SOURCE: Hamer, Mary. “Portia and Calpurnia.” In William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar, pp. 30-41. Plymouth, U.K.: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1998.

[In the following essay, Hamer studies the characters of Portia and Calpurnia in Julius Caesar, and examines the ways in which the education of women and the Roman conception of marriage contribute to their fate.]

When Portia enters and starts to speak, it is the first time, as we realize, that the voice of a woman has been heard. In public Calpurnia expressed only acquiescence and stood silent. Or perhaps we haven't even thought that was odd, for to some people the life we are shown in Shakespeare's Rome is perfectly natural and of interest only because it is such a good imitation of normal behaviour as we meet it in real life, rather than Shakespeare's play being a way of confronting us with questions about what we now think is normal and about what we take for granted.

To a woman's ear, the ear of a woman who has been married more than once, as I have, and as indeed the historical Portia herself had been, the words of Brutus strike a familiar note. The wife takes her husband by surprise; ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, rather put out as the broken movement of his first line shows: ‘Portia! What mean you? Wherefore rise you now?’ (2.1.233). As a form of greeting this leaves something to be desired, the more so perhaps if we hear in it a muted and domestic echo of the tribunes' cry that opened the play: ‘Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home!’ (1.1.1.). Even at home there is a Roman official alert to maintain control of the space. Though Brutus goes on more smoothly, a wife might well hear reproof in his voice, under the even movement of the iambics, a reproof offered under the guise of telling Portia what is good for her. ‘It is not for your health thus to commit / Your weak condition to the raw cold morning.’ (2.1.235-6), warns Brutus, reminding his wife to think of herself as weak. If instructing Portia offers a way for Brutus to stabilize himself, after the interview with the conspirators who have only just left the stage, for Portia to answer him with ‘Nor for yours neither’ breaks through that temporary calm. ‘Nor for yours neither’, she tells him, reminding him that what is bad for her is also bad for him, that she is not the only one who might fall sick. That a man's body is not that different from a woman's, after all. If nearly everyone in this play is sick in some way as Wilson Knight suggested—Caesar suffers from epilepsy and deafness, Brutus claims to be out of sorts, Ligarius is too ill to attend the conspirators' meeting, while Calpurnia has not been able to conceive and Portia mutilates herself—perhaps we are now being shown the common source of the diseases of Julius Caesar, a source that is found in the relations between women and men.¹

The conspirators wanted Brutus to act but Portia, his wife, wants him to speak to her. ‘Speak to me speak, why do you never speak’, begs the woman in T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. Does Portia sound like that in the ears of Brutus? But such terms as neurasthenic or neurotic, which are often applied to the anxious women in Eliot, don't seem to fit the behaviour of Portia here. As she speaks, she reveals herself, in Carol Gilligan's phrase as ‘a naturalist of the human world’ in her close observation of her husband. Maybe this is not what a Roman wife was supposed to do. It was Virginia Woolf, wasn't it, who suggested that for hundreds of years women had had the magic power of reflecting men at twice their natural size?² When Portia mirrors Brutus in this play, she does not show him what he wants to see about himself or reach for the language of admiration used to him by other men.

                                                  yesternight at supper
You suddenly arose and walked about,
Musing and sighing, with your arms across,
And when I asked you what the matter was,
You stared upon me with ungentle looks.
I urged you further, then you scratched your head
And too impatiently stamped with your foot.
Yet I insisted, yet you answered not,
But with an angry wafture of your hand
Gave sign for me to leave you.

(2.1.238-47)

It does not please Brutus to be observed in this state, reduced to silence, a silence that makes him strangely akin to the speechless bodies that Rome would like to make of the workmen and of the women, capable only of making a wordless gesture, a sign. For all her training as a Roman wife, Portia cannot avoid registering his behaviour in fine detail and noting it as strange. Case notes are what Portia offers, a scrupulous record of the recent interaction between them, which has convinced her that he is in distress.

When the resemblance was noted between the symptoms of shell-shock in army officers during the First World War and the hysteria that Freud had studied in intelligent highly educated women, W. H. R. Rivers offered an explanation.³ Rivers suggested that when the officers found themselves trapped and made helpless by the conditions of trench warfare, that put them into a position more often occupied by women, who in everyday life found themselves the targets of external attacks against which they had no defence. Men of other ranks manifested the same symptoms too. What if the problem for Brutus was his position as a man, a man confined by the language that Rome with its particular values and traditions made available to him? There might be more to men and to women too than their culture chose to recognize. Portia's description of the gesticulating, frowning body of her husband might well put us in mind today of the distorted postures adopted by hysterics that were recorded in the photographs of Charcot (FM 149-54). Aphasia is the term used for the loss of speech but it sounds very clinical. Showing Brutus utterly speechless might have suggested that, like Ophelia in Hamlet, he was abnormally disturbed. But that is not at all Shakespeare's point here. Brutus is nothing if not a normal and decent man. Instead Shakespeare chooses to ask us as audience to believe the words of Portia, when she tells us that Brutus is moved by feelings that he cannot put into speech.

We are to believe Portia, though we may come to be troubled by the excess of her own emotion as the scene proceeds, an excess that produces not speechlessness but a flood of language, too many words. ‘I am not well in health, and that is all.’ (2.1.257), mutters Brutus, almost sulkily. Isn't physical illness what hysterics turn to when they cannot reach language? Brutus might sound composed, to some ears, when he claims that he is simply not well but the audience knows for itself and Shakespeare is exploiting this, to drive a wedge between Brutus and ourselves, that this composure is a false front, a mask. Strange that some of us should feel as audience that there is something dignified about his lie; we may be closer to ancient Rome still than we think—or than Shakespeare was. The masks of ancestors were kept in the homes of certain Roman aristocrats and worn on the streets on special days: is it part of the duty of a Roman, even of a modern one, to keep the truth about himself from his wife? If Portia begins to sound insistent and even hysterical herself as she tries to make sense of him, if she kneels and starts to beg to be allowed to know what is happening in her own house, can we listening to her put a name to her desperation?

Deprivation or denial of sensory input can drive people mad. If hysteria develops when women or men are under threat and unable to defend themselves, there might be a threat to Portia that we need to recognize. It might lie in her husband, Brutus, in his refusal to acknowledge his own disturbance, a fact that she cannot avoid knowing because she's so close to him.

You have some sick offence within your mind,
Which by the right and virtue of my place
I ought to know of.

(2.1.268-70)

Portia begs. That right and virtuous place, Roman marriage, whose rules both Brutus and Portia are earnestly trying to observe, seems to be almost a form of torture for both women and men and to come between them at every turn. Portia has begun to frame questions about marriage for herself; is it because she is a wife that her husband must keep himself secret from her, she wonders?

Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus,
Is it excepted I should know no secrets
That appertain to you?

(2.1.280-82)

Her husband never has to address this question, because it is immediately translated or transposed by Portia, who is a good daughter of Rome, into a complaint.

Like Freud's patients, and like the women Virginia Woolf wrote of, Portia was one of the daughters of educated men, ‘excellently well seen in philosophy’ as Plutarch writes, but this may not have been much help to her (JC 166). Her own father, Cato, who is said to have spent the last night before he killed himself reading Plato, is also described in the same entry as being impervious to reason (OCCL). Portia too is trapped within the structures of Roman thought. A good woman, as Portia has been told, is a wife: a bad one a harlot. Stop treating me like a bad woman, she says, instead of staying with the all-important question: can it really be true that good women are meant to be punished by being kept at a distance by their husbands?

Though Portia can move Brutus to feeling—usually by physical gestures like kneeling rather than by words—she cannot move him to a language that escapes from the shackles of Rome. He can only repeat that she is true and honourable, a Roman wife and not a Roman harlot. The division between good women and bad ones seems the only way of thinking about women that is of interest in Rome. If Brutus tells Portia that she is dear to him, as he does, he phrases it in terms of comparing her to his blood. Perhaps Portia also thinks that only deep in the body, where the response to experience and to the outside world can remain locked and unspoken within living tissue, can what is true and what is valuable be found. Portia cut into her own body—‘Giving myself a voluntary wound / Here, in the thigh.’ (2.1.300-301)—in order to convince Brutus of her own worth, a worth that would be identical with silence, with keeping silent about her husband. A Roman wife must keep quiet about what she knows.

Portia cuts herself: when women do that today it is taken as a sign that they are gravely at risk, as the work of psychiatrist Estela Welldon has shown.⁴ You would not think any husband or lover could bear to see his wife's body mutilated in this way. But Brutus exclaims in admiration at the wound: ‘O ye gods, / Render me worthy of this noble wife!’ (2.1.302-3). What gods would prompt a man to admire a wounded body? It is earthly powers that profit from the battles where wounds are received. But in a military culture like Rome's, that is one that makes waging war the principle by which it grows, the human instinct to recoil from injury has to be managed and transformed. In the course of her good Roman education, Portia has learned the same lessons that are designed to form Roman men. When it comes to bodies, there has been an attempt to educate both Brutus and Portia out of tenderness and respect. But perhaps in a Roman marriage, as in a Roman Catholic one today, where control of fertility is officially forbidden, husband and wife are not intended to be lovers. There is sadness in those words that Portia utters soon after she begins to address her husband; ‘Y'have ungently, Brutus, / Stole from my bed’ (2.1.237-8), she complains. Is it tenderness and sexual pleasure that Portia is missing?

There was a market for images of Portia making demonstration of the wound in her thigh, in Christian Europe after the Renaissance. … They seem to have been intended to titillate, as the image of a sexualized wound. Maybe this image of Portia offers a surrogate, suggesting that the vagina is a wound, one that might be made or probed by a blade. Bodies are so exciting to each other: it seems that pleasure in active cruelty must develop once tenderness for the body has been discredited and disallowed. Freud argued that men could not bear to look directly at representations of the female genital because it reminded them that their own member could be cut off, but the image of Portia and the example of Freud himself might seem to expand that theory.⁵ What if the imaginary, the unconscious of Christian Europe, were haunted by the image of the vagina as a wound, a wound that might have given pleasure to someone in making it?

Portia is at risk both physically and psychologically: we are left in no doubt of this by the demonstration of her anxiety at 2.4 when she is waiting to discover whether the attack on Caesar has been carried out. Her breathing, the process by which she maintains the exchange of oxygen in her body, has become uneven as the jerky line-movement reveals:

I prithee, boy, run to the Senate House.
Stay not to answer me but get thee gone.
Why dost thou stay?

(2.4.1-3)

Of course the scene in one sense is playing with the audience, who are being teased and made to wait for the climactic moment of the murder. The appetite in us for violence is being worked up. But there is something for us to learn about Portia, something we need to understand. We might be tempted to compare her with Lady Macbeth, another wife in a warrior culture who decides that she must stop being a woman. Lady Macbeth, who tells us that she has borne children, wants to suppress her milk, to undo what is maternal in her response and in her body. It is a move, as we know, that would be appreciated in Rome. But Portia, the educated woman, the woman who has had the intellectual training of a Roman man, is required to suppress her own voice.

O constancy, be strong upon my side,
Set a huge mountain 'tween my heart and tongue!
I have a man's mind, but a woman's might.
How hard it is for women to keep counsel!—

(2.4.6-9)

Portia finds herself put under unexpected pressure once she is more closely involved in public affairs: her anxiety must be kept secret. Being true to Brutus and true to her education for Portia means learning to block her own response and to silence herself. Intuitively though, she knows the enormity of what she has undertaken and names it in the imagery of her speech. Agreeing to suppress her own voice means introducing a stony mass into the living organism of her body, a mass that will crush out her life. We have seen her put up one fight against the demand to suppress her own perceptions and her fears, when she succeeded in persuading Brutus to confide in her. Portia wanted only to share more closely in her husband's life. Now we realize that the demand for self-censorship in women was one that Portia has absorbed into her own being. Portia's training in dissociation began when her education divided her from herself, teaching her to believe that she had ‘a man's mind but a woman's might’. She is proud of being able to think like a Roman man, and even to speak as if she were one, against her own sex: ‘How hard it is for women to keep counsel’ she moralizes. This means that when actively suppressing her voice makes her feel ill—‘I must go in.’ (2.4.39), ‘O, I grow faint—.’ (2.4.43)—instead of pausing to question what she is doing to herself as a woman, Portia falls back on the adages she has been taught. She has only just admitted that it will take the weight of a ‘huge mountain’ to prevent the impulses of her heart from issuing in speech when Portia laments ‘Ay me, how weak a thing / The heart of woman is!’ (2.4.39-40). As Shakespeare's audience, we can hear Portia contradict herself and enter into confusion: to us Portia's problem appears to be that her impulses, her feelings of anxiety on behalf of her husband at this critical moment are so strong. Portia may think of herself as failing but we who observe her recognize a triumph, the triumph of her Roman education in Portia. This education has taught her to despise what she feels as a woman and has cut her off from the promptings of her own voice. Nothing in that education prepared her to recognize when she was putting herself in danger.

Two acts later at 4.3 Shakespeare shows us what is the outcome when a woman educated in Rome is put under the double stress of sharing the tensions of her husband's life. The news of Portia's suicide comes to us at the close of a quarrel between her husband and his friend and on the eve of the battle between men that will take up the whole last act of the play. Portia's death cannot be separated from the struggles for power that take place between men: it is a disturbing fact that Brutus and Cassius, who had been quarrelling between themselves, make their truce over Portia's dead body, or its representation. Didn't Luce Irigaray argue that the figure of a woman is necessary as the foundation for the pacts of men?⁶ Plutarch knew of two different explanations for the death of Portia: he argued in favour of the story that she had killed herself because she was ill and no one would help her. But Shakespeare chooses the other version, the one rejected by Plutarch: ‘she, determining to kill herself (her parents and friends carefully looking to keep her from it), took hot burning coals and cast them into her mouth, and kept her mouth so close that she choked herself (JC 183). This story takes us into a hideous world, one of mutilation and of fury at psychological abandonment: yet in its image of a mouth closed at all costs in the midst of friends, it picks up resonance. It recalls the silencing and self-destruction that we have seen Portia impose on herself in the name of loyalty and love.

We meet Calpurnia as a woman with a voice and a will of her own for the first time at 2.2. She is only too aware of the dangers by which the life of her husband, Caesar, is threatened in the world outside. Portia knew that something was troubling her husband, whatever he said to the contrary. Both women bring into the world of the play knowledge that is unwelcome, knowledge that has been acquired by accurate observation on their part. But where Portia succeeded in persuading Brutus to confide his plans to her, Calpurnia will not be able to get Caesar to make use of what she knows. Calpurnia has picked up what they intend to do to her husband. Even before she comes in, Caesar is repeating the words that she cried out beside him during the night in her dream: ‘Help ho, they murder Caesar!’ (2.2.3). Like Portia, Caesar can't help registering something of the disturbance in his partner, though it is made easier for him in that Calpurnia has words and images too, as we find later, for what she fears. Does Calpurnia communicate so vividly because she has never had her mind trained to think like a man, because she lacks Portia's familiarity with philosophy? Caesar doesn't ask Calpurnia what she thinks her dream means, although it is such a specific warning, unlike the generalized threat they both perceived in the thunder and lightning. Caesar never treats Calpurnia's dream as a form of perception or as an opinion that she is offering about the world, maybe because the dream is produced not out of a book but out of her own woman's body, like her voice.

Freud suggested that in nineteenth-century Europe dreams carried knowledge and desires that it was not permissible to admit to in everyday life. It would not be particularly surprising, in view of what we have already seen on the occasion of the Lupercalia, if Calpurnia had some desire of her own to see Caesar dead. I've never heard that giving a wife instructions brings out the best in her. When Caesar turned his back on the Soothsayer in public it was to dismiss him as a dreamer. Unofficial knowledge, the sort that is not sponsored by the state but carried on the individual voice, is easy to dismiss in Rome. Didn't the wife of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea, who warned him not to join in the plot against Jesus, find this out for herself? She sent messages to her husband as he sat in court saying that she had ‘suffered many things in a dream because of this just man’. Before the scene is out we may feel that Caesar himself is just a man, merely human, and that like Jesus he too is a victim of collusion among men who are jockeying for power.

With its emphasis on shutting down language, the Roman state wants to outlaw the ability to dream. Today doctors tell us that is not a healthy sign—our bodies need to go every night into that deep sleep where dreaming occurs. Whether we choose to remember our dreams or not is a different question. In private, as we see here, Caesar can't resist a dream, as Cassius told us in the previous scene but it marks a change in him:

For he is superstitious grown of late,
Quite from the main opinion he held once
Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies.

(2.1.195-7)

At the end of his life, according to Jasper Griffin, Caesar felt a sense of futility (HWC 18). Turning to dreams and omens might well be read as a search for a meaning that has been lost, a turn that is made when experience or even life itself has lost its meaning. No one would say that Rome had ever shown much respect for human life, whatever honours it chose to heap on exceptional men. Is the Caesar that Shakespeare invites us to observe exposed in his nightgown here, one who has been left with nothing to believe in, not even much sense of reality, by his unchallenged supremacy in Rome?

Instead of asking Calpurnia about what she dreamed, Caesar sends to the priests. What does he tell them to do but cut up a body (2.2.5), just as Portia cut into herself in search of the truth? Do all Romans suspect that the body holds a secret for them that they have missed? Many of them seem to feel that the body is meant to speak but they don't trust the mouth somehow, it doesn't do the job that it should: ‘Speak hands for me!’ says Casca (3.1.76). According to Antony, Caesar's wounds ‘like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips’ (3.1.260; see also 3.2.215). But Calpurnia, having escaped their education, does not share their secret doubts about language: she is determined to take her dream seriously and to keep her husband at home, a resolve that makes her pit her will against his. ‘What mean you, Caesar, think you to walk forth? / You shall not stir out of your house today.’ (2.2.8-9). That's a strong statement to make to the man who had taken to himself the title of Dictator for life. How strangely she is answered though, ‘Caesar shall forth’, her husband says, speaking of himself in the third person, as if he were a monument or an institution rather than a man (2.2.10). He is given to wishful thinking too, for he seems to believe that he can frighten away any threat. But Caesar listens to the priests and that may have confused him, unlike Calpurnia, who has never had any time for their doings—‘never stood on ceremonies’, as she puts it herself (2.2.13). It is because Caesar only pays attention to the voices of other men that he will defy Calpurnia's common sense and venture outside.

The priests like to designate frightening experiences as signs: that's one way of playing upon our realistic sense that as human beings we can be hurt. That instinct might at last be attempting to surface in Caesar. But we may also be frightened by our own intimations of power. If Calpurnia takes the storm for a warning sign now, is it because the storm resonates with her own suppressed impulses of violence, a suppressed violence against Caesar that she has also picked up in the other men who surround him and come to her house? As Plutarch said, it only creates trouble for everyone making one man so special.

Notes

1. Quoted Geoffrey Miles, Shakespeare and the Constant Romans (Oxford, 1996), 134. n. 25.

2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (London, 1929).

3. See ‘Male Hysteria: W. H. R. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell-Shock’, in Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 (London, 1985).

4. Estela V. Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood (London, 1988).

5. S. Freud, ‘The Infantile Genital Organisation’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, p. 144.

6. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One (Itaca, 1985).

Abbreviations

Quotations from Julius Caesar are taken from the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition, edited by Marvin Spevack (Cambridge, 1988). All other Shakespeare quotations are taken from the Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

FM: The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980, by Elaine Showalter (London, 1987)

HWC: ‘Here Was a Caesar!’, by Jasper Griffin, New York Review of Books (1988), vol. 35, no. 8, p. 14(4)

JC: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, edited by Marvin Spevack (Cambridge, 1988)

OCCL: Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, edited by Paul Harvey (Oxford, 1980)