[In the following essay, Chang views Julius Caesar as a demonstration of Shakespeare's historical relativism.]

Criticism of Julius Caesar has moved steadily toward the position recently taken by Mildred E. Hartsock, that the play “is a demonstration that the truth of character cannot be known.”¹ Earlier critics had become reconciled to a divided characterization of Caesar, and they began to find inconsonances in Brutus as well.² The more the play is examined, the more one is inclined to accept the conclusion Miss Hartsock tentatively offers: “Perhaps Shakespeare was playing a bitter ‘modern’ trick, and, in the spirit of Pilate's embarrassing question, implying that the truth cannot be known.” The difficulty, by her own admission, is that this interpretation comes close to proposing “that in 1599, a playwright would be expressing a twentieth-century concept of relativity.” It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the concept of relativity is not peculiar to the present age, and that the internal evidence which Miss Hartsock drew from the play was not misconstrued. Julius Caesar exploits for dramatic purposes the growing awareness among Renaissance historians and others that the past is difficult to retrieve, and that the ends of history are best served by scrupulous objectivity.³ What begins in the period with the attempt to define the ends and means of history culminates in Julius Caesar as the dramatic representation of the ironic discrepancy between man's desired and created realities. Nothing of a man's character can be inferred from his actions.

Machiavelli, especially in his Discourses and History of Florence, provided the Renaissance with an example of history as a science—accurate, analytical, and dispassionate. In these works he manifests the principle that, in the affairs of state at least, actions have always been framed to the demands of the situation. Thus, the history of the past reveals a politic for the present; the ideal prince must be an astute observer of the moment. For the unsophisticated of orthodox moral commitment, the reaction was simple, since the distinction between ethics and politics was unacceptable. For others, there was a real challenge in the historical basis of Machiavellianism. Jean Bodin, Samuel Daniel, and Francis Bacon attempted to accommodate the new demands of historical accuracy to the old ethical norms. Though Bodin never accepts Machiavelli's apparent indifference to ethical imperatives, regarding politics as the Florentine did, “a system of actions and reactions operating in a moral vacuum,”⁴ neither does he excuse the crude injection of moral commentary in history: “The first attempts to embroider history occurred when it was thought fine to use an honorable lie for the praise of virtuous characters and the vituperation of evil.”⁵ In effect, the new science of historiography imposed an ethical neutrality⁶—though quite unlike Machiavelli's—on those with an undeniable commitment to orthodox ethics. Objectivity insists that praise and blame be withheld. This quality is the final mark of the true historian, in Bodin's estimation: “The best writers are fully equipped on all three counts [integrity, learning, and experience], if only they could rid themselves of all emotion in writing history.”⁷

Montaigne clearly states his approval of these standards in his praise of those historians “who have nothing of their owne to adde unto the storie, and have but the care and diligence to collect whatsoever come unto their knowledge, and sincerely and faithfully to register all things, without choice or culling, by the naked truth leave our judgement more entire, and better satisfied.”⁸ The consequence of revealing all, however, is that there will be events in a man's life which simply cannot be reconciled and for that reason no single judgment can be made about a man. Montaigne advises against seeking coherence in men's lives, a temptation to which even good historians succumb.

There is some apparence to judge a man by the most common conditions of his life, but seeing the naturall instability of our customes and opinions; I have often thought, that even good Authors, doe ill, and take a wrong course, wilfully to opinionate themselves about framing a constant and solide contexture of us. They chuse an universall ayre, and following that image, range and interpret all a mans actions; which if they cannot wrest sufficiently, they remit them unto dissimulation.⁹

While the ideal man may be exemplified in Cato, whose life is “an harmony of well according tunes and which cannot contradict it selfe,” Montaigne recognizes that “With us, it is cleane contrary, so many actions, so many particular judgements are there requir'd. The surest way [to understand past events] (in mine opinion) were to refer them unto the next circumstances, without entering into further search, and without concluding any other consequence of them.”¹⁰ Thus, the critical factors in human events lie not in the will of man but in the circumstances of his life, and since those circumstances are forever changing, there can be little opportunity for constructing a consistent view of men. Whether history reflects the principles of Machiavelli's opportunism, or Bodin's objectivity, or Montaigne's skepticism, the recording of the past exposes man as a creature governed by occasion.

Montaigne's caveat is addressed to the historian, though it deserves consideration by the dramatic critic as well. For what he says is apt in the case of Caesar, pointing to a way of looking at the man's inconsistent behavior. In addition to the fact of a divided tradition of praise and blame, and the cogent suggestion that the shifting portrait reveals not the man himself but those who view him,¹¹ there remains the consideration that Caesar responds to different situations in ways that are proper to the given circumstances. The swimming episode as recounted by Cassius shows Caesar as a coward in the face of death. And even if some allowance is made for Cassius' hatred, the fact remains that Caesar was afraid. Speaking for himself, Caesar declares that death, being the necessary end, holds no terror for him. Finally, at the moment of his assassination, he bears himself well. The courageous equanimity he expresses only serves to underscore the difference in his conduct when on two occasions he faces actual death, and may therefore be discounted as a dramatic device to force the issue home. Ordinarily, the discrepancy in Caesar's conduct is taken as evidence of his character, although another approach is possible. Caesar is fearful when death is close but not certain, as in the swimming episode: Cassius is there to save him. But when it is too late, after the conspirators have struck their several blows, he is capable of the resolve he claimed in repudiating fear of death. At his last moment, under the circumstances, Et tu, Brute! is the mot juste.

Caesar is no different from the conjectural example Montaigne uses to illustrate his point about the behavior of men.

He whom you saw yesterday so boldly-venturous, wonder not if you see him a dastardly meacocke to morrow next: for either anger or necessitie, company or wine, a sudden fury or the clang of a trumpet, might rowze-up his heart, and stir up his courage. It is no heart nor courage so framed by discourse or deliberation: These circumstances have setled the same in him: Therefore it is no marvell if by other contrary circumstance he become a craven and change coppy.¹²

The difficulty is that historians, moral commentators, and critics are ever ready to revert to explaining events in terms of character, as in the case of Caesar's fatal decision to attend the Senate. Caesar in II.ii vacillates between going to the Senate and remaining at home, unable to decide because he does not know what to make of Calpurnia's dreams. Without question, vanity intervenes to lead credibility to error, but only because the truth is not self-evident. Whether vanity is the principal characteristic of the man is beside the point, since, from his point of view, the evidence of dreams and augury offered no firm basis for intelligent choice. The irrelevance of motive and act can be further illustrated by reference to Cassius' suicide, for there, too, ambiguous circumstances propel a man to his death. As Pindarus relates the scene taking place, there is no indication that the troop surrounding Titinius is hostile, though that is the distinct impression the audience gets. With the noblest of intentions, the restoration of personal honor jeopardized by having sent forth a friend to his capture, Cassius commits suicide. As things turn out, the surrounding troops were allies, and Cassius becomes a victim of his own version of reality. If the dramatic point here is to present the absolute discrepancy between the best of motives and a futile act, perhaps little can be said about Caesar's pride and his own heroic death.

As historians freed themselves from the obligation to offer heroes and villains, restricting themselves to demonstrable truths, they came to the greater moral problem implicit in Montaigne's skepticism. For while the older school might presume that the great crimes of history are the effects of malicious and designing men, men on the order of Shakespeare's Richard III, the new historians found in the past a complex web of causes and pressures, the sum of which reduced the significance of individual initiative. Samuel Daniel, in his epic treatment of the fall of Richard II and the accession of Henry Bolingbroke, departs from Mirror tradition to claim that quite possibly the usurper was himself guiltless, being no more than a man who reacted appropriately to opportunities not of his own making. Of Bolingbroke, he writes,

          And let vnwresting Charitie beleeue
That then thy oath with thy intent agreed;
And others faith, thy faith did first deceiue,
Thy after-fortune forc't thee to this deed.(13)

Daniel then comments on the historical accounts of the event, pointing out the impossibility of discerning a man's motives, refusing to make coherent what in fact is only sequentially linked:

          Whil'st those that are but outward lookers on …
Deeme things were so contriv'd as they are done,
And hold that policie, which was but fate;
Imagining, all former acts did run
Vnto that course they see th'effects relate. …(14)

Rejecting the interpretation found in the Mirror for Magistrates, that Henry Bolingbroke was driven by pride,¹⁵ Daniel in addition chooses not to consider Bolingbroke's pledge as inspired by policy. Rather than reconciling the man's words and his deeds by charging dissimulation, he accepts the disparity. Moreover, in attributing to fate the otherwise unaccountable rise, he means to say only that one thing led to the next, that each succeeding situation offered the man the option of rising or falling, and that there was no choice, no malice. Finally, Daniel, like Montaigne, is acutely conscious of the historian's penchant for creating a meaningful pattern where none existed. On this, Daniel could not be clearer:

          For, some the world must haue, on whom to lay
The heauie burthen of reproche and blame;
Against whose deedes, th'afflicted may inuay,
As th'onely Authors, whence destruction came:
When yet, perhaps, 'twas not in them to stay
The current of that streame, nor help the same;
But, liuing in the eye of Action so,
Not hindring it, are thought to draw-on wo.
          So much vnhappie do the Mightie stand …
That if by weakenesse, folly, negligence,
They do not coming miserie withstand,
They shall be deemed th'authors of th'offence,
And to call in, that which they kept not out;
And curst, as they who brought those plagues about.
          And so remaine for euer rigistred
In that eternall booke of Infamie;
When yet how many other causes led
As well to that, as their iniquitie?(16)

The ramifications of historical objectivity are, I believe, evident even as Daniel dismisses the naïveté of seeking out scapegoats for the shattering disorders of the past. For the price to be paid is man's freedom; fate and chaos replace personal initiative, and men are lost in the great movements of history. Jean Bodin, who contributed greatly to the development of historical investigations, found himself dealing with the paradox that while man shapes history, he cannot be said to control his own life. Man shapes history by accident and not by grand design. The problem is not that men are corrupt and vicious, as Machiavelli suggests,¹⁷ but that they are the prisoners of fallibility.

But because human history mostly flows from the will of mankind, which ever vacillates and has no objective—nay rather, each day new laws, new customs, new institutions, new manners confront us—so, in general, human actions are invariably involved in new errors unless they are directed by nature as leader. That is, they err if they are not directed by correct reasoning or if, when the latter has deteriorated, they are not guided without the help of secondary causes by that divine foresight which is closer to the principle of their origin. If we depart from this, we shall fall headlong into all sorts of infamy. Although the mind of man, plucked from the eternal mind, isolates itself as far as possible from earthly stain, still because it is deeply immersed in unclean matter, it is so influenced by contact with it, and even distracted within itself by conflicting emotions, that without divine aid it can neither uplift itself nor achieve any degree of justice nor accomplish anything according to nature. Consequently it comes about that as long as we are handicapped by the weakness of our senses and by a false image of things, we are not able to discern useful from useless or true from false or base from honorable, but by a misuse of words we attribute our actions to prudence in order not to trespass.¹⁸

Bodin, it should be noted, implicitly concedes to man the conscious desire to pursue the good, raising instead the question of man's ability to discern the true from the false, or the base from the honorable. In the case of Marcus Brutus, the problem is not the determination of his moral fiber, for that is bound with Roman honor. The question is whether he can effect his high ends when handicapped by his humanity. His is the new servitude to error, replacing the medieval slavery to Fortune. Unlike the malicious Cassius, Brutus freely wills the conclusion derived through logical error. Though Machiavelli rejects the abject state of man as subject to the fickle goddess, others find man in bondage to error. “Opinion,” Ben Jonson writes, “is a light, vaine, crude, and imperfect thing, settled in the Imagination; but never arriving at the understanding, there to obtaine the tincture of Reason. Wee labour with it more than Truth. There is much more holds us, then presseth us. An ill fact is one thing, an ill fortune is another: Yet both often-times sway us alike, by the error of our thinking.”¹⁹ Though Fortune may intervene in human affairs, more frequent are the occasions when man is frustrated by his own failures in separating reality from appearances. At the most fundamental level, appearance and reality are matters of epistemology. To the extent that action and will are dependent on knowledge and understanding, whether the truths affirmed correspond to objective reality bears on the problem of conduct. Significantly, man is least blameworthy when his vicious actions issue from error, and this may well account for our ability to accept Brutus at face value.

Often regarded as an anticipation of the tragedies, the play is as well a culmination of the histories. The divided response of history to Brutus and Caesar, one alternately patriot and assassin, the other hero and tyrant, only emphasized the unreliability of historical accounts. And in the melancholy events surrounding the Ides of March, there were the prima facie discrepancies between intention and act. In the play, Cassius anticipates the judgment of history.

                                        How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted o'er
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

(III.i.111-13)

But history made of that scene what it would, even as Brutus and Antony did in their funeral orations. In history, as in the play, the demands of the situation, and not the deed itself, controlled the view taken.

Shakespeare's purpose, however, was that of a dramatist, and accordingly he managed his material in order to exploit just that kind of irony implicit in Bodin and Daniel, of seeing man committing acts of unavoidable moral significance and yet lacking full awareness of what it is he is doing. Rather than an objective portrait of Brutus, Shakespeare presents the noblest Roman of them all, a man so completely dedicated to honor that he never for a moment considers that he may be wrong. Such is the protagonist who kills the man he honors in death with the title, “my best lover” (III.i.50), and who incites the civil war which destroys the very Republic he seeks to preserve. By removing from his character any hint of malice or self-serving aspiration, Shakespeare creates the paradox of good performing evil, or, more to the point, of the irreconcilable gap between intention and act. Brutus is a moral agent altogether different from the usual. Where the older tradition held that he was responsible for his actions, whether he was regarded as assassin or liberator and patriot, in Shakespeare he is allowed his nobility even when his actions are deplored. In the interview with Portia, Shakespeare builds toward a moment of self-confrontation, when Brutus must acknowledge what his wife will most assuredly tell him. But the scene is cut off, thereby allowing the audience to understand the terrible fact of murder in assassination, even while denying Brutus this last chance to refer his illusions to the moral realities his wife discerns. The point of the play is not that character cannot be known; every schoolboy knows that Brutus is noble. The play presents the bizarre spectacle of crime without guilt.

A rereading of Richard II, with attention to Bolingbroke, who never explicitly declares his hopes for the throne, and to Richard, who relinquishes the kingship even before the crown, will reveal that Julius Caesar is not the first instance of events shaping themselves in spite of conscious human intention. Nor is it the last, for there is yet Troilus and Cressida. And for the precise reason that Shakespeare was not a modern playwright who might well be satisfied with a demonstration of relativity in human affairs, he passed on to Hamlet. Hamlet is a reply to man's apparent dislocation through subjectivism. Its hero is a man keenly aware of how small a part of life is really his, in terms of reason and will, and yet who refuses to concede his humanity to either the imposition of heaven or the tyranny of dubious impressions.

Notes

1. Mildred E. Hartsock, “The Complexity of Julius Caesar,” PMLA, LXXXI (1966), 56-62. My citations are from pp. 61 and 62.

2. Brents Stirling, Unity in Shakespearian Tragedy (New York, 1956), p. 47; Adrien Bonjour, The Structure of Julius Caesar (Liverpool, 1958), p. 20; Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (New York, 1963), pp. 46-57.

3. Of special value are J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1928); Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, 1946); Lily Bess Campbell, Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, 1947); Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance, particularly Chapters 2, 3, and 4 (New York, 1950); F. Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought, 1580-1640 (London, 1962); Kenneth Douglas McRae's Introduction to his fascimile edition of Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York, 1963); and Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964).

4. Mario Praz, “Machiavelli and the Elizabethans,” in The Flaming Heart (New York, 1958), p. 96. The study is an expansion of “‘The Politic Brain’: Machiavelli and the Elizabethans,” The Proceedings of the British Academy (London, 1928), pp. 49-97.

5. Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds (New York, 1944), p. 43.

6. For this useful phrase I am indebted to Max Otto. What he intended by it is something other than my application; however, his original sense has a high degree of relevance to this study: “Science is ethically neutral in its processes but not in its results. It does things to man's world and his outlook. One of the things it does is to deprive the natural order of the kind of meaning which has long been deemed necessary to sustain an ethical or a religious spirit” (The Human Enterprise [New York, 1940], p. 241).

7. Bodin, Method, p. 43.

8. The Essays of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, ed. W. E. Henley, The Tudor Translations (London, 1893), II, 104. Note Montaigne's remarks on Guicciardini: “Moreover, I have noted this, that of so severall and divers armes, successes, and effects he judgeth of; of so many and variable motives, alterations, and counsels, that he relateth, he never referreth any one unto vertue, religion, or conscience: as if they were all extinguished and banished the world: and of all actions, how glorious soever in apparance they be of themselves, he doth ever impute the cause of them, to some vicious and blameworthie occasion, or to some commoditie and profit” (Essays, II, 107).

9. Essays, II, 6. Cf. Hartsock: “It is more convincing to say that Julius Caesar is not a problem play, but a play about a problem: the difficulty—perhaps the impossibility—of knowing the truth of men and of history” (p. 61). Sir Philip Sidney, in the Apology for Poetry, objects of the historian, “Many times he must tell events whereof he can yield no cause; or, if he do, it must be poetical” (ed. Geoffrey Shepherd [London, 1965], p. 110).

10. Essays, II, 8. In a dedicatory letter to Leicester, John Stow speaks of history as “setting before our eyes, to our instruction & profite, the incredible inconstancie, & continuall alterations of this transitorie world” (The Chronicles of England [London, 1580]).

11. Schanzer, pp. 32-33.

12. Essays, II, 9.

13. Samuel Daniel, The Civil Wars, ed. Laurence Michel (New Haven, 1958), I, 98.

14. Civil Wars, I, 99.

15. Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily Bess Campbell (Cambridge, 1938), p. 53.

16. Civil Wars, V, 65-67.

17. “By no means can a prudent ruler keep his word—and he does not—when to keep it works against himself and when the reasons that made him promise are annulled. If all men were good, this maxim would not be good, but because they are bad and do not keep their promises to you, you likewise do not have to keep yours to them” (The Prince, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert [Durham, 1965], I, 65).

18. Bodin, Method, p. 17.

19. Timber: or, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson (London, 1937), VIII, 564.