[In the following essay, Knights analyzes how Shakespeare contrasted public and private life in Julius Caesar. ]

Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599, and the play was first performed in the new theatre, the Globe, which Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, had recently had built on the Bankside. Shakespeare, of course, got the material for his play from Plutarch's Lives of Caesar and Brutus. But, just as in gathering material for the English historical plays from Holinshed, he selected only what he needed as an artist dealing with the universal stuff of human nature, so here his purpose is not simply to reconstruct the historical situation in Rome in the year 44 b.c. The historical material is of interest only for what Shakespeare makes of it. That he made of it a pretty exciting drama is witnessed by the fact that the play is still being performed today, still capable of holding audiences not all of whom are compelled by the exigencies of university examinations. It is exciting; it is richly human; it holds the attention. It also happens to be an important work of art—which means that through the forms of a dramatic action it focuses a particular vision of life: the sequence of events, the dialogue, the interplay of different characters, are held together by an informing ‘idea’, so that all these elements contribute not solely to an evening's entertainment but to an imaginative statement about something of permanent importance in human life. What, at that level of understanding, is Julius Caesar ‘about’? That is the question to which I want to attempt an answer.

Before tackling that question directly, there are two matters I want to touch on—one concerning the play's structure, the other its substance: they are, in fact, closely related. The action of Julius Caesar turns on a political murder, the assassination of Caesar, which takes place in Act III, scene i—right in the middle of the play. Before the murder, attention is focused on the origin and development of the conspiracy—Caesar on one side, Cassius, Brutus, and half a dozen more, on the other. After the murder, attention is focused on the struggle between the conspirators (Brutus and Cassius) and the successors of Caesar (Octavius Caesar and Antony), on the failure and disintegration of the republican cause. It is possible to see a blemish here: the climax, it can be said, comes too early, and when Caesar has disappeared from the action, Shakespeare only contrives to hold our interest by such tours de force as Antony's oration and the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius. In fact, however, the play forms a coherent and tightly woven whole. The murder of Caesar is, if you like, the axis on which the world of the play turns. Up to that event, we are shown one half of that world, a hemisphere; as soon as the daggers are plunged into Caesar's body the world of the drama turns, and fresh scenes and landscapes come into view: but it is still one world. Dropping the metaphor, we may say that the interests aroused in the first part find their natural fulfilment in the second: that there is nothing in the presented action of the last two and a half acts (and action includes psychological as well as physical action) that is not a revelation of what was implicit, but partly concealed, in the conspiracy itself. There is no question here of a broken-backed play in which flagging interest must be maintained by adventitious means. The play is as much of a unity as Macbeth; and, like Macbeth, though less powerfully, it reveals the connexion between observable events in the public world and their causes in the deeper places of personal life—matters not so easily observed except by the eye of the poet.

My second preliminary observation concerns the nature of the interest enlisted by this play. In dealing with Julius Caesar, as indeed with other of Shakespeare's plays, there is a particular temptation to be guarded against—that is, the temptation to abstract from the play certain general issues and to debate them either in the abstract or in a context which Shakespeare has not provided for them. Criticism of Julius Caesar is sometimes confused by considerations that apply either to the historical situation at Rome at the time of Caesar's assassination, or else to specifically twentieth-century political situations, and the play is debated as though Shakespeare were putting before us the question of whether dictatorship or republicanism were the more desirable form of government. He is doing nothing of the kind; and perhaps the first thing to notice is how much of possible political interest the play leaves out. There is no hint of, say, Dante's conception of the majesty, the providential necessity, of the empire which Caesar founded. On the other hand, there is nothing that can be interpreted as a feeling for the virtues of aristocratic republicanism—in the way, for example, some of the first makers of the French Revolution felt when they invoked Roman example. We are not called on to concern ourselves with whether ‘Caesarism’ is, or was, desirable or otherwise. Instead, there is a sharp focus on a single, simple, but important question—on what happens when personal judgment tries to move exclusively on a political plane, where issues are simplified and distorted. I may say, in passing, that if we want a wider context for the play, we shall find it not in a realm of political speculation foreign to it, but in those other plays of Shakespeare—they include such different plays as Troilus and Cressida and Othello—where the dramatist is posing the question of how men come to deliver themselves to illusion, of how they construct for themselves a world in which, because it is not the world of reality but a projection of their own, they inevitably come to disaster. This means, of course, that the play offers no solution—it offers no material for a solution—of the question, Empire or Republic? dictatorship or ‘liberty’? Shakespeare is studying a situation, bringing the force of his imagination to bear on it, not offering solutions, or not, at all events, political ones.

Yet—and this brings me to the substance of what I want to say—Julius Caesar does have important political implications. It takes up Shakespeare's developing preoccupation with the relation between political action and morality. ‘Politics’, I know, is an exciting word, and ‘morality’ is a dry word. But what I mean is this:—Politics are the realm where, whatever the particular interests involved, the issues are to some extent simplified and generalized, and therefore seen in abstract and schematic terms. Morality—and I mean essential living morality, not just copy-book maxims—has to do with the human, the specific and particular. Martin Buber, in his great book, I and Thou, has made us familiar with an important distinction—between the world of ‘thou’ (the world of relationship) and the world of ‘it’ (the world where things, and even people, are treated simply as objects, and manipulated accordingly). For the politician there is a constant temptation to lose sight of the ‘thou’ world, and Martin Buber's distinction may help us here.

Julius Caesar is a play about great public events, but again and again we are given glimpses of the characters in their private, personal, and domestic capacities. Caesar is concerned for his wife's barrenness, he faints when he is offered the crown, he ‘had a sickness when he was in Spain’, he listens to Calpurnia's dreams and fears. Brutus causes his wife concern about his health; we are told of his disturbed sleep; we see him forgetting his public cares and ensuring, with real tenderness, that his boy Lucius gets some needed sleep. And much more to a similar effect. Now Shakespeare at this time was nearing the height of his powers—Hamlet is only a year or two away—and it is unlikely that he put in these domestic scenes and glimpses because he didn't know what else to do. It is obvious that we are intended to be aware of some sort of a contrast between public life and private, and commentators have, in fact, noticed this. They point, for example, to the contrast between Caesar the public figure and Caesar the man:

          … for always I am Caesar.
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf.

When Brutus, in his ‘gown’ (the symbol of domestic privacy) speaks gently to his boy, we are told that this ‘relieves the strain’ of the tragic action. And every account of the characters includes some reference to those aspects of Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius that are revealed in their more intimate moments and hidden or disguised in public. What seems not to have been recognized is the cumulative effect of these and many other reminders of a more personal life—the important part this pervasive but unobtrusive personalism plays, or should play, in our evaluation of the public action.

That we are intended to be aware of the characters as men, of the faces behind the masks, is clear enough. We may notice in passing that on occasion the contrast is emphasized in visual terms. At the beginning of II, ii, according to the stage-direction that makes every schoolboy laugh, Caesar enters ‘in his night-gown’ (a dressing-gown, or house-coat); then, as the conspirators prevail over his wife's entreaties, ‘Give me my robe, for I will go.’ Not only are all the main figures at some time divested of their public robes—those ‘robes and furr'd gowns’ that, according to King Lear, ‘hide all’—and allowed to appear as husbands, masters of households and friends, but they all, in turn, emphasize each other's personal characteristics. ‘He was quick mettle when he went to school,’ says Brutus of Casca. A principal reason why Cassius thinks Caesar isn't fit for his exalted position is that he, Cassius, is the stronger swimmer, and that Caesar, like the rest of us, was hot and cold and thirsty when he had a fever. And although Antony, addressing the crowd, deliberately makes emotional capital out of Caesar's mantle, ‘I remember,’ he says,

The first time Caesar ever put it on;
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii,

the touch of particularity, of revealed privacy, is intended for us, the audience, as well as for the Roman crowd. We notice, too, how often the word ‘love’ appears in this play. I haven't made a count, but it must be about two dozen times, which is perhaps rather surprising in a political play. Again and again the characters speak of their love—their ‘dear love’ or their ‘kind love’—for each other, just as they seem to find a special satisfaction in referring to themselves as ‘brothers’. Now the effect of all this is not only one of pathos or simple irony. The focus of our attention, I have said, is the public world: from the arena of that world, personal life—where truth between man and man resides—is glimpsed as across a gulf. The distance between these two worlds is the measure of the distortion and falsity that takes place in the attempt to make ‘politics’ self-enclosed.

The attempt—the attempt to make public action and public appearance something separate and remote from personal action—is common to both sides. Caesar constantly assumes the public mask. It seems to be a habit with him to refer to himself in the third person as ‘Caesar’; and there is his speech, so charged with dramatic irony, when, immediately before the assassination, he rejects the petition of Metellus Cimber:

I could be well mov'd if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me;
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament …
So in the world; 'tis furnish'd well with men,
And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshak'd of motion: and that I am he,
Let me a little show it. …

What this means, in the case of Caesar, is that in the utterance and attitude of the public man we sense a dangerous tautness. In the case of Brutus, a parallel divorce between the man and the statesman results in something more subtle and more interesting. That a particular bond of affection unites Caesar and Brutus, the play leaves us in no doubt. Almost the first words that Brutus speaks of Caesar are, ‘I love him well’, and when, after the murder, he insists again and again that Caesar was his ‘best lover’, there is no need to doubt his ‘sincerity’ in the ordinary sense of the word. So, too, Cassius tells us, ‘Caesar doth bear me hard; but he loves Brutus’; and Mark Antony:

                    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. …

It is this Brutus, the close friend of Caesar, who wrenches his mind to divorce policy from friendship; and the way in which he does it demands some attention.

It is, of course, true that on matters of public policy you may have to take a firm stand against men whom on other grounds you like and respect: you can see this in the government of a university, for example, as well as in the government of a state. Is Brutus doing more than follow this principle to a necessary conclusion? Well, yes, I think he is. For the moment I want to put on one side the scene in which Cassius (in Brutus's own words later) ‘whets’ him against Caesar, and ask your attention for the long soliloquy at the opening of Act II in which Brutus reviews his own motives and intended course of action. This is what he says:

It must be by his death: and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown'd:
How that might change his nature, there's the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;
And that craves wary walking. Crown him! that!
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him,
That at his will he may do danger with.
The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power; and, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
And when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may:
Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities;
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg
Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.

Now it is a principle of Shakespearean, indeed of Elizabethan, stage-craft, that when a character, in soliloquy or otherwise, develops a line of argument—as when Faustus, in Marlowe's play, produces a number of specious reasons for dismissing the traditional sciences—we are expected to follow the argument with some attention. Not, of course, that we follow such a speech merely as logicians. We are dealing with drama, which means that when a character expounds, say, his reasons for a course of action, what he says is intended to reveal some aspect of what he stands for and is committed to as a human being. And we are dealing with poetic drama, which means that even in an expository speech we are aware of much more than can be formulated in conceptual terms. But we do not, on this account, switch off our intelligence or such powers of logical thought as we may possess. As Virgil Whitaker says in his book, Shakespeare's Use of Learning, ‘Like Marlowe, Shakespeare expected his audience to be able to detect a fallacy in reasoning.’ With this in mind, let us turn back to Brutus's soliloquy. It is a curious argument, in which qualities known in direct contact between man and man (‘I know no personal cause to spurn at him’) are dismissed as irrelevant to public considerations; and it is precisely this that gives the air of tortuous unreality to Brutus's self-persuadings—full as these are of subjunctives and conditional verbs, which run full tilt against the reality that Brutus himself acknowledges:

The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power; and, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. …(1)

but:

                              since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus. …

On this Coleridge shrewdly commented that what Brutus is really saying is that he ‘would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar as a monarch in Rome, would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be’. In Brutus's mind, however, what is is now completely lost in a cloud of mere possibilities:

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

Caesar is already, as Brutus describes him later, ‘the foremost man of all the world’; he is not still ‘in the shell’, neither is he ‘young ambition’. But it is by sophistries such as these that Brutus launches himself on what Clarendon was to call ‘that fathomless abyss of Reason of State’.

Shakespeare, of course, was a very great psychologist, and what the play also shows—and I want to dwell on this for a moment before returning to the scene of Brutus's crucial choice and its consequences—is that personal feelings, which Brutus tries to exclude from his deliberations on ‘the general good’, are, in fact, active in public life. But they are active in the wrong way. Unacknowledged, they influence simply by distorting the issues. The famous quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius certainly has this ironic significance. It is, of course, Cassius, in whom the ‘taboo on tenderness’ is strongest—who is scornful of ‘our mothers' spirits’ (I, iii, 83) and despises Caesar for behaving ‘as a sick girl’ (I, ii, 127)—who here displays the most pronounced ‘feminine’ traits—‘that rash humour which my mother gave me’ (IV, iii, 119). That the whole thing contrives to be touching should not obscure the fact that the causes of the quarrel—they had mainly to do with money—did demand a more impersonal consideration. Now the relevance of this is that it is above all in Cassius that the springs of political action are revealed as only too personal. What nags at him is simply envy of Caesar: ‘for my single self’, he says to Brutus:

I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself. …
                              … And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.

Caesar, he says to Casca, is:

A man no mightier than thyself or me
In personal action, yet prodigious grown.

And it is this man who acts as tempter to the ‘idealizing’ Brutus, skilfully enlisting what Brutus feels is due to his own ‘honour’. I do not wish here to pursue the temptation scene in any detail; but that it is temptation the play leaves us in no doubt. At the end of the long, skilfully conducted second scene of the first act, Cassius is left alone and reveals his thoughts about the man whom we can only call, at this stage, his dupe:

Well, Brutus, thou art noble; yet, I see,
Thy honourable mettle may be wrought
From that it is dispos'd; therefore 'tis meet
That noble minds keep ever with their likes;
For who so firm that cannot be seduc'd?

Editors disagree about the meaning of these lines. Some would have it that Cassius means that the noble disposition of Brutus may be, as it were, wrenched from truth by his friendship with Caesar, the dictator: the man of republican virtue should ‘keep ever’ with those like-minded to himself. It may be so; but I find it hard not to read the lines as a firm ‘placing’ comment on Cassius's own relations with Brutus: ‘For who so firm that cannot be seduc'd’—by specious reasoning? The most we can say for Cassius is that his appeals to Roman ‘honour’, to the ‘nobility’ of his associates, are not simply laid on for the benefit of Brutus, but are part of his own self-deception. The banished feelings have come in by the back door, thinly disguised by much talk of ‘honour’.

It is of course true that the play does not present Caesar as an ideal ruler, and I myself think that Shakespeare would have agreed with Blake's gnomic verse:

The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.

But when Brutus, the man of honour and high moral principles, accepts Cassius's arguments and enters the world of the conspirators, he enters a topsyturvy world—a world where ‘impersonal’ Reasons of State take the place of direct personal knowledge; and at the same time true reason, which is a function of the whole man, has given way to obscure personal emotion. Shakespeare leaves us in no doubt of the confusion of values and priorities in that world. We have noticed how often love and friendship are invoked in this play, indicating what men really want and need. What we also have to notice is how often the forms of friendship are exploited for political ends. When Caesar is reluctant to go to the Senate House, Decius inveigles him with protestations of ‘dear dear love’, and the conspirators drink wine with their victim before leading him to the Capitol; Brutus kisses Caesar immediately before the killing; Antony talks much of love and shakes hands all round as a way of deceiving the conspirators. It is this, therefore, that explains our sense of something monstrous in the action, symbolized by the storms and prodigies, and made fully explicit by Brutus in his garden soliloquy—for it is time to return to that—when, deserting the actual, he has given himself to a phantasmagoria of abstractions.

At this point, Brutus's self-communings are interrupted by his boy, Lucius, who brings him a letter—one of many such, purporting to come from the citizens of Rome asking for redress at his hands, but, as we know, manufactured by Cassius. ‘O Rome!’ says Brutus, not knowing that the letters do not represent ‘Rome’ at all,

                    O Rome! I make thee promise;
If the redress will follow, thou receiv'st
Thy full petition at the hand of Brutus!

Then, as Lucius goes off once more to see who is knocking at the gate in the darkness:

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

The indications here—the insomnia, the fact that Brutus is, as he has said earlier, ‘with himself at war’—are, if we remember Macbeth, clear enough. And the signs of a mind at war with itself, attempting to batten down its own best insights, which yet refuse to disappear, continue into Brutus's musings as the muffled conspirators are announced:

                    O conspiracy!
Sham'st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,
When evils are most free? O! then by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy;
Hide it in smiles and affability:
For if thou path, thy native semblance on,
Not Erebus itself were dim enough
To hide thee from prevention.

Conspiracy is not only ‘dangerous’, it is ‘monstrous’, associated with night and darkness, with evils and Erebus. As J. I. M. Stewart has said, Brutus's words are those of a ‘man over the threshold of whose awareness a terrible doubt perpetually threatens to lap’.

Brutus, of course, is not a deliberate villain as Macbeth is; but like Macbeth he is presented as losing his way in a nightmare world—‘like a phantasma’, something both horrible and unreal, ‘or a hideous dream’. In other words, Brutus's wrong choice not only leads to wrong action, it delivers him to a world of unreality, for the ‘phantasma’, far from ending with the acting of the ‘dreadful thing’, extends beyond it. As the play proceeds, we are made aware not only of a complete lack of correspondence between the professed intentions of the conspirators and the result of their act, but of a marked element of unreality in the world which they inhabit. Let us take two examples, for Shakespeare provides them, and he presumably intended that we should take notice of what he provides.

Shakespeare often puts before the audience two different aspects of the same thing, or suggests two different angles on it—sometimes, but not always, in juxtaposed scenes. He makes no obvious comment, but the different scenes or passages play off against each other, with an effect of implicit comment, for the audience itself is thus enlisted in the business of evaluation and judgment. I think of such things as Falstaff's description of his ragged regiment, following hard on the heels of Hotspur's heroics about warfare, in the First Part of Henry IV; or the way in which, in Antony and Cleopatra the summit meeting on Pompey's galley is followed immediately by a glimpse of the army in the field, with some irony from a soldier about the High Command. In Julius Caesar, the murder of Caesar is not only presented on the stage, it is described both in prospect and in retrospect. You all remember the way in which Brutus envisages the action to the conspirators in the scene with which we have been dealing. Pleading that Antony may be spared, he says:

Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar;
And in the spirit of men there is no blood:
O! that we then could come by Caesar's spirit,
And not dismember Caesar. But, alas!
Caesar must bleed for it. And, gentle friends,
Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. …

Is that the way political assassinations are carried out? Before the battle of Philippi, Brutus taunts Antony, ‘you very wisely threat before you sting’, to which Antony retorts:

Villains! you did not so 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;
Whilst damned Casca, like a cur, behind,
Struck Caesar on the neck.

Antony, of course, speaks as a partisan of Caesar, but the energy of the verse (‘your vile daggers Hack'd one another in the sides of Caesar’) leaves us in no doubt that Antony's account is nearer to actuality than Brutus's fantasy of a ritualistic sacrifice.

My second example is of even greater importance, for it concerns the whole sequence of events in the second half of the play—consequences, I want to insist once more, that are shown as flowing directly from what Brutus and the rest commit themselves to in the first part. As soon as Julius Caesar falls, Cinna cries out:

Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.

And Cassius:

Some to the common pulpits, and cry out
‘Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!’

Then, as something of the mounting bewilderment outside the Capitol is conveyed to us (‘Men, wives, and children stare, cry out and run as it were doomsday’), Brutus enforces the ritualistic action of smearing themselves with Caesar's blood:

                                        Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood
Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords:
Then walk we forth, even to the market-place;
And, waving our red weapons o'er our heads,
Let's all cry, ‘Peace, freedom, and liberty!’

The irony of that hardly needs comment, but the play does, in fact, comment on it with some pungency. I suspect that what I am going to say will be obvious, so I will be brief and do little more than remind you of three successive scenes. When, after the murder, Brutus goes to the Forum to render ‘public reasons’ for Caesar's death, it is his failure in the sense of reality, of what people really are, that gives us the sombre comedy of his oration: so far as addressing real people is concerned he might as well have kept quiet. ‘Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?’ he asks, and much more to the same effect. To which the reply is successively:

—Live, Brutus! live! live!
—Bring him with triumph home unto his house.
—Give him a statue with his ancestors.
—Let him be Caesar.

After this, the response of the crowd to Antony's more consummate demonstration of the arts of persuasion comes as no surprise: it is:

Revenge!—About!—Seek!—Burn!—Fire!—Kill!
—Slay!—Let not a traitor live!

Mischief, in the words of Antony's cynical comment when he has worked his will with the crowd, is indeed afoot; and the very next scene—the last of the third Act—gives us a representative example of what is only too likely to happen in times of violent political disturbance. It shows us the death of an unoffending poet at the hands of a brutal mob:

—Your name, sir, truly.
—Truly, my name is Cinna.
—Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.
—I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
—Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

The frenzied violence of this, with its repeated, ‘Tear him, tear him!’ is followed at once by a scene of violence in a different key. If the mob is beyond the reach of reason, the Triumvirs, Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus, are only too coldly calculating in their assessment of political exigencies:

ANT.
These many then shall die; their names are prick'd.
OCT.
Your brother too must die; consent you, Lepidus?
LEP.
I do consent—
OCT.
                                        Prick him down. Antony.
LEP.
Upon condition Publius shall not live,
Who is your sister's son, Mark Antony.
ANT.
He shall not live; look, with a spot I damn him.
But, Lepidus, go you to Caesar's house;
Fetch the will hither, and we shall determine
How to cut off some charge in legacies.

And, when Lepidus goes off on his errand, Antony and Octavius discuss the matter of getting rid of him, before they turn their attention to combating the armies now levied by Brutus and Cassius. These, then, are the more or less explicit comments on Brutus's excited proclamation:

And, waving our red weapons o'er our heads,
Let's all cry, ‘Peace, freedom, and liberty!’

That peace and liberty could be bought with ‘red weapons’ was the illusion: the reality is mob violence, proscription, and civil war.

In following the story through to its end, Shakespeare was, of course, bound to follow his historical material; but, as an artist, he made this serve his own purposes. Many of you must have noticed how often Shakespeare, in his greater plays, makes the outward action into a mirror or symbol of events and qualities in the mind or soul: Macbeth is perhaps the most obvious instance of this. The last act of Julius Caesar certainly follows this pattern. Even before the battle of Philippi Brutus and Cassius appear like men under a doom; and, although defeat comes to each in different ways, it comes to both as though they were expecting it, and prompts reflections, in themselves or in their followers, that clearly apply not merely to the immediate events but to the action as a whole. Cassius asks Pindarus to report to him what is happening in another part of the field (‘My sight was ever thick,’ he says), and, on a mistaken report that his messenger is taken by the enemy, kills himself. On which the comment of Messala is:

O hateful error, melancholy's child!
Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men
The things that are not? O error! soon conceiv'd,
Thou never com'st unto a happy birth,
But kill'st the mother that engender'd thee.

Harold Goddard, in his interesting chapter on Julius Caesar, says of this, ‘The whole plot against Caesar had been such an error.’² We may add further that the play also enforces the close connexion between error and a supposed perception of ‘things that are not’. As Titinius says to the dead Cassius a moment later, ‘Alas! thou hast misconstrued everything.’ As for Brutus, defeated and brought to bay with his ‘poor remains of friends’, he senses that this is no accident of defeat but the working out of the destiny to which he committed himself long before:

Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest,
That have but labour'd to attain this hour.

And then, as he runs on his own sword:

                              Caesar, now be still:
I kill'd not thee with half so good a will.

These last ten words—if I may quote Goddard once more—‘are the Last Judgment of Brutus on a conspiracy the morality of which other men, strangely, have long debated’.³ Earlier in the play, you may remember, Cicero had commented on certain portents and men's interpretation of them:

But men may construe things after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

That seems to me an anticipatory summing-up of Brutus's whole political career, as the play presents it.

Let me repeat once more, Brutus was not, in any of the ordinary senses of the word, a villain; he was simply an upright man who made a tragic mistake. The nature of that mistake the play, I think, sufficiently demonstrates. Brutus was a man who thought that an abstract ‘common good’ could be achieved without due regard to the complexities of the actual; a man who tried to divorce his political thinking and his political action from what he knew, and what he was, as a full human person. Many of us remember the idealizing sympathy felt by liberal young men in the 1930s for the Communist cause. There had, it was felt, been excesses, but as against the slow cruelty of a ruthless competitive society, its degradation of human values, even violence might seem like surgery. ‘Today,’ said W. H. Auden, in his poem, ‘Spain’ (1937):

Today the inevitable increase in the chance of death;
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.

That, of course, was written before the Russian treason trials of 1938 and the subsequent purges, and Auden subsequently re-wrote the lines; but they serve to illustrate the matter in hand. ‘General good,’ said Blake, ‘is the cry of the scoundrel and the hypocrite; he who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars.’ There is some exaggeration in the first half of that aphorism, but it contains a profound truth, sufficiently demonstrated in many eminent figures in history. Shakespeare demonstrates it in the figure of a man who was neither a scoundrel nor a hypocrite:

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!’

Shakespeare offers little comfort to those who like to consider historical conflicts in terms of a simple black and white, or who imagine that there are simple solutions for political dilemmas. In the contrast between the ‘gentle’ Brutus and the man who, for abstract reasons (‘a general honest thought’), murdered his friend and let loose civil war, Shakespeare gives us food for thought that, firmly anchored in a particular action, has a special relevance for us today, as I suspect it will have at all times.

Notes

1. It may not be unnecessary to comment that ‘remorse’, here, means pity, and ‘affections’, passions.

2. Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. I, [University of Chicago Press, 1960], p. 329.

3. Ibid.