SOURCE: Kaufmann, R. J., and Clifford J. Ronan. “Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: An Apollonian and Comparative Reading.” Comparative Drama 4, no. 1 (spring 1970): 18-51.

[In the following excerpt, Kaufmann and Ronan discuss Julius Caesar as a sustained study of the limits and tragic potentiality of Stoic constancy.]

My enemies are those who want to destroy without creating their own selves.

Nietzsche

A man's virility lies more in what he keeps to himself than in what he says.

Camus

All crimes, so far as guilt is concerned, are completed even before the accomplishment of the deed.

Seneca

I

Peter S. Anderson's brilliant essay in a recent issue of this journal advanced discussion of Julius Caesar to a new level of methodological sophistication.¹ His working out, through intelligent deployment of structuralist techniques, of a “metonymic epistemology of sacrifice” must be studied in toto and attentively to appreciate its rich critical dividends. The essay charts the mythopeic infrastructure of the play better than this has ever been done. He transposes into discursive language something of the wonderful polyphony of the play, its interplay of mutually qualifying analogues from different planes of abstraction. Numerous critics have felt, but they have not been able to annotate convincingly, the special poetic of Julius Caesar. They have sensed its crucial intermediary role as a bridge between the painterly and rhetorical modes of the plays of the 90's and the deeper reaching verbal and psychological dynamics of the sequence of Shakespeare's greatest plays which follow it. But much of their commentary has been negative, as, e.g., in observing Caesar's relative lack of imagery; or they have swallowed the bait of ideology and ethical analysis and lost the play's tonal shading in the process.

Anderson by applying pre-modern modes of constitutive thinking—specifically those of Levi-Strauss when mapping the non-Kantian modalities of The Savage Mind—has rehabilitated what we would call the “prismatic capacities” of the late-medieval-cum-renaissance mind, at least as these are ideally typified by the instrument we know as Shakespeare's imagination. With Julius Caesar as his text, Anderson articulates the patterns of substitution and displacement (not just words for words, but of words for things or agents, of events for metaphors, and in all possible qualitative permutations) which are refracted through this prismatic logic. This is valuable, and the exegetical dividends are impressive, but his excitement in his discovery is also great; so, our praise is not seasoned when we say that, occasionally “the frame devours the picture.” Hence, he stimulates further discussion, for as he says himself in one of many passages of telling generalization:

Julius Caesar is not a closed field. The Shakespearean play, even if it is, as here, a sort of “maimed ritual,” is not an hermetically sealed torture chamber in which the audience undergoes what is undergone. The play opens from and onto a public life outside itself in which the audience once moved, will again move, and even in experiencing the play, moves. There is not so much suspension of disbelief during the play as there is participation in the larger life through the play. Drama is a form of participation, and surely Brutus, perhaps above all other characters, elicits our response to life outside the play.

(pp. 16-17)

This is well said and pertinent to an adequate response to the specialized tone of Julius Caesar. So is his earlier more arguable statement that “Stoicism is no more than a dialect of sacrificial language.” Anderson's placing of the play as particularly “open” in its inertial movement; his classification of Stoicism as “no more than” a subset of his central organizing paradigm, sacrifice; and his choice of Brutus as the figure through whom we gain access to the play's outward reaching orbits of connotation promote concentration on the play's vital core; they also invite recourse to a method consonant with his own but, more comparative and less subject to virtuoso overdevelopment than his mythopeic approch. The essay which follows is intended as an Apollonian complement to his essentially Dionysian reading of Julius Caesar. Any Apollonian reading must be sensitive to a number of different normative manifolds within which any particular art-product is placed. Without trying to be exhaustive, we will therefore take up along with the ordering principles of the text itself several related but distinctive aspects of the play's contextual position: in the creative continuum of Shakespeare's work; in the emergent tradition of Roman plays; in late Elizabethan cultural revision of ethical imperatives; and in the perennial role of drama as form of iconographic philosophizing.

II

Anderson's essay concludes with an almost undeniable assertion:

We can no longer content ourselves … with asking if the murder of Caesar was per se abominable, or if love, honor, rebellion, ambition are perjorations or eulogia of mankind. For the language we have heard (itself conceptual) and the spectacle we have seen (itself perceptual) have dramatized a mythos.

(p. 25)

What he rejects here is readings of the play as a medley of topoi, of isolable sections, scenes, intermingled biographies, and atomistic appraisals of virtues and of the agents who possess or lack them. This is in our view correct; we've had too many of these. Yet, Julius Caesar has certain properties which make this kind of critical misbehavior more likely than in discussing any other Shakespearean play. Again and again scenes are organized like painters' compositions or sculptors' groupings. When the action moves it is as if it were formally choreographed. The principal characters come on (or are revealed) in studied postures; they strike attitudes; they classify themselves; they await their individual fates. Throughout there is a form of “kinetic visualization” by which we are made to feel the slow pull of emotional experiences of the highest specific gravity: indecision; curdled envy; deliberate self-incitement; the lonely burdens of insomnia; the ventriloqual commands of stylized inner voices; the solemnly rehearsed charade of Caesar's “foolery” in refusing the crown; the self-investiture with an activist persona by the meditative Brutus; Portia's hypnotic pursuit of stoical credentials; laggard rhythms of spiritual fatigue; the muted dirge of sedated grief. This is not an ordinary spectrum of dramatic emotions. The grammar of self-control is not, any more than the discipline (as in Zen practice or stoic) of spiritual composure, a tractably conventional dramatic subject. Yet when the play is well performed emotion swirls up through fissures in the play's surface; Julius Caesar is not hectic, but the play succeeds.

For Stoicism is at the same time a histrionic and a sedative ethic. In its cultivation of a superior and impervious passivity Stoicism is as Anderson claims a “dialect of sacrifice,” for there is in Stoicism a strong and not wholly persuasive infusion of cultural “sour grapes” whereby the excluded earn victory over the privileged by denying the contest itself—a category shift unilateral but not truly independent. What is left out of this reading, however, is what makes Stoicism dramatic. It is not the loathsome, self-eulogizing priggery of the orthodox stoic which can be effectively dramatized; George Chapman made this mistake several times. What is dramatic is the heroic excess in stoic discipline itself and its correlative demands for self-reimbursement through praise from initiates who know the serio-comic agon of self-control. Stoicism is a form of acting.

In the most likely chronology of Shakespeare's plays, we can see Twelfth Night as the comic twin of Julius Caesar, as A Midsummer Night's Dream is of Romeo and Juliet. As the “twin” metaphor suggests both sets of plays share a repertoire of themes, though they develop them differently as the differing tonal range of their respective genres requires. Twelfth Night shares with Julius Caesar a dissatisfaction, almost a disillusionment, with self-confining role-playing; both offer virtuoso opportunities for posturing; and both are educative and corrective in their movement. With elegance and decorum each play scrutinizes morbidities of manner; each arrives at a point where we (though not always the characters themselves) learn: “It won't work.” Both plays are very pragmatic appraisals of excessive stylization of life and mood, of miscasting and over-acting. That one measures tragic consequences and the other the lesser weight of folly should not distract us from what they hold firmly in common. Both plays are diagnostic ventures into the mysteries of the sick-ego, while neither sinks to the univocal level of direct satire. There is a tempering respect in Shakespeare's attitude towards his materials which preserves dignity in the tragic and gaiety in the comic play.

There is further critical purchase to be gained from this collocation. In the manner of comedy generally and preëminently in the instance of Twelfth Night the audience is invited to study shadings of a central quality, or to compare variant forms of a central theme. We adapt easily to the ensemble phenomenon in comedy, but when we encounter an extension of it into tragedy we resist its critical implications. Julius Caesar is an ensemble play with at least six roles which are arguably major and a larger number which are exacting and more than incidentally contributory to Shakespeare's enlargement of his analysis. At the same time, no single character dominates the whole sweep of the action. From its almost too studiously composed first scene onwards, Julius Caesar is obsessively concerned with its complex organizing pun on “mending of soles” (souls; spirits) which is the verbal focus of this first scene. Cobblers or “botchers” catch up in the contrary connotations of their name the ambiguity of the mender's role and of our longing for and suspicion of saviours. The initial evocation of cobbling partly prejudges the play's tone. Less dignified than its medical analogue of healing, which is applied later in the play, it is wholly unsinister and suggests incapacity rather than vicious intent. In its aura of homeliness and the humble, it touches a note of bathos which is also a feature of the play. Brutus is hobbled by a kind of plain-minded density which, while not without its virtuous implications, makes him a “botcher” (a bungler) whose ponderous imagination never really circumscribes the issues. A mistaker of parts for wholes, he is historically myopic. We intend no slur when we say he would be translated graphically if wearing thick glasses. Thus the moral picture he composes is scrupulously draughted, but it has no environment, no perspectival inclusiveness. If a morally renovating tableau is to be properly composed it must “read” persuasively. But Brutus's vision comprises only neatly diagrammed iconographic personifications within the huge Rubens-like, swirling mural of historical change offering spasmodic cues to flexible opportunists who adapt to its multiple perspectives.

The tone of Julius Caesar is critically determined by the subtle but consistent incongruities of agent to aphorism, evaluation to speaker—a kind of pervasive botchery of judgment. Look for example at the play's most quoted lines:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

(IV.iii.218-19)

These lines, so sacred to the anthological mind, are a form of ironic epitaph for Brutus's hopes rather than the advertisement of his practical insight which, out of context, they seem to be. The mild argument of the secondary conspirators (II.i.101-111) over the direction of the sun's rising is exactly parallel to the conspirators' perceptual confusions in The Tempest (II.i.52-59) where they cannot reach unanimity about the color of the grass. In both contexts the contrived scene denies unanimity of motive at the same time that it exposes to doubt the objectivity of moral vision.

If Matthew Arnold's emblem of spiritual health, Sophocles, “Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,” is an acceptable index, then Julius Caesar is a virtual chrestomathy of failures in objectivity: Cinna's murder; Cassius's mistaken reading of Titinius's movements on the battlefield at Philippi, where after acknowledging “My sight was ever thick,” Cassius takes his own life wrongly “imagining” (i.e., trusting the form of “sight” afforded by inner fantasy over optical evidence from the world of extension) that the disasters he has secretly feared have now materialized—his epitaph spoken by Titinius is a dismayed, “Alas, thou hast misconstrued everything” (V.iii.21, 84); Caesar's misevaluation of Decius, of the Soothsayer, and indeed, of Brutus himself; Antony's bland and dismissive underestimation of Cassius; and, so comprehensively it is easy to overlook, Brutus's mis-estimation of his own immunity, through private rectitude, to the damaging effects of the “ritual” execution of Caesar.

In modern terms, Brutus' rationalist ethic denies the wilderness of irrational feeling—symptomized by his insomnia, his vulnerability to hallucinations and, above all, by a gradual leakage of his vitality—surrounding the neatly fabricated moral edifice within which his spirit has domiciled itself. It is easy to multiply evidence from Shakespeare's text of pervasive implantation of homologous expressions for this disease of subjectivity. It is crucial, however, that this not be misread as an unsympathetic, satiric indictment of faults discoverable in Roman figures distanced from us by outmoded error and historical time. The tone of the play is otherwise. It is diagnostic, patient and gently disenchanted.

In our present climate of tolerant enlightment towards the mentally ill, with all our humane efforts to temper uniformed judgments of behaviour distorted by neurosis and improper education it is strange that we should abandon this perspective when confronted by a pioneering instance of its imaginative annotation in Julius Caesar. If we look at the play not through disciplinary or self-righteous eyes but through the diagnostic lens ground by Shakespeare, we can share his exciting effort to comprehend the consequences of a self-imposed disease called Stoicism. From this angle of vision we are obliged to recall that tragedy is never perfectly compatible with morality. To act is to falsify the self, especially if a given morality of self requires preservation of technical innocence. The Stoics respected, even revered, technical innocence—all that could preserve the vigilant self from unwitting collaboration with myriad enemies contagiously surrounding it in hostium terra, which was their name for the actual world at our disposal when we act and choose.

III

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare for the first time moves beyond the pathos of inwardness as in Richard II; the pathos of victimization as in Romeo and Juliet; the pathos of self-enclosing resentment as in Richard III into a more generously conceived and therefore morally ambiguous world, where tragic complexities are incubated. The ethical mathematics of Julius Caesar reaches far beyond the simple computations of Tudor poetic justice to a distributive mode in which every member of the world of the play is transvalued as a result of the play's central action, Brutus's decision to step from the private world, in which his ethic is just and right, into the public realm, where as Goethe said to Eckermann,

Everything we do has a result. But that which is right and prudent does not always lead to good, nor the contrary to what is bad.

To an extraordinary degree it remains difficult to make confident assignments of blame and praise, or of good and bad to any isolable action in Julius Caesar. And this is why the play stands astride the deep gulf between Shakespeare's gifted earlier and his wholly mature work. If the play which immediately precedes it in Shakespeare's canon, Henry V, is clearly dedicated to the ceremonial externalities of patriotism, Julius Caesar is as clearly devoted to the inner tensions produced by and the inner costs of seeking deep concord between action and the promptings of that same ideal. Brutus dies pro patria as certainly as those of Henry's “Happy Few” who did not return from Agincourt, but if this is certain, all the rest is not so certain.

The only act in the play that might be labelled unequivocally evil is Antony's selfish incitement of the mob to a violence whose mindless horror is embodied in bestial dismemberment of a living human body, because the mob finds a hated name, Cinna, attached to it. Yet, Antony proceeds immaculately through the play to stand over Brutus's corpse and speak literature's most dignified epitaph. Cassius's Iagoesque promptings of Brutus, and rancorous hatred of Caesar coexist with a nature feminine in its capacities for tenderness and solicitude. Portia steps from her historical niche as her father Cato's symbolic heiress into a role streaked with ambiguities, wherein she is equally noble and foolish. She patiently endures self-inflicted wounds but lacks the larger patience which can suffer and wait. Her suicide like Cassius's is the product of an over-active imagination and a morbid one. Yet, what she represents to Brutus must be assigned a very high valence to account for his actions on hearing of her death. To a remarkable extent, Julius Caesar is “about” the problems of spiritual economy—of dealing with one's self—although the manifest content of the play is political. The various intersections of psychic and political control are dramatized and mutually evaluated. This apparent divergence is the very strength of the play, since, as tragedy, it seeks to knit together moral realms distorted by axiological separation in formal political and ethical writings respectively. The worlds of the great 16th century moralists and of the emergent analysts of Realpolitik, lacked a set of common denominators which Shakespearean tragic drama provides. The play gives a needed frame to neo-stoic depictions of self-preserving moral postures; it also restores a moral inner dimension to Machiavellian tactical description.

A great deal has been written about the role played by stoical doctrines in Elizabethan drama.² Nowhere, however, has a larger structural evaluation of this been made. Elizabethan drama in toto comprises a major ethical, even a religious inquest. It is not pretentious to claim for it status as an epistemological and ontological enquiry. Working in terms of the plastic philosophizing of the dramatic form in which many competing points of view—and many discrete elements—can be activated and set in qualifying relationship to each other in a manner more flexible than is possible in discursive prose because this is tied to its inherited theorems, playwrights dissatisfied with received conjunctions of name and object, gesture and value, emblem and caption can seek new more satisfying alignments of action and meaning. Stoic doctrine was drawn close to Christian passive virtue in Renaissance moralizing, until through the amassed power and reiteration of what could be called Tudor Paideia they constituted a prescriptive orthodoxy of moral feeling. The Elizabethan drama—in its ideological workings—can be seen as a Reformation testing and critique of this program, mainly from a moderate but acute Erasmian position.

Hence, in Julius Caesar, when Shakespeare undertakes a nearly systematic analysis of Stoic constancy and its surrounding constellation of supportive virtues, he is partly clearing ground for the more open-hearted and bold-spirited inquest into the sustaining values of mankind we find in the mature tragedies of the ensuing years. He has to expose the insufficiency of Brutus' claims to possess already what Shakespeare knew was still to be sought: the formula for self-knowledge.³Nosce Te Ipsum is the unfailing lodestar of Renaissance moral programs. Brutus' life provided the best articulated exemplum of self-knowledge of any classic political leader; his case needed to be examined. But, the aim of the play is not grossly satiric. Brutus is not exposed as a crass or vicious man. In fact the entire strategy of the play contradicts such conclusions. But he is self-deceived; his ethical reach is far exceeded by the consequences he nobly but misguidedly sets in motion. He is not subverted as a man, but as the linchpin of an ethical system with extravagant and unjustified claims, he is discredited. Reality, as Shakespeare clearly knew, is more complex than the Stoics with their unrealistic and world weary undervaluations of power and privilege could register.

Julius Caesar like Hamlet is frequently in the interrogative mood. A troubled catechism, it puts questions to the mysteries of will, of auctoritas and of charisma. When near the end of his self-lacerating tirade against Caesar's pretensions, Cassius asks the apparently rhetorical question,

Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that ‘Caesar’?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?

(I.ii.142-43)

he is asking a question about “being” and one about “meaning” without finding any way to relate these two different orders of things. As a victim of envy, Cassius can not bring his mind to a state of repose in the area of public assent or judgment. As Caesar says of him, he is “a great observer” who “looks quite through the deeds of men.” There are complications in this, for when tragic drama matures it too can “look quite through the deeds of men.” Conventional collocations of gesture and meaning are subjected to scrutiny, until it is no longer possible to say whether political greatness lies in the apparent object or in its “unfolded” inner workings; or whether greatness is a psycho-cultural penumbra both recognized in and bestowed upon the object by observers more naive and selfless than Cassius? Rephrased, Cassius's basic question about Caesar might run, “What is the anatomy of charisma?” It is too much to say that Julius Caesar answers this question, but it confronts it.

Thus Julius Caesar more than any other of Shakespeare's tragedies is an enquiry into the elemental constituents of greatness, and an impressively exact dramatic analysis of the emotional pathology of those who are nearly great. Caesar's greatness is an historical donnée of the play. In fact, it may well be the major defect of the play that this received greatness is merely imputed as seemingly beyond need of demonstration. To an unusual extent the central platform of the action is History, as characters with varying personal credentials elect themselves or are drafted to assume Historical Roles. Strong and explicit support for these observations is supplied by Shakespeare's text.

Many readers, coming to Julius Caesar after studying highly imagistic later plays, improperly conclude that this tragedy has few if any important iterated figures. Though we believe that significant patterns of imagery (particularly in the references to and spectacles of blood plus fire, stone plus metal) appear in the play, we see the incandescent central figure as that of “moving” or motivating one's self and others. This figure is not materialistic in reference, nor can it be referred to separable inner qualities as in many of Shakespeare's plays; it refers to political process in its most intimate ethical phase. The range of this process is considerable and runs from persuasion through flattery to imaginative bullying or domination. In terms of Shakespeare's own ordering of his Roman material, the play tests constancy. At this crucial level of organization it is a detailed and sophisticated study of the properties of human will and of the will's power to deflect or, conversely, to sanctify declared purposes. Thus Cassius incessantly tries to “move” Brutus; Antony is the master tactician of forensic “moving” through eloquent demagogery; Caesar, like Tamburlaine, prides himself on his perfect constancy, which is to say, his immunity to the manipulative pressures exerted by wills other than his own; Brutus's troubled colloquies with himself are quests for an Archimedean point of leverage from which he can “move” himself. A closer appraisal of the play within the context of the Elizabethan rehabilitation of romanitas will enlarge and document these contentions.

IV

Julius Caesar is concerned with the fate of a country, hence its method of revealing motives is specialized. Tonally, it subordinates its ironies to the heroic, thus creating a mode of paradoxically heroic tragedy. Its ground tone is neither satiric nor one of heroic laudation, but one in which heroism is accepted as an authentic category but subject, by the very nature of its mandates, to complex ironic reservations. Shakespeare does not inflict upon the experiences of the play the satiric reduction that marks a play like Troilus and Cressida; rather he recognizes and exposes the ironic limitations of a prescriptive heroic program. Critics who have been aware of these structural ironies have over-reacted to them and have concluded that Julius Caesar is to be read as having an anti-heroic comic stress like Henry IV or as a satiric and absurdist analogy to Troilus and Cressida.⁴ This is to employ an impatient reductionism and to strip the play of its poised management of a pattern of sympathies which is tragic in a special way we are concerned to annotate. For, Julius Caesar fulfills the heuristic function of tragedy and should be judged by its responsible, controlled exploration of the tragic network of relationships of men with self, others, and with the received, ideological environment. By comparison with later tragedies, the coolly classical Julius Caesar is less analytical in its method of exploring the relational gaps between intention and performance. Hence, it contains little that corresponds to the articulate, final epiphanies of Othello or Macbeth, or of the less direct self-recognition of Coriolanus.⁵ Its figures are contextually evaluated, weighed pragmatically in terms of their terminal gestures, or summarized rhetorically after the fact as figures who have been converted to the symbolhood enjoined by their historical actuality and by the cultural distillation they have undergone.

The impact of all plays is partly residual or delayed and partly synchronic with performance. The unbroken record of stage-popularity of Julius Caesar, and its own special beauty and delicacy, significantly derives from its unthreatening tone, its buffered idiom, and its consequent exceptional dependence on residual impact on the “beating mind.” The audience's response is more delayed than immediate to this tragic contemplation of Romans pursuing their inner needs and social ideals in a community whose ethic promoted such yearnings even as its structure frustrated them.

The force of the play lies of course not only in the dramatist's handling of these “yearnings” but also in his very choice of them. They are lofty ideals and ones centrally desired by thoughtful spectators in 1599: post-medieval, virtually post-Christian yearnings for the models which pagan Stoic Rome could provide of personal integration, humanistic civilization and social stability.

The original spectators watching Julius Caesar in 1599 would be familiar with Stoical ideas not only by reason of non-dramatic influences (particularly Erasmus and Lipsius)⁶ but also because of a dramatic tradition with a decade or more's standing. At its inception, this Stoic dramatic tradition consisted of at least two interdependent features: 1) a new interest in basically heroic stoical acts, particularly suicide, and 2) a tendency to call the agents of these acts “constant,” “resolute,” and Roman or Roman-like.

Prior to Julius Caesar suicide had been treated as basically unstoical and unheroic in almost all the extant plays except the pseudo-Senecan Hercules Oetaeus, the Kyd-Garnier Cornelia, and two stage-plays written around 1588, Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Lodge's Wounds of Civil War. Otherwise, in most of Seneca's own plays⁷ and those of Garnier and his sixteenth century English translators and imitators⁸ as well as in most other English non-Roman plays of the time, attitudes towards suicide tended to be sentimental, negative, confused or awkwardly suggestive of a residual Christian and irreconcilably medieval revulsion at this “desperate” rejection of the hope (espoir) of God's grace. From the suicide situations in Marlowe's Dido,⁹The Misfortunes of Arthur,¹⁰Romeo and Juliet,¹¹ Wilmot's 1591 version of Tancred and Gismund,¹² and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy,¹³ there emerges hardly more of Stoical heroism than from medieval dramatic suicides¹⁴ and the titular characters' suicides in the early Elizabethan Apius,¹⁵Jocasta,¹⁶ and Gismond.¹⁷

When used in senses wider than that of sexual fidelity, “constancy” and other allied words are unfailingly popular features of the stage-descriptions of stoical behavior, particularly stoical Roman or romanized¹⁸ behavior in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The causes for this sudden orthodoxy of stage practice are difficult to discriminate fully and certainly. The late sixteenth century English interest in Stoic-influenced writers like Plutarch¹⁹ and Montaigne, in Seneca, and in Seneca's Renaissance follower Lipsius, whose Two Bookes of Constancie was published in England in 1594,²⁰ spurred a tendency of the dramatists to make a four-way identification between stoic, constant, heroic, and Roman behavior. Glimpses of this tendency, which can be seen in Tamburlaine (where it could conceivably have started) are absolutely unmistakable in a work printed in 1594 but probably written at about the same time as Tamburlaine: namely, Thomas Lodge's Wounds of Civil War. Plays written or translated between the late 1580's (the date most commonly assigned Wounds and Tamburlaine) and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar occasionally show faint signs of the tendency to make this same identification: the Kyd-Garnier Cornelia (c. 1594),²¹ Daniel's Cleopatra (c. 1594);²² the anonymous Caesar's Revenge (c. 1595);²³ and Latin comedy Laelia (c. 1595),²⁴ which unlike the other three has an Italian rather than a Roman setting. But it is not until after the time of Julius Caesar that there are unmistakable signs that this four-way identification has been confidently assimilated into the Elizabethan dramatic tradition.²⁵ For even Shakespeare shows few signs of knowing of this identification when he writes his first Roman play, Titus Andronicus,²⁶ which, though probably written in the late 1580's, was first printed in the crucial year for the interest in Roman Stoicism, 1594.

The earliest Roman history play extant, Thomas Lodge's The Wounds of Civil War (pub. 1594; ed. Joseph W. Houpert, 1969), devotes as much attention to the Wonders of Roman Constancy as to the Wounds of Civil War. With the inconsequential exception of one minor character (Carinna), every one of the long list of upper-class characters in danger of dying illustrates the maxim “even in death most courage doth appear” (IV.i.23).

The heroic suicide of Lodge's Young Marius is crucial to the plot as well as to the twin themes of Constancy and Civil War. Disregarding the historical testimony of the chief source of the play (Appian) as to Young Marius' “Crueltie”²⁷ and terrified suicide (he “hidde himselfe in a Cave” or underground ditch²⁸), Lodge makes the youth a patriotic idealist and gives him a composed, almost operatic, suicide on the battlements before throngs of friends and enemies. Furthermore the reporting of this stunning event to Sulla is made the turning point in the play. For upon hearing of Young Marius' fate, Sulla quickly moves from momentary laughter to deep contemplation and on to the uncharacteristic—and totally unhistorical—religious mood with which his life and the play ends.

Lodge, excessively careful to be clear, makes almost everyone involved in Young Marius' death reiterate the words “constant” or “resolute.” The youth himself boasts, “My resolution shall exceed” Fortune's power (V.ii.20), and his followers announce that they are “resolv'd” (V.iii.41) to join him in death. When killing himself, Young Marius says to the opposing Sullan general:

Farewell, Lucretius, first I press in place,
                                                                                                    Stab[s himself].
To let thee see a constant Roman die.

(V.iii.81-82)

Lucretius bursts out with the words, “A wondrous and bewitched constancy” (1.94), and hurries to report to Sulla that Young Marius “with more constancy than Cato died” (V.v.57). Immediately Sulla exclaims, “What, constancy, and but a boy? … But let us have this constancy describ'd” (11.57, 59). Lucretius then recounts how Young Marius and his friends armed themselves with “worthy resolution” (1.74) and “constancy and courage” (1.66). This story then prompts Sulla to plan his escape from “Inconstant chance” (1.102).

Of the dramatist's many preparations for this constancy episode, the most remarkable is the totally fictitious encounter of Marius with “Cornelia” and “Fulvia” (for so Lodge, on no authority, names Sulla's wife and daughter). These two ladies, while planning to escape imprisonment through defiant suicide (“our constant ends,”—IV.i.375), mouth such thematically important phrases as, “We wait our ends with Roman constancy” (1.335) and “constant Roman hearts” (1.357). Marius responds in kind, congratulating them for being “resolute to die” (1.382) and, twice, for possessing suicidal “constancy” (11.330, 353). The treatment of Roman Constancy in Lodge's piece is inescapable, and serves as the most obvious dramatic model for the inspired variations that Shakespeare was to play on that theme in 1598 or 1599.

V

It is impossible to tell whether the 1623 Folio Julius Caesar, the sole authoritative text, is a revision by Shakespeare or is substantially the play he wrote in 1598 or 1599. In any case, the work is a painstaking and powerful narrative investigation of the psychological and moral implications of living under the twin Roman ideals so frequently discussed in the Renaissance: stony constancy²⁹ and fiery spirit.

Behind the Renaissance notion of stoical Roman coldness, which is realized in Julius Caesar most clearly by verbal and presentational images of statuary, lie Erasmian influences and the growing Renaissance familiarity with specimens of actual Roman sculpture. Anson informatively points to Erasmus' caricature of the Stoic model as a “stony semblance of a man,” “no more moved” by his emotions “than if he were a flint or rock” (The Praise of Folly, tr. John Wilson, 1688). Critics who speak like Dowden of Julius Caesar as a “gallery of antique sculpture”³⁰ make a richly instructive error of interpretation. For the chief Romans of the play think they might resemble statues, stones, metal, and other hard, cold objects. Most of the aristocrats strive less to be gods than to be solid, “constant” inanimate things; for they regard such a condition as central to the functioning of a stoical, soldierly, administrative Roman. Yet the commoners, wiser, more irresponsible, and less histrionic than their noble counterparts, resist their own adoption of this ideal mercilessly, while tolerating and applauding it in their supposed betters. Melting in shame at the charge of being “blocks” and “stones,” the “basest metal” of the plebeians is changed to “tears” that flow into the Tiber (I.i.40-66). In the Forum the commoners again respond on cue: when Antony claims that a good eulogist would make “The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny,” the citizens shout, “We'll mutiny,” and call for “fire” with which to “burn all” (III.ii.234; III.iii.41).

The noble Romans are excessively concerned with statues, mistaking themselves and one another for the materials or products of the sculptor. Brutus, who in an analogous figure will identify himself as the “flint” in a tinder-box (IV.iii.111-113), is introduced as a “firm” man of honorable metal-mettle who may nevertheless be “wrought” into ignoble shapes (I.ii.313-316). Cassius is confident that Brutus will keep his eye out for messages affixed to “old Brutus' statue” (I.iii.146), and the mob senses that this chief conspirator would not be unpleased to have “a statue with his ancestors” (III.ii.55). Caesar, who wanted his “images” decked with holiday attire (I.ii.290; I.i.73), is almost as angry at seeing them stripped as at losing his precious crown. He identifies himself implicitly with those cold statues no less than, later, with the “northern star” (III.i.60). Shakespeare's Cassius, unlike his counterpart in any of the ancient histories, is haunted by Caesar in the shape of a “Colossus” (I.ii.136). More significant still, Shakespeare's Calphurnia envisions her husband as a bleeding “statua” (II.ii.76), although Plutarch expressly reports that she dreamed only of a portentous break in an “ornament” distinguishing her husband's house (Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, V, 83). Fittingly, then, in his death scene Caesar reclines in a bloody but statuesque pose, in “ruins” (III.i.256) beneath the bleeding image of his defeated rival:

                                                  in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey's statua,
Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell.

(III.ii.191-193)

The play's imagery of cold stoniness is frequently punctuated by the very important imagery of stony fieriness. But genuine coalescence of these two imagistic strains is so rare that when it is realized, as in the Quarrel Episode, it is gratefully welcomed by the audience. Then, through Brutus' self-description, the playwright reveals his basal structuring of all the noble Roman psyches and their predicaments.

O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb
That carries anger as the flint bears fire;
Who, much enforced, shows a hasty spark,
And straight is cold again.

(IV.iii.110-113)

Several inferences should be drawn from these lines. The Romans' desire, most prominent in Brutus, for lamb-like gentleness (the opposite of bloody wolfishness, a trait elsewhere in the play and in Renaissance literature associated with the Romans³¹), is tragically irreconcilable with their more dominant goal of metamorphosis into “cold,” spark-giving “flint.” A noble Roman desires to possess the hardness and coldness of flint along with its capacity, when “enforced” by hard metal, to give off fire. Lastly, Brutus' or another Roman's “hasty spark” is of no importance unless he “shows” it.³² For the play frequently indicates Roman concern with public self-verification through histrionic “show.” Without listing the many obvious examples of this in the actions of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony, we would call special attention to Brutus' first scene, where this trait is established through verbal iteration. The conversation with Cassius begins with Brutus' apology for forgetting the “shows of love to other men” (I.ii.46). Midway in the conversation Cassius, defining his and Brutus' relationship as that between portions of an apparently functional tinder-box, congratulates himself on having “struck but thus much show of fire from Brutus” (l. 177). Brutus fails in self-criticism. Apparently ignoring the possible inadequacy of his own “flint” and the implication that his “fire” is merely ornamental, he tacitly accepts Cassius's definitions and criticizes the so-called games of Caesar and Antony. Brutus and other noble Romans in the tragedy are characteristically more able to detect “shows” in one another than in themselves.

The justly popular Quarrel Episode (IV. ii and iii) is an emblem-in-action of Roman strivings after the appearance and reality of fiery constancy. We have the testimony of Leonard Digges, who, when praising his contemporary's total literary achievement, twice singles out this episode (E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, II, 231-233).

[When] on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were,
Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience,
Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence,
When some new day they would not brooke a line,
Of tedious (though well laboured) Catilines;
Sejanus too was irkesome.

(Shakespeare's Poems, 1640)

                    till I heare a Scene more nobly take,
Then when thy half-Sword parlying Romans spake,
Till these, till any of thy Volumes rest
Shall with more fire, more feeling be exprest,
Be sure, our Shake-speare, thou canst neuer dye.

(First Folio)

“Fire” and ‘nobility’ are what the spectators encountered; ‘ravishing’ “wonder” is what they carried away with them.

What Digges and the audience responded to in IV.ii and iii, was the dynamism and dignity of the clash between the two fatigued Romans. This dynamism (while preventing the scene from becoming “tedious” and “irkesome”) more positively resulted from the saturated aggression of the two major characters tottering on the brink of a moral outburst of emotion, while forestalling it. Shakespeare learned the lesson so ignored by Tudor drama that superficial sword-clattering stage violences convey intense passion less well than agonies of restraint. The dignity which made this complex scene nobly take derives not so much from the formalized nobility of the sentiments as from the fact that both men are visibly cultivating constancy, and thus showing how they can harness their awakened and threatening passions. Digges and the audience could have recognized in the scene their age's picture of aristocratic Roman behavior—contentiously proud, and yet perilously constant or restrained; martial, vengeful, even philistine, and yet devoted to pacific, civilized ideals of brotherhood and honesty. The inner excitement of the play derives from Shakespeare's power of placing us exactly at those points where rancor, envy, cupidity, and power-lust are incubating, like the serpent in the egg. The play provides, for the first time in Shakespeare's development, large-scale and immediate poetic access to emergent, as distinguished from tabulated, passion.

Constancy, the shell where passion incubates in Julius Caesar, is lapidary, and far more brittle than that of a serpent's egg. The motif of constancy in this drama is conveyed not only by imagery of hard, cold substances but also, as in Lodge's Wounds of Civil War, by iteration of the words “constant,” “resolute,” and their cognates. Such verbal references occur in Julius Caesar in greater numbers than they do in any other Shakespeare play except 3 Henry VI. Also as in Lodge's drama, the constancy theme is firmly centered around minor characters before being made to radiate to other more important figures in the play.

An important, but seldom noticed function of Portia in Julius Caesar is to provide, in propria persona or indirectly, occasions to probe the workings of Roman constancy. Suicide is potentially the most dignified act in the Roman stoic repertory. Her “Impatient” (IV.iii.152) suicide operates like a foil, calling to mind that of her heroic father, Cato, and preparing artistically for the tragic deaths of Brutus, Cassius, and Titinius. Further by having the news of Portia's death announced in the Quarrel Episode, Shakespeare reveals an intention to dramatize Brutus' aspiration towards patient, carefully wrought stoic constancy: Brutus characterizes himself as the equal of any man in “bear[ing] sorrow” (IV.iii.147); Messala exclaims, “Even so great men great losses should endure (l. 191); and Cassius reflects that Brutus' responses witness the triumph of “art” over “nature” (ll. 193-194). When Portia herself appears, she awaits the news of the assassination quite nervously (II.iv), despite those pretensions to manlike constancy that were emphasized a short while before (II.i.). This woman was once able to induce sufficient constancy to undergo a quasi-suicide and give herself a “voluntary wound” (II.i.300). Now she is barely able to withhold the conspiracy from the Soothsayer, her servant, and all Rome. Shakespeare devises numerous strategies to expose the ad hoc, or self-exhausting, nature of Stoic composure. Portia's tragic pretensions almost become a laboratory exhibit under Shakespeare's sympathetic but undeceived scrutiny.

Almost all of the incidents and speeches in the Portia story are taken directly from Plutarch. Yet Shakespeare concentrates, intensifies, and enriches the implications of the Plutarchan version. The audience is given a sense, for example, that Portia's suicide follows the model of her father, Cato, and sets an example for her husband. She, like her desperately courageous warrior brother, is a link between the two archetypal Republican suicides who so interested the Renaissance; she is, as it were, the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son-in-Law. The mere arrangement of the plot leads the audience to feel that her death, like that of her father, serves as an important precedent to Brutus in his moment of crisis. The deeply divided Brutus eventually follows these examples even though he may speak disparagingly of her state as “Impatient” and “distract” (IV.iii.152, 155), of Cato's death as “cowardly and vile,” and lacking in “patience,” logic and piety (V.i.101-108). If Brutus were a simpler hero with a lesser, more mean intelligence, he would not be ready to see a “vile” suicide as benefitting his own “great … mind” (V.i.104, 113). So too, he would not praise his wife as “noble” for pleading the precedent of her suicidal father when she slashes her own skin:

PORTIA:
I grant I am a woman; but withal
A woman well-reputed, Cato's daughter.
Think you I am no stronger than my sex,
Being so father'd and so husbanded?

.....

I have made strong proof of my constancy,
Giving myself a voluntary wound
Here, in the thigh: can I bear that with patience,
And not my husband's secrets?
BRUTUS:
                                                                                                    O ye gods,
Render me worthy of this noble wife!

(II.i.294-303)

“Being so father'd and so husbanded” (l. 297), Portia seeks to act with Roman constancy and Roman manliness. Conversely, Brutus is eventually willing to act as inconsistently as a woman supposedly would—as inconsistently, in fact, as his own Roman wife does:

I do find it cowardly and vile.
.....                    [Yet] think not, thou noble Roman,
That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome;
He bears too great a mind.

(V.i.104, 111-113)

In Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans inconsistency is an evil to which women are allegedly more susceptible than men.³³ But with the complex paradoxical figure of Brutus, Shakespeare suggests that a true man is brave enough to be womanish. In a truly manly man—Brutus and the heroes of all Shakespeare's later tragedies—the vices and virtues are practically indistinguishable and, by being so intermingled, a new moral taxonomy is implicitly proposed to replace the unduly rigid one he starts from.

His faults in him seem as the spots of heaven,
More fiery by night's blackness

(Antony and Cleopatra, I.iv.12-13)

Traits that are supposedly heavenly look black and traits that are or look black give off a white stellar light. Brutus' suicide shows him to be a viable model of conventional Roman manliness and at the same time a weak and inconsistent—which is to say a deeply human—person. If Brutus had been less flawed, he would have not been able to embody the extremes of weakness and strength. If he had been less “a woman,” he would have seemed less ordinary, weak and lovable. He would also have lost his claim as a true hero. As it is, his feet may be of clay, but his stature towers inspiringly (and totters fearfully) above all the other characters. It is this insight for comprising weakness within his presentation of his protagonist's essential character that leads Shakespeare directly on to the technical breakthrough represented by his characterization of Hamlet considered as a psychological contrivance which prompts belief and compels identification.

In his suicide Brutus reached the upward limits of heroism and manhood. But the play makes amply clear that these limits are tragically restrictive, being reinforced by a man's fate, his human weaknesses and the values that govern the society in which a man seeks to define himself. In Brutus' final phrases, as Traversi rightly notes, there is “the sense of a flatness, of empty exhaustion”:³⁴ striving admirably still to raise his life from the level of nature to that of art, the exhausted Brutus dictates the last paragraph of his history:

                                                            Brutus' tongue
Hath almost ended his life's history.

(V.v.39-40)

Although he retains some fiery resolve, we keep perceiving in his tired, unimaginatively direct diction the ashes of a burnt out spirit: “we two went to school together”; “leap in” the “pit,” do not “tarry till they push us”; “Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes”; “Thou art a fellow of good respect,” Strato, with “some smatch of honour”; “Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face, / While I do run upon it”; “my bones would rest” (V.iv.22-41). Brutus' final concern about obtaining the outward signs of honor from his school friends and from the rest of the debased “world” is deeply pathetic. In fact, it is hardly less pathetic than his realization that the assassination of Caesar has been at least partly an act of self-hate; an attack on what Brutus intuits is his own “evil spirit” (IV.iii.282).

                                                                      my bones would rest,
That have but labour'd to attain this hour.
.....                                                                      Caesar now be still:
I kill'd not thee with half so good a will. …

(V.v.41-42, 50-51)

In her own scenes, Portia prefigures and mirrors Brutus and the other ironic images of Roman constancy with their heroic-tragic need to win acceptance and to prove their manliness and Roman-ness. By the “voluntary wound” (II.i), she intends to prove her patient constancy, her more-than-womanly strength, and her kinship with the spirit of Lord Brutus, Cato, and presumably soldiers and other men who risk wounds: Deprived of Brutus' presence in “her bed,” from which he has “urgently … Stole” (ll. 237-238), she denies that she is “Brutus' harlot” (l. 287) by, ironically, presenting herself as an ersatz male who searches for Brutus' mental, rather than physical, “secrets” or hidden parts.

PORTIA:
Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose 'em:

.....

                              can I bear that [wound] with patience,
And not my husband's secrets?
BRUTUS:
… by and by thy bosom shall partake
The secrets of my heart.
All my engagements I will construe to thee.

(II.i.298-307)

Two scenes later (after an interval of scarcely two hundred lines) Portia appears in an episode that in no way contributes to the narrative progression. Instead, it serves to undermine her prior pretensions to constancy:

O constancy, be strong upon my side,
Set a huge mountain 'tween my heart and tongue!
I have a man's mind, but a woman's might.
How hard it is for woman to keep counsel!
                    … Ay me, how weak a thing
The heart of woman is!

(II.iv.6-9, 39-40)

And in turn the episode helps cast suspicion on the like pretentions of other characters. Flustered, she cannot give her servant a single coherent command though she tries no fewer than seven times within forty-five lines. She asks the Soothsayer if he knows of any conspiracy, and she decides that her servant has overheard her fearful mumblings. What prevents the boy and the Soothsayer from guessing her (and her husband's) plot? These men's ignorance, mere chance, the tragic pattern, the sardonic spirit of History, or even the merciful Roman goddess Constantia? But surely not Portia's own intelligence, self-control, and constancy.

Aside from its obvious function of heightening the tension before the assassination, this scene exists in order to cast doubt upon Portia's constancy and the wisdom of Brutus who was consumed with confidence in it. To a large extent the audience shared Brutus' admiration for Portia's constancy in II.i, and thus must herewith revise this response.

Portia's two attempts at becoming an emblem of constancy are closely linked to the play as a whole, but particularly to the stage-moments immediately before and after her appearances. Even on the mere word “constancy” and its Elizabethan synonym, “resolution,” Shakespeare rings the changes several times within a few moments of Portia's appearances (II.i.113, 202, 227; III.i.22, 60, 72, 73, 131). In only one of these instances does constancy have an heroic, unironical sound to it:

CASSIUS:
Brutus, what shall be done? If this be known,
Cassius or Caesar never shall turn back,
For I will slay myself.
BRUTUS:
                                                                                                    Cassius be constant:
Popilius Lena speaks not of our purposes.

(III.i.20-23)

Here, of course, Brutus in contrast to Cassius (and Portia) embodies heroic constancy—the ability to see the facts clearly and unemotionally, the ability to bide one's time patiently without despair, hysteria, or diminution of purpose.

Elsewhere throughout these stage moments Roman constancy is subjected to an interrogating irony, perhaps nowhere stronger than it is in the final hubristic speeches of Caesar. The good and great man whom (in II.ii) Calphurnia and Decius Brutus “o'ersway” from what he is “resolved” (II.i.202), strains to make the Romans believe he is greater and more “constant” than a man can be:

I could be well moved, if I were you;
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me:
But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
.....                    [among men] I do know but one
That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion: and that I am he,
Let me a little show it, even in this;
That I was constant Cimber should be banish'd,
And constant do remain to keep him so.
.....          Hence! will thou lift up Olympus?

(III.i.58-62, 68-74; italics ours)

The irony is strong and manifold. First this Jove-like Caesar is merely an actor, one of the “players,” just as Casca had claimed (I.ii.262). Besides, the audience has just witnessed his vacillations at his home (II.ii) and is rightly expected to see the knives of the conspirators cruelly disprove his present claim to Olympian immobility and stellar constancy. Furthermore, Caesar's own language points towards the ironically external nature of constancy itself. “That I am he, / Let me a little show it”—with these words Caesar joins the ranks not only of Brutus but also of Hamlet, Angelo, Troilus, Achilles and the other philosophically puzzled or puzzling figures of the plays of Shakespeare's middle years. Though he is truly brave, constant, and royal, he and his whole society demand that he continually renew and compulsively prove his virtues and talents and not let them lie hidden and unapplauded, rusting, unused. Thus, Caesar‘s request that his fellow Romans let him “a little show” himself “constant” marks simultaneously several features in him and his society: on the one hand, a genuine heroic stature and a pathetic-ironic (and, yet, almost tragic) need even in old-age to keep proving oneself; and, on the other hand, the tragic situational tensions of man the social animal, who is the product, creator, and victim of his social ideals. The Stoic ethic was deeply histrionic and required renewed exposures to the gods' validating appraisal.

To be sure, the play (and history) make clear that there is a distant point at which even these ironies and these tragic elements dissolve, making good Caesar's and Portia's claim to “constancy,” though of a sort other than they intended: Caesar and, to a much smaller extent, Portia exert a constant power over the action in the last half of the play, and their self-assured greatness has had its effect over the imagination of the poet, his audience and Western civilization. By the end of the play “the spirit of Caesar,” which Brutus intended to oppose (II.ii.167, 169), has come to mean many things, not the least of which is the steadfast constancy with which Caesar and Octavius and, perhaps, Antony, seek supreme power. Yet despite these ultimate justifications for the Roman claim to constancy during most of the play, the audience regards the characters' claims to permanence and immobility as being tragically and ironically unfulfilled. The close analysis to which Shakespeare subjects these claims in the process of the play does not diminish dignity, it goes to show the costs and stresses of greatness.

Just as Portia's references to constancy prepare the audience for Caesar's, so too Portia's references are prepared for by the remarks of the conspirators (II.i). Throughout most of this scene, the conspirators busy themselves with externals and the processes of externalizing. In the Portia sequence of that scene, Brutus' wife is concerned with externalizing her wifely love, her manly spirit, and soldierly Roman constancy and dependability. Portia, wrongly but sincerely, thought “her voluntary wound … in the thigh” was obstetric, letting her “bear” her “constancy.” Her honorable husband is less superficially naive and more superficially insincere than she is about external appearances; but beneath the surface he is a tragically innocent opportunist, the true soul-mate of Portia, and of his “best lover” (III.i.50), Caesar.

Brutus dismisses the conspirators with the practical advice that they not disguise themselves with the forthright, conspicuously muffled faces of “faction” and “conspiracy” to which he had earlier objected (II.i.77); instead they should look dishonestly “fresh and merrily” (II.i.224).

Let not our looks put on our purposes,
But bear it as our Roman actors do,
With untired spirits and formal constancy.

(II.i.225-227)

He intends the condition of being a patient self-controlled Roman actor to be a praiseworthy condition. But the Elizabethan audience could hardly fail to see irony in the idea that the great idealist and leader of the noble-minded, aristocratic, old-fashioned Romans should be telling his group that they are to model themselves upon common players. Whatever else it may also do, the reference to actors subtly undercuts the nobility of the conspiracy and of the parade of constancy that is to follow.

In a series of arbitrary decisions which are simultaneously heroic and absurd, the conspirators keep choosing one set of external appearances over another and keep affirming their choices with formal constancy.

When the conspirators speak of including Cicero in their faction, Metellus argues that Cicero's “silver hairs / will purchase us a good opinion / And buy men's voices to commend our deeds” (II.i.144-146). To be sure, Brutus disapproves of the idea and says that it would not be in the interests of the internal organization of the conspiracy. But Shakespeare in no way permits Brutus to counteract the impressions that Metellus' images create for the audience—the faint but consistent impression that the conspirators are vote-buyers, bourgeois tradesmen, and impious traitors (like Caiphas and Judas). Again the conspirators are shown as Roman actors, men who are eager to disguise their actions and to pretend most constantly that they are dignified.

Many characters in Julius Caesar have a largely unjustified faith that they can capture reality if they steel (or petrify) themselves and play their parts in the rituals and ceremonies of life correctly, which is to say, constantly. Though this seems to be equally true of many non-Roman Shakespearean characters (e.g., Richard II, Henry IV, Claudius, Macbeth), the fact is that the Romans of Julius Caesar are more capable of self-deception and thus can play their parts with more constancy. Macbeth, contrarily, retains our conditional sympathy through his catalogue of definitively terrible acts just because his powers of self-deception are so minimal. The constant Brutus—in a way reminiscent of Shakespeare's exemplar of self-deception, the more malleable Richard II—strains until he deceives himself into believing that his very figures of rhetoric are realities that can be manipulated. He takes literally his own analogy between Antony and “a limb of Caesar,” concluding that Mark Antony “can do no more than Caesar's arm / When Caesar's head is off” (II.i.165, 182-183). Furthermore, he assumes that by an act of will the conspirators can redefine themselves and become “sacrificers, but not butchers” who “hack” limbs (ll. 166, 163). Though he twice shows concern over how the assassination will “seem” and appear to “the common eyes” (l. 179), he is more concerned about how the deed will appear to the conspirators' own eyes:

And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide 'em. This shall make
Our purpose necessary and not envious.

(II.i.175-178)

The image he projects in this parable is of a selfish, urbanely sadistic employer who, knowing that his men are full of aggressions, surreptitiously manipulates them until they release their emotions and are punished; thereupon the employees can function more productively because of their release from the original strain and because they now feel guilty and under an obligation to the master. The “master” symbolizes the “heart” of each conspirator; the “servants” are not just the implements of murder—hands, daggers, and so on—but the murderous emotions. The obvious irony is that for a noble, constant Roman, emotion is not permitted to come spontaneously from the heart. But the residual horror of the passage is that Brutus should think that constancy can make truth. For he says that if in their hearts the conspirators are properly steeled to ignore the deceptions that they perpetrate upon their emotions, these spurious emotions will become the truth not only for the “common eyes” but for the conspirators as well: “This shall make / Our purpose necessary and not envious.” He forgets one of life's ground truths: we have being for ourselves, but we gain our meaning from others.

A parallel instance of the perverse workings of Roman constancy occurs earlier in II.i in the Orchard Soliloquy. There Brutus argues that for “the general” good Caesar must not be equipped with the “sting” of legalized supreme power (ll. 12, 16). He admits that there is “question” (1. 13) whether Caesar may abuse this power, but, rather than let the population run risks, Brutus believes action must be taken against Caesar now. And there is only one practical action against a man who is King in all but name: “It must be by his death.” One may refuse to grant Brutus' assumption that no man's life is more valuable than the right of the majority to escape the dictator's “scorning” and the gross “abuse of greatness,” but his radically democratic assumption has some claim to intellectual respectability, and his argument is honorable, logical and carried to its practical conclusion. Ironically, however, in epilogue to his argument he detects the arbitrary (i.e., self-persuading) element of his own reasoning:

                                                                                                                        since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities:
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg.

(II.i.28-32)

Brutus instructs himself to pretend—for his own benefit or that of others—that the assassination is designed to eliminate certain evil, rather than the mere risk of evil. To implement one's ideas in politics, one usually must, like an actor, a tailor or dyer, “fashion” things and change their “colour.” Brutus illustrates this principle in his attitudes towards Caius Ligarius:

He loves me well, and I have given him reasons;
Send him but hither, and I'll fashion him.

(II.i.219-220)

But as Shakespeare says in Sonnet CXI, “Public means … public manners breeds.” Tacitly Brutus agrees to sacrifice some of his personal nobility for the nobility of the idea he holds, hoping that his nature will not “like the dyer's hand” become “subdued to what it works in.” In this play, to judge from Brutus' quarrels with Cassius (III.ii and IV.ii), Brutus' ideas remain the same. But his constancy (which is his very being) is soiled in the working. His arrogant anger towards Cassius reflects how much it has cost Brutus to maintain his moral security, so as to feel impeccable while he tolerates and exploits the suppression of free speech and the use of bribery and extortion. No honorable man can, for long, play a cobbler, a tailor, a dyer, an actor, a despot, a political boss and still act, without damaging psychological lacunae, as if he respects himself. Occasionally in the last half of the play the audience has a fleeting sense that Brutus has lost the very constancy he must have in order to prove himself to himself and to his society. Just like Portia who begged to be regarded as a constant man, and Caesar who begged to be regarded as more constant than a man, Brutus finds himself a man of less absolute and honorable constancy than he ignorantly assumed himself to be. Through history, whose judgments tend to be relative and humanely tolerant, all three achieved a reputation for constancy by reason of their extraordinary perseverance in pursuit of this virtue.

If Julius Caesar is compared to Shakespeare's non-Roman plays, it can be seen that the makeup of the typical Roman character is distinguished mainly by the uneasy coexistence in the same personality of intense factiousness and a will to constancy. Other traits in his makeup are found in approximately the same proportions as they are found in the makeup of Shakespeare's non-Roman heroic, manly personages: pride, love of truth, love of freedom, love of honor, restraint, readiness for self-assertion, martial courage. And yet it is amply evident that these traits are related not only to one another but also to factiousness and constancy. Again and again, the conspirators (who come closer to representing the old Republicans than do Caesar, Antony and Octavius) show their concern about acting like men and Romans. A modern classicist,³⁵ who is an amateur critic of Shakespeare, has noted that Shakespeare frequently puts the word “Roman” in the conspirators' mouths (some thirty times in fact) but hardly ever gives the word to Caesar, Octavius, and Antony. This critic concludes that this distribution is meant to sound a Ciceronian note and to suggest the “old Roman” republican personality as it is depicted in Livy and Cicero. Perhaps a better way would be to try to explain why traits flatly declared to be “Roman” should be almost identical with traits declared to be “manly” in non-Roman plays.³⁶

The capacities of being loyal to one's friend or master, of speaking truth plainly, and of listening to painful truths with patience are regarded as plausible signs of masculinity in Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear but most notably Othello. There, Iago pretends to ground his soldierly manhood in being “direct and honest” (II.iii.378) rather than in following unverifiable intuitions: since “my jealousy / Shapes faults that are not” (ll. 147-148), I would be compelled to violate “my manhood, honesty, or wisdom, / To let you know my thoughts” (ll. 153-154). In return, he asks the Moor to endure Fortune's truths composedly: “Would you would bear your fortune like a man!” (IV.i.62), “Good sir, be a man” (l. 66), have “patience” or I will say you are “nothing of a man” (ll. 89-90); “Are you a man? have you a soul or sense?” (III.iii.374). The very qualities that Iago defines as ‘manly’ are, in Julius Caesar, identified first as “Roman” and only later as ‘manly.’

BRUTUS:
Now, as you are a Roman, tell me true.
MESSALA:
Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell:
For certain she is dead, and by strange manner.
BRUTUS:
Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala:
With meditating that she must die once,
I have the patience to endure it now.
MESSALA:
Even so great men great losses should endure.
CASSIUS:
I have as much of this in art as you,
But yet my nature could not bear it so.

(IV.iii.187-195; italics ours)

Messala explains to the audience that to act “like a Roman” is to resemble “great men” in “truth”-telling, “patience,” and ability to “bear” calamity: in other words, romanitas is equivalent to virtus, the virtues of a man (vir). This pattern of localizing and then universalizing is exactly paralleled by Antony's eulogy at the end of the tragedy:

This was the noblest Roman of them all:
.....                                                  Nature might stand up
And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’

(V.v.68-75; italics ours)

If the Folio text in IV.iii is reliable and the dual revelations of Portia's death are intentional, Brutus might seem very much less admirable to the audience than he does to Messala. As if anticipating the extremely ironic light in which Brutus' display of constancy could be viewed by the audience, Shakespeare makes Cassius praise Brutus for having a “nature” strong enough to play this trick. Since, the audience's awareness of what is happening on stage is almost identical with that of Cassius, Cassius can substantially become a spokesman for the audience. So, Shakespeare has Cassius lead the audience beyond the superficial judgment that Brutus is a fraud to the more profound perception that Brutus' little trick is a sign of this truly constant nature. Brutus is not a sly prig who will defame any human tie (e.g., to Portia and to Messala) if he can thereby make himself and others believe in his constancy. Rather, Brutus, whose love for Portia is made amply clear by his sweet but foolish decision to tell her of the conspiracy, can restrain his profound attachments to the past and his deep emotional life; he can also manipulate them in the face of present dangers and in the interests of the moral health of his comrades. Cassius' remark, therefore, means: I know that Romans and “great men” are supposed to practice this “art” of stoic constancy, but in a crisis my “nature” would not be heroic, manly, and Roman enough to maintain this art. The episode thus simultaneously reveals the staginess, the concern for the “general good,” and the heroism involved in being able “to bear it as our Roman actors do, / With untired spirits and formal constancy” (II.i.226-227). …

Notes

1. Shakespeare's Caesar: The Language of Sacrifice,” CompD [Comparative Drama], III (1969), 3-26. Among the many recent studies of Julius Caesar, with their often stale obsessions with canonized issues, a few stand out as especially vital intellectually, keenly informed, or fresh in their perceptions. John Anson's “Julius Caesar: The Politics of the Hardened Heart,” ShakS [Shakespeare Studies], II (1966), 11-33, is a sensitive and versatile “ethnological approach” to the play with some strikingly phrased comments on the play's reflection of “the current discussion of Neo-Stoic ethics.” Though his adversary posture towards Brutus distorts his argument, his essay is of high caliber. Mildred E. Hartsock's “The Complexities of Julius Caesar,” PMLA, LXXXI (1966), 56-62 is serviceable as a review of critical schools and polemical positions as well as providing a modest caveat to all who undertake a reading of the play: “The outcome of a close examination of Julius Caesar is the discovery that no theory of the meaning of the play or of its major characters can unify the dissident elements” (p. 61). Hartsock's essay can be joined to J. C. Maxwell's earlier bibliographical essay, “Shakespeare's Roman Plays,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey], X (1957), 1-11; and to Leonard Dean ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Julius Caesar (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968) to provide a nearly complete review of such scholarly and critical commentary as remains germane to a well-informed approach to the play. In Dean's anthology readers will find samplings of important recent contributions from Stirling, Schanzer, Charney, Rabkin, Heilman et al., and bibliographical guidance for following the issues further. These will suffice until the appearance of the Caesar Variorum edition being prepared currently by John Velz. While not denigrating the quality of these anthologized contributions, it is evident that critical argument about the play had begun to reach a point of unprofitable stasis until the appearance of the essays by Anson and Anderson cited above.

   Throughout our essay we cite Shakespeare in The Complete Works, ed. Hardin Craig (Chicago, 1951, 1961); in quoting other authors, we have modernized only the letters i, j, u, and v.

2. See Section IV of this essay, infra.

3. There is a profound difference between envy, which wishes to destroy the intolerable capacities or possessions of another person who cannot be denied superiority to one's self in this hated particular, and jealous guardianship of what are felt to be the necessary attributes of human goodness and dignity. Brutus is susceptible to Cassius's envious deprecations of Caesar not because he covets Caesar's role, or because he shares Cassius's gnawing rancor, but because he decides Caesar is growing pathologically (cf. the serpent-egg metaphor) into something offensive to an antecedent and sacrosanct notion of human quality. Brutus identifies his own Self as a preserver or priest of these threatened sanctities. If, as scholars allege, Brutus traces a progress in ways analogous to Macbeth's, he more clearly prefigures an inner process analogous to Hamlet's. Both are infected by a “Saviour-Complex,” but for both this is largely induced by events which “choose them.” Both are made to feel and do accept their obligations to serve as repositories of spiritual values, otherwise eclipsed by the presence of a Caesar or a Claudius. There is in both plays a sense of the awful deforming power of such dominant figures as it acts on the moral structure of those under their political care, so that e.g., Cassius's envy is a disease caused equally by the defects of his own nature and the action of Caesar's nature upon his susceptibilities. This tainting presence or “hidden imposthume” must be removed lest it corrupt all the rest. It is easy for Brutus, with his abstract generalizing habits of thought, to extrapolate from the personal conditions of Cassius or Ligarius to that of Rome as a spiritual community. The entire deontology of Stoicism puts the wise man in a physician's role thereby committing him to be a doctor to the ailments of the value system. Thus Brutus's intellectual allegiance to Stoic dogma about human freedom may complicate many of his actions, but this allegiance neither sullies nor precludes his love for Caesar, nor his undeniable urge to control men whom his ethic classifies as less self-controlled and hence less admirable than himself, or Caesar.

4. Nicholas Brooke, Shakespeare's Early Tragedies (London, 1968), pp. 150, 161, sees the play as a “grotesque (almost Falstaffian) comedy in uncomfortable reflection,” and as a work that is awkwardly deflected at IV.iii from its true course, namely, to be “something more like Troilus and Cressida, where the end shows life simply going on,” with everyone's getting the equivalent of venereal disease.

5. The self-dramatization of Oth. V.ii.352-356, 358-359 rather than the hyperbole of 265-280 or the cheering-up of 341-351; the fairly full self-awareness of Cor. V.iii.182-189 rather than the boasting of V.vi.114-117.

6. Anson, op. cit., 13-18, makes useful remarks on Lipsius' treatment of the Stoic notion of the individual's inner fire, and on Erasmus', Browne's, and Burton's criticism of the flinty stoniness that the Stoic doctrine of Constancy encourages.

7. Many characters in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies (rpt. Bloomington, 1966) often wish voluntary death: Oedipus, Antigone, Theseus, Amphitryon, Hecuba, Jason, but only Phaedra, Jocasta, Deianira, and Hercules translate wish into action. Neither Phaedra nor Jocasta could be a model for the Elizabethan Senecal suicide. The lack of cool dignity in the dying love-crazed Phaedra can be seen in her gruesome anatomical inventory: “lims in lusty plight,” “bowles,” “eies,” and total “body”—all are now ready for dead Hippolytus' use. The lack of dignity in Jocasta's death springs 1) from her tasteless quibbles about the complexity of her family tree, 2) from her debate as to where to thrust her sword (“brest,” “throte,” “womb”?) and 3) from her and the chorus' insistence upon such unheroic touches as the “doulfull,” “dyrefull” “hideousnesse” of her gushing “bloud,” her “sighes, and scalding teares,” her feeling “faint,” her moans about her “sindrownd soule.” However in Hercules Oetaeus, though the “silly woman” Deianira strikes several Jocastan and Phaedran poses, the hero himself dies with a saintly Stoic “cherefull looke” of great “majesty and grace.”

8. The final and/or overall attitudes towards suicide in the Countess of Pembroke's 1590 literal translation of the Marc-Antoine, in Kyd's 1594 translation of the Cornélie, in the Porcie (which Kyd promised to translate), and in Brandon's Garnieresque Virtuous Octavia of 1598 are confused, confusing, and thus basically unheroic. Garnier's long and perplexed literary dalliance with suicide is interestingly treated in Mouflard, Robert Garnier, 1545-1590 (II, 117-120).

9. In her final moments, when she ceases to “rave,” V.i.265 (Ribner ed.), Dido seems to be gaining considerable dignity. But soon she over-reaches mere Stoical self-assertion and plunges into bombast, even striking a residually Christian note when she says, “Ay, I must be the murderer of myself” (1. 270). Also, the hurried sequence of deaths (Dido, Iarbas, Anna seriatim) is rather less skillfully and fully dramatized—and therefore less moving and heroic—than the suicides (Agydas, Bajazeth, Zabina, Olympia) and quasi suicides (note particularly Calyphas) in Tamburlaine.

10. In I.ii Queen Guinevera, like Oedipus in Seneca's Thebais, is persuaded after much debate to relinquish the wild, desperate purpose of suicide.

11. In death Romeo and Juliet are more blind, and thus pathetic, than heroically stoic. In the dénouement the kindly Friar (who earlier condemned Romeo's first suicide attempt as “desperate,” “wild,” beastly, and unfitting a “man,” III.iii.108-111) keeps reminding the audience that these suicides are sad signs of human frailty in a deterministic universe: an “ill unlucky thing,” “a lamentable chance” in “an unkind hour” (V.iii.136, 145-146).

12. In the 1591-92 version, as in the 1567 version (see n. 17 below), the heroine and her father lack stoical calm and are regarded as damned and demonic. The 1591 chorus speaks of the heroine's “resolution” (ll. 1696-1697), only to show her that it has been overthrown by “rashnes” and the bewitching influence of a “damned furie” (l. 1692). Her father dramatizes his own suicide in a thoroughly medieval Christian way: “be thou desperate / One mischief brings another on his neck” (ll. 1850-1871).

13. Hieronymo, who bites off his tongue and stabs himself with a mere penknife, is too crazed to be a heroic Senecal suicide. His is a merely “monstrous resolution,” as the King notes, IV.iv.191. (Kyd references are to The Works, ed. F. S. Boas). And though Bel-Imperia has a stoic side like the apprehended Iago, her suicide is less operatically heroic than those of later Elizabethan stage-stoics.

14. For example, the episodes entitled “Mors Pilati” (The Ancient Cornish Drama, ed., tr. Edwin Norris, Oxford, 1859), in which Tiberius reflects that Jesus must have inspired Pilate's suicide, it being the “cruelest” revenge for the Crucifixion, since “For a more cruel death, certainly, / Than to kill himself, / No man may find.”

15. The good Virginius, despite his own prior desire for suicide, announces at the end of the play in inconsistently shocked tones, “Apius he him selfe hath lewdly slaine / … desperate for bluddy deede,” 11. 1149-1151 (R. B., Apius and Virginia, McKerrow, Greg eds.).

16. The first of the two accounts of Jocasta's death is remarkably low-keyed and therefore lacking in heroic aura (V.ii.173-177). The second account produces pathos, not admiration; “With bloudlesse cheekes and gastly lookes … She gorde hirselfe with wide recurelesse wounde,” V.iv.27-29 (Cunliffe ed., Early English Classical Tragedies).

17. In the 1566 version (see n. 12 above) of the Gismond (Cunliffe ed., op. cit.) the heroine's father's suicide is a wildly vindictive act in which he decides to “wreke my wrathfull ire / upon my self” (V.iv.30-31). The immorality of this action is further underscored by the Epilogus, who says Tancred slew himself in “depe despeir” (l. 5).

18. For example, the Junius Brutus-like behavior of the English King as described in HV, II.iv.35-38:

    How terrible in constant resolution,
    And you shall find his vanities forespent
    Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus,
    Covering discretion with a coat of folly.

19. Among the Marginal Notes in North's Plutarch, 1579, for instance, are references to “The wonderfull constancy of the conspirators,” and “The wonderfull constancy of Brutus” (G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, V, 99 and 115).

20. Shortly after this date, coinciding with the increase of interest in constancy, Schonaeus' Judithae Constantia was translated. This work celebrates a Biblical rather than a pagan stoic heroine.

21. In this play as in many later ones, the stoic element is emphasized by reiteration of the words Resolution, Constancy, and their cognates. They appear more frequently in Cornelia than in any other of Kyd's plays, according to Charles Crawford's Concordance to … Kyd (Louvain, 1906-1910, Bang's Materialen, XV). In her debate with Cicero on suicide, Act II, the heroine says she wishes to imitate “the resolute” (l. 321), and not to outlive her husband, Pompey; this phrase has been supplied entirely by Kyd; there is nothing in Garnier that corresponds to it. Though she is dissuaded from suicide, the play draws to a close once she learns of the death of her father. One of the Scipios, he kills himself in an extremely dignified, heroic way—in a much nobler and more soberly stoical fashion than the available historical documents in Appian, Cicero, Livy, Seneca, Dio, and Tacitus would seem to permit. See Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, III, 1228. In the stage-nuntius' description of Scipio's death the word “resolv'd” is once again used of stoical Roman self-immolation (Kyd, ed. Boas).

22. In l. 463 the chorus, with a finely poised sense of heroic paradox, momentarily balances its view of suicide between the pagan heroic ethic and the chivalric Christian one, saying that Cleopatra's “Dispaire doth … a courage give” to her. Later, this heroine, whose suicide is more stoical than those of most stage and closet drama figures of the 1590's, exclaims: “Who can stay a mind resolv'd to die,” l. 1171; “For what I will / I am resolv'd,” ll. 1432-1433 (Bullough, Sources, V).

23. Though the play ends with Brutus's quite inconstant and unheroic suicide, Cato and a few minor characters stand as impressive spokesmen for Roman constancy. In ll. 1045-1052 Cato tells his son, “Remember boy thou art a Romaine borne,” and urges his followers in the “declining state” of Rome to maintain their traditional “strength of minde, that vertues constancy.” In ll. 1523-1524 Trebonius seeks to redouble the courage of his troops with the motto, “forward resolution / Shews you descended from true Romaine line” (ed. F. S. Boas, W. W. Greg).

24. Edward H. Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and His Fellow Dramatists (Manchester, 1925), p. 437, points to a character in this play who announces his readiness for death with the phrase, Romanus sum, Romano more moriar.

25. Seventeenth century Roman dramas are full of evidence associating Romans with Stoic Constancy-and-Resolution and/or Fieriness. A few such tragedies resemble Julius Caesar (with its images of the tinder-box and the constant stellar fire) in integrating Roman Constancy and Fieriness explicitly. Almost plagiarizing Caesar, Richards in his Messallina (A. R. Skemp ed.), ll. 2385-2434, toys with several Caesarian images in describing the hardness and warmth of three major characters: the “flinthearted” Emperor, his “Taper”-like victim, and the victim's “Phoenix”-like wife. Also, the Romanized heroine of Marston's Sophonisba (ed. H. H. Wood), V.iii, achieves a stellar destiny because she has the character of tempered steel from which sparks keep flying. She is made paradoxically “hard and firme” and “more cold” than fate by the fires of misfortune and the “flame” of her “vertue.” Her burning “vertue” is itself refined by the pressure of the “sparkling steel … strokes of Chance” and by chilling immersion in the “seas of miseries.” Almost as effective and Caesar-like is the episode in which the Heywood-Webster Scaevola (Rape of Lucrece) coolly and defiantly burns his own hand on stage and is pardoned and praised by his enemy: “Roman we admire thy constancy / And scorne of fortune, go, return to Rome,” ll. 2751-2752 (Allan Holoday ed.). And the republicans in Sejanus I.93ff. (Barish ed.), who feel that they lack the old-time “fire” and that there is “nothing Roman” in them, long for the soul of “constant Brutus.”

    Evidence of the seventeenth century use of Stoic Roman Constancy motifs alone are to be seen in many more plays. In Massinger's Roman Actor I.iii (A. K. McIlwraith, ed., Five Stuart Tragedies), a sycophant, when ascribing to Domitian “every touch” “Roman,” includes “Cato's resolution.” Fearing that her ardent king will bestow on her a fate worse than death, the virgin Roman wife in the Faithful Friends (Dyce ed. anonymous Beaumont … Fletcher, London, 1844, IV, 153) alludes to her suicidal “resolve, / Which beyond death is constant.” The self-assertive villain hero of the Heywood-Webster Appius and Virginia (Lucas ed., Webster), unlike his counterpart in the early Elizabethan Apius, slays himself like a “true-bred Roman,” V.ii.146, that is, “bravely,” l. 140, and “with as much resolved constancy / As [he] offended,” ll. 34-35. “Constancy” is one of the “six Roman champions” in a didactic masque presented to Titus in Hemming's Jew's Tragedy, 1. 3069 (H. A. Cohn, ed.). Fletcher's Aecius in Valentinian IV.iv (Bullen Variorum) kills himself with such “constant nobleness” that he indicates that he was “alone a Roman” (l. 294).

    Coriolanus provides splendid but quite typical examples of how the Constancy motif operates in a seventeenth century play. In the very first lines the Roman mob, which will prove itself to be as ironically inconstant as the hero, asserts its intention to be “resolved” (I.i.4-5), even to the point of committing the equivalent of suicide. The theme of the hero's own futile aspiration towards constancy is heralded in the first scene also when, not long after his entry, he describes himself as “constant” (l. 243). Later, Aufidius makes a supposed compliment, the real sarcasm of which is inaudible to Coriolanus' Roman ear: “You keep a constant temper” (V.vi.105). Further verbal echoing of the Constancy-Revolution theme is found in V.vi.95; II.iii.40; IV.vi.105. And the work as a whole investigates the tragic difficulty of translating the Roman ideal of constancy into creative, purposive action instead of into mechanized, inflexible gesture.

26. Titus Andronicus, like the narrative “Lucrece,” deals with Stoic Constancy without reiterating this theme again and again verbally. Yet it is significant that resolution and its cognates appear in II.i.57,105; III.i.239; and twice in the opening scene, I.i.135,278. This opening scene further establishes the role of self-control in the dynamics of Rome by having Bassianus pledge to “consecrate” the emperorship to “continence (ll. 14-15).

27. An Auncient Historie …, tr. W. B. (London, 1578), p. 52.

28. Ibid, p. 56.

29. Early hints of this tendency can be seen in the mention of the “stony heart” of the non-dramatic Caesar of 1591 in Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, ed. L. B. Campbell (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), p. 302, and of the dramatic Caesar of 1594 in the Kyd Cornelia V. In Shakespeare's Ant. III.iii.24 the “cold, holy still” Octavia is likened to a “statue.” The hardness and coldness of the Romans is also emphasized by such references as the descriptions of Valeria as an “icicle / … curdied by the frost” in Cor. V.iii.66-67; allusions to the senators as “flints,” to Catiline as stone, to Rome as having “stony entrails” Catiline III.647; V.677ff; I.93 (Herford, Simpson eds.); and the reference to Flaminius as a man of “cold blood” and “frozen conscience,” in Believe As You List, ed. Sisson, l. 414.

30. Edward Dowden, Shakespeare's Mind and Art (rpt. New York, 1967), pp. 306-307. Cf. Adrien Bonjour, The Structure of “Julius Caesar” (Liverpool, 1958), p. 24, which describes the plot as possessing “the rigor, and the beauty of a syllogism carved in porphyry.”

31. The bloodiness of the stereotyped factious and imperialistic Roman was axiomatic in the Renaissance, as proven by T. J. B. Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Roman,” ShS, X, 27-38 and J. Leeds Barroll, “Shakespeare's Idea of Roman History,” MLR [Modern Language Review], LIII (1958), 327-343. The Romans' wolfishness, a hitherto unnoticed part of their bloodiness, may be seen in several passages: for example, not only in JC, I.iii.104-105, but also in the Heywood-Webster Appius II.ii.52, Fuims Troes, IV.iv; Roman Actor, V.i.257; Sejanus, III.251; anon. Marcus Tullius Cicero, V, sig. E2^v. Apparently, the earliest reference is found not in antiquity, but in the Kyd-Garnier Cornelia, V.240.

32. There is no denying, however, Brutus' love for Portia, Lucius, the Old Rome, and the Caesar whom “the heart of Brutus yearns to think” will be betrayed.

33. Donne's Paradoxes opens with the statement “That women are inconstant, I with any man confesse,” Juvenilia facs., ed. R. E. Bennet (New York, 1936). In Sonnet XX Shakespeare compliments his young male friend on having a “woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted / With shifting change, as is false women's fashion.”

34. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Roman Plays (Stanford, 1963), p. 74.

35. Richard M. Haywood, “Shakespeare and the Old Roman,” CE [College English], XVI, 98-101, 151.

36. For an excellent, general but non-encroaching discussion, see Robert B. Heilman, “Manliness in the Tragedies: Dramatic Variations,” Shakespeare 1565-1964, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Providence, R. I., 1964).