[In the following essay, Levitsky illuminates Brutus's Stoic virtues and contrasts his character with the less admirable Caesar.]

In a survey of the half-century (1900-50) of scholarship dealing with Shakespeare's Roman plays, J. C. Maxwell commends Sir Mark Hunter's “Politics and Character in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar” as “one of the first among modern attempts to correct the tendency to overidealize Brutus and give him too central a part in the play.”¹ In the thirty-odd years since Hunter's study was published this overidealization, I suggest, has been overcorrected.² For while it is true that Brutus is not the ideal hero that Henry v is, he is still the noblest Roman of them all. This, I submit, is all that Shakespeare ever intended him to be; but that all is no little, and it ought not be denied him.

One of the more recent denigrations of Brutus is John Anson's “Julius Caesar, the Politics of the Hardened Heart,” in which Romans generally are indicted as “blocks … stones … worse than senseless things.”³ Certainly Shakespeare was capable of using such terms to describe young men who would devote their lives to “suck[ing] the sweets of sweet philosophy.” And, unquestionably, the moral petrification resulting from attempts to stifle the emotions is condemned in such a snow-broth-and-congealed-ice character as Angelo in Measure for Measure.

But it was a simpler matter to write a play about the villainy of a hardhearted Renaissance Italian than to write one about the villainy of a Stoic Roman. For while the Elizabethans could ridicule “that astonishment, which the Stoikes call tranquility,” they could also admit that these men “had certaine principles upon which they did builde, which indeed are not to be despised” and that their respect for the moral virtues was such as to make many a Christian blush.⁴

One might venture as a general observation that the almost unqualified admiration of the ancients seen in earlier sixteenth-century philosophical tracts is, after the end of the century, supplanted by a measure of distrust in that hardiness which may become either hardness or a Pelagian-like overconfidence in the Self. Certainly, Sir Thomas Elyot's sage is Stoic (Bankette of Sapience, 1539); and, unquestionably, the various volumes of sententiae popular in Shakespeare's youth encouraged the reader to admire that fortitude consistently proclaimed by Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius and avowedly practiced by Zeno, Stilpo, and Cato.⁵ On the other hand, William Jewel's The Golden Cabinet of True Treasure (1612, sig. R3^v) can censure “the severe Stoickes (which would have … men … to be stupid and senseless)”; and Thomas Cooper (The Mysterie of the … Government of our Affections, 1618, sig. B14^v) can ridicule those Stoics who “coniected such a kind of senseless happinesse which might free from all affections.”

Nevertheless, Pierre Charron's Of Wisdom (1606), Henry Crosse's Vertues Commonwealth (1603), and Anthony Stafford's Heavenly Dogge (1615) stand—along with others—as monuments to a long-cherished ideal of virtue through self-mastery. While a perusal of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century treatises on virtue reveals a certain ambivalence toward the Stoic,⁶ there is nevertheless evidence that, however grudgingly, many Elizabethans and Jacobeans did admire that discipline which Hamlet commends in Horatio.

Although Stoicism is tried and found wanting in Julius Caesar, we may observe that in the course of that trial the same rigid control that fosters induration can also function as an assurance of moral stability. The “constancy” which arms a man against flattery, fawning, and bribery; which sustains him in carrying out calmly whatever decisions are necessary for the good of his country; which enables him to face death without tears or terror—this quality certainly could be seen by the Elizabethans as commendable. While they sometimes called it stubbornness or stoniness, they were also capable of calling it fortitude, resolution, or constancy—all branches of virtue both in the Roman catalog and in the Elizabethan.

To see the firmness of Brutus as merely evidence of the hardened heart is to miss the dilemma at the center of his tragedy. To categorize him as just one more Roman is to overlook the painstaking care with which his creator has set him apart from his countrymen. Though the “cheefe and princypall vertue” (namely, a faith in God) was lacking in all “Infydelles,” it was a mistake, as Bishop Woolton pointed out, “to be so dull and senseles, to thinke that there is no dyfference betweene Cato and Catalyne.”⁷

Schoolboys learned the difference between Cato and Cataline, for Cato was held up as a model of pagan virtue.⁸ It may, therefore, be edifying to note that in the opening paragraphs of his chief source for Julius Caesar, Shakespeare found the following:

Marcus Cato the philosopher was brother unto Servilia, M. Brutus' mother, whom Brutus studied most to follow of all the other Romans …⁹

E. A. J. Honigman has pointed out the probability that Shakespeare got some hints from Plutarch's “Cato Utican” for his portrayal of Brutus.¹⁰ The integrity, the idealism, the sense of justice, and stubborn devotion to what he considers the good of his country—all these traits attributed to Brutus by Plutarch—are found augmented in Cato. While their most outstanding similarity is their hatred of tyranny, it is important to note also that Plutarch makes both of them gentle and human. If Brutus studied to be like Cato, he would have “mingled with his severity and hardness” a tenderness and concern for those closest to him (Plutarch, VII, 298).

Following Honigman's lead, I suggest that Plutarch's comparison of Dion and Brutus may have been a further source for the characterization of Brutus:

For wherein their chiefest praise consisted, … in hating of tyrants and wicked men: it is most true that Brutus' desire was most sincere … For having no private cause of complaint or grudge against Caesar, he ventured to kill him, only to set his country again at liberty … Furthermore, the respect of the commonwealth caused Brutus, that before was Pompey's enemy, to become his friend, and enemy unto Caesar, that before was his friend; only referring his friendship and enmity, unto the consideration of justice and equity.

… [Brutus'] very enemies themselves confessed that of all those that conspired Caesar's death, he only had no other end and intent to attempt his enterprise, but to restore the empire of Rome again to her former state and government.

(IX, 316-17)

If Shakespeare availed himself of all that Plutarch had to say about the relative virtue of these Romans and also noted the common opinions of Elizabethans concerning the dangers of the Stoic creed, he was almost certain in writing a play about the Rome of Caesar's day to create a hero about whom we would have mixed feelings. For if every schoolboy knew the difference between a Cato and a Cataline, he also knew the difference between a pagan and a Christian. What Shakespeare is faced with in this play is the problem of keeping both these distinctions always before us: though Brutus is no ordinary pagan, he does have the Stoic flaw of too much confidence in his own will and wisdom; though he must fail as the self-appointed savior of Rome, he can nevertheless be the noblest Roman of them all.

What I propose to point out, then, is the method by which Shakespeare has caused Brutus to stand head and shoulders above his fellows and at the same time to fall short, not only of the Christian ideal, but also of the Stoic effort to control the passions and to be always ruled by Right Reason. In Brutus we can see a man who from the beginning suffers in spite of his fortitude and who knows that there is some danger in disjoining remorse from power, while in Caesar we see a man who in his absolute inflexibility has become inhuman. Again, we see in Brutus' uprightness and integrity a contrast to Cassius' malicious envy; and in his disciplined life a contrast to Antony's “epicureanism.”

We repeatedly see in Brutus the purity of motive, steadfastness of purpose, and strength of will characteristic of the Stoic, mixed with a tendency toward human passion and compassion which render him more vulnerable to suffering but also more lovable than the obdurate Caesar. For example, although he calmly reviews (in soliloquy) the reasoning behind his decision to kill Caesar, we are expressly told that he did not arrive at this decision without experiencing great mental perturbation: he has not slept, the interim has been like a hideous dream, and his whole being has been in a state of insurrection. Shakespeare has preserved Brutus' humanity and at the same time given us a man so devoted to his country that he will kill his friend to save it. Calmly Brutus states the probable consequences if Caesar is allowed to become King and calmly he says what must be done to prevent it. He has no personal cause; his cause is the general good of Rome. Caesar is the kind of person who, according to Brutus, will forget the common people (“base degrees”) who have helped him to the throne; the kind of person who in his perfect justice untinged with mercy will be dangerous if he gains absolute power:

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

(II.i.18-21)

When we meet Caesar, we find him precisely the cold dispenser of justice Brutus has described. Unlike Brutus, Caesar does not (as far as we know) mingle with his severity and hardness any tenderness or gentleness. His affections do not, indeed, sway more than his Reason. But the fact of his refusal to heed the supplications in behalf of Cimber is not what condemns him: it is presumably commendable for a judge to remain unmoved by “couchings” if he is certain that his sentence is just. We cannot fail to note, however, the pride of Caesar and the contempt in which he holds those beneath him:

These couchings …
Might fire the blood of ordinary men.
.....I spurn thee like a cur out of my way,
.....I could be well moved, if I were as you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:

(III.i.36-59, passim)

Caesar's own term for remaining “unshak'd of motion” is constancy:

… I am constant as the northern star
… I was constant Cimber should be banish'd
And constant do remain to keep him so.

(III.i.60, 72-73)

Is constancy, then, not a virtue after all? Not, it would appear, as Caesar practices it. The majesty of the judge who will not be moved by “base spaniel fawning” is overshadowed by the arrogance of the proud man's claim to be more than flesh and blood. The man has become a god—but a god lacking in mercy and kinship with mankind. That Shakespeare has pictured him thus indicates, I think, a condemnation both of tyranny and of Stoic induration.

We ought not to forget, however, that it was Brutus who warned us against the dangers of this hardness—of the disjoining of remorse from power. And it is perhaps the supreme irony of the play that Brutus worries about Caesar's lack of affections at the very moment when he is attempting to stifle his own. Even so, there is revealed a fundamental difference in the characters of the two men: it is Brutus who is consistently shown to be governed by selflessness and to be capable of human suffering. The difference is not so much in the actions of the two men as in their spirit. For the Stoic, good or evil lies in the intention, in the motivation: of Caesar's motives, we can never be sure; of Brutus', we are repeatedly assured that they are entirely unselfish.¹¹ For the Christian, compassion, grief, sorrow ought to accompany even an execution of justice—as they do in Brutus. And the strong ought to sympathize with the weak, as Caesar manifestly does not.

The difference in spirit between Brutus and Caesar is clear in the language Brutus uses when instructing the conspirators how to carry out the assassination. He manifests his superiority over his fellows without once asserting that he has no fellow. And it is apparent that he is not “unshak'd of motion.” Prior to, in the course of, and immediately following the conversation with the other conspirators, Brutus is made to reveal a humanity that we never see in Caesar. In laying the plans for the murder, though the Stoic coldness is certainly underscored more heavily than the affections, it is precisely the expression of both in a single scene that makes the dilemma so poignant:

O, that we then could come by Caesar's spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it!

(II.i.169-71)

Does this in Brutus seem stony? Stones should be made of harder stuff. It is stern, certainly, but it is not the sternness of Caesar.

Brutus' expression of regret has come as a kind of aside interrupting his description of the spirit in which the assassination should be carried out—a spirit of calm, allowing for no envy, anger, or hatred:

Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully:
Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods.

(II.i.172-73)

Our culture understands—even forgives—the murder committed in the heat of passion whereas it utterly condemns the cool, premeditated murder, however “just” the cause. The sanctions of the Stoic were quite the opposite: the Wise Man could both determine and carry out his duty by means of his reason unaided by emotions.

That Brutus' constancy here is meant to be of this sort cannot be denied. What he demands is no less than the extreme justice Caesar will insist upon. But the language of sacrifice,¹² the aside expressing regret, and the earlier picture of a Brutus “vex'd … with passions of some difference”—while they do not alter the act of “Stoic Justice”—they keep us aware of the essential humanity of the character, of his suffering as a man even while he must act as a man.

Immediately the deed is done, we hear once more how gentleness and severity are commingled in Brutus:

… yet see you but our hands
And this the bleeding business they have done:
Our hearts you see not: they are pitiful.

(III.i.167-69)

This much to Antony. For the citizens of Rome, he amplifies upon the same theme: he loved Caesar, but he loved Rome more; he had tears for him and honor for his valor, but he killed him for his ambition. Though he amplifies, he does not embellish. The effusive and emotive oration is for Antony to deliver—“Antony, that revels long o'nights” (II.ii.116).

In the famous quarrel scene, Brutus is once again shown to be something more than—or something less than—a Stoic. Surely (though he is not subject to choler as Cassius is) Brutus speaks the following words in passion:

What villain touch'd his body, that did stab
And not for justice? What, shall one of us
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers, shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes?

(IV.iii.20-24)

And though one cannot imagine him—like Cassius—“weep[ing] his spirit from [his] eyes,” or indulging in such false heroics as

                                        … There is my dagger,
And here my naked breast;
.....Strike, as thou didst at Caesar.

(IV.iii.100-01, 105)

still the scene shows us a Brutus not only quite human in anger and in grief, but finally—in his “O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb”—as gentle as any Christian could desire. That “no man bears sorrow better” he proves in his calm reception of the news of Portia's death:¹³

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

(IV.iii.190-92)

That he feels his loss keenly, nonetheless, is tellingly revealed in his simple “O Cassius, I am sick of many griefs. … Portia is dead” (IV.iii.145-48). Nor is the passion of fear entirely foreign to the breast of Brutus, as we learn when the sight of Caesar's ghost makes his “blood cold and [his] hair to stare” (IV.iii.280). Yet the calm response, “Why, I will see thee at Philippi, then,” once more assures us that the Roman Stoic does make some use of his philosophy. This mingling of the Stoic calm and fortitude with the flesh-and-blood emotions of anger, grief, and fear is, I suggest, Shakespeare's attempt to give us the modified version of a Stoic that he considered the noblest kind of pagan.

If Brutus must learn that he is not entirely invulnerable where the passions are concerned, he is also to discover that his Reason is not (as the Pagan Wise Man thought) wholly infallible. Brutus, being something of a philosopher, had long pondered the noble way to die as well as the noble way to live. Yet, face to face with the issue, he is far from certain whether he ought to commit suicide. In answer to Cassius' question: “What will you do if we lose the battle?” he replies, in effect: “I will practice what I have preached. I earlier blamed Cato for committing suicide ‘for fear of what might befall’ because somehow I have always considered this escapism cowardly and vile. Therefore, ‘arming myself with patience,’ I will take whatever Providence has in store for me” (paraphrase of V.i.101-08).¹⁴ Brutus promptly changes his mind, however, when reminded that this patience may mean being led captive through the streets of Rome.

The patience and the reliance on Providence which Brutus decides to reject would have made him more Christian than Stoic. But he was not and could not be Christian. What he could be Shakespeare made him: a Roman who stood out as more human than Caesar, more disciplined than Antony, and more pure-in-heart than any of his fellow conspirators. It is the spirit of Brutus that has been shown to stand up against the spirit of Caesar. The action of Brutus has been generally proclaimed, both by historians and literary critics, as wrong, since whatever Caesar as King might have become he could hardly have brought more woe to his country than did the consequences of his assassination. As for Brutus' spirit, however, Shakespeare was at some pains to depict it as right.

What Shakespeare attempted in this characterization was extremely difficult: to depict his “antique Roman” with the qualities of firmness and fortitude which distinguish the Stoic hero without sacrificing those qualities of pity, love, grief, and vexation which distinguish him as Man. He was more successful, I think, in his delineation of a Henry V, where the emphasis could be reversed: the hardness necessary to a soldier is there superimposed upon an Englishman who by “art and nature” is more passionate than the Roman. In the reformed and mature Hal, the paradox of “the mirrour of all Christian kings” waging an aggressive war in the name of God and St. George is to our modern consciences (possibly) more easily reconcilable than that of a Roman Stoic “boldly but not wrathfully” killing a man he loves because he loves his country more.

How much of Shakespeare's portrait derives from his sources concerning Brutus' nature and philosophy and how much from his own sense of the combination of humanity and heroism which ought to be attributed to a man so generally acclaimed as noble must remain a conjecture. In any case, what emerges is one

whose blood and judgement are so well commedled
That [he is] not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please,

but who, at the same time, is not one who “in suffering all, … suffers nothing” (Ham. III.ii.70-76, passim). The complexity of Brutus' character, I suggest, is at least partially attributable to the fact that Shakespeare shared with his fellow Elizabethans an ambivalence toward the ancient virtue of constancy. What the Stoics claimed for themselves, the Elizabethan doubtless aspired to even while condemning it as a manifestation of the sin of Pride.

Brutus is not the wholly unimpassioned Wise Man posited by the Stoics: the fate of such a man would not be tragic. Neither is he subject to the passion of envy as is Cassius or of pride as is Caesar: such a man is not heroic. In his self-sufficiency and his unswerving pursuit of virtue as the ultimate goal, Brutus is Stoic; but in his warmth and gentleness and capacity for suffering, he is simply human. In picturing him thus, Shakespeare has given us a tragic hero whom we can admire even as we fear for him, whom we can love even as we pity him.

Elizabethan playwrights apparently assumed an audience familiar with the importance—and the rarity—of the proper admixture of the four elements in the microcosm (i.e., the human body) necessary to produce harmony within itself and with the macrocosm.¹⁵ While Brutus may never have heard the music of the spheres, that he possessed a “bounteous gift of nature” which distinguished him “from the bill / That writes [men] all alike” (Mac. III.i.100-01) is unequivocally asserted in the final encomium pronounced over his dead body:

… the elements [were]
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’

Notes

1. “Shakespeare's Roman Plays: 1900-1956,” Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957), 9.

2. There have, of course, been champions of Brutus since that time. For a fairly comprehensive bibliography of recent scholarship on this subject, see William R. Bowden, “The Mind of Brutus,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 17 (1966), 57-67.

3. Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 31.

4. Jeronimo Osorio da Fonseca, Five Bookes of Civill and Christian Nobilitie (London: T. Marsh, 1576), sig. M3^v. George Gifford, A Treatise of True Fortitude (London: J. Roberts f. J. Hardy, 1594), sig. B6^v. Richard Barckley, A Discourse of the Felicitie of Man (London: R. Field f. Wm. Ponsonby, 1598), sig. V2^r.

5. See, e.g., Erasmus' Chiliades (London: E. Whitchurch, 1545) and William Baldwin's A Treatise of Morall Phylosophie, sixteen editions of which appeared between 1547 and 1620.

6. Ludwig Edelstein's recent book, The Meaning of Stoicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966), corrects a number of misconceptions with reference to Stoicism; and Joseph Chang's “Shakespeare and Stoic Ethics” (Diss. Wisconsin 1965) points out the unorthodoxy of much of Seneca's Stoicism. Our interest here, however, is in what the Elizabethan understood this austere code to demand. For the basic tenets of Stoic discipline as they can be found in Elizabethan and Jacobean treatises see my “Rightly to Be Great,” ShakS [Shakespeare Survey], 1 (1965), esp. pp. 142-45. To those 16th- and 17th-century titles mentioned above (in text and footnotes), the following may be added, as particularly pertinent: George Gascoigne, The Dromme of Dommesday (London: J. Windet f. G. Cawood, 1586); Guillaume de la Perriere, Mirrour of Policie (London: A. Islip, 1598); John Downame, A Treatise of Anger (London: T. E. for W. Welby, 1609); Richard Hooker, A Remedy against Sorrow and Feare (Oxford: Jos. Barnes, 1612); Daniel Tuvil, Essayes, Morall and Theologicall (London: J. W. for E. Edgar, 1609); Gabriel Powel, The Resolved Christian (London: V. S. f. T. Bushel, 1600); Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London: V. Sims f. W. Burre, 1604).

7. The Christian Manuell (London: J. C. f. T. Sturruppe, 1576), sig. DVI^v.

8. Seneca admits that such a wise man as the Stoics approve is seldom found; but, he says, “I believe that Cato … exceedeth by farre the Wiseman which is now in question.” The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, trans Tho. Lodge (London: W. Stansby, 1614), sig. Kkk2^r.

9. Plutarch's Lives, trans. Sir Thomas North, ed. W. H. D. Rouse, 16 vols. (London: Dent, 1898), IX, 243-44. Hereafter, volume and page number will be incorporated in the text.

10. “Shakespeare's Plutarch,” SQ, 12 (1961), 342-51.

11. See Jason Saunders, Justus Lipsius: The Philosophy of Renaissance Stoicism (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), p. xiii. In Plutarch, it is reiterated that “his intent was good,” that he was concerned for the general good, etc., while Caesar is described as one who “never seemed to care for any man, but for himself” and who gave “good and silver by handfuls … [only] to serve his turn …” (see VII, 216, IX, 277-88).

12. Shakespeare also allows Brutus the language of hypocrisy, however, in II.i.175-77, when he demands that the heart remain untouched by anger while stirring up the hands to deeds which men generally assume cannot be done except in anger. That Brutus has actually bowed to the expedient of hypocrisy is much clearer in II.i.82.

13. In “Julius Caesar in Revision,” SQ, 13 (1962), 187-205, Brents Sterling reviews a number of suggested explanations for the duplicate revelation of Portia's death.

14. Although the terms Shakespeare uses here have Christian connotations (particularly the word “providence”), the sentiments could as easily be derived from Plato, whom Cato and Brutus are said by Plutarch to have admired.

15. E.g., Marlowe's Tamburlaine speaks of “Nature that fram'd us of four elements, / Warring within our breasts for regiment” (Tamburlaine I.869-70); and Shakespeare's Cleopatra declares: “I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life” (V.ii.292-93). E. M. W. Tillyard's Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943) provides a thorough explanation of the “humours psychology” based upon the distribution of the four elements in the human body.