late continually occupied: your wittes and sences having bene overlabored, doe easilier yeelde to such imaginations.¹²

If Brutus is as melancholic as Cassius says here, there is another basis for considering that ‘cause or matter’ is absent. Timothy Bright finds absence of an object characteristic of melancholy:

The reason is because, they measure all outward accidents, by that they finde of discontentment within: not that the humor that discontenteth is any instrument of passion, or carieth with it faculty to be displeased: but because it disquieteth the body, and giueth discontentment to nature, it is occasion why displeasures are made great: and where there is no cause, nature troubled within, faireth as greatly displeased with that which outwardly should not displease. …¹³

The melancholic's self-perception would be especially problematic and circular, for the perceptions on which it depends would be themselves conditioned strongly by the self as perceiver. All these circumstances invite manipulation of appearances by Cassius, Caesar, and in remarkable ways Brutus. The situation has a notable effect on the individualistic politics of the play, well described by A. W. Bellringer: ‘The cross-assessments and counter-estimates, the generalisations on men and their worth, are not mere constructions of ambiguous “characters” on Shakespeare's part, but fall essentially into a dialectic of suspicion.’¹⁴ Suspicion is doubtless a more honest fulfilment of Cassius' proposal that persons evaluate each other than the portrayal of it that he gives to Brutus.

For these several reasons given or implied by the various writers, self-knowledge, either direct or reflected, is problematic: the otherness of the soul as object of knowledge from the consciousness-in-a-body that is to do the knowing, the imperfectness of reflection in an imperfect being, the difficulty of modelling knowledge to oneself after knowledge of others, the tendency of self-limiting descriptions of oneself to reflect back on the means and degree to which they are known, and the relativity of the perceptions by which one might judge oneself (including especially their dependence on that very same self). To these can be added a comment by Elizabeth Freund on the passage in Troilus and Cressida which lays open the connection with paradoxical self-reference:

The drift of the text Ulysses is so ‘rapt in’ concerns a perennial philosophical and literary critical topos: we cannot step outside our own minds and must rely on reflection, echo, and mirroring otherness to constitute us. The ‘eye’, organ of sight, cannot see itself but by reflection; the ‘I’ cannot know itself with any immediacy, but must loop along strange courses of speculative mirroring which prohibit it from ever coinciding with itself. Achilles remains unperturbed by the prospect of a strange loop which puts in question the very existence of himself as subject, and he persists in believing that ‘speculation’ (eyesight, insight, consciousness, the self) does eventually—even if indirectly—rise into view. But Ulysses pursues the more radical conclusion, that no man can ever be in full possession of himself, and continues to attack and undercut Achilles' confident self-possession until, by the end of the scene, Achilles is no longer so sure that he can see himself.¹⁵

Self-knowledge involves self-reference, and in both processes the subject and object fail to coincide. To introduce another person as mediator of self-knowledge is to compound the discrepancy, especially if that person is duplicitous as, for instance, Cassius is. Yet (to continue the application to Brutus and Cassius) after Cassius had shown Brutus a reflection, the situation might not be as much in his control as he thought or wished, if Brutus could in turn adjust his self-image to his own perceptions of Cassius. (Mirrors can reflect reciprocally, though Cassius takes care not to say so.) Trusting though Brutus is, something of the dialectic of suspicion might operate. But Brutus would not be in control either, for self-knowledge would presumably change him, especially to the degree that it involved something alien introduced by Cassius. For this reason, even if he could perceive a good deal about particular strategies of his own and Cassius' at particular moments, Brutus would really never be able to coincide fully with himself in self-knowledge, view himself from an ‘absolute’ or unchanging position outside his interaction with Cassius. He could never make an absolute, accurate statement of self-knowledge that would be definitive, even for that moment.

Thus, although in a large sense self-knowledge and its relation to knowledge of others must be questioned, Brutus may well have a keen eye for Cassius' immediate strategies.¹⁶ In the second scene he responds not directly to Cassius' offer to be a mirror but rather to the obvious political implications in his report of ‘many of the best respect in Rome, / Except immortal Caesar, speaking of Brutus / And groaning underneath this age's yoke’; Brutus replies, ‘Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius’ (1.2.59-61, 63). Anyone who can then discuss whether Caesar's crowning is to be feared (a slip of the tongue that may be calculated) and can desire that Cassius might impart to him ‘aught toward the general good’ has a fair idea of what he expects to hear. He keeps his counsel about what he does hear, the obvious envy by Cassius of the Caesar whom Brutus professes to love well, yet he shows not only awareness of Cassius' purpose but some acceptance: ‘What you would work me to, I have some aim’ (1.2.163). Brutus is thus a willing collaborator in being manipulated; but if self-knowledge alone is problematic, compounded with self-management and collusion it is doubly or trebly so.

Brutus' soliloquy in the orchard sounds most natural not as isolated self-reflection but as meditation conditioned by an internal dialogue with an imagined other, someone like Cassius:

It must be by his death. And, for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown'd.
How that might change his nature, there's the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking. Crown him that,
And then I grant we put a sting in him
That at his will he may do danger with.
Th' abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power. And, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may.
Then, lest he may, prevent.

(2.1.10-28)

My italics mark the clearest signs of dialogic response. Brutus begins with what seems like a conclusion;¹⁷ but he would have been brought to that point as if by an unheard voice letting him reach the decision himself. Death is no new concept to him in these deliberations, and the word needs no emphasis; the change is rather in the assertion of will signalled by the verbs. Brutus next defines himself in contrast to the unheard other by his lack of personal animus and his ability to speak truly of Caesar, yet he must concede decisively that Caesar would be crowned and that crowning puts a sting in him. Brutus carries on this persuasion by the imagined other-in-himself through flagrantly rhetorical means: by application of abstract principles to individual cases, and by argument from analogy.¹⁸ Although these arts are ultimately directed against himself, they are at first weapons in a constant mental skirmish with the idea of Cassius' influence.

Brutus' final direction in this speech seems all the more an artful self-manipulation:

          And, since the quarrel
Will bear no color for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities.
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg
Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.

(lines 28-34)

But A. D. Nuttall rightly puts the emphasis instead on the abstract argument Brutus is pursuing (again, one might add, a more understandable activity if it serves an internal polemic): Nuttall paraphrases ‘Fashion it thus’ as ‘Let's try the argument this way.’¹⁹ His final point, though, is that even if the argument is not itself an attempt by Brutus to dictate a motive to himself, it eventually may become that: ‘the proper corruption of moral abstraction is diabolical cynicism’. Surely it is here that self-delusion takes place: though Brutus has consciously cultivated an imagined debate, the dispute does not really establish by rational inquiry what would be sufficient motive for killing Caesar, but rather it becomes itself that motive. Process usurps over substance, and mental staging impinges on overt action. The rhetorical quality of Roman culture (reproduced in Elizabethan education) projects itself into dramatic imagining, and this dramatic pre-enactment in turn governs the act of assassination that will be staged for us. Brutus' self-consciousness thus generates its own self-altering self-reference, a metadrama that rewrites his internal drama and thereby shapes the overt one that we see.

Brutus acknowledges the decisiveness of his commitment though he feels its cost:

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

(lines 61-9)

In this he is like Macbeth, but he himself is the dagger of the mind, to be held by another. He well knows and accepts that he has been whetted by Cassius.²⁰ He seems to view his suffering not as a warning to turn back but quite the contrary, as a goading to take relief in action. By the end of the scene images of sickness are being converted to frenzied activity through an effort of will: Portia's wound to Brutus' prayer that he may be worthy of her in conspiracy, and Ligarius' probably feigned sickness to companionship in the exploit.

If Brutus' attitude seems strangely self-detached, it befits not only the knowing paradox of self-imaging through others but an ironic distancing from the shows of Caesar's politics. The tone is set by Casca as he describes the display that incited the rebels, Caesar's refusal of a crown:

I can as well be hang'd as tell the manner of it. It was mere foolery; I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown—yet 'twas not a crown neither, 'twas one of these coronets—and, as I told you, he put it by once; but, for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offer'd it to him again; then he put it by again; but, to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it.

If the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him, according as he pleas'd and displeas'd them, as they use to do the players in the theatre, I am no true man.

… when he perceiv'd the common herd was glad he refus'd the crown, he pluck'd me ope his doublet and offer'd them his throat to cut. An I had been a man of any occupation, if I would not have taken him at a word, I would I might go to hell among the rogues.

(1.2.235-42, 258-61, 263-8)

Caesar, like Richard III appearing between two bishops to reject an offer of the throne (Richard III, 3.7), has mastered the art of the political feeler, which allows him to claim credit now for refusing what he most wants but which also prepares for eventual acceptance. For the more knowing, the performance is, if need be, a transparent ruse that coerces with the force of political prophecy; its effect is to be like the Scrivener's response to another of Richard's stratagems, ‘Who is so gross / That cannot see this palpable device? / Yet who so bold but says he sees it not?’ (3.6.10-12). As if displaying humility, Caesar also makes an offer to the crowd (like Richard reversing the hostility of Lady Anne) of his undefended body: but again he tries to intimidate possible rebels by showing how safe he is. Almost to foreshadow the assassination, Casca thinks of taking literally this offer that was not meant so; the cynical display is an occasion for a cynical reaction. He looks on Caesar's show with an unwilling suspension of disbelief. Brutus' response too is jaded: where public life is lie and show, and is at least half meant to be known as such, it is paradoxically likely (and not unknown in our own time) that he should willingly connive at distorting his image of himself to prepare for action. And as audience we are yet more directly touched by Casca's gibe at playgoers: powerless to alter a famous event of history and wanting the fictive-historical show to go on however bloody, we anticipate with the eagerness of tragic audiences for dramatic irony a more literal enactment of Caesar's open-doublet gesture.

The conspiracy can rise to an acceptable claim of nobility only by an effort of will, and Brutus at once sets out to achieve it. As if to ennoble the deed by style and theatricality he sets high standards for the conspirators:

                    do not stain
The even virtue of our enterprise,
Nor th' insuppressive mettle of our spirits,
To think that or our cause or our performance
Did need an oath …
O, that we then could come by Caesar's spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it. And, gentle friends,
Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.
Let not our looks put on our purposes,
But bear it as our Roman actors do,
With untir'd spirits and formal constancy.

(2.1.132-6, 169-74, 225-7)

As critics have said, he tries himself to write a tragedy in which the act of killing Caesar is purified.²¹ The artifice of such writing, evidenced by the resistance of fact and eventually by the course of the play, is as clear in its self-undermining as a liar paradox.

As the conspirators finally enact their sanctified bloody deed, they at once look forward to future performances which already for us carry their own belying:

Brutus. Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood
Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords.
Then walk we forth, even to the market-place,
And, waving our red weapons o'er our heads,
Let's all cry, ‘Peace, freedom, and liberty!’
Cassius. Stoop, then, and wash. [They bathe their hands and weapons.] How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
Brutus. How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,
That now on Pompey's basis lies along
No worthier than the dust!
Cassius. So oft as that shall be,
So often shall the knot of us be call'd
The men that gave their country liberty.

(3.1.105-19)

The spectacle of stage blood, so popular in Shakespeare's time, reinforces the word-picturing,²² but at the same time it both corrupts the verbal purification that Brutus sought and reminds us, the tragic spectators, of our thirst for gore. Moreover, in the contrast between the play that the characters thought they were staging for posterity and the way we actually judge the outcome we see how ‘history denies their dreams’.²³ Here is a truer action of the mirror than in Cassius' pretensions to represent Brutus: all the characters on stage have their being only as we the audience judge them, but they are in turn a mirror held up to disclose and determine for us our own nature. We see that Caesar bleeds in the sport now played by his jubilant killers, but we know that they themselves will bleed. And are those future tragedies, which are called sport by an actor in the present tragedy, any more or less sportive as entertainment than what we see at the moment? There is moreover no reassuring distinction between reality and its enactment either present or future, since all that we see is staged and our own existence is paradoxically drawn into that staging by the metadramatic mirror. And what is our own sportive nature if we behold in the mirror the expected and desired tragic bloodbath?

More positively, the mental force exerted by Brutus to make his deed other than it is can be viewed as poetic. Probably the word ‘sport’ is only coincidence, but a comment by Plutarch as he prepares to discuss Alexander the Great puts importance on the smallest mental activity and, somewhat like Cassius, compares the image of the face:

the noblest deedes doe not alwayes shew mens vertues and vices, but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sporte makes mens naturall dispositions and maners appeare more plaine, then the famous battells wonne, wherein are slaine tenne thowsande men, or the great armies, or cities wonne by siege or assault. For like as painters or drawers of pictures, which make no accompt of other partes of the bodie, do take the resemblaunces of the face and favor of the countenance, in the which consisteth the judgement of their maners and disposition: even so they must geve us leave to seeke out the signes and tokens of the minde only, and thereby shewe the life of either of them, referring you unto others to wryte the warres, battells, and other great thinges they did.²⁴

Here is almost a challenge to the dramatist to project an internal life into history imaginatively. The imaginative poetic power or ‘phantasie’ is to George Puttenham a mirror, though there are both false and true glasses: ‘And this phantasie may be resembled to a glasse as hath bene sayd, whereof there be many tempers and manner of makinges, as the perspectiues doe acknowledge, for some be false glasses and shew thinges otherwise than they be in deede, and others right as they be in deede. …’²⁵ These ambivalent notions are put to their hardest test in tragedy where the images are hard to distinguish and where the characters make their choices knowing the difficulties.

The outcome of the deed is foreshadowed almost as soon as Antony comes upon the bloody scene. At once he seems overcome with grief, but he does not lose control of himself:

O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well.—
I know not, gentlemen, what you intend,
Who else must be let blood, who else is rank;
If I myself, there is no hour so fit
As Caesar's death's hour, nor no instrument
Of half that worth as those your swords, made rich
With the most noble blood of all this world.
I do beseech ye, if you bear me hard,
Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and smoke,
Fulfill your pleasure.

(3.1.149-60)

His feelings may well be sincere, but if they are they also serve a politic purpose by making him seem trustworthy in any possible deal with the conspirators.²⁶ He actually repeats Caesar's gesture in the coronation episode of putting himself at the others' mercy, though not as a show of strength; yet the conspirators are in fact in a weak position, for they must treat him gently if they are to prove themselves in their own minds (or at least in Brutus' mind) not to be butchers. He places an important proviso on any compact he might make with them:

Antony. Friends am I with you all, and love you all,
Upon this hope, that you shall give me reasons
Why and wherein Caesar was dangerous.
Brutus. Or else were this a savage spectacle.
Our reasons are so full of good regard
That were you, Antony, the son of Caesar,
You should be satisfied.

(lines 221-7)

He thus manages to reduce Brutus' project of justifying the death to a condition for a political bargain (an empty one, since Antony has already privately made up his mind). Of course it will also become a public rhetorical contest in the Forum, and that major concession Antony arranges at once, while a show of fairness is still uppermost in Brutus' mind. The old cynical politics of Caesar still live in Antony's somewhat calculated emotional shows and in his purposes which are meant to be partly divined. Antony also knows something like the craftiness of Cassius' mirror tactics: the image of himself he shows to Brutus, or allows him to discover in half-hidden purposes, will minister to the image that Brutus wants to have of himself as sanctified killer.

The triumph of Antony's funeral oration is even more the triumph of the Caesarian politics of show, along with the rhetoric that mirrors and serves them. Again he trots out the display of Caesar's refusing the crown to establish what was always its crudest meaning, and he is obvious in his use of irony and rhetorical question, and also of litotes or perhaps occupatio:²⁷

You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And, sure, he is an honorable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.

(3.2.97-103)

The heavy-handedness of his rhetoric and its contrast with our subtler assessments of character produce opposite effects on us and on the plebeians (though they have been, and remain, parodies of the theatre audience). The result is well described by Nicholas Brooke:

His repulsive ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech is an exhibition of the destruction of reason by rhetoric; the continuous play on ‘Brutus is an honourable man’ becomes unbearable in its insistence—to us—on its truth, at the same time that it is used to enforce—on the crowd—the belief that it is not true.

(p. 157)

Almost the same divergence occurs in the beginning of his speech:

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar.

(lines 76-9)

Though his statement of intention seems straightforward to his hearers in the Forum at the time, he means them to discover gradually his purpose of actually praising Caesar and to congratulate themselves on their sagacity in sharing in his rhetoric (his tactics of flattery might parody Cassius' initial handling of Brutus). Thus too the crowd would come to perceive a ‘good’ that ought to live after Caesar, first when his will is read and then when they resolve to avenge his death. For us, who know Antony's resolve that ‘Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge, / With Ate by his side come hot from hell, / Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice / Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war’ (3.1.271-4), the intended effect of his speech sounds more like one of the evils living after Caesar. Somewhat like Cassius, Antony projects to his auditors the images he desires them to have of Caesar and themselves (and of course Brutus and the rest), partly by their planned divining of his not-so-hidden meaning. Behind all this there is another art hidden from them in his deeper purposes; if they knew of it, they might not be moved as they are, but one cynically suspects that they would nonetheless. Meanwhile, on the less consoling metadramatic level, the plebeians who execute and partly mirror Antony's intention are parodic versions of us.

In the abstract, as well as in the practical examples displayed by Antony, verbal irony is an especially paradoxical intertwining of notions of truth and falsity. Irony is transparent dissimulation, and its transparency is what distinguishes it from lying; the irony must at once be apparent to the initiated reader. Yet it could be said that a text must be always already understood by the reader in order to be comprehended at all, and this oddity would seem to be especially the case with ironic texts. Further, to the extent that a text contains a signal of its irony, that signal destroys in literalism the irony it displays, so that an ideal irony would dispense altogether with signals.²⁸ From this viewpoint, irony almost makes the liar paradox, with its overt statement that undoes itself by self-reference, seem unproblematic by comparison. In this play, though, there are multiple levels of paradox which are latent as irony is, and they are all the more hidden when they seem to have disclosed something of themselves. The half-open political moves and the staged disclosures of character (one's own or someone else's) are reversed by what remains for the time hidden; yet events become overt enough in the end for Brutus and Cassius, and therefore us.

Metadramatically too we would like to see and refer to or mirror ourselves in the best qualities of Brutus, especially his self-description, which seems to be our way into his character and into the whole play. But Brutus all but self-consciously turns his best into a great mistake; and apart from that the play continually forces us to compare ourselves and the world we know with characters and situations that are less than perceptive and ideal. Whether through Renaissance puzzlings about the limits and difficulty of self-knowledge, the traditional liar paradox, Cassius' disingenuous notions about mirrors, the metadramatic vision of tragedy as a blood sport, or some more modern problematics, we may have to concede that like Brutus we did not always already know and therefore never will, can never complete the task without paradox, nor indeed begin. Yet these statements themselves claim that Julius Caesar has shown Brutus and us a great deal.

Notes

1. Shakespeare and Society (1967), pp. 13-14. I have quoted more from Troilus than Eagleton did and have used, as throughout, the Complete Works, ed. David Bevington, 3rd edn (Glenview, 1980). I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the University of Kansas General Research Fund grant 3439-0038.

2. The example of Bakhtin is not casual: the view quoted from Eagleton resembles the thesis in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, published under the name of V. N. Volosinov but argued to be Bakhtin's by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 160, 166. Without naming titles, Eagleton describes Raymond Williams, to whom his early book is dedicated, as a long-time enthusiast of Volosinov—The Function of Criticism (1984), p. 109. Bakhtin's views on the novel are expressed in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination. Eagleton cites both the Marxism book and Bakhtin's book on Rabelais in William Shakespeare (Oxford, 1986), p. 106.

3. His flight into privacy is well discussed by Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983), pp. 170-1.

4. There are discussions in the Oxford, Arden, and Cambridge editions of Julius Caesar, and the New Variorum edition of Troilus and Cressida. Sources for wording and ideas are discussed by Gary Taylor, ‘Musophilus, Nosce Teipsum, and Julius Caesar’, Notes and Queries, ns 31 (June, 1984), 191-5. The ideas about eyes and reflections are treated as proverbial in Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, 1950), and R. W. Dent, Shakespeare's Proverbial Language (Berkeley, 1981), E231a and 232. There is much information on writings about self-knowledge in Rolf Soellner, Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-Knowledge (Columbus, 1972).

5. Those fyue qvestions, which Marke Tullye Cicero, disputed in his manor of Tuscalanum, trans. John Dolman (1561), E6v-E7. Perhaps Cicero is influenced by Plato's distinction in 1 Alcibiades (another source which has been claimed for Shakespeare), 132E-133E, between the soul itself and qualities or things which merely belong to the person.

6. Trans. Sir Philip Sidney, Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (1912; repr. Cambridge, 1962), vol. 3, 252, 264-5; other references include 266, 270-1, and 296 (Plotinus).

7. Problemes, in The Problemes of Aristotle (Edinburgh, 1595), G5-G5v. Zimara's work appeared with Aristotle in at least the Latin edition of 1583 and the English ones of 1595 and 1597. He is mentioned as raising problems about self-knowledge in the oft-printed annotations by Claudius Minoes on Andrea Alciati's Emblemata (Emblem CLXXXVII, ‘Submouendam ignorantiam’). He was very well known as a commentator on Aristotle and Averroës.

8. Poems, ed. Robert Krueger (Oxford, 1975), p. 9 (ll. 105-12). Other pertinent passages include ll. 185-8 and 761-4. J. L. Simmons says that this first-quoted passage ‘shows the incoherence of the image when pursued too far on the literal level’—Shakespeare's Pagan World (Charlottesville, 1973), p. 96.

9. Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works, trans. Josuah Sylvester, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford, 1979), vol. I, 283, 323-4 (I.vi.773-5; II.i. ‘Eden’ 261-8). His knowledge of Greek philosophy is evident in ‘Le Triomfe de la foi’, Chant Second.

10. The French is quoted from Works, ed. Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr, John Coriden Lyons, and Robert White Linker (Chapel Hill, 1940), vol. III, 8 (ll. 229-30). Pyrrhonian scepticism is described by Diogenes Laertius (IX.61f.) and by Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism. In I. 14 Sextus discusses the statements such as ‘All things are false’ which cancel themselves out in the manner of the liar paradox, my next topic.

11. The relevant passage from Wilson is in the edition by Richard S. Sprague (Northridge, 1972), pp. 216-17, where Epimenides the Cretan, describing Cretans as liars, self-referentially undercuts his own statement. I have given reasons for Wilson's pertinence and have applied the paradox critically to Shakespeare's plays in two articles in Shakespeare Quarterly: ‘The Paradox of Timon's Self-Cursing’, 35 (1984), 290-304; and ‘Macbeth's—And Our—Self-Equivocations’, 37 (1986), 160-74.

12. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (1964), vol. 5, p. 116. This, along with the speech by Cicero, is cited by D. J. Palmer, ‘The Self-Awareness of the Tragic Hero’, in Shakespearian Tragedy, ed. David Palmer and Malcolm Bradbury, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 20 (1984), p. 138.

13. A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), facsimile ed. Hardin Craig (New York, 1940), p. 96. Brutus is discussed as melancholic by W. Nicholas Knight, ‘Brutus' Motivation and Melancholy’, Upstart Crow, 5 (Fall 1984), 108-24. Though the description is just, Brutus seems, for reasons which will appear, to be more self-conscious and perhaps therefore less pathological than Knight describes.

14. A. W. Bellringer, ‘Julius Caesar: Room Enough’, Critical Quarterly, 12 (1970), 31-48; rpr. in Shakespeare's Wide and Universal Stage, ed. C. B. Cox and D. J. Palmer (Manchester, 1984), pp. 146-163; p. 152.

15. ‘“Ariachne's Broken Woof”: the Rhetoric of Citation in Troilus and Cressida’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York, 1985), pp. 28-9. ‘Strange loops’ are discussed in relation to the self-reference of the liar paradox by Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach (New York, 1979). In Gadamer's Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1985), Joel C. Weinsheimer applies Gödel's reasoning about self-reference in mathematical axioms to the claims of Hegelian self-knowledge (as an explanation of Gadamer's views): self-knowledge, though it may be true, must be incomplete (as it is, given the nature of language) or else potentially paradoxical (pp. 37-59). William R. Brashear discusses the implications for tragedy of noncorrespondence of knower and known according to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler in The Gorgon's Head (Athens, Georgia, 1977), pp. 1-26.

16. His awareness of Cassius' doings is discussed by Camille Wells Slights, The Casuistical Tradition (Princeton, 1981), p. 83.

17. Palmer, p. 136. He also says of Brutus that ‘The sequence of his speeches progresses inwards, revealing a disordered judgement’—and perhaps, one might add, a strange loop.

18. Slights, pp. 82-91 (with emphasis, however, on a casuistical rather than rhetorical tradition); Gayle Greene, ‘The Language of Brutus' Soliloquy: Similitude and Self-Deception in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar’, in Humanitas: Essays in Honor of Ralph Ross, ed. Quincy Howe, Jr (Claremont, 1977), pp. 74-86. The rhetorical emphasis in the play is justly described by Anne Barton, ‘Julius Caesar and Coriolanus: Shakespeare's Roman World of Words’, in Shakespeare's Craft, ed. Philip H. Highfill, Jr (Carbondale, 1982), pp. 24-47, and by James R. Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 153-66. Constitution of an individual through the words of another is a subject of Pierre Spriet, ‘Amour et politique: le discours de l'autre dans Julius Caesar’, Coriolan (Travaux de l'Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, Série B, Tome 5, 1984), pp. 227-39.

19. A New Mimesis (1983), p. 108. Perhaps Brutus' mind is almost running ahead to a justifying speech he would make in the Forum; the outline has a heading ‘Extremities’, though the subtopics are as yet unspecified.

20. The note on l. 61 by the Oxford editor, Arthur Humphreys, partially agrees with this interpretation; but I do not think the implications of ‘whet’ are unconscious for Brutus.

21. Sigurd Burkhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, 1968), pp. 7-8; Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (1968), pp. 152-3; Lawrence Danson, Tragic Alphabet (New Haven, 1974), pp. 56-67 (the latter two critics with emphasis on the failure of purification). An earlier treatment of ritual and counter-ritual is Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy (New York, 1956), pp. 44-53.

22. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 51.

23. Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto, 1978), p. 160.

24. Plutarch's Lives, trans. Sir Thomas North, ed. George Wyndham, Tudor Translations (1895), vol. 4, p. 298. Reuben A. Brower, Hero & Saint (Oxford, 1971), p. 207, remarks on Plutarch's failure to follow his precept.

25. The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 19. This passage is cited by Palmer, p. 139. The element of deceit in figurative language according to Puttenham is discussed by Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘Shakespeare's Liars’ (British Academy Shakespeare Lecture, 1983), Proceedings of the British Academy, 69 (1983), p. 166.

26. Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Reading the Signs: towards a Semiotics of Shakespearean Drama’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (1985), p. 129. He also notices (p. 134) that Antony's soliloquy revealing his stratagem (ll. 255-76) parallels one by Cassius after he has worked on Brutus (1.2.308-22).

27. Serpieri discusses litotes, paralepsis (occupatio), and negation among Antony's techniques (p. 133).

28. These points about irony are made by Beda Allemann, ‘De l'ironie en tant que principe littéraire’, Poétique, 36 (November, 1978), 388-96. He does not draw a comparison to the liar paradox.