SOURCE: Kujawinska-Courtney, Krystyna. “Julius Caesar: Two Visions of the Past.” In “Th' Interpretation of the Time”: The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Roman Plays, pp. 26-58. Victoria, B.C., Canada: University of Victoria, 1993.

[In the following essay, Kujawinska-Courtney argues that the play's treatment of Julius Caesar's character is focused on whether Caesar should be viewed as insolent, impious, and imperfect, or as sacred and idolized. Kujawinska-Courtney contends that Shakespeare's manipulation of his character “shakes the audience's confidence that either Caesar is the correct one.”]

How Caesar should be seen, how his past (shadowy in the play but often invoked) can or should be a contributor to his charisma—these are the focus of Shakespeare's play about his assassination. Is Caesar profane and flawed as Cassius sees him (I.ii), or sacred and iconic as Antony presents him (III.ii)? Shakespeare's manipulation of mimesis and diegesis in the unfolding dramaturgy of the play shakes the audience's confidence that either Caesar is the correct one.

The first scene of Julius Caesar can be taken as a microcosm of the entire play. In that it portrays a set of challenges to the Roman Plebs' momentary endorsement of Caesar's greatness, it prefigures the dramaturgical design of the later action, which is a series of subversions of opinions. Typical of Shakespeare's expositions, it implies rather than explains. Only after a vigorous disagreement between Tribunes and Plebs does the theatrical audience learn that the Plebeians flocking to the streets and rejoicing are in fact celebrating Caesar's triumph on his return to Rome after defeating Pompey's sons at Munda. Plutarch's narrative indignation couched in his account of the celebration of Caesar's victory over civil, not external, enemies (Henley 1896, 5:56-57) is turned in Julius Caesar into an agon between two attitudes—glorification and condemnation—toward a war hero. Though at this moment of the dramatic action Shakespeare aims chiefly at evoking the fickleness of the mob, in the larger pattern of the play the dramaturgy aims at complicating any evaluative comment the audience might make about Caesar's past.

The stage-traffic in Act I, scene i, is heavy in movement, repartee, and emotional energy. But this initial dominance of mimetic representation is pushed aside by Marullus's sudden burst of oratorical verse into a basically prose context. This intrusion freezes the movement of the action and like a film close-up, focuses attention on the speaker and on his message. The change of linguistic mode defamiliarizes the audiences—both offstage and onstage—and serves to set Marullus at a distance from the Plebeians, imposing on them his Patrician authority.¹ In a way not only the content but also the form of his speech contributes to the apparent power of his argument. Marullus's political message is very simple: the Plebeians' adoration of Caesar is condemnable once the collective heroic past of Rome becomes a touchstone for an ultimate valuation of Caesar's glory and that of the late Pompey.

According to Marullus's interpretation, the dramatic present reveals the Plebeians as betrayers of their own memory. In the past they vigorously celebrated the victories of the “great Pompey.” Now they have unscrupulously abandoned the previous allegiance, “mak[ing] holiday to see Caesar, … rejoic[ing] in his triumph” (I.i.30-31). They are paying homage to Caesar's victory, just attained over great Pompey's kindred. In his reprimand of the Plebeians' present behaviour, Marullus implicitly chastises Caesar for his unprincipled civil war:

Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome:
And when you saw his chariot but appear
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way,
That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?

(I.i.37-39,42-51)

Flavius, the other Tribune, picks up the moral thrust that Marullus has just made in his critical valuation of Caesar's past. Yet the audience perceives an ironic twist in Flavius's narrative confirming the glory of Caesar by attempting to subvert it. He sees the need to pluck scarves honouring Caesar's past achievements from his statues and to pluck Caesar's “growing feathers … [to] make him fly an ordinary pitch” (I.i.72-73). The point is that the “scarves” are there and the feathers “growing.”

This first scene of the play reveals the praxis of the whole dramatic world of Julius Caesar. Caesar's past establishes him as a person constantly elevated by some, and denigrated by others. His elevation and denigration are presented by the immediacy of objective mimetic representation which is constantly played against subjective diegeses, detached by their very nature. The apparent conflict between these two dramaturgical modes intensifies the cloudiness of the dramatic world of the play.²

The cognitive process of the spectators/readers is complicated by the fact that up to the Forum scene (III.ii) they are exposed only to one-sided narratives, all of them diminishing Caesar. In fact, the colossal side of Caesar (I.ii.134) is never substantiated by any details in the play.³ There are no narrative explications of Caesar's audacity in the domination of the pirates who held him captive, his strategy on battlefields, or his genius as a statesman, law-giver, and reformer of the calendar.⁴ Shakespeare prima facie ignores Caesar's renown in time past, showing him as crowned with laurel leaves, and ignoring the spectacular achievements through which they were gained.

When eventually Antony's oratio funebris supplies the spectators with concrete evidence of Caesar's famous deeds, the catalogue is scant and questionable. For instance Antony skillfully telescopes Caesar's glory on battlefields into an emotional but insubstantial aetiology for the cloak covering Caesar's dead body. It is supposedly the cloak that he remembers Caesar “put … on; … that day he overcame the Nervii” (III.ii. 173, 175). By implication Antony makes use of the personal or collective memory of his onstage and offstage audiences who should remember that the battle against the Nervii was the most precarious and most decisive in the Gallic wars (Henley 1896, 5:22). But the anecdote of the garment is problematic. Plutarch's Antonius had not participated in the battle against the Nervii (Henley 1896, 6:5-8); he first joined Caesar in Gaul three years later. Shakespeare's Antony narrates then with assured conviction events which he did not witness. Further, the battle itself took place some seventeen years before the Ides of March, 44 b.c., which makes the historical value Antony assigns to the cloak highly doubtful. Antony creates, then, in his narrative reference to a garment a little myth to intensify the larger myth of Caesar's military glory. The complexity of the relationship between these two myths may be diminished for the less educated audience: they react emotionally (as the stage audience does) to the story of the origin of a gashed mantle, but Antony's devious manipulation of history escapes them.⁵

Antony's prevarication in the Nervii allusion bears comparison with other selective references to Caesar's past in his speech. He reminds the Plebeians of the material profits that Caesar's victories once brought to Rome (III.ii.90-91), and he alludes to Caesar's sympathetic engagement with the problems of the poor (III.ii.93). In other words Antony narrates only those details of Caesar's past which he can easily turn into “acts of public service rather than a quest for personal glory” (Thomas 1989, 65). Indeed, the Caesar of this demagogic speech was a “virtuous” man in the formulation of the historian Donald Earl who points out that the Roman concept of virtus “consisted in the winning of personal pre-eminence and glory by the commission of great deeds in the service of the Roman state” (1967, 21).

Though Antony elevates Caesar's spiritual greatness, as a political tactician he knows how to exploit the mimetic power of the semantic symbols: Caesar's bleeding body and his bloodied cloak (III.ii.160, 172, 196-199, 226-228). The choreographic use of properties qualifies and exaggerates the expectations of the onstage and offstage audiences who are already aroused by his narrative. And so the judiciously managed properties set up the final emotional involvement of both audiences.

The Forum audience never notices as deceptive Antony's clever management of the narrative (Caesar's past) and of the stage (Caesar's corpse). But the theatre audience may see through his crafted behaviour. As the mimetic and diegetic interplay of his actions shows, Antony is as much a manipulator as an idealist. He is perpetuating Caesar's glory; but he also has another objective—to fashion himself, morally and politically, into the ultimate defender of the Caesarian status quo—he intends to assume in the future the dead Caesar's powers over Rome which were exercized in the present and forged in the past.

It is not only Caesar's past as a Roman hero that is made ambiguous in this play. Even events that Caesar is involved in the unfolding action are made morally ambivalent by Shakespeare's careful management of dramaturgy. The highly politicized Lupercal and the accompanying political byplay constitute a turning point in the conspirators' decision to murder Caesar. Yet Shakespeare omits the mimetic presentation of this crucial historical moment. His strategic decision to have the offering and declining of the crown narrated by differently biased witnesses adds to the obscurity of the entire dramaturgical world of Julius Caesar. Since under such circumstances closure about the moral rectitude of the conspiracy is precluded, the theatre audience wavers, continually modifying its response to Caesar and to the assassins. Subjective diegeses, appealing as they are, cannot substitute for the objective power of mimetic representation which the staged Lupercal could have offered.

The psychological situation of the theatre audience in the matter of the Lupercalian ceremonies is complicated more drastically by the fact that the action is taking place “just off-stage,” and the offstage sounds make the audience feel that it is almost witnessing a mimetic presentation. Maurice Charney treats these shouts as “a good example of presentational images that are not visual” (1961, 68). In this unusual bit of dramaturgy, Shakespeare teases the audience with near-mimesis accompanied by strongly prejudiced diegesis to evoke a tense uncertainty which the onstage characters share with the theatre audience.

The near-mimesis functions as a lurking danger to the reality perceived on the stage. The shouts of the crowd imply Caesar's political success, while Cassius and Brutus, present on stage, voice their anxiety about the threat to the Roman Republic that the ceremony nearby evidently poses. The inner energy Brutus and Cassius exude is infectious, and the spectators are more likely to be caught up in the point of view of these intense Romans whom they see than in the more distanced near-mimesis in the marketplace offstage.

Earlier, as soon as the Lupercalian procession instructed by Caesar has left to perform the rites (I.ii.11), Cassius begins his attempt to lure Brutus into the conspiracy as an ally. He must maneouver the responses of his interlocutor in a careful way, as he does not know Brutus's attitude toward Caesar's supposed political plans. Cassius, of course, wishes Brutus to learn who his real friends are and how much they expect him to safeguard the welfare of Republican Rome.

Speaking from a Patrician's stance, Cassius begins his tales about Caesar's past by referring to his own and Brutus's equality to Caesar, an equality conferred by their birth and nurture (I.ii.96-98). The content of the anecdotes themselves serves, however, as an illustration of Cassius's opinion that Caesar has no right to any superior status and that in fact he is an inferior creature. Demeaning Caesar's past, Cassius struggles to find a space for himself in the past and future history of Rome. In the first of his two narratives Cassius compares himself to Aeneas rescuing a feeble old man Anchises/Julius Caesar (I.ii.111-114). This comparison is to illustrate not only Caesar's weakness but also Cassius's grandeur, and his belief that, owing to his heroic mission in the assassination he plans, he himself will become another founder of a new Rome—immortalized by grateful generations (Miola 1983, 82-85). In his second account of Caesar's weaknesses, his illness in Spain, Cassius deprives Caesar even of his gender and his maturity, assigning to him the identity of “a sick girl” (I.ii.127), who should take an inferior place to real men—by implication Cassius.

Ironically enough, Cassius's narrative denigration of Caesar is clothed in an illeistic grammar borrowed from Caesar's own style in the Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Those members of the audience who know Caesar's work and can make the connection will be aware that Cassius is willy-nilly paying tribute to Caesar by imitating his style.⁶ Thus the very rhetoric of his anecdotes reveals that he cannot escape the concept of Caesar's greatness—he models himself on the man he belittles to Brutus. Once more, then, Shakespeare differentiates between an average theatre-goer and an intellectual one. The commoners standing in the pit of the Globe in 1599 most likely took Cassius's style at face value, while the more educated part of his audience, those sitting in the tiers, could have extrapolated from Cassius's adopted style a means of distrusting him as a manipulator of Brutus's response. (Brutus has never seen through Cassius's stylistic machinations, and already in the play he himself has assumed Caesar's illeistic style—I.ii.42-46).

Frequent use of anacoluthon reveals the agitation of Cassius's mind and his natural inclination to rash action.⁷ Indeed, Shakespeare's Cassius is, as Plutarch says, of “hotte stirring” (Henley 1896, 6:189); being dared he jumped instantly into the water during the swimming match with Caesar and “bade him follow” (I.ii.105). Now he is not afraid to risk his life while probing Brutus's political convictions.

Attempting to capture his brother-in-law's attention by whatever means, Cassius makes an ample use of histrionics. Like an amateurish actor who plays for the applause of the public, he accentuates and repeats the phrases that have appeared to be of interest to his listener or have evoked his disbelief: “he did shake; 'tis true, this god did shake” (I.ii.120). Using emphatic auxiliary verbs he ingrains in Brutus's mind those facts of his narrative which he regards as important (I.ii.116,119-120,123). His theatrical ploy extends then to a convincing performance; he enacts Caesar's part in front of Brutus, supposedly giving his words verbatim (I.ii.101-103,110-126).

Shrewdly arranging the diegetic and mimetic dimensions of drama, Cassius—the director and actor—is successful in luring Brutus's interest. Unintentionally his seduction is intensified by the offstage shouts from the ceremony to which all men except Cassius and Brutus have been drawn. Shakespeare uses these offstage sounds cumulatively (I.ii.77SD,130SD) to fuel the nervousness of the apprehensive Brutus which Cassius is quick to exploit. For instance the first offstage flourish-and-shout punctuates precisely the point Cassius has been circling towards. The fear Brutus admits after the first offstage shout (I.ii.77-78) encourages Cassius to enter into a more open denigration of Caesar. Whatever defence of Caesar Brutus might consider making is refuted by the growing suspicion that he shares with the audience, a fear of Caesar's quest for power.

In the third part of his narrative Cassius concentrates on a comparison between Caesar and Brutus. He uses the same technique here that Marullus used with the Plebeians in the first scene; comparing Caesar to another, Cassius disparages him in relation to Brutus in the same way that Marullus disparaged Caesar in relation to Pompey. Next he subtly appeals to Brutus's pride with his allusion to Brutus's ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, who was one of the founders of the Roman republic:

O, you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once that would have brook'd
Th'eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.

(I.ii.156-159)

The more educated part of the theatre audience would know that by a scarcely veiled innuendo Cassius besmirches Caesar further. He equates him with the “devil”—the tyrant Tarquin who dominated Rome in the past. Eliminating the new would-be tyrant, Brutus will repeat his ancestor's act of salvation and earn for himself a place in the history of Rome.

Cassius's narrative bait appeals successfully to Brutus's sense of his own identity; later in the play Brutus makes the heroic identification with his ancestor and, like Cassius, hopes to find a space for himself in the approval of the future:

My ancestors did from the streets of Rome
The Tarquin drive, when he was call'd a king.
… O Rome, I make thee promise,
If the redress will follow, thou receivest
Thy full petition at the hand of Brutus.

(II.i.53-54,56-58)

To apply the terminology of modern psychology, Cassius makes use in the “temptation scene” of Brutus's subconscious “desirable identity images, [that] represent what people can be or should be in a particular context, and are influenced by personality factors, and situational factors, and audience factors” (Schlenker 1986, 25).

The whole scene ii of Act I is a skillfully orchestrated interaction of mimetic and diegetic elements. Looming offstage, the colossal figure of Caesar dominates the reality of the stage, in a way his spirit will dominate the events to come after his assassination. Cassius portrays Caesar as a physical weakling, but paradoxically he finds in his personal ambition a threat to the Republic. Cassius's fear of this alleged weakling is an ironic confirmation of Caesar's glory and political importance. In addition, sagacious members of the audience see that the hidden aim of Cassius in the conspiracy against Caesar is to substitute his own charisma, a-building at this very moment, for Caesar's stature in the power structure of Rome.

The meaning of the off-stage shouts is ambiguous, as ambiguous as the concept of Caesar's greatness or weakness, which is never univocally proclaimed in the play. Shakespeare plays these shouts against Cassius's narrative, and the clash between near-mimesis and the diegetic response to it clouds a single interpretation of the dramatic world of the play. Too few clues (the shouts offstage) and too many clues (the staged part of the scene) effectively limit the hermeneutic horizon of the spectators.

The revelation of the events which have just taken place offstage is delayed by the ceremonial entry of Caesar's train. The audience learns about the mood of those returning, observing through Brutus's eyes that they appear to be in a disturbed state (I.ii.180-186). A fragmentary eye-witness account comes in Casca's twice-told tale of the Lupercalian rites and their political embellishment. His first narrative is so scant that it only whets the audience's desire for the truth. He speaks on the urging of his interlocutors, who almost have to drag the answers out of his throat:

CASCA:
Why, there was a crown offer'd him, and, being offer'd him, he put it by with the back of his hand, thus; and then the people fell a-shouting.
BRUTUS:
What was the second noise for?
CASCA:
Why, for that too.
CASSIUS:
They shouted thrice: what was the last cry for?
CASCA:
Why, for that too.
BRUTUS:
Was the crown offer'd him thrice?
CASCA:
Aye, marry, was't, and he put it by thrice, every time gentler than other; and at every putting-by mine honest neighbours shouted.
CASSIUS:
Who offered him the crown?
CASCA:
Why, Antony.

(II.ii.217-229)

Answering their detailed questions in a very uncooperative manner, Casca four times abruptly calls attention to his next statement with the particle “why,” as if he wanted to exclude vaguely apprehended doubt or objection. Other interpretations of Casca's “why”s are, of course, possible. They can be a signal of his impatience or of his desire to seem a “blunt fellow” (I.ii.292).

But whatever the interpretation of Casca's rhetorical ploys, his flat factual report does not satisfy Brutus's and Cassius's interest. They demand a more connected and more circumstantial discourse; Brutus, true to a ritual cast of mind that will reappear in the preparations for the assassination, focuses his questions here not so much on Caesar's refusal of the crown as on “the manner” of this refusal (I.ii.230).

Casca responds by re-imposing his uninvolved point of view:

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 offered it to him again; then he put it by again; but to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time. He put it the third time by; and still as he refus'd it, the rabblement hooted, and clapp'd their chopt hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refus'd the crown, that it had, almost, choked Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it. And for mine own part, I durst not laugh, for fear of opening my lips and receiving the bad air.

(I.ii.231-247)

The affectation of being primarily concerned with the noisome air reeking from the rabble enables him to appear offhand about the details of the ceremony; Casca seems to find it difficult to recall them. He corrects himself for using the word “crown” for “coronets” (I.ii.233-234), as if pedantically determined to get every mimetic detail correct, or his posture may be that he really has not paid close attention to what Brutus and Cassius think the most important stage property of the off-stage scene. His repetition of the phrase “to my thinking” (II.ii.235-236) may suggest that Casca himself is unsure of an objective interpretation of the events, having been in some way numbed by the mimetic moment he has just been through. That moment was a bit of street theatre arranged by Antony to exploit the rites. (Ironically the theatre audience itself is and will be to the end of the play also unsure about the meaning for Caesar's intention of this supposedly impromptu “mimesis.”)

The mimetic context of Casca's narrative usually makes critics more interested in him as a character than in the real meaning of Caesar's reaction to the offer of the crown (MacCallum 1910, 286-287; Simmons 1973, 87-88; Dorsch [1955] 1986, lvi). Such a critical approach disregards the fact that Cassius and Brutus ascribe to Caesar the privateness of his pursuits and political ambition, while the Caesar Casca conveys has obeyed, even if reluctantly, the will of the people. He has placed their priorities above his. The overall effect of Casca's report and Brutus's and Cassius's interpretations of his report is, then, the confirmation of the feeling growing in the spectators that human evaluative process has less to do with truth than with what people can be persuaded to believe, or persuade themselves to believe.

The interpretation of the conflicting diegetic evaluations of Caesar is further perplexed when in the scenes leading to the assassination the audience is also confronted with Caesar in action. During the four times he appears on the stage, the spectators see an inconsistent portrait of this famous warrior and politician. In each of his entries Caesar displays simultaneously both profanum and sacrum sides—his “two bodies” as it were, are revealed. Indeed, in Julius Caesar the medieval concept of the king's two bodies is turned into a pivot on which Shakespeare's dramatic presentation of Caesar is poised⁸ and the clash between the profane and sacred aspects of Caesar successfully complicates the offstage audience's response.

The implications for Caesar's political situation and for his charisma loom large, but he acts as if they did not exist. Though repeatedly claiming immunity from normal human passions (III.i.36-43), Caesar unabashedly demonstrates his human weaknesses. On the one hand he insists on his spiritual uniqueness:

          men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion; … I am he.

(III.i.66-70)

On the other hand, the first two of Caesar's state entries, though ceremonial, reveal his own human frailties, pointing out that he is “flesh and blood, and apprehensive.” He speaks imperiously in Act I, scene ii,⁹ but what he speaks about is failure in family life (“barrenness” I.ii.6-9) or his physical disability (“deafness,” I.ii.210-211). He has no narratives of his past heroic achievements; he feels the need of none, because “the real man Caesar disappears for himself under the greatness of the Caesar myth. … He is a numen to himself” (Dowden [1875] 1964, 37). In this he follows blindly a static concept of the inherent sacredness of his charisma and power.

Shakespeare's Caesar is not aware of the culturally enduring truth that remaining at the center of power depends on a charisma that must be constantly renewed by self, by coterie, and by crowd. Clifford Geertz's formulation in terms of cultural anthropology is relevant here:

No matter how democratically the members of the elite are chosen … or how deeply divided among themselves they may be … they justify their existence and order their actions in terms of a collection of stories, ceremonies, insignia, formalities, and appurtenances … The intense focus on the figure of the king and the frank construction of a cult … around him make the symbolic character of domination. … [M]ajesty is made, not born.

(1983, 124)

The conspirators, as if conscious of this cultural and historical phenomenon, subvert Caesar's charismatic domination by undermining the basis in the past for Caesar's present glory, and they thus suspend their own cooperation with creating Caesar's mystique. At the same time Caesar himself willy-nilly advances the assassins' strategy, since in his misplaced confidence¹⁰ he neglects the power of the two buildingblocks of charisma, diegesis and mimesis. Eventually even Casca, the most obsequious member of Caesar's coterie (I.ii.1,14) disengages himself from Caesar and becomes one of the members of the conspiracy against him. As Caesar ignores the dialectics of his image, he also decenters the theatre audience's commitment. What he thinks of as perpetual and static, the audience may come to regard as volatile and dynamic.

The offstage audience's response to Caesar as the center of power is again defocused by the scene in his house on the morning of the Ides of March. The “night-gown” (“house-coat”) which the stage direction (II.ii.1SD) attributes to him evokes another rupture in the publicness of his self-regard—he receives his political colleagues in attire which has no place in the public world. Moreover, the only two narratives of past action which Caesar delivers in the play are placed in this scene, and they show his involvement in domestic, not state affairs. He recalls the disturbances of the previous night, concentrating on his wife's nightmarish cries (II.ii.1-3) and later in the scene he relates the contents of her upsetting dream to his visitor:

Because I love you, I will let you know:
Calphurnia here, my wife, stays me at home.
She dreamt to-night she saw my statue,
Which like a fountain with an hundred spouts
Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans
Came smiling, and did bathe their hands in it.
And these does she apply for warnings and portents
And evils imminent; and on her knee
Hath begg'd that I will stay at home to-day.

(II.ii.74-82)

As Calphurnia's dream has not been narrated in any other way on the stage, the spectators are left to interpret the circumstances of her original narrative which have not been supplied. Caesar's behaviour allows them to deduce that the couple must have talked about the dream before arising, presumably from the same bed. It is a touching glimpse of a politician's private life; Caesar who not only shares the intimacy of a bed with his wife and finds time to talk to her, is really concerned about her welfare. The affection in Caesar's married life does not help him, however, in the implementation of his charismatic greatness, at least from his stage audience's point of view. Decius's interpretation of Calphurnia's dream reminds Caesar of his public image in which there is no place for domestic emotions (II.ii.93-104).

Calphurnia's presence asserts (in vain) the validity of private life, but it also enlarges the dramatic world of the play by overtly connecting the supernatural with the natural. The spectators have earlier experienced the mimetic and diegetic intrusion of the prodigies into Rome (I.iii, II.i.44-45). Now Calphurnia's detailed narrative description (II.ii.13-26) heightens the tragic dimension of Julius Caesar, since she gives the omens the function of a direct warning to Caesar.¹¹ Her husband ignores them, and his feeling of his own charismatic security and invulnerability contributes to the dramatic tension, amplifying the audience's anticipation—it knows him to be a doomed man on the very brink.

Earlier in the play when the portents are experienced mimetically by the audience they are integrated organically in the political world of the play. Casca (I.iii.5-3,15-28) and Cassius (I.iii.46-52,62-79) both narrate particulars of the portents while the cosmic storm is actually in progress (the storm at night, lightning flashing ominously over the characters who meet in the street). And this combination of mimetic and diegetic presentation of the disorder in the macrocosm intensifies the experience for the audience.¹² At the same time the audience is not allowed to forget Caesar's glory, since the portents are “commensurate with the greatness of Caesar's influence” (Whitaker 1953, 228). Indeed, whatever biases the narrators reveal, their accounts of the omens in the heavens add to the sense of Caesar as colossal, a concept that transcends the mimetic world of the play. The presence of the divine intervention therefore confirms Caesar's sacredness, despite the weaknesses of his profane identity revealed by mimesis.

Building on his pattern of binary evaluation of Caesar—elevation and denigration—Shakespeare makes his characters Casca and Cassius express radically opposed opinions about the premonitory import of the tempestuous night. In the heightened emotions of his harrowing experiences in the streets of Rome, the prosaic Casca the theatre audience has known turns to poetry, but even so he retains some of the rhetoric of his Lupercalian narrative; repeating phrases (I.iii.5-6), especially anaphorically (I.iii.9). This time his piling up a list of prodigies in an unceasing fashion reflects not impatience or cynical bluntness, or any other affectation. The spectators now will find only one meaning in his rhetoric: he is very frightened. Thomas F. Van Laan observes that “the fearful, superstitious attitude Casca reveals towards the storm … suggests that his tough-guy pose” of the previous scene “may well be intended to conceal something a little less praiseworthy” than his enthusiasm for any “bold or noble enterprise” (1978, 158). Casca's fright affirms his respect for the omens and by implication his respect for Caesar who, the theatre audience senses, is associated with them.

Cassius—Caesar's opponent—prides himself on his immunity from the portents of the night. In his narrative he describes how he “walk'd about the streets,” “bar'd [his] bosom to the thunder-stone” and “when the cross blue lightning seem'd to open the breast of heaven [he] did present [himself] even in the aim and very flash of it” (I.iii.49-52). Wolfgang Clemen interprets Cassius's position:

[He insists] with elevated rhetoric on the search for the “true cause” … and uses the portents for his own purpose. … [He] sees in the nocturnal storm and in the omens an incitement to Caesar's murder, a sign of the indignation of Nature at Caesar's actions.

(1972, 52)

Cassius thus dislocates the meaning of the omens from the center in which fearful Casca has placed them in order to dislocate Caesar from the center of power.

In Act II, scene i, Brutus is able to read letters by the light of the lightning flashing in the sky. He shrugs off stoically the meaning of these cosmic disturbances (II.i.44-45) but for all this the scene in the orchard, in which the conspiracy is launched, is rich in moral overtones. By introducing the prominent trope of the layering of future on present and past, and past on present and future, this scene contributes fittingly to the irreconcilable dichotomies that can be said to animate the whole of Julius Caesar. Several antecedent and retrospective narratives of the assassination confuse the spectators' attitude to Caesar more and more. From the very beginning of the conspirators' commitment, Brutus assumes the role of a “metahistorian” and manipulates the cognitive act of the theatre audience's “seeing.” The ritualized aesthetic paradigm which he uses as a strategic interpretation for the future staging of the murder reveals him also as an endower of his stage audience with meaning. Contrary to his fellow-assassins who perceive Caesar only as a human, profane entity, Brutus initially acknowledges Caesar's incorporeal magnitude which could threaten the integrity of the Roman Republic. Caught in the paradox of his idealized reasoning, he wishes the assassins could separate the sacrum from the profanum in Caesar and kill his spirit without shedding his blood (II.i.166-171).

The irony of Brutus's narrative interpretation of an event which is yet to come lies in the fact that his allusion to ritual and ceremony aims at the spiritualization of the bloody performers of a violent act—and ironically, at the victim's expense:

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.
And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide 'em. This shall make
Our purpose necessary, and not envious;
Which so appearing to the common eyes,
We shall be call'd purgers, not murderers.

(II.i.172-180)

Alienated from the gory reality of the murder, the conspirators are to aspire to sacredness, substituting their greatness for Caesar's. In Brutus's narrative they will assume Caesar's place in heroic stature—and the heroic is an ultimate Roman value-concept. At this moment of the play, Brutus's expectation of grandeur diffuses the negative response of the onstage and offstage audiences to the pending assassination; in turn Brutus's grand vision will later be challenged by the mimesis of the act. This conflict between a diegetic assignment of moral meaning and a challenging mimetic reality is, of course, paradigmatic for the play as a whole.

Even if Harry Berger Jr., is right that “the performative use determines textual meaning, [and that] a reading of the playtext can never do more than lay out the ensemble of possibilities that underlie and enrich the selectivity of the performance” (1989, 5), the director who disregards the textual stage directions of Julius Caesar and tries to ritualize formally the assassination scene, will “evoke ridicule or involuntary laughter from the audience” (Taylor 1985, 19). Such a director, like Brutus in his antecedent staging of the event, does not take into consideration the human factor, real people witnessing responsively a mimetic act of murder.

Theatrical and performance criticism of this scene recognizes an escalating tension when the prophetic (diegetic) becomes the present (mimetic) in/of the assassination for both the conspirators and the spectators. Both the offstage and onstage audiences concentrate their attention on Casca as the first to deliver a blow against Caesar (III.i.30) and on Brutus the last, “the conspirator in whom we are most interested … as the moral focus of the event” (Taylor 1985, 25). The immediacy of the murder prevents a detached, evaluative response. Shakespeare's formulaic “They stab Caesar” (III.i.SD) results in a flurry of violence; but this brief mimetic moment is immediately succeeded and undercut by Caesar's laconic, resonant and poignant half line, “Then fall Caesar” (III.i.77). This half line as one critic says presents Caesar “greater—or more sympathetic” than anywhere else in the play (Andrews 1989, 146).

The immediate aftermath of the assassination forms a very significant mimetic moment in the development of the play. Here the newly-emerged factions—Republican and Caesarian—attempt to fill the political vacuum with their own charismatic stature. A shrewd manipulation of mimesis and diegesis becomes an ultimate ideological means by which the leaders of the factions manifest their powers and impair the powers of their opponents—Caesar's corpse constitutes an important point of reference in their representational and narrative ploys.

Cassius and Brutus diminish the moral value of Caesar's life by ritualizing his murder. Cassius relegates the figurative meaning of the assassination to future theatrical performances (III.i.111-113) while Brutus invites his friends to join him in a symbolic gesture, smearing their hands with Caesar's blood (III.i.105-107). In Brutus's narrative, which turns the murder into a myth, Caesar's past glories are forgotten, while Caesar's corporeal presence “no worthier than the dust” (III.i.116) finds a pragmatic use. Yet, Cassius's and Brutus's diegetic and mimetic manoeuvers are only partly successful. Their interpretations of the premeditated bloodshed and the mutilated body calm down the agitated minds of their colleagues—they need the psychotherapeutic balm of their historiographies. At the same time, distanced from the committed crime, the offstage audience may question the assassins' indifference to the value of human life and their disrespect for the dead body. There is, indeed, a stark discrepancy between what the audiences see and the interpretation Brutus is making of what they have seen moments before. The sight of Caesar's bleeding corpse embellished by diegetic interpretation is very disturbing; Octavius's servant, confronted with the mimetic reality, breaks down in the middle of his own narrative and tears come to his eyes (III.i.279-282).

Similar indifference to Caesar's life may be detected in Antony's first gesture toward the assassins. Though he has been portrayed as Caesar's confidant in Act I, scene ii, and as one whom Caesar affectionately teased about his social life in Act II, scene ii, here in Act III, scene i, after Caesar's death Antony appears at first in the scene of the murder only vicariously—through an intermediary who has essentially been programmed to speak for him. Whether Antony is devoted to his dead friend or whether he is only a self-seeking politician is a question that may trouble a spectator in this scene. The glimpses the audience has had of Antony early in the play have been most brief—a contemptuous characterization of him by Brutus prominent among them (II.ii.165). Now Antony takes on importance in the political world of Rome; whatever his motives, he is suddenly a major bidder for power in the void created by Caesar's death.

Treading on politically insecure ground, Antony never loses his head—he does not rush to the site of the murder but sends his servant who is to convince the assassins about Antony's willingness to ally himself with their cause. And he makes sure that his messenger does not make any spontaneous interpretation of his master's will; he stage-manages his spokesman so precisely that his narrative approaches mimesis, without the freedom that normally enables diegesis to take an interpretative slant.

Antony knows that he must flatter Brutus by giving the impression that he is engaged in creating Brutus's charisma. Making a powerful use of mimetic signals, he therefore emphasizes his own inferior position in relation to the power-wielding conspirators—Antony orders his servant to “kneel,” “fall down” and deliver his exact words “prostrate” (III.i.123-125). The narrative he has instructed his messenger to deliver begins with an exordium, catching Brutus's attention immediately—it appeals to those values which the leader of the conspiracy cherishes most: nobleness, wisdom, valiance and honesty (III.i.126). Since Antony cannot deny his affiliation with his dead friend, he vicariously contrasts his attitude to Brutus with his sense of Caesar, but he is careful not to over-emphasize his past allegiance. Antony affirms then his past respect and love for Caesar, prefacing his eulogy with the statement that he “fear'd” him (III.i.125). But even this tactical ploy is ambivalent, as “fear'd” has the positive and sacrum sense of “revered,” “was in awe of,” while it also has the negative and profanum sense of “trembled before.”

The self that Antony conveys through his elaborately coached messenger is submissive and ready to defect to the camp of the victors over Caesar. Ironically the tightness of Antony's “directions” and the servant's emphasis on those directions may suggest retrospectively to the theatre audience (as it does not to Brutus) that Antony is a crafty schemer, although in the mimetic moment the servant's impressive performance may postpone such an awareness. Indeed both the audiences are put here in the position of identifying with the speaker as his convincing “play” overwhelms their intellectual response.

Brutus and Cassius have just attempted, somewhat less than successfully, through ritual to draw attention away from the bleeding corpse of Caesar to the ideals that dictated the conspiracy against him. Now moments later, Antony's histrionic servant draws attention away from the same bleeding corpse—to the absent Antony. For all his scantily professed love of Caesar, Antony approves of this distraction, indeed planned it.

Mesmerized by the performative present, the conspirators lose an objective perception of Antony's narrative. His willingness to cooperate is taken at face value, and his reference to “the hazards of this untrod state” (III.i.136), which the alert theatre audience may interpret as his political condemnation of the assassination, is lost on his stage audience. The conspirators seem to concentrate only on Antony's hypothetical pledge of “true faith” (III.i.137) to the Republican cause, neglecting his implication that the conspirators killed the certainty and the stability of the Caesarian past when they stabbed Caesar, creating an as yet “untrod” future. Even Brutus, who in the past has diminished Antony as a person (II.i.165,181-183,185-189), changes his point of view and pays Antony a compliment:

Thy master is a wise and valiant Roman;
I never thought him worse.

(III.i.138-139)

The offstage and the onstage audiences will find this statement “I never thought him worse” ironic in light of II.ii.165 where Brutus contemptuously has referred to Antony as “a limb of Caesar.”

Brutus's conveniently short memory is shared in this scene by Cassius. The very man who has so recently advocated Antony's elimination agrees now to admit Antony into the newly created power structure:

Your voice shall be as strong as any man's
In the disposing of new dignities.

(III.ii.177-178)

And his admission of Antony into the distribution of “new dignities” may recall to the minds of the audience Cassius's pragmatic frame of mind—in his antecedent and retrospective narrative Cassius never loses his touch with political reality—he knows what Antony intends to gain. Caesar's death means the creation of new charismatic positions couched in financial benefits.

With Antony's appearance at the site of the murder, the attention of the onstage and offstage audiences once more focuses on the immediate result of violence. His aim is to produce guilt in the assassins, as Maurice Charney says, by drawing attention to their “purpled hands” (III.i.158)—“the outward badge of their guilt” (1961, 54). But there is more: Antony tries to arouse guilt by emphasizing the semantic importance of the body of Caesar itself. Caesar's “Conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils [may be, as Antony observes] shrunk to this little measure,” his lifeless corpse (III.i.149). But that bloody corpse still has power—it eliminates Brutus's nearly successful attempt to detach the mimetic aftermath of the assassination from violent physicality.

Trying to preserve the assassins' dignity, Brutus and Cassius successively break into (III.i.164,211) Antony's emotional response which is taking full advantage of the theatrical aspect of the situation. And, since at that moment they are the wielders of moral and political power, Antony then “appears to agree with Brutus's notion about the limitations of [his] present vision” (Homan 1986, 93). His apology that he “was indeed sway'd from the point by looking down on Caesar” (III.i.218-219) is accepted by Brutus who is taken in by Antony's histrionic posture beside Caesar's corpse. Moreover, Brutus agrees to let him speak, significantly in a ritual, and tells Cassius that he himself will assure the Plebeians that there will be “all true rites and lawful ceremonies” (III.i.241) at Caesar's funeral. Imposing at this moment of the play his limited ritual point of view, and in effect ignoring the dead man's blood, Brutus unintentionally enlarges the vision of the offstage audience, convincing it (if it is not already convinced) that he himself has been rendered an unreliable narrator by his cast of mind. From this time onward Brutus will try to justify his own greatness, and implicitly the greatness of the conspirators, by creating the charisma of their heroic spirituality. He will entirely identify himself with the assassins.

It is only when Antony remains alone on the stage that he freely expresses his anguish over Caesar's death, praising him as “the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times” (III.i.256-257). Yet, Shakespeare does not allow the spectators even now to fully identify themselves with Antony's narrative authority. The sense that he is sincere, imposed on the audience that hears his intimate soliloquy, is seriously threatened by the political expediency of the instructions Antony sends immediately afterward to Octavius (III.i.287-296). Juxtaposing an emotionally attractive soliloquy with a calculating political strategy following immediately is typical of the means Shakespeare uses in Julius Caesar to prevent the offstage audience's full engagement or detachment to a given narrator.

Shakespeare's handling of Brutus's and Antony's Forum orations may produce the same ambivalence in the theatre audience's response. Brutus's oration is, in fact, another instance of his self-assertive political/rhetorical methods. And his self-assertiveness is present in the repetitive solipsistic elevation of Brutus's own image,¹³ which the critics concentrating on his style (Hoey and Winter 1981, 315-339; Nathan 1982, 82-90), and on the soundness of his argument and the psychology of his persuasion (Lundholm 1938, 293-305; Crane 1951, 143-145) almost completely disregard. But it is not incidental that in 41 lines of Brutus's speech there are 23 personal and possessive pronouns referring to the speaker:

hear me for my cause. … Believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe. Censure me in your wisdom. … If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus's love to Caesar was no less than his. …

(III.ii.13-38ff; emphasis added)

Brutus outlines Caesar's merits in his speech, but thinking about his own political fate he denigrates Caesar by presenting him as over-ambitious, as a threat to Republicanism. Even Caesar's virtues are mentioned in a vague way as a sounding board for Brutus's own position, political and moral, in Rome. And Brutus's position is foregrounded—he is to be believed for his honour.

He never admits in this speech that in the past he actually loved Caesar or rejoiced at his glorious deeds. Expressing only his present state of mind, Brutus completely distances himself and seeks to distance the listeners from Caesar's past, which may be lingering in the tender memory of the Plebeians. Ironically, he breaks the rhetorical rules of the laudatio funebris, turning attention exactly away from the object and toward the speaker. The ideal teller of the virtus of a king should figuratively disappear from his own enunciated narrative (Marin 1988, 78-80); Brutus is, then, more a historian of his own merits than a historian of Caesar's.

A moment later, swept away by overbearing rhetoric and yet detached by a lurking awareness of some hidden agenda, the spectators cannot make a complete commitment to Antony any more than to Brutus. The historical strategy which Antony employs is effective. First of all he undercuts the reasoning of Caesar's assassins that he “was ambitious” (III.ii.27)—their rationale for Caesar's death—and that he was seeking the satisfaction of his personal aims rather than the public good. Antony attacks the conspirators' ideology by his constant repetition of the word “ambitious,” an adjective which he ridicules in his interpretation of Caesar's and the conspirators' actions (III.ii.81,88,92,95,100).

The political byplay that he and Caesar engaged in at the time of the Lupercalian rites supplies him with diegetic material for his indoctrination of the Roman Plebs (I.ii). Ignoring the rites themselves, Antony destroys for his agitated listeners the political implications which the assassins have earlier imposed on that event. According to them the manner in which Caesar rejected the offered crown revealed him as ambitious for a throne (I.ii). Now Antony selectively omits the manner of the refusal, concentrating entirely on the political and moral dimension of Caesar's behaviour, and he construes it as a sign of his Republican integrity. After all, Caesar waved away the royal emblem when he was presented “a kingly crown which he did thrice refuse” (III.ii.98-99). Beguiled by the attractiveness of his oratorical ploys, the onstage audience becomes easily coaxed into accepting Antony's assertion: “tis certain [Caesar] was not ambitious” (III.ii.115). Antony has thus effectively achieved his aim—he has expunged from the minds' of the Plebeians the conspirators' authority as the liberators of Rome from the supposedly tyrannous clutches of a power-seeking Caesar.

Controlling the disposition of his onstage listeners, Antony makes use of the staged assassination, imposing on it his own diegetic closure. Though Antony was cleverly excluded from the scene of Caesar's murder and afterward “fled to his house amaz'd” (III.i.96), he narrates with assured certainty the dramatized details of the scene at the Capitol. And he uses these details as punctuation when he exhibits the gashes in Caesar's mantle:

Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca 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,
.....For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel.
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar lov'd him.
This was the most unkindest cut of all;
For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,
Quite vanquish'd him: then burst his mighty heart;
And in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey's statue
… great Caesar fell.

(III.ii.175-180,183-191)

Presenting himself as an omniscient narrator, Antony assumes an authority over his subject matter from his stage audience's point of view; he focuses on the mimetic effect of the assassination, and this focus brings him an emotional involvement of his onstage public.

The spectators may, however, question the extent of his “omniscience” and indeed his candor, though his narrative follows precisely the events of the staged assassination at the Capitol. For a while the theatre audience may respond to Antony not as a mere narrator-character, one who possesses a limited vision of the dramatic world, but as the “implied narrator”—Shakespeare—as the “author-in-the-work” of Julius Caesar (cf. Uspensky 1973, 158-159). This unexpected intrusion of the author's total plot knowledge into the dramatic text intensifies the semiotic significance of Caesar's murder as staged. (Cf. Iser 1974, 288-289, for the principle). The authorial “presence” not only exposes the falsehood of Brutus's ritual interpretation of the events of the assassination but also makes the spectators vigilantly attentive to Antony's narratives. Straining their concentration on Antony's diegetic reliability helps the audience to realize that he regularly warps rituals into political opportunities. The Lupercalian rites and Caesar's funeral are two outstanding instances. It is therefore ironic that Shakespeare's dramaturgical manipulation of diegesis and mimesis subverts both Brutus—the ritualist—and Antony—the exploiter of rituals.

The shadow of political self-interestedness and dissimulation stays with the theatre audience for the rest of the play (Cf. Miola 1983, 105). The retrospective references to dead Caesar and to the mimetic presence of his spirit are turned into a means of self-fashioning, and are no less fashioned by the newly created centers of authority: the Republicans and the Caesarians. Each of the main characters of the play “desires to be more than he is. Each sees in the historical moment a challenge to himself to extend the bounds of his personal domain, to possess a larger being, to realize in himself the idea of the nobility of Rome” (Nevo 1972, 99).

The post-assassination dramatic world of Julius Caesar intensifies the interpretative memories of the onstage and offstage audiences who, engaged in an unceasing dialogic quest for the meaning of Caesar's stature, are constantly dislocated by the narratively and mimetically represented powers of his bodily absence. The strategic manipulation of his past value evokes the tension between Antony's and the conspirators' narratives on Caesar's murder, a tension which permeates the second part of the play.

If, as Northrop Frye suggests, the term “heroic” really implies “something infinite imprisoned in the finite” (1967, 5), the assassination of Caesar indeed creates “a moment of catastrophic self-deception” on the part of the conspirators (Brockbank 1989, 135). Contrary to their expectations, their murder strengthens Caesar's spirit, which, released from the imprisonment of its profane body, sets off on its long, phantasmal quest for revenge. William J. Rolfe's opinion that “[Caesar's] real share in the action of the play … begins with his death” (1893, 176) reflects the Victorian hyperbole of his rhetorical strategy; nevertheless even more than when alive, Caesar dead seems to shape powerfully the history of the Roman world.¹⁴

Antony seems to unleash the spiritual powers of Caesar in the antecedent narrative in which he predicts that “Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge” (III.i.270) will bring on the atrocities of civil war. Yet, unlike Richmond in Richard III, Antony receives no promise of future success from a spirit's immediate presence; and unlike Hamlet, Antony is never directly inspired by a spirit's calling. As if disbelieving the honesty of Antony's actions, the spirit seems to handle its personal revenge itself, assigning to Antony's and Octavius's army only the policing that an army can do. This lack of personal cooperation between Caesar's spirit (the force that manifests its authoritative punitive powers over the murderers) and Antony and Octavius (the force that assumes the charisma of this power) alienates the theatrical audience. The audience is put on guard not to identify itself with the spectacularly self-politicized revengers.

The ultimate cause of the defeat of Cassius and Brutus is the stealthy and ambient encroachment of Caesar's spirit over their doctrinaire minds. This is the spirit that Antony envisions in his soliloquy over Caesar's body: “And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge, …” (III.i.270). The revenge it ranges for has a psychological, not physical, dimension—it is constantly a presence in the conspirators' minds. But, of course, there is the proximate cause, the armies, which Antony and Octavius head—though not in total unison. The doubleness of the vengeful forces arrayed against the conspirators draws the theatre audience's sympathy to them as underdogs, even as the spectators remember the reasons for revenge against them. Brutus and Cassius are separated morally and physically from Rome and they are both in imminent danger of alienation from one another. (Brutus is isolated by insulating grief for his lost wife).

Brutus and Cassius are fighting for their survival in the aftermath of the assassination, but Antony and Octavius are struggling also to survive in a dangerous world. The “proscription” scene and the “quarrel” scene (IV.i,IV.iii) manifest the capacity of Shakespeare's diegetic and mimetic strategies to arrange the spectators' response to the characters who are caught in the double web of history-making and history-experiencing. The principal characters behave as if they were history-makers, capable of assuming the charisma of Caesar. In reality, all of the characters to one extent or another are history-experiencers, pawns in a game played by Caesar's spirit.

If the audience had any doubts about Antony's attitude to Caesar, the “proscription scene” (IV.i) disperses them definitely. Amidst the urgent questions concerning the consolidation of powers against his Republican opponents, Antony never forgets about his own political stature—ironically at his dead friend's expense. He makes references to Caesar, but these references are far from an altruistic veneration of his memory. Antony's parsimonious intention to “cut off some charge in [Caesar's] legacies” (IV.i.9) is not calculated to perpetuate Caesar's greatness among the Roman Plebeians. At the same time Antony's reference to his “own” spirit governing Lepidus's “corporal motion” (IV.i.33) points out his egoistic appetite for his own transcendent sacredness.

Paradoxically Antony fashions himself as Caesar did before him. Blind to the implications of his political situation; he does not recognize the possible subversion of his powers by his close friend. Though Octavius demands concessions in the proscription without making any himself, and though Octavius assumes leadership in planning for the military campaign at the end of the scene, Antony plunges himself into an assumed charisma, seeing himself, as Caesar saw himself: the unchallenged center of a recently consolidated power.¹⁵ And he intends to exercise his rule in a more tyrannical and arbitrary way than Caesar did—ironically under the banner of his murdered friend's name. Suspicion of something less than honourable in Antony's vengeance for Caesar's death turns to reality in this scene of power consolidation in the Caesarian camp.

The “quarrel” scene presents another example of a power-in-the-making, this time from the Republican standpoint. Brutus's new and less subtle method of sustaining his dominance over Cassius is revealed to the audience in this mimetic moment. But since his moral position now lacks the authority that his philosophizing once conferred, his insistence on his worth is more blatant. Unable to escape Caesar's memory, Brutus, like Antony in the preceding scene, makes narrative references to Caesar, but only to achieve his own political aims. Chastizing Cassius for dubious methods of raising money, Brutus once more returns to his myth of the sacredness of Caesar's assassination—the assassination of “the foremost man of all this world” (IV.iii.18-26) [22]). Yet, his attempts to rise above the realities of financial affairs, and to exercize his authority by using the moral weapon of constancy to the conspirators' cause reveal him at his worst: Brutus is peevish, and unreasonable to an extreme degree.

Even before Cassius's arrival Brutus asserts himself as the leader of the Republican camp. He undermines his friend's authority by narrating to Pindarus—Cassius's servant—his master's insubordination (IV.ii.6-9). The spectators can also detect Brutus's political self-assertion in his insistence in front of “Cassius and his Powers” on discussing Cassius's grievances in private (IV.ii.41-47). His choice of terminology is suggestive: “I will give you audience,” he says—as a king does. Brutus purports to be sparing Cassius from the embarrassment of a public quarrel; yet he puts Cassius in the embarrassing position of an inferior. There is something devious, as well as high-handed, in his dealing here.

Cassius begins the argument in the tent by enumerating his grievances against Brutus:

That you have wrong'd me doth appear in this:
You have condemn'd and noted Lucius Pella
For taking bribes here of the Sardians;
Wherein my letters, praying on his side,
Because I knew the man, was slighted off.

(IV.iii.1-5)

His rationally balanced narrative stands in an opposition to the narrative style of his approach to Brutus in Act I, scene ii. The spectators may feel that Cassius projects security in his position within the power structure of Rome. His security does not, however, last long, since Brutus makes sure that Cassius understands who is at the center of political dominion.

Stylus arguit hominem. The style of Brutus's reprimand of Cassius recalls the style of his Forum speech, although these two speeches are different in mode: the former in prose, the latter in verse:

Remember March, the ides of March remember.
Did not great Julius bleed for justice's sake?
What villain touch'd his body, that did stab,
And not for justice? What, shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers, shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes,
And sell the mighty space of our large honours
For so much trash as may be grasped thus?
I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon,
Than such a Roman.

(IV.iii.18-28)

Despite the ordering and reconstructing of the past that Brutus's narratives confer, he reveals here his unpleasant self-righteousness and his egocentric devotion to his own person, confirmed by his solipsistic locutions:

                                        I did send to you
For certain sums of gold, which you denied me;
For I can raise no money by vile means;
By heaven, I had rather coin my heart,
And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring
From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash
By any indirection. I did send
To you for gold to pay my legions,
Which you denied me:

(IV.iii.69-77; emphasis added)

The theatre audience has heard this self-concern from him before—in the funeral oration.¹⁶

Brutus's stable linguistic style in narratives illustrates Ricoeur's general principle that “‘narrative repetition’ … means the ‘retrieval’ of our most fundamental potentialities, as they are inherited from our own past, in terms of a personal fate and a common destiny” ([1980] 1981, 179). Indeed, Brutus believes in the “retrieval” of his “most fundamental potentialities”—his leadership of the conspiracy and the sacredness of the assassination. Once he has decided on a course of action with its supposed consequences, he adheres to it as the only truth—his “personal fate and a common destiny.” No wonder the critics accuse Brutus of an excessive constancy to abstract idealistic reasoning, which he often formulates on the basis of false diegetic assumptions (Smith 1959, 373; Palmer 1970, 399-409; Rackin 1978, 40).

The variety of verbal and nonverbal signals which the spectators are exposed to mimetically in the “quarrel” scene may prevent them from exploring Brutus's narrative strategy aimed at curbing Cassius's political appetites. After the initial attempts at self-assertion, accompanied by outbursts of unrestrained anger (IV.iii.13-14,17,28-30,41), Cassius realizes that he cannot displace Brutus's belief in the charisma of his leadership of the Republican camp. After all, Cassius himself has set this belief in motion much earlier. It was he who implanted in Brutus the idea of Brutus's superiority by birth and social position (I.ii.156-159, I.iii.140-145). It was he who insisted on Brutus's moral and spiritual uniqueness so ardently that he infected the conspiracy with this orthodoxy. Caius Ligarius, for example, has invoked Brutus as “Soul of Rome” (II.i.321). Later in the play Cassius has by evasion twice accepted Brutus's priority of voice, however unreasonable his voice might have sounded (II.i.181-189, III.i.226-243), affirming thereby Brutus's complete control over the assassins.

Retreating to his position as second best in the Republican camp, Cassius takes refuge in a melodramatic gesture; he bares his bosom and offers Brutus his dagger:

I, that denied thee gold, will give my heart:
Strike, as thou didst at Caesar; for I know,
When thou didst hate him worst, thou lov'dst him better
Than ever thou lov'dst Cassius.

(IV.iii.103-106)

Although some critics see this gesture as Cassius's spontaneous reaction to Brutus's apparent withdrawal of friendship (Traversi 1963, 60-67; Leggatt 1988, 149), the body language implied by the text at this moment invites a more complex interpretation. Cassius's gesture can be read as an iconographic symbol of his total submission to Brutus. Shakespeare's theatre audience, aware of medieval cultural conventions as a modern audience is not, could read this gesture in terms of the medieval master/vassal relationship (cf. Geertz 1983, 106, for the principle); vassal Cassius accepts Brutus as the master of his life and death. Brutus sees this gesture as such, since his anger suddenly disappears and he is “cold again” (IV.iii.112).

The spectators will probably also notice that Cassius narratively extends his visual submission. The content of his narrative reveals his eagerness to escalate further Brutus's charisma.¹⁷ He seems in this exclamatory speech to recall that Brutus struck specifically at Caesar's heart: “I … will give my heart: strike, as thou didst at Caesar” (IV.iii.103-104). Yet Antony, after Plutarch, has insisted that the blow “was the most unkindest cut of all” (III.ii.185). Shakespeare makes no further reference to the “one wound” that Brutus gave Caesar “about his privities” (Henley 1896, 5:68), but informed members of an audience of Julius Caesar may find irony in Cassius's reference to Brutus and Caesar's heart. Here in Act IV, scene iii, as in so many places late in the play, Caesar and his assassination become a touchstone for the spectators' evaluation of the characters and for the characters' evaluation of themselves and others.

The encounter of the Caesarian and the Republican camps before the battle of Philippi is another assertion of the eternal presence of Caesar in the mimetic and diegetic dimensions of the play. Extending his previous historical account of the circumstances of Caesar's death, Antony aims at “radical subversiveness,” of the conspirators' charismatic authority, to apply Stephen Greenblatt's phrase (1981, 41-61). He does not attempt to seize their authority, but he challenges the principles upon which that authority stands. And thus Antony strikes at the assassins with a harsh narrative description of the scene in the Capitol:

                              when your vile daggers
Hack'd one another in the sides of Caesar:
You show'd your teeth like apes, and fawn'd like hounds,
And bow'd like bondmen, kissing Caesar's feet …

(V.i.39-42)

Since his ultimate goal is to re-ritualize Caesar's death at the expense of these assassins, Antony deprives them of their strength, the authority which they derive from the myth of their ritualized participation in the act in the Capitol. Subverting their spiritual image of themselves as priestly sacrificers, he denigrates them by turning them into butchers and vicious animals who mercilessly have torn their innocent prey to pieces.

Antony reinstalls Caesar at the center of power in Rome by recalling his veneration by the obsequious conspirators, who kissed Caesar's feet. Further, making diegetic use of the audience's earlier mimetic engagement in the assassination scene in which Brutus and Casca formed the two centers of dramatic interest, Antony now turns Brutus and Casca into the foremost objects of his attack:

In your bad strokes, Brutus, you give good words;
Witness the hole you made in Caesar's heart,
Crying, “Long live! hail, Caesar”
.....While damned Casca, like a cur, behind
Struck Caesar on the neck. O you flatterers!

(V.i.30-32,43-44)

Antony's interpretation of the moral facts of the assassination here constitutes a second instance of a kind of intertextuality (III.ii.175-180,183-191), a dialogue, as it were, between the mimetically once-represented event and the diegetic re-vision of that event.

The narrative impact of Antony's speeches is lost in the mimetic present of the flyting, especially in that the encounter reveals further an intended dissension in both the Republican and Caesarian camps. Cassius insults Antony (“a masker and a reveller,” V.i.61-62), but neither he nor Brutus makes any attempt to undermine the subjective narrative Antony has provided of the assassination. Instead, Cassius turns petulantly on Brutus:

Flatterers? Now Brutus, thank yourself.
This tongue had not offended so to-day,
If Cassius might have rul'd.

(V.i.45-47)

His indignation aims at Brutus's inefficiency as the leader of the Republicans, not at Antony as the narrative abuser. Cassius subverts, then, the authority of the man he promoted to dominate the conspiracy and the theatre audience might treat his comment as another example of Cassius's nostalgic pining for his own lost political dominion. The Caesarian camp is also a place of political rivalry. Octavius builds up his own image as “another Caesar” (V.i.54), but Antony, foolishly serene in his power as head of the Caesarian camp, leaves Octavius's politically challenging remark without any comment.

As the play goes on, the spectators become more and more aware that Caesar has been moulded by the characters of the play, consciously and unconsciously, into an icon of their subjective memories. The little that has been seen of Caesar on stage tends to pass away under the impact of the narratives used to achieve the speakers' aims. The narratives assume the function of his tomb, where Caesar subsists not as a decaying corpse but as a living spirit—the spirit which is, however, not free-willed but willed by their political biases.

Antony's diegeses on Caesar are perhaps most powerful, since his elocutionary skills, recurring so as to become quasi-formulaic, systematically destroy the conspirators' negative constructions of Caesar. And the theatre audience is constantly manipulated by Antony's rhetoric into seeing Caesar as the very personification of absolute power itself. He has portrayed Caesar as having acted independent of legions and logistics; now Caesar's spirit seems to Cassius and Brutus to exercize a power over them, their camp, and their cause, a power detached from other agencies. Like the living Caesar, whom the spectators know from the practices of his glorious past described in Antony's narratives, Caesar's spirit exercizes power on his own.

Yet, as his mimetic encounter with Brutus affirms, Caesar as a spirit also requires the active participation of his victims in heightening the charisma of his power. At first Brutus is not a willing participant; he undermines Caesar's importance by his indifference when the Ghost appears to him at Sardis (IV.iii.280-286). The Brutus of Act IV, scene iii, still feels that the mantle of Caesar's sacrum self has come to rest on his own shoulders after the assassination and that Caesar and his Spirit are now incidental.

This feeling of apparent indifference is slowly dispersed by the conspirators' growing insecurity. Eventually even they recognize Caesar's spirit as a part of the Other World, the world which the leaders of the plot refused to accept when they disregarded or misinterpreted in Caesar's lifetime the meaning of prodigies and omens. Their change of beliefs illustrates Clifford Geertz's assertion that in primitive societies “the existence of bafflement, pain, and moral paradox—of the Problem of Meaning—is one of the things that drives men toward beliefs in gods, devils, spirits, totemic principles, … but it is not the basis upon which those beliefs rest, but rather their most important field of application” (1973, 109).

Cassius, once the sturdiest Sceptic of the gods' interference in human affairs (Velz 1973, 256-259), and a man who arranged past events diegetically to make them mean what he wanted them to mean, is the first of the conspirators to apply the authority of the supernatural:

You know that I held Epicurus strong,
And his opinion; now I change my mind,
And partly credit things that do presage.
Coming from Sardis, on our former ensign
Two mighty eagles fell, and there they perch'd,
Gorging and feeding from our soldiers' hands,
Who to Philippi here consorted us.
This morning are they fled away and gone,
And in their steads do ravens, crows, and kites
Fly o'er our heads, and downward look on us,
As we were sickly prey; their shadows seem
A canopy most fatal, under which
Our army lies, ready to give up the ghost.

(V.i.77-89)

Indeed, Cassius is the man who undergoes at this moment of the play Geertz's spell of “bafflement, pain, and moral paradox,” turning to the supernatural in his dissatisfaction with his political position. Even his soldierly experience has been doubted, since he was made to obey Brutus's insistence on the time and manner in which the battle against Octavius' and Antony's armies is to be fought. His resigned narrative passage recalls to the minds of the theatre audience the mimetic representation of his humiliation in the military strategy conference at Sardis (IV.iii.195-224):

Give me thy hand, Messala:
Be thou my witness that against my will
(As Pompey was) am I compell'd to set
Upon one battle all our liberties.

(V.i.73-76)

Cassius's narrative explication of the birds' behaviour is, then, closely connected with the mimetic diminution of his powers within the Republican camp. But his comparison to Pompey aims at regaining his self-respect. He posits himself historically in a rank equal to that of one of the greatest heroes of the Roman Republic and, as Shakespeare's audience could know, one of the Nine Worthies.¹⁸

Later in the scene Cassius projects his insecurity on Brutus by asking him:

Then if we lose this battle,
You are contented to be led in triumph
Thorough the streets of Rome?

(V.i.108-110)

In his answer Brutus elevates his own value by referring to himself, as Caesar did, in the third person singular:

think not, thou noble Roman,
That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome;
He bears too great a mind.

(V.i.111-113)

Conscious of the fact that the clock of his history began ticking at the moment of Caesar's fall at the Capitol, he refers to this moment and predicts his own suicide in case of defeat (V.i.113-114), changing his previous philosophical stand on this matter.

The mimetic tension of the approaching battle might cloud the importance of Cassius's and Brutus's narrative anxiety over their fate in the case of defeat. Expressing their apprehension over the possibility of being led in triumph in Rome after Antony's and Octavius's hypothetical victory, Cassius and Brutus subconsciously equate them with the mighty Caesar himself who came “in triumph over Pompey's blood” (I.i.51). This is the first instance in the play when they implicitly engage themselves in the making of the charisma of Antony and Octavius.

Cassius's and Brutus's attempts to disengage their deaths from the intervention of Antony and Octavius, men of a calibre smaller than that of Caesar, can be interpreted in two ways. Their narrative references to Caesar's spirit help them to justify their own political failure, unavoidable in the light of the divine power of Caesar's greatness. Michel Foucault has written that historically the ritualized public executions of traitors were to reveal “the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. … [It] did not reestablish justice; but it reactivated power” (1977, 49). Subconsciously, then, Brutus and Cassius also attribute to Caesar royal prerogatives, the prerogatives they were so afraid of. As happens in the case of an attempted assassination punished by a king who has escaped it, the narrative presence of Caesar's spirit in the moments of the suicides of Cassius and Brutus becomes a semiotic sign of Caesar's sovereign power.

The dramatic structure of the circumstances preceding Cassius's death follows to a certain extent his temptation of Brutus (I.ii). Placed in the position of a witness of the offstage action—near mimesis, he tries to find the meaning of events he cannot see. This time, however, his misconstruing “everything” (V.iii.84)¹⁹ is fatal, while the mimetic focusing on his suicide goes hand in hand with his narrative affirmation of the power of Caesar's spirit. He asks his servant Pindarus:

                                                                                with this good sword,
That ran through Caesar's bowels, search this bosom.
Stand not to answer. Here, take thou the hilts,
And when my face is cover'd, as 'tis now,
Guide thou the sword.—Caesar, thou art reveng'd,
Even with the sword that kill'd thee.

(V.iii.41-46)

Brutus also dies with Caesar's name on his lips: “Caesar, now be still; I kill'd not thee with half so good a will” (V.v.50-51). And though later in reporting his death, Strato does not attribute it to Caesar's spirit but to Brutus's own will, he does deny the military action of Antony and Octavius any credit for this morally significant event: “For Brutus only overcame himself, and no man else hath honour by his death” (V.v.56-57). Brutus was as specific about the ultimate cause of Cassius's suicide as he later was about his own:

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.

(V.iii.94-96)

The immediacy of the mimetic presence of Cassius's and Brutus's deaths is intensified by their narrative references to their pasts. At these climactic moments of the play Shakespeare places the audiences in the position of narratively and mimetically engaged participants in the action. Trying to find help in their suicides, both Cassius and Brutus use their pasts to manipulate the responses of the onstage and offstage audiences. Cassius reminds his servant:

In Parthia did I take thee prisoner;
And then I swore thee, saving of thy life,
That whatsoever I did bid thee do,
Thou shouldst attempt it. Come now, keep thine oath.

(V.iii.36-40)

Brutus appeals to Volumnius's school sentiments:

                                                                                                    Good Volumnius,
Thou know'st that we two went to school together;
Even for that our love of old, I prithee
Hold thou my sword-hilts, whilst I run on it.

(V.v.25-28)

Extending the dramatic world of the play, they present themselves for the first time as men with personal, and not only political histories. They suddenly are frail, human individuals, not charismatic leaders of the nation. This new side of Brutus's and Cassius's portrayal makes it easier for anyone sitting in the audience to see her/himself in their place.

As Brutus is paired with Cassius, he is contrasted with Antony, once more in the late scenes of the play. Brutus remains the self-conscious ritualist he was at the time of the assassination, while Antony finds a pragmatic use for ritual as he has done before. The style and structure of Brutus's (V.iii.99-106) and Antony's (V.v.68-75) eulogies reveal the difference between the personalities and oratorical skills of these two opponents. Brutus's brevity in the praise he gives to dead Cassius could possibly be justified by the tactical needs of the war:

The last of all the Romans, fare thee well!
It is impossible that ever Rome
Should breed thy fellow. Friends, I owe more tears
To this dead man than you shall see me pay.
I shall find time …

(V.iii.99-103; emphasis added)

However, his own overwhelming presence in the speech once more indicates that Brutus is, first of all, interested in the perpetuation of his own history, even in the moment of emotional crisis. In short, once more the displacement of the subject (Cassius) in the narrative reveals the personal as opposed to the public dimension and demeanour of the speaker (Brutus). The theatre audience in face of this displacement is more likely to be moved by the mimetic portrayal of the waste of a human life than by the diegetic moment in which Brutus wanders from the awesome present to the indeterminate future.

In contrast, Antony's eulogy over Brutus's body, like his previous public speeches, concentrates on his subject and appeals to the emotions of the listeners:

This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up.
And say to all the world, “This was a man!”

(V.v.68-75)

The truth of his rendering of Brutus's character is left for the spectators to decide. By this time in the play they have had enough experience to perceive the dissimulative mode of Antony's rhetoric, and have had enough mimetic material to form their own point of view.

The ending of the play belongs to Octavius, who also comments on Brutus's death: “According to his virtue let us use him, with all respect and rites of burial” (V.v.76-77). The rest of his imperial speech concentrates on the events of the nearest future. He is, indeed, a shrewd politician, who realizes the importance of “the evening of victory.”²⁰

Julius Caesar is forgotten in the last words of the play. The present and the future are the arena of the newly emerged power, and this newly emerged power seems to know how to preserve itself by the narrative orchestration of charisma.

Notes

1. Marullus's narrative passage imposes also the local flavour of Rome as the historical background of the events to come. It introduces urbs Romae and its sempiterna attributes: “conquests,” “chariots,” “streets of Rome,” “Tiber.” The word “Rome” reverberates throughout his speech. Moreover, the speech evokes the feeling permeating the dramatic world of the play that “Rome is a world of speeches to crowds and that the course of Rome's history is a record of what effect speeches had” (Velz 1982, 58).

2. Many critics have noticed the cloudiness of the dramatic vision of the play and have found the effect it produces as deliberate, offering a variety of reasons: Ernest Schanzer connects it with characters and relates it to the perception of the play (1955, 297-308); Mildred E. Hartsock says that Shakespeare used this dialectic technique of presenting moral and political problems to explore the divergent, contradictory, and relative “truths” of human existence (1966, 56-62); Rene E. Fortin regards it as a purposeful experiment in point of view, intended to reveal the limitation of human knowledge (1968, 341-347); Lynn de Gerenday explains the play's ambivalence in “the way such formal devices as rhetoric and ceremony (reinforced by an emphasis on play-acting) bind and distance love and hostility from conscious expression” (1974, 25); Lawrence Danson finds the linguistic and ritualistic confusions of Julius Caesar as the main source of the problems of communication and expression in this tragedy (1974, 50-67). Harley Granville-Barker disposes, however, of the whole matter by suggesting that in 1599, when Shakespeare wrote the play, he was still struggling for adequate dramatic means, and that it is an imperfectly constructed play ([1947] 1959, 350-352).

3. For further implication of the “Colossal” in drama cf. Chapter Three, note 21 and accompanying text.

4. Plutarch devotes more than half of his Life of Julius Caesar to the presentation of his achievements in war and peace (Henley 1896, 5:2-60). Shakespeare's omission of these facts seems to be a deliberate strategy aimed at heightening the ambiguity of the play.

5. The popularity of Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives in the English Renaissance (cf.: MacCallum 1910, 141-167; Shackford 1929, 5-6, 19-45) gives some confidence that the more intellectual part of Shakespeare's audience saw through the duplicity of Antony's account of this part of the Gallic wars. The modern playgoer is likely to find him/herself in the position of the less well-read groundlings at Shakespeare's theatre. Only those members of the audience who possess extra-textual knowledge of the Roman history can understand the craftiness of Antony's rhetoric.

6. Yet, Cassius is not consistent in his use of the third-person style in this narrative passage. He impetuously backs into the first person in several places, signifying his egoism (I.ii.104,114,119,123).

7. Throughout this book the analysis of present tense in past tense narratives follows Nessa Wolfson's stylistic interpretation of anacoluthon. She reasons that the sudden intrusion of present tense into past tense narratives in literature makes narratives vivid, since it causes the action being recounted to appear to the listener (or to the reader) as if it were happening at the moment of telling. The narrators, in telling their stories, become so involved in the art of narrating that they imagine themselves reliving the events in question and recount them as if at the scene of action. The altered tense may also have the effect of focusing attention on an event or point in the story that the speaker (the implied author of the work) wishes to dramatize (1981, 226-231). It is pertinent in this context to notice that Shakespeare's use of anacoluthon in Calphurnia's narrative on the events preceding Caesar's death (II.ii.13-26) has been misunderstood by some editors of Julius Caesar, who have emended “fight” to “fought” and “do neigh” to “did neigh,” obliterating Shakespeare's stylistic ploy in this passage.

8. The clash between the profane and sacred aspects of Caesar forms the basis of the play's binary evaluation of his moral and political stature. For instance Cassius's narrative in scene ii, Act I centers on Caesar's profane side, while Antony's Forum address to the Plebs in scene ii, Act III, in some sense counterbalances this image by insisting on Caesar's spirit, his sacred side.

9. Caesar's imperious style may also be explained as his attempts “to convert [his] … unofficial military title [imperator] into an official political one” (Velz 1982, 66).

10. For instance, Calphurnia abruptly reprimands him, “Your wisdom is consum'd in confidence” (II.ii.49).

11. Muriel C. Bradbrook says that where a situation is already inescapable by means of human choice, Shakespeare introduces the omens that indicate “a sympathetic response from Nature, a sensitive reaction in the macrocosm, more like an Early Warning system than a Messenger of Heavenly Wrath” (1969, 109).

12. It was probably his success in Julius Caesar at integrating the supernatural with the deepest meanings of the action (a first in the canon) and making them a dramaturgical element of the play that encouraged Shakespeare to venture on portents in an even more complex way in his later plays: Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth. In those plays the omens overtly enlarge human matters to a macrocosmic, almost apocalyptic dimension.

13. Gordon Ross Smith lists fourteen instances of the egocentric wilfulness of Brutus (1959, 367-379); however, Mildred E. Hartsock disagrees with his interpretation of the passages and gives instances where Brutus is not willful or egocentric. The discrepancies in critics' reception of Brutus's character result probably from the fact that, as Hartsock says, “one responds to Brutus in partibus, not in toto.” I would, however, disagree with her point that “this difficulty of assembling Brutus” as a character is connected with Shakespeare's presentation of Brutus “as a living, complex human being … not found in Plutarch” (1966, 60). The analysis offered here invites an assumption that the ambiguous perception of Brutus is inseparable from the mimetic and diegetic modes of the play.

14. The idea of Caesar's fame after his death is already present in Shakespeare's Richard III, where a precocious little boy, Prince Edward, says:

    This Julius Caesar was a famous man;
    With what his valor did enrich his wit,
    His wit set down to make his valor live.
    Death makes no conquest of this conqueror,
    For now he lives in fame, though not in life.

    (III.i.84-88)

15. Octavius undermined Antony's political status by his shrewd action that he undertook in coming to Rome (III.ii.266), despite Antony's other plans for him (III.i.290-296). Yet while at that moment of the play Antony's blindness could be excused by his excitement at the furious climax of his Forum oration, here, in the “proscription scene,” when Octavius again ventures to assert himself in his relation with Antony, his political machinations are too obvious to be missed.

16. In addition to the recurring myth of the ritualized assassination and Brutus's solipsism, the analogies between these two narrative speeches cover major rhetorical matters: balance, type of sentence structure, important words used in opposition to a harmonious group. Instead of the imperatives which he relied on in the Forum scene, Brutus constructs the first part of his narrative in the “quarrel” scene out of interrogatives, expanding them by adjectivals and reaching a climax with a conditional. There is also repetition of phrases, even alliteration.

17. To a certain extent Brutus imposes his control over the situation by putting into practice the well-known fact, expressed by Louis Marin: “The stronger man … is stronger only through the annihilation of the less strong man, but the stronger man is also such only by enslaving the latter, that is, in making him work for him” (1988, 27). Cassius reduces himself to such a position.

18. Shakespeare must have been fascinated by the figure of Pompey the Great because though he never made him the hero of a play, he often refers to him and his greatness (cf. Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, Henry V, Antony and Cleopatra). In Julius Caesar the figure of Pompey is inseparable from the most important events of the play, including the location of the assassination itself. It would probably be too far fetched to understand Pompey's recurring presence in a wider context of revenge, as Plutarch does (Henley 1896, 5:68; 6:197) nevertheless he is mimetically and diegetically incorporated within the dramatic world of the play. Four of ten references to him belong to Cassius (I.iii.127,147,152; V.i.75), Marullus mentions him three times (I.i.37,47,51), Brutus once (III.i.115), Antony once (III.ii.183), and Metellus Cimber once (II.i.216).

19. Rene E. Fortin believes that the concept of misconstruing “includes much more than the immediate situation surrounding the suicide. For to some degree the central action of misconstruing touches all the characters of the play” (1968, 345). It also touches the audience, which struggles to find a solid ground for its epistemological perception of the dramatic situation presented.

20. Louis Marin says in another context that “the evening of victory … is once, but always and ever after, the moment of domination, of the end of the war and of the definition of the strongest part as the dominant part … the masters pose themselves as institutors of continuity.” (1988, 35)

List of Works Cited

Primary Texts:

All citations from Shakespeare's three major Roman plays are taken from the New Arden Editions:

Julius Caesar. 1955. Ed. T. S. Dorsch. London: Methuen, 1986.

All citations from Shakespeare's other works are taken from:

The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 1951. Ed. David Bevington. Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1980.

All citations from Plutarch are taken from W. E. Henley, ed. Plutarch's “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans” Englished by Sir Thomas North, Anno 1579. Vol. 1-6. London: David Nutt in the Strand, 1895-1896.

Secondary Texts:

Bradbrook, M. C. Shakespeare: The Craftsman. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969.

[Danson, L.] Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974.

Fortin, R. E. “Julius Caesar. An Experiment in Point of View.” Shakespeare Quarterly 19 (1968): 341-347.

Gerenday de, L. “Play, Ritualization, and Ambivalence in Julius Caesar.” Literature and Psychology 1 (1974): 24-33.

[Granville-Barker, H.] Prefaces to Shakespeare. 1947. Vol. 2. Princeton, Princeton UP, 1959.

Hartsock, M. E. “The Complexity of Julius Caesar.” PMLA 81 (1966): 56-62.

MacCallum, M. W. Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background. London: Macmillan, 1910.

Marin, L. Portrait of the King. Trans. Martha M. Houle. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1988.

Schanzer, E. “The Problem of Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare Quarterly 3 (1955): 297-308.

Shackford, M. H. Plutarch in Renaissance England With Special Reference to Shakespeare. Wellesley: Wellesley College, 1929.

Smith, G. R. “Brutus, Virtue, and Will.” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 367-79.

[Velz, J. W.] “‘Orator’ and ‘Imperator’ in Julius Caesar. Style and the Process of Roman History.” Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982): 55-75.

Wolfson, N. “Tense-Switching in Narrative.” Language and Style: An International Journal 14 (1981) 226-31.