SOURCE: Yoder, R. A. “History and the Histories in Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24, no. 3 (summer 1973): 309-27.

[In the following essay, Yoder characterizes Julius Caesar as a condensed version of Shakespeare's historical tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV, Parts One and Two, and Henry V). Yoder relates Julius Caesar's Rome to England during the time of the tetralogy and demonstrates how both Shakespeare's Rome and England are plagued by disintegration and the unstoppable progression of power.]

Henry the Fifth, thy ghost I invocate …
A far more glorious star thy soul will make
Than Julius Caesar or bright—

(1H6, I.i.52-56)¹

I. THE NECESSARY FORM

Julius Caesar, a play remarkable for an infinite variety of interpretation, was the turning point of Shakespeare's career. As much as it points ahead to the great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, so much does it draw upon the cycle of history plays that Shakespeare had recently completed. The legacy of these histories is illuminated if we can imagine Julius Caesar as the whole drama of the tetralogy telescoped into one play: Rome, like Shakespeare's England during the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, is a study of continuous disintegration and the inevitable progress of power—what Warwick describes to Henry IV as “the necessary form” of things that allowed Richard to prophesy, or “guess,” what was to come:

There is a history in all men's lives
Figuring the nature of the times deceas'd;
The which observ'd, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasured.

(2H4, III.i.80-85)

It is what Jan Kott calls the “Grand Mechanism” of history, according to which the Percies would play Bolingbroke to Bolingbroke's Richard. It is the ultimate historicism, where everything can be explained in terms of the historical process, but the process is circular and absurd.²

In Julius Caesar the necessary form of things is called “a tide in the affairs of men.” Brutus, in this moment before Philippi, forgets that tides must also fall. But the metaphor is appropriate for the play: Caesar rose and fell, so will Brutus, so ultimately will Antony. These great men, and Cassius too, are presented in brilliantly individualized portraits whose contrasts have delighted character analysts over several centuries. As significant as the contrasts, however, are parallels of gesture and action among these very different characters, particularly between Caesar and Brutus who are the heads of their respective factions. Characters in the play become reflections of each other, as Cassius says, in their first interview, that he will be a mirror for Brutus:

CASS.
Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
BRU.
No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.

(I.ii.50-52)

What recommends Cassius for this role is the quality he and Brutus share in contrast to Antony: they are withdrawn and serious types, not lavish and reveling in their affections like the sportier Antony who frequents plays and banquet tables. The more familiar distinction between the noble Brutus and the scheming Cassius emerges in the following soliloquy. Cassius hypothetically exchanges roles with Brutus to show that he would never be manipulated.

Caesar doth bear me hard; but he loves Brutus.
If I were Brutus now, and he were Cassius,
He should not humour me.

(I.ii.310-12)

Yet whenever their positions are reversed, whenever Brutus urges a case upon Cassius after the conspiracy has been formed, Cassius is, if not “humoured,” always brought round to Brutus' side, acceding against his better judgment in the fatal decisions to spare Antony and to force the battle at Philippi. Perhaps Cassius too needs a mirror to discover the self he knows not of. He lacks self-awareness, most painfully when he glories in recounting how he, like Aeneas, rescued Caesar. The intensity of his indignation, similar to the high pitch of Iago's excitement when he fabricates Cassio's dream, reveals too much: how Cassius yearns for the “honours” Caesar receives instead of the “honour” that he tells Brutus is the subject of his story. Like Iago, Cassius is tortured by a sense of inferiority or impotency that he sometimes bitterly acknowledges and otherwise fiercely denies. Here he denies it, and since he believes himself Caesar's equal, there is no reason why Caesar is a “god” and Cassius a “wretched creature.” Cassius should be a god, too, at least as celebrated as Caesar and Aeneas. In a way he will be, but only after his inability to take charge and the full failure of his self-confidence are clearly revealed.

It has often been said that although Caesar is killed, the spirit of Caesar dominates the remaining action of the play. Cassius and Brutus die by the hands that killed Caesar, with Caesar's name on their lips:

Caesar, thou art reveng'd,
Even with the sword that kill'd thee.

(V.iii.45-46)

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

(V.v.50-51)

These words confirm the numerous parallels that relate the chief conspirators to the man they conspired against. Cassius first suggests that Brutus is Caesar's equal:

Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that “Caesar”?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with 'em,
“Brutus” will start a spirit as soon as “Caesar”.

(I.ii.140-45)

Then, on the morning of the assassination, Brutus and Caesar appear in a similar light:³ both are awakened by a group of well-wishers who finally prevail upon them to go to the Capitol. It is their common fate to be torn from their private beds and thrust into public affairs. As public men they respond to honor, but they are also susceptible to flattery—thus Brutus is flattered by Cassius, Caesar by Decius. As public men they must be supremely confident, avoiding whatever may hint of cowardice, through some, like Calpurnia, might call it wisdom. So Brutus disdains an oath in order to dramatize the purity of his cause, perhaps even to reassure himself about a course of action he does not relish. And Caesar puts aside all the auguries because he would not bear the “shame of cowardice.” Caesar, too, in his images of the elder lion (II.ii.46) and the northern star (III.i.60) boasts so extravagantly that it seems he must persuade himself as well as others.

Caesar and Brutus are both honorable men, though hardly invincible or free from personal weaknesses. It is Caesar's ambition that traditionally sets him apart from Brutus, yet this quality is not pronounced in the play. It does figure, however, in the parallel between the two characters after Caesar's death, and then with a terrible irony. Brutus, in his careful, symmetrical prose, has shown the reason for Caesar's death—ambition: “As he was ambitious, I slew him.” Then in a figurative and characteristically hypothetical way he invites the populace to put him, Brutus, in Caesar's place:

Then none have I offended. I have done no more to Caesar than you shall do to Brutus. … With this I depart, that, as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death.

(III.ii.37-38, 45-48)

Brutus, a little less flamboyantly than Caesar, nevertheless like Caesar offers his throat to the people (cf.I.ii.262). His supposition, and the principle he espouses, are beyond them; but they respond to this show of pure virtue by literally accepting his invitation:

ALL.
… Live, Brutus! live! live!
3 PLEB.
Let him be Caesar.
4 PLEB.
                                                                      Caesar's better parts
Shall be crown'd in Brutus.

(III.iii.49, 52-53)

Here most powerfully the necessary form of things, the Grand Mechanism, is at work. Neither Brutus nor the citizens are fully conscious of what they say, yet the audience sees the force of history unroll: another Bolingbroke must replay Richard's part.⁴

Thereafter Caesar preys upon the minds of Brutus and Cassius until his ghost haunts Brutus the night before the battle. And it begins to dawn on us that both the major conspirators are casting themselves in their victim's role. Comparisons with Caesar are prominent in the Quarrel Scene. First, Cassius complains that Caesar would never have treated him as Brutus has. Then, in Caesar's gesture already repeated by Brutus, Cassius offers to resolve their dispute by his own death:

                                                                      There is my dagger,
And here my naked breast. …
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.99-100, 104-106)

Cassius puts first Brutus, then himself in Caesar's place. In this scene it is Brutus' manner, most of all, that recalls Caesar, for this is his most imperious and probably least attractive mood. Caesar to Metellus Cimber, Brutus to Cassius—they are lead weights, “constant,” “unassailable,” “unshak'd of motion” (III.i.60, 69-70); they will not be moved. Brutus lashes out at Cassius,

Must I give way and room to your rash choler?
.....                                                                                                              Must I budge?
Must I observe you? Must I stand and crouch
Under your testy humour? By the gods,
You shall digest the venom of your spleen,
Though it do split you; for, from this day forth,
I'll use you for my mirth, yea, for my laughter,
When you are waspish.

(IV.iii.39, 44-50)

Brutus reduces Cassius to his court jester, the “common laughter” that Cassius would not be taken for (I.ii.71), and dismisses him with Caesar's extravagant confidence:

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

(IV.iii.66-69)⁵

When the two conspirators, now reconciled, make their formal farewell to each other before the battle, Brutus is still sanctimonious about his own worth:

No, Cassius, no: think not, thou noble Roman,
That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome;
He bears too great a mind.

(V.i.111-13)

And then he echoes Caesar once more:

                                        O, that a man might know
The end of this day's business ere it come!
But it sufficeth that the day will end,
And then the end is known.

(V.i.123-26)

With the same stoic feeling, somewhere between calm and indifference, Caesar went to the Capitol, and so Brutus faces the death of Portia, the ghost of Caesar, and the battle at Philippi.

If Caesar's ambition would have him crowned, Brutus is, in the last scenes of the play, emotionally crowned by his own righteousness. Familiarly in Shakespearean tragedy the crown, actual or figurative, works the progressive isolation of its wearer.⁶ Caesar and Brutus isolate themselves, despite their protestations of loyal friendship, and entrench themselves as they approach their ends in a cold and insular fatalism. Cassius is also crowned in the play, though ironically, because it is only after death and after Cassius has suffered not just a decline but an ignominious reversal. He would have been equal to Caesar but he is reduced to a “common laughter.” Like Iago who tells Roderigo, “'Tis in ourselves, that we are thus, or thus,” Cassius knew where the fault lies—“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings” (I.ii.138-39). “We are govern'd with our mothers' spirits,” Cassius explained to Casca, Romans under the yoke of Caesar have grown “womanish” (I.iii.83-84); indeed, Caesar himself once cried “as a sick girl” (I.ii.127) and for that Cassius despised him. Yet “womanish” aptly describes Cassius under the yoke of Brutus in the Quarrel Scene,⁷ and, as Cassius himself reminds us, his mother's spirit, “that rash humour which my mother gave me,” governs his mood (IV.iii.119).

Even the most dramatic reversal in Cassius is also a parallel between himself and Caesar. Earlier Cassius had remarked to the conspirators how Caesar changed toward the end of his life:

                                                  But it is doubtful yet
Whether Caesar will come forth to-day or no;
For he is superstitious grown of late,
Quite from the main opinion he held once
Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies.

(II.i.193-97)

And Caesar did consult the augurs and all the portents, though he finally put them aside. Just so, Cassius who would not blame the stars trembles at the omens before Philippi; his words bespeak his alteration:

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 …

(V.i.77-87)

He does “but believe it partly,” he says, and like Caesar he goes ahead; but in fact Cassius has made up his mind to die. “Time is come round [it is his birthday], / And where I did begin, there shall I end” (V.iii.23-24), and his suicide, brought on by a premature conviction of defeat, is attributed by Messala to melancholy. Never before in the play has Cassius been melancholic; but he is changed utterly, and is no longer the thing he was or thought he was. Only in death is he “crown'd” by the body of Titinius (V.iii.97); only when dead Cassius is linked with the “sun of Rome” (V.iii.60-63) does he approach the godlike Caesar who compared himself to the northern star, the one fixed star of the firmament. But this sun is blood red and setting, unlike the golden sun, the emblem of crescent and fertile royalty that is conspicuously missing from Julius Caesar.

In a more general and political sense, Antony who was a “limb of Caesar” takes over Caesar's part.⁸ He contributes significantly to the series of parallel actions in the play. Antony continues the pattern of exchanging places: “But were I Brutus, / And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony / Would ruffle up your spirits …” (III.ii.228-30), he tells the people. As the conspirators flattered Caesar, so Antony will flatter the conspirators. After the assassination Antony's servant, at his master's direction, lavishes praise on Brutus and explicitly compares him to Caesar:

Brutus is noble, wise, valiant, and honest;
Caesar was mighty, bold, royal, and loving:
Say I love Brutus, and I honour him;
Say I fear'd Caesar, honour'd him, and lov'd him.
If Brutus will vouchsafe that Antony
May safely come to him, and be resolv'd
How Caesar hath deserv'd to lie in death,
Mark Antony shall not love Caesar dead
So well as Brutus living; but will follow
The fortunes and affairs of noble Brutus
Thorough the hazards of this untrod state,
With all true faith. So says my master Antony.

(III.i.126-37)

Antony will re-enact the honorable bond between the conspirators when he formally shakes the hand of each, as Brutus had (“Give me your hands all over, one by one,” II.i.112). Shortly, however, as Cassius whetted Brutus against Caesar, Antony will whet the people against these honorable men. Then Antony will hold sway in Rome—but only for a moment. The tides of power are so foreshortened in this play that before long Octavius will be ascendant, Antony beginning to ebb. Octavius asserts his will against Antony's (V.i.20), taking both the title and the tone of Caesar who had said, “The cause is in my will: I will not come” (II.ii.71).

Caesar, Brutus, Cassius in his way, Antony, and Octavius: each man in his time plays the same part, and so the “necessary form” of things shapes itself by repetition and parallels. It seems to me that any character study of Julius Caesar will be unsatisfactory if it fails to take account of Shakespeare's cross-purposes in the play. The issue cannot be one of character, that Brutus is nobler than Caesar, or that Antony is shrewder than Brutus; nor can it be the triumph of Caesarism or of liberalism. Character and ideologies give way to history. Men are brilliantly differentiated, but drawn into the mechanism of history they lose their streaks, repeating each other's ways, becoming more and more alike. Character hardens like glass or metal, so that men can mirror each other with their shiny surfaces, and like good Romans steel themselves against the knocks of fate—they are not brittle or pliant, though they may be bent. At this stage, to borrow a formula, “Role predominates over character,”⁹ and the concept of role-playing is surely at the center of Shakespeare's tragedy.

II. THE WORLD OF ROME

The triumph of history as mechanism in Julius Caesar is the extent to which role dominates character. Role is, in the broadest sense, any action that is prescribed or formalized: it may be formalized merely by being repeated, or it may be an established social function. In a more technical sense, role, or a mask or persona fitting the requirements of one's environment, is a normal development of the human personality; but the extreme dominance of role effects the “dissociation of personality,” which Jung defined once as “a neurosis having the character of an inner wastage with increasing exhaustion.”¹⁰ The concept of “inner wastage,” it seems to me, precisely fits these Romans. Inwardly they are used up, some external force drives them. They play a role up to the hilt, but at the expense of character; thus there is nothing spontaneous about them, even in a great effort they seem to be merely going through the motions. With them forms are everything, although the world their forms defined is rapidly falling apart. As Rome disintegrates, they cling to the images or illusion of what they are supposed to be for Rome's sake.¹¹

This, impressionistically, is the atmosphere of Rome: inner wastage in a dying world, life sucked out of the hollow shell, so that the mechanism, all that is external and inhuman, sweeps the stage like the army of Fortinbras. This kind of world we encounter in the histories and the great tragedies, and I want to examine more closely Shakespeare's anatomies of England and Rome to see how this impression is contrived. Especially in Julius Caesar, where events are telescoped, poetry assumes much of the burden; the condition of society is rendered by a complex poetic substructure radiating from a key word, “ceremony.” “Ceremony,” allied with “honor” and “courtesy,” is one of the chief virtues of the courtly world; but the word had already acquired a subordinate, disparaging sense of “merely formal or external” in Shakespeare's time. This ambivalence arises in The Merchant of Venice when Portia and Nerissa stand on the ceremony of the rings they gave to Bassanio and Gratiano. In the context of the play the ring is another external contract, a law or commandment that must be seasoned by mercy or love; in these terms Antonio urged generosity to the doctor of law who saved him from Shylock's bond:

My Lord Bassanio, let him have the ring.
Let his deservings, and my love withal,
Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandement.

(MV, IV.i.449-51)

Later, when Portia disparages Bassanio's honor for having parted with a “thing held as a ceremony” (V.i.206), it is in fun, the play of one sex on the other, because, of course, Portia is the doctor and has the ring, and because she knows very well the difference between a token and the substance of a vow. This, however, is a lesson the English have not altogether learned in the histories. Portia played with the ring, but Richard II takes seriously the myths of the crown. The deposition marks the failure of a man and a world that believed in the efficacy of ceremony. Bolingbroke, who scorned the “bare imagination,” is more realistic and successful in a limited way. For him, as he explains in a lecture to Prince Hal, the ceremonies of office do hold real power but only insofar as they are properly manipulated. Comparing himself to Richard, he says,

Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company,
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession,
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.
.....Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne'er seen but wonder'd at, and so my state,
Seldom but sumptuous, show'd like a feast,
And wan by rareness such solemnity.

(1H4, III.ii.39-59)

And it is by a rather crude manipulation of ceremony that the King's party maintains power, when Prince John pledges “restored love and amity” to the insurgents in Gaultree Forest and then, after they have dismissed their armies, treacherously arrests them for treason. There is superb irony in Bolingbroke's response to this victory, “And wherefore should these good news make me sick? (2H4, IV.iv.102); for neither the king nor his land is healed. Ceremony, as the illusion of power for Richard, as the means to power for Bolingbroke, fails to unite, indeed it only isolates the ruler from the ruled. Thus Falstaff's conclusion that “Honor is a mere scutcheon” (1H4, V.i.140) points ahead to the soliloquy of Henry V before Agincourt:

And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?
What kind of god are thou, that suffer'st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? What are thy comings-in?
O ceremony, show me but thy worth!
.....                                                                                          No, thou proud dream,
That play'st so subtly with a king's repose;
I am a king that find thee; and I know
'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running 'fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave …

(H5, IV.i.246-47)

As Henry does here, Richard himself once testified to the bare humanity of a king (R2, III.ii.171-77); but Richard saw this truth momentarily and too late. Henry V has lived it as Prince Hal: “Hal would know that the men who fought at Agincourt were men who liked small beer; and this sort of understanding, essential to his kingship, has come to him through his wanderings in the streets.”¹² Unlike his predecessors, Henry V is able to revitalize the community he rules with the appealing rhetoric of Agincourt—

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition.

(H5, IV.iii.60-63)

And he brings it to a festive climax, in the tradition of Shakespeare's comedies, by enlarging himself and the realm with his marriage to Katharine of France. Thus the completing work of the tetralogy clarifies the condition of England and cures its ills, at least for a moment. And this is accomplished by Hal's education and his re-evaluation of the concept of ceremony.

(I)

“Ceremony”—word and concept—works as pervasively in Rome as in England. Brents Stirling has brilliantly described the central action of the play in terms of ceremony and counterceremony: Brutus' inward “insurrection” shows up when he rejects the idle ceremony of an oath among the conspirators, but then tries to cloak the assassination in robes of ritual sacrifice; Antony mocks this formality with the obsequious entrance of his servant and his own repetition of the conspirators' acts, shaking their hands, re-enacting the blows each dealt to Caesar.¹³ It is not, however, just the central act in Julius Caesar that is dressed in sanctified forms; the play is remarkable for the way in which all personal relationships are embellished with professions and rites of love, and with the same rhetoric of brotherhood that resounded in Henry V. G. Wilson Knight summarizes this motif:

No play of Shakespeare concentrates more on ‘emotion’, ‘heart’, ‘love’. All the persons are ‘lovers’, with a soft eroticism not quite ‘passion’, but powerful, itself fiery. They all call each other ‘noble’. … So the action first shows us love, friendship, imperial sway. This surface is rudely gashed by the daggers of revolt, torn open, and the naked flames exposed which feed the mechanisms of social order, life, and love. The wound heals, Antony's love for Caesar avenges his death, peace is restored. And love and friendship bring the only final peace to the souls of both Brutus and Cassius.¹⁴

So marvellously perceptive, so wrong in judgment, is my response to this passage. For all the vivid life-suggestion, there is little vitality and love in Rome, with or without Caesar. It is as if all the imagery of love were conjurer's art, trying to coax life back into the dying city. Caesar may be a lover of Rome, but no more so than Brutus, for whom Caesar is a serpent and Rome's potential ravisher. Calpurnia does not shake off her sterile curse. Brutus cannot shatter a harmony that does not exist, and Antony, who “lets slip the dogs of war,” does nothing in his own right to restore peace. That is the point that Knight misses: all the life-suggestion, all the pageantry and ceremony, is only suggestion; it does not work.

That Rome is undergoing a crisis of disunity is evident at the beginning of the play in the first words of Flavius—“Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home: Is this a holiday?” (I.i.1-2). The tribune disdains and bullies the very people he is supposed to represent (we can imagine modern street-corner counterparts for this scene). He is frightened, of course, that the people have discarded their “rule,” for to Flavius and Marullus the return of Caesar is a sign of Misrule, a holiday Rome can ill afford. Marullus, too, chides the tradesmen:

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey?

(I.i.35-37)

This is, as it were, Marullus' funeral oration for Pompey. Marullus, like Antony, wants the people to shed tears for their fallen leader; but he is not so clever as Antony, who uses the same verbal counters (wood, stones, men, III.ii.144) to compliment rather than insult the populace. Marullus reminds us that blood has already been shed, that Caesar himself has set a “plague” (I.i.54) of ambition, murder, and revenge into motion. Flavius urges the cobbler to be a “mender of bad soles” by assembling the people in a rite of expiation; meanwhile, he and Marullus will remove the festive “ceremonies” that were to welcome Caesar. There are already bad consciences, “guiltiness” and “fearfulness” in the city. Moreover, the public state is mirrored in its persons. Almost all the characters of the play are in some way physically sick or distressed:¹⁵ Caesar is presumably deaf in one ear and epileptic; Calpurnia is barren, Cassius has a “lean and hungry look,” and Brutus is sick with inner strife, the microcosmic “insurrection” that corresponds to the divisive illness of the body politic. Finally, the great storm symbolizes not just the “death of princes,” as Calpurnia fears; nor is it, as Cassius interprets, the “monstrous state” Caesar's coronation would bring, or a sign of nature's collusion with the conspirators (I.iii.71-78, 127-30). The storm is not so partisan: with its attending portents it is, like the storms of Lear and Macbeth, an expression of cosmic disorder, “civil strife in heaven,” that is not restricted to particular men and places but spread out through the entire world.

(II)

Thus Rome is raw as the morning air on the ideas of March, “rheumy and unpurged.” Is it warmed and purified by endless vows of love among the Romans? In fact, for all the outward signs, there are no redeeming or sustaining personal relationships in Julius Caesar, nothing like the love of Cordelia for her father or Horatio's loyalty to Hamlet. Romans profess love, but they do not act from it; their love is a cold constancy at best, treachery at worst; it is gilt that has worn and cracked, a ceremony become a masquerade.¹⁶ And like the sacrificial rites of the assassination, this ceremony offers the illusion of propriety and decency to desperate men. These two varieties of ritual, one public and the other more personal, are appropriately connected when Brutus uses the key word to comment on the offices of love:

                                                                                Ever note, Lucilius,
When love begins to sicken and decay
It useth an enforced ceremony.

(IV.ii.19-21)

Brutus refers to Cassius, but he speaks for all of Rome: the sickness of the whole state is the untuning of its persons, and love that is cold or dying insists upon display.

Significantly what Cassius asked of Brutus at the beginning of the play was not love, but the “show of love” (I.ii.33), a phrase repeated by Brutus. True Romans are supposed to despise mere show, the flattery and fawning of an unworthy lover. Cassius would not be trustworthy, he tells Brutus, if he were one

To stale with ordinary oaths my love
To every new protester; if you know
That I do fawn on men and hug them hard,
And after scandal them …
… then hold me dangerous.

(I.ii.72-76)

Caesar scorns the kind of entreaty that “melteth fools”—

                                                                                                    I mean sweet words,
Low-crooked curtsies, and base spaniel fawning.
Thy brother by decree is banished:
If thou dost bend and pray and fawn for him,
I spurn thee like a cur out of my way.

(III.i.42-46)

Yet precisely this show of love costumes the conspiracy: “Hide it in smiles and affability,” Brutus tells himself (II. i. 82), and he directs his cohorts,

Good gentlemen, look fresh and merrily.
Let not our looks put on our purposes,
But bear it as our Roman actors do,
With untir'd spirits and formal constancy.

(II.i.224-27)

And Caesar, who would not be flattered, is seduced by Decius' protestations of “dear, dear love,” and suffers the rites of symposium (II.ii.126) and the betrayal kiss (III.i.52)¹⁷ before he is struck down by his “good friends.” The truth is, as Decius said, “But when I tell him he hates flatterers, / He says he does, being then most flattered” (II.i.207-208). Whatever he says, Caesar believes in ceremony—not only omens and the rites of the Lupercalia (“Leave no ceremony out,” he instructed Antony, I.ii.11), but in all the courtesies of office. He has played a role for the people, as “do players in the theatre” (I.ii.257), and he expects to be idolized for his part. Those who would deny him, like Marullus and Flavius, “for pulling scarfs / Off Caesar's images, are put to silence” (I.ii.282).

Amid these treacherous ceremonies of love, the love of Brutus for Portia and his friendship with Cassius are often cited as examples of noble Roman devotion.¹⁸ Portia's appeal to know her husband's secret is moving, yet the very asking suggests a possible remoteness in their relationship. Subsequent events bear out this possibility: it is not so much that Brutus does not confide in Portia as that he is unaffected by what she does, even when ultimately she takes her own life. Portia is held at the same distance as the men who surround Brutus; she is saluted with the same epithets, “honourable” and “noble,” and she is treated so much like a lesser version of masculine virtue that she aspires to it—constancy is the virtue of Caesar and Brutus, and so “constancy” is Portia's aim. Constancy for her is not love or faithfulness but firmness, clenching her teeth and tightening her lips, something one proves by inflicting a “voluntary wound … in the thigh” (II.i.300) or by swallowing fire. If by her suicide Portia finally unsexes herself she wins from Brutus only a stoic dismissal. The second revelation of her death, particularly, hints of Macbeth's numb resignation under similar circumstances:

Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala.
With meditating that she must die once,
I have the patience to endure it now.

(IV.iii.189-91)

Here Brutus demonstrates his philosophy, both its strength and its weakness: if it enables him to endure all terrors, it also stops up his vital warmth.¹⁹

The friendship between Brutus and Cassius climaxes in the quarrel and reconciliation before Philippi. In this crucial scene both characters are clarified and at the same time diminished. Brutus stands on principle, Cassius on personal loyalty: Brutus would punish Lucius for taking bribes even though Cassius has personally recommended him; Brutus will have nothing to do with “indirections” or “vile means,” while Cassius expects a “friendly eye” to overlook mere indiscretions. Brutus is irritable and arrogant throughout the quarrel, Cassius is petulant and whimpering like a chastened wife that Brutus does not love him—

… O Brutus! …
Have not you love enough to bear with me,
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?

(IV.iii.117, 118-20)

The emphasis here, as in the early moments of the conspiracy, is on the qualitative difference between the two men, a difference that a common goal can only momentarily efface. Brutus and Cassius muffled their disagreements in the conspiracy, and now in the face of danger they will do so again. Their rift is smoothed over by “enforced ceremony”: after all, when they leave the tent, regardless of the outcome of their quarrel, their armies must “perceive nothing but love from us” (IV.ii.44); they drink wine together (IV.iii.157-61)—Caesar, too, drank wine with his friends, and they were false to him; they part with an elaborate ritual, repeating the same formula that conveys, even while it settles, their predominant fears. They are united, but it takes only Antony's cutting tongue to bare their division once more:

ANT.
… O you flatterers!
CAS.
Flatterers? Now, Brutus, thank yourself.
This tongue had not offended so to-day,
If Cassius might have rul'd.

(V.i.44-47)

The alliance of Brutus and Cassius is a yoke of necessity, and their reconciliation is the last role the historical mechanism requires of them.

Finally, the love of Antony—not, of course, the love he feigns to the conspirators who would reciprocate by taking him as a brother, with “all kind love, good thoughts, and reverence” (III.i.176)—not this calculated gesture, but his contrastingly simple statement about Caesar: “He was my friend, faithful and just to me” (III.ii.87). Antony's is an “ingrafted love,” Cassius says, pursuing Brutus' image of Antony as a “limb of Caesar” (II.i.165, 184). Such an organic metaphor is rare and suggests a fusion or involvement that all the other relationships in the play lack. Yet this love is not life-giving; its fruits are cruelty and havoc, dramatically underlined in the brief street scene that follows Antony's oration (III.iii.26-35). Long-cracked, Rome has at last collapsed. Here chaos is come, and although all share the responsibility for it Antony is most directly its agent. Antony prophesied a monarch's revenge for Caesar, and he “let slip the dogs of war,” intentionally giving them the leash. When the crowd rushes off to burn the traitors' houses, Antony reminds us that he set the fire in their hearts and little cares who is consumed in the flames: “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot, / Take thou what course thou wilt” (III.ii.262-63). Antony acts the Lord of Misrule; he is “a masker and a reveller” (V.i.62), fat enough to allay Caesar's distrust of lean men, and in his funeral speech a mocker of honorable men, like Falstaff. But with Antony there is no free play, his games are skillfully manipulated and maliciously conceived. He has fooled the conspirators and turned citizens into beasts with his magic oratory, and he will shortly swindle them of Caesar's legacy (IV.i.9) and contemptuously make an “ass” (IV.i.19) of his fellow triumvir Lepidus. If Antony loved Caesar, he loves no other. Brutus may be so rigidly devoted to honor that he can but coldly love men; Antony's devotion to Caesar's spirit is so intense that it sweeps away judgment and compassion. Both therefore fail to restore life and both lose the substance of love.

(III)

Pattern of imagery enlarge this sense of devitalized personal relationships in Julius Caesar. To put the negative case first, the most important political images in the histories are never applied to Rome: the Roman state is never a garden, not even one overgrown with weeds to signify its diseased condition; and Roman leaders are not compared to blossoming plants or to the sun itself.²⁰ Nothing remains of this iterative motif that climaxes in the celebrated prologue to the fourth act of Henry V:

A largess universal like the sun
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all,
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night.

(H5, IV. Pro. 43-47)

Indeed, to thaw or be thawed is rather a debilitating quality, if one is to heed Caesar or Brutus. Contrast the sunlike largess of the King with Caesar's constant northern star, or the “little touch of Harry” with the grotesque and hypocritical account that Decius gives of Caesar nourishing Rome with saintly teats spouting blood. Without the imagery of living and life-giving things, the whole social life of Rome suffers the “sterile curse.” Perhaps Shakespeare meant to say that republican government is inevitably barren and that sun-imagery is simply inappropriate to its form. Yet I doubt it; his England had trouble enough with her kings until one was able to show how the sun-imagery could really work at the level of practical politics. If Shakespeare intended a political or social point, I would think it more likely that he attack not the republicanism of Rome, but something more pervasive and personal—perhaps what we can label the “stoicism” of its people—something in the roots of a society that inhibits the kind of organic community expressed in the garden and sun images.

The dominant strain of images in Julius Caesar compares men to animals. The Roman people are “the common herd” to Casca, and to Cassius “sheep” and “hinds” without whom Caesar would be no “wolf” or “lion.” Antony, before he woos them as men, calls the plebians “brutish beasts” for not mourning Caesar. This patrician contempt is not heaped solely on the masses. Animal imagery shows the contempt the great Romans feel for each other and the viciousness of their internecine struggle. Most commonly they call each other dogs, and never in complimentary terms: they are the “base spaniel fawning” that Caesar despises (III.i.43) or the cruel hounds that bring their successive victims to bay (III.i.204, IV.i.48-49, V.i.41). For Brutus Caesar is an “adder,” Cassius “waspish” and like a “horse hot at hand”; Lepidus is Antony's “horse” and an “ass”; Cicero is a “ferret” with “fiery eyes.” An assortment of verbs like Brutus' “chew” (I.ii.169) or Cassius' “Brutus, bait me not” (following Brutus' “I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon, / Than such a Roman,” IV.iii.27-28), and much plucking, gorging, and sucking add to this impression of subhuman ferocity. None of these comparisons suggests anything of vitality or noble passion; they are all unattractive, predatory animals eyeing each other with mutual suspicion.²¹ Even animals like the lion, horse, or falcon, which are sometimes used to enhance men, serve more ignoble purposes here. The lion in the Capitol is merely “surly” (I.iii.21), a sign that Caesar is no mightier than other men, according to Cassius (I.iii.76). Caesar as a lion (I.iii.106, II.ii.44-47) is not noble, merely plundering and “terrible.” And when he is compared to a falcon by the tribunes (I.i.72), it is to dishonor him by plucking feathers from his wing.

Again it is instructive to think back to the history plays. Henry V can tell his men at Agincourt to “imitate the action of the tiger” without dehumanizing them because he so precisely limits the scope of their brutishness (H5, III.i.1-9). The lion is valiant, everyone knows, even when Falstaff, who is not, claims the comparison for himself (1H4, II.iv.266-71). Something of what Rome lacks is in the outlandish Hotspur, who, according to Hal's burlesque, makes his wife wait upon his horse (1H4, II.iv.104, cf. II.iii.71ff.). Hotspur's sense of honor may be less admirable than Brutus', yet it brings forth a warmer and more impressive tribute from Kate Percy than Portia's suicide. (2H4, II.iii.). And for glorious vitality there is nothing in Julius Caesar to compare with the king's forces described by Vernon (in 1H4, IV.i.97-103). The animals that inhabit Rome make it, beneath ceremonies of love and friendship, an unsavory, predatory world much closer to the “forest of beasts” cataloged by the protagonist in Timon of Athens (IV.iii.325-50) than to the chronologically nearer world of the English histories.

The quality of Roman life is implied even more forcefully by the great variety of references to metals. For the qualities of metal, to use the play's recurring pun, describe the mettle of an honorable Roman. At his best he is stronger than any metal; Cassius defines this strength as he boasts to Casca,

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit;
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

(I.iii.93-97)

Yet, like the philosophy of Brutus, this virtue is in fact Rome's weakness: characteristically for the play, Cassius' strength of spirit is measured by its power not to give life but to extinguish it. And though Cassius disdains “worldly bars,” throughout the play lead, steel, iron, brass, flint, stone, and wood block out the lines of Roman constancy. This constancy, when it grows impervious to all about one, bars the harmonious fusion of parts that makes a well proportioned garden and a working state. A score of constant Romans does not add up to a healthy Rome.

Metal imagery works very much like the animals in Julius Caesar. The list above comprises all baser metals. The common people are “basest mettle” (I.i.61), and perhaps their “guiltiness” is gilt (this pun is explicit in H5, II. Pro. 26) or the superficiality that allows them to be so easily swayed one way and then the other. The noble Romans are more polished, mirrors and glass; but despite his own claims Caesar can lose his “lustre” (I.ii.123), and Cassius discovers that even “honourable mettle may be wrought” (I.ii.306). When great men bend to base deeds, they depend upon the “richest alchemy” of Brutus to show, by transforming murder into sacrifice, that theirs is not the guilt of the plebes. Cassius “whets” (II.i.61) Brutus against Caesar, but “fashion” as he may—the verb has an equivocal sense, drawing from Henry's admonition to Canterbury not to “fashion, wrest, or bow your reading” (H5, I.ii.14)—Brutus cannot make the hard, steel points of argument and sword into rich gold. Roman fire does not transform, it tempers these metals, so that the “leaden points” (III.i.173) that Brutus offers Antony become in the end of the play sharpened, hardened steel. All the metallic images of the concluding scenes are destructive rather than vital: the flint of Brutus sparks but is quickly cold (IV.iii.110); “murd'rous” sleep with its “leaden mace” is a symbol of death and arrest (IV.iii.265); and the end is wrought by “piercing steel and darts envenomed” (V.iii.76).

Compared to the base metals, references to gold and silver are decidedly sparse, and even those lack their usual honorific force and are often debased. They are not richly symbolic, but have merely a hard, literal value. The “silver hairs” of Cicero, for example, will only “buy men's voices to commend our deeds” (II.i.144), like an ordinary bribe. The gold that Brutus and Cassius argue about (IV.iii.11ff.) is money and nothing more. To Brutus it is a “base bribe” and “trash,” and it weighs upon him unrewardingly, as gold merely encumbers the poor ass in Antony's figure for Lepidus (IV.i.21). Both Brutus and Cassius would “coin” their hearts—Brutus would pay his legions (IV.iii.72-77), and Cassius, offering his heart “richer than gold” to Brutus, would thereby redeem his reputation (IV.iii.98-104). But for Cassius this is a persistent and hollow gesture (cf. I.iii.49, 97) to prove by his own death the triumph of his spirit.²² Again, I must conclude, the gold of Julius Caesar is not the gold of Harry that dazzles the eyes of France (H5, I.ii.279), nor the “hoop of gold” that would bind the realm in brotherhood (2H4, IV.iv.43), nor the later, equally symbolic “golden blood” of the meek King Duncan; it is rather the gold of Pluto or Plutus (JC, IV.iii.101), the god of wealth, who is said to be only a steward to Timon of Athens (Tim. I.i.275)—it is hard cash that cannot buy true friendship.

There, finally, is the fabric of Rome, contrived with subtlety and in considerable detail by the organization of motifs and images in the play. Dramatically, of course, it is an impression, but for analysis I have abstracted three distinct elements: first, the signs, on all levels, of division and crisis; second, the ceremonies, both the elaborate public rituals and the more personal ceremonies of love and friendship; third, the continuous imagery involving animals and metals. Together they project a special world, Shakespeare's peculiar creation, in which traditional forms have lost the power to humanize men and yet remain, for those who give themselves to these illusions of power, to work ironic and destructive effects. Thus the ceremonies of Rome are but illusions of love and justice and honor, and Romans who refuse to see the limitations of their social code are swept up in the ironies of history.

If the anatomy of Rome explains why history triumphs over men in Julius Caesar, it incidentally suggests that this triumph is not inevitable or inescapable. For the “world” of the play—its conditions or situation—is one men have created. The details and especially the imagery show that this world is fashioned from personal relationships and individual standards of conduct; and the action describes how men increasingly narrow their conduct into roles that support the necessary form of history. The mechanism of history draws its power from the situation men have made, and in its remorseless way it turns on the makers. A critic who challenges Jan Kott makes the point that to gain perspective on the conflict where the grotesque always defeats the tragic, we must be sensitive to the “conditions of society within which the conflict goes on.” For the point, he quotes Kott himself:

… This notion of an absurd mechanism is the last metaphysical concept still surviving in the contemporary grotesque. But this mechanism does not stand in a relation of transcendence to man, still less so to the human species. It is an ambush which man has prepared for himself, and into which he has fallen.²³

History is this sort of ambush in Julius Caesar.

Notes

1. Citations for Julius Caesar and the histories are from the individual Arden Shakespeare editions (London, 1955); for the other plays, from Hardin Craig, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Glenview, Illinois, 1961).

2. See Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, 1966), especially pp. 6-11, 14. According to Kott, Shakespeare made history a blind mechanism rather than a rational or divine order (pp. 47-48) and so conceived, history transformed the tragic world into the grotesque.

3. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), pp. 106-13, gives a detailed analysis of the parallel in these scenes.

4. Brutus and Bolingbroke are dissimilar characters, but Caesar has been compared with Richard II for believing in his own invulnerability. See Douglas Peterson, “‘Wisdom Consumed in Confidence’: An Examination of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,” SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] XVI (1965), 19-28.

5. T. S. Dorsch, ed., Julius Caesar (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), p. xli, and Rabkin, p. 112, make the same point about this passage.

6. This prominent theme is traced through the major tragedies by John Holloway, The Story of the Night (London, 1961). See his summary, pp. 146-47. I do not see the tragic realization or knowledge that Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (New York, 1963), pp. 46ff., 63, 70, gives to Brutus, for (as I shall argue below) chaos is not what Brutus brings into existence but what was implicit in Rome at the beginning; all the major characters, wittingly or not, help it along. Brutus, I think, shares some of the ambiguity Schanzer ascribes to Caesar (pp. 12-32).

7. L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare and Political Wisdom: A Note on the Personalism of Julius Caesar and Coriolanus,” SR, [Sewanee Review] LXI (1953), 46.

8. I follow Maurice Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), pp. 74-77.

9. Holloway, p. 26.

10. Carl Jung, Psychological Types, trans. H. Godwin Baynes (London, 1923), p. 484. See the discussion of “Soul” and related concepts, pp. 588-96.

11. Cf. L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare's Politics: With Some Reflections on the Nature of Tradition,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XLIII (1957); Julius Caesar contrasts “person and persona” (p. 118). It shares with the greater nonpolitical plays “a preoccupation with the ways in which men give themselves to illusion” (p. 119). “Shakespeare's political plays are creative explorations of conceptions such as power, authority, honour, order, and freedom, which only too easily become objects of ‘idolatry’” (p. 127). These comments and “The Public World,” Chapter II of Knights', Some Shakespearean Themes (Stanford, 1960) provide fruitful insight and direction.

12. M. M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty: A Study of Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1961), pp. 304-305.

13. Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy (New York, 1956), pp. 40-54.

14. G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London, 1951), pp. 61-62. Knight insists on vitality and yet finds “mechanisms” the appropriate metaphor for “social order life, and love”—presumably because they are social rather than personal. Contrast the suggestion that Shakespeare's concept of society is more in the “organic” tradition of Dante, Aquinas, Hooker, and Coleridge, in L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare's Politics,” pp. 123-27.

15. Knight, Imperial Theme, pp. 40-42.

16. See L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare and Political Wisdom,” p. 47. Schanzer (p. 32), comparing Pirandello, says we never know whether there is a real Caesar behind the mask.

17. These rituals and their association with Judas are noted by Schanzer, p. 30.

18. E.g., Knight, quoted above, or V. G. Kiernan, “Human Relationships in Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare in a Changing World, ed. Arnold Kettle (New York, 1964), pp. 52, 55, 61.

19. See L. C. Knights, “Shakespeare and Political Wisdom,” p. 48, and William Bowden, “The Mind of Brutus,” SQ, XVII (1966), 57-67, for similar view of the relationship between Brutus and Portia. Northrop Frye, Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto, 1967), p. 26, calls Brutus “one of the few characters in Shakespeare capable of an impersonal loyalty,” but “the one man for whom personal loyalties are inappropriate.” This distinction comes across forcefully in the play.

20. Caroline Spurgeon traced both these patterns from Henry VI through the histories, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 216-24, 233-38.

21. Here I think Knight, Imperial Theme, p. 33, clearly misjudges the effect of the imagery. For example, he sees in the horses of Antony and Brutus images of “fiery vitality and spirit.” In fact, Antony uses the image to make Lepidus appear as a mindless beast of burden, and Brutus implies that Cassius is all show without substance. Knight is closer to the truth when he cites the horse as a symbol of disorder (II.ii.23). The only ennobling images, it seems to me, are Antony's comparison of Caesar to a hart (III.i.204) and possibly Brutus making himself a lamb (IV.iii.109).

22. Again contrast G. W. Knight's interpretation of these images, Imperial Theme, p. 35.

23. Alick West, in Shakespeare in a Changing World, pp. 255-56. The quotation, slightly changed, is in Kott's chapter on King Lear, p. 133.