SOURCE: Bellringer, A. W. “Julius Caesar: Room Enough.” Critical Quarterly 12, no. 1 (spring 1970): 31-48.

[In the following essay, Bellringer maintains that the subject of Julius Caesar is essentially Roman, with no significant Elizabethan or modern parallels.]

I

Julius Caesar is best regarded as an example of Polonius's category ‘tragical-historical’. The tragedy is inherent in the historical situation: it is Rome's in the same sense that in the history plays the tragedy is England's. But Roman politics are significantly different. Julius Caesar cannot simply be read as a cautionary tale for the times, warning dissatisfied subjects against the folly of killing the king. Any relations with Elizabethan politics are tangential rather than analogous. Ancient Rome is not just a monarchical nation-state, but the whole expanse of conquered Europe. She is also a small city with a peculiar political tradition. From this contradiction comes the tension of ‘the times’ which largely determines the fates of the individuals in the play. As Robert B. Heilman has argued, ‘the antecedent fact is the public situation—… the apparent development of a political dictatorship—and we see the private life in this context’.¹ It is a mistake to look for a tragic hero here. There is no scope and no worked out role for greatness.

Shakespeare's interest in Roman history seems to have been twofold. He is concerned literally with analysing a transfer of power, with dramatising errors and their results, with demonstrating what was practical. But he is also taken up with firm sentiments, with admiration for sacrifice, with regret for passing ideals, and conversely with distaste for a sterile ethic. The result is an appropriate poetic style, dignified and clear, rarely persuasive, capable of giving away the speaker without satire, and yet suggesting a certain hollowness.

Obviously he took his lead from his source. Plutarch, though republican in his sympathies, concluded that in Caesar's time absolute rule was a necessity for Rome. The aristocratic cause was upheld merely by those who refused to recognise the inevitable. The republic, once dominant in Italy by virtue of its coherent inner structure and intelligent policies, had now as a result of territorial expansion become ineffectual. The noble virtues which had worked in the early days, frankness of dealing, openness in negotiation, respect for the consensus, were no longer relevant. They were the marks of patriotism and honour in a governing class imbued with the strong sense of legality which allows for compromise between contending interests under the pressure of limited national aims. Plutarch regretted their obsolescence. The need now was for control, but the glamour had departed; these are the points that Shakespeare's drama undoubtedly makes. His play is coolly distanced aesthetically. The experience it enacts is of a saddening, almost chilling kind. Rome is in an unfavoured, graceless state. There is some personal pathos, but no individual tragic focus. The play is an episode in a larger action, and is open-ended in the sense that it conveys the idea that it can all happen again, in a slightly altered form. The death of Caesar is central only chronologically. The theme is the emergence of another Caesar. There are even signs of yet another civil war.

Width of reference, spaciousness both geographical and historical, is indeed a poetic characteristic of Julius Caesar, not perhaps with the excess of Antony and Cleopatra. But the dispersal of forces is essential in the earlier play too. Antiquity is made to evoke its own antiquity once removed, but the effect is not the paradox of making the scene seem more contemporary. The sense of the past within the past is not simply a device, but is thematically crucial, since the play turns on the issue of the relevance of that remoter, small Rome to the Rome of Caesar. As usual the opening scene concisely indicates what is to be salient and gives us an advantage of hindsight before any of the main characters has appeared. Two disintegrating forces have destroyed republican stability and threaten to overturn the existing tradition entirely. Inside the city there is the populace, never likely to be organised into more than an instrument, but exhibiting a kind of ‘murderous innocence’ and dangerously inconsequential in its ideas and loyalties. Beyond the city the unimaginable extension of the frontiers has put power into the hands of generals, whose armies have warred against each other. Civil wars pre-date the conspiracy, which is itself as much Pompey's revenge as the battle of Philippi is Caesar's. Military power, answerable only to these ambitious generals, of whom Caesar is the greatest, but still only one in a series, is complemented by the manageable riotousness of the citizens, to the detriment of conventional institutions, particularly the senate. The opening exchanges of the play, humorously selfish as they are, soon turn to menace. The commoners, unlike Dekker's shoemakers, get no joy from their holiday for the occasion is unworthy of it. They are seen to vanish from the stage ‘tongue-tied in their guiltiness’ at the thought of the plague that must light upon their ingratitude to Pompey. They are at first upbraided by the tribune for appearing on a working day without the signs of their crafts; the tradesmen are lost in the mob. The puns glance at the theme of mending what is bad and recovering what is in danger. The disorderliness and irresponsibility of the people are, however, not emphasised till Marullus vehemently denounces them.

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

The speaker is Pompey's man and his partisanship crude. We rather feel it is the misfortune of the cruel men of Rome to have experienced both Pompey and Caesar in turn. Marullus's righteous distinction between a valid triumph, in which the tributaries ‘grace in captive bonds’ the chariot wheels of the victorious Pompey, and an invalid one, in which Caesar, the conqueror in a civil war, comes victorious over his rival's ‘blood’, that is, Pompey's heirs, is far from impressive. The tribunes' outspokenness has already the quality of a forlorn protest, and their courage in disrobing the images of Caesar's trophies looks futile. But at the end of the scene Flavius's words,

These growing feathers pluck'd from Caesar's wing
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,
Who else would soar above the view of men
And keep us all in servile fearfulness,

though impracticably sanguine, express an ominously sane sense of Caesar's own delusions, as well as a fear of his unpredictability. The first grim moment in the play is when we hear from Casca in the next scene that ‘Marullus and Flavius for pulling scarfs off Caesar's images, are put to silence’. It is the unmistakeable sign of arbitrary power in a society where it is dangerous to think too much.

Reminders that Pompey is still to be revenged are unexpectedly prominent in Julius Caesar. Caius Ligarius's original offence with Caesar, we are told, was that of ‘speaking well of Pompey’. After the assassination Brutus does not refrain from pointing out that Caesar

          now on Pompey's basis lies along,
No worthier than the dust!

Antony in his speech to the people adds the lurid detail that Pompey's statue ‘all the while ran blood’ as Caesar fell, presumably out of sympathy, but also possibly accusingly. Even more striking is the reference in the last act when Cassius in his moment of partial belief in ill omens calls Messala to witness that against his will,

(As Pompey was) am I compell'd to set
Upon one battle all our liberties.

The interest in these passages does not lie in the question of whether Pompey could plausibly be seen as a champion of ‘liberties’ rather than just as a proto-Caesar. The significance is that the fighting into which the action of the drama visibly deteriorates at the end is not the unprecedented result of a unique crime, but is the reversion after an interlude to a state of affairs which was, and is, as is hinted by Octavius's differences with Antony, to continue, normal, until the man of destiny inaugurates his empire. The play ends suitably with a war-act in which the ‘bloody sign of battle is hung out’ and Octavius, or as he calls himself, ‘another Caesar’ asserts his superiority over Antony and fulfils his ambition of succeeding where his uncle failed.

I was not born to die on Brutus' sword.

The boasts and confusions of the battle-scenes are not, however, as in Troilus and Cressida, left to amount to ironic farce. In Julius Caesar the disorder represented on the stage by a succession of clumsy combats and nasty suicides confronts us with that condition of ‘hazard’ in the remote regions of the Roman world on which the militarists continuously depend. The ending establishes an oppressive continuous present, ‘this losing day’ of the defeated Brutus's bitter boast. The drastic instant solution attempted by the conspirators loses significance, for slaying has become ‘a deed in fashion’. As J. F. Danby points out, Antony's moral tribute to Brutus is in effect a testimony to the hollowness of the triumvirs' victory. ‘The problems implicit are only made more urgent by this false resolution’ (Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature, 1949, p. 145). Octavius has the last word, less generous than Antony's, but proper in a deadly way.

Within my tent his bones to-night shall lie,
Most like a soldier, order'd honourably.

His tent has become the place of honour. The unimaginative injunction at the close can hardly engage the audience's assent:

                                        let's away,
To part the glories of this happy day.

For can glories be parted so happily? One's mind turns to what has been lost, unity, civility, scrupulosity, and what was a commonwealth of sorts.

II

I mean by this the old Roman Republic, to whose values Shakespeare's verse affords a resonance thinner than, but still comparable with, his pastoral idealism elsewhere; in their desperate vulnerability these virtues are emphatically stressed. For whatever Horatio may have felt about

the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,

in the play which deals with that period we are given scant evidence of security. In fact it is a clear point that Caesar's presence, though arguably more commanding and more persuasive than it seems, is unworthy of his reputation. The details that are to Caesar's disadvantage do not amount to a denigration of the historical character, but they make the hero-worship of the mob seem very blind. His domination of public life is imposing enough, but a little doubt as to his reliability makes all the strength of the republicans' case. Negatively, their logic is sound. Caesar's first entry too is surely undignified. His requirement that the unfortunate Calpurnia should be touched by Antony's fertility symbol exposes the central weakness of the monarchical system, the uncertainty of suitable succession. His pompous style with its imperious presumptions is oddly deflated by the admission that he is deaf in one ear. Also he is inconsistent, for while respecting one superstition in the matter of his wife's barrenness, he rejects the soothsayer as ‘a dreamer’. In his domestic setting later Caesar makes a poorer showing than Brutus does. Though he evidently relates the disquieting features of the night to his personal circumstances (Act II, Scene ii), he concedes nothing to Calpurnia's case, based on a dream, but only, for a time, something to her ‘humour’. Caesar's usage of his wife looks like a kind of proleptic royal arbitrariness (in that house we are already in a world of palace influences), especially in the light of the fact, which the next scene presents excitedly, that Brutus has confided fully in Portia and had meant it when he said,

You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.

He could trust her. Caesar's unattractiveness is partly due to his inability to drop the public mask. This might not be a serious flaw in a ruler, but the public mask in itself is also not pretty. When Caesar makes Stoical contentions like this,

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,

he reveals the kind of self-deception that can issue in cruelty.² There is of course the argument that, in spite of his failings of tone, Caesar's pre-eminence can be taken dramatically for granted just as God's can in a miracle play. As for instance T. S. Dorsch suggests, Caesar's ‘greatness and nobility do not need to be emphasized; they are implicit in the attitude towards him of every one else in the play’. So we can soon realise ‘that the stabbing is mere senseless butchery’ and admire Shakespeare for providing ‘some intelligible motives for this incredible piece of criminal folly’ (Arden edition, 1955, intro., pp. xxix, xxxv and xxxix). This interpretation demands a great deal in the way of silent meaningful expressions from the actor who plays Caesar, but I doubt if he could have counted on unequivocal admiration for Julius Caesar in audiences of the 1590's any more than in audiences to-day.³ Ben Jonson of course complained that Shakespeare had put sayings into Caesar's mouth ‘which were ridiculous’, but whether his example,

Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause,

or the Folio version, possibly altered to meet his criticism,

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied,

is the original, neither lacks the sinister assumption of infallibility.⁴ There is also the revealing phrase that Caesar drops casually, ‘Caesar and his senate’. Caesar's last, unsuspecting speeches are almost thrasonical in style. The insistence on constancy in decisions suggests an authoritarian rigidity, which is virtually tautological.

          I was constant Cimber should be banish'd,
And constant do remain to keep him so.
… Hence! Wilt thou lift up Olympus?

That Caesar should stress his immobility the moment before he is struck down scarcely makes for implicit grandeur. The irony confirms one's unfavourable response when he interrupts Metellus, before any reasonable case can be made for repealing his brother's banishment, with a scornful speech. Here Caesar distinguishes himself from ordinary men, or fools, whose blood can be thawed or fired so as to

          turn pre-ordinance and first decree
Into the law of children.

He professes that he rejects the suit in order to demonstrate that he is the one man in the world he knows

That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshak'd of motion.

One's impression of a long-sighted hauteur, of an inflexibility that over-simplifies to justify prejudice, is not lessened by the knowledge that this was precisely the reaction that the conspirators had calculated on getting and had needed from Caesar. And ‘so, by excluding the passions, repressing the sensitive soul, and disjoining the operational nexus of hand and heart’, argues John Anson, ‘Caesar, in his will to remain untouchable, threatens to occupy the whole space of the living world: … now a god, now a block, Caesar emerges precisely a colossus, and, as such, the incarnation of Stoic man.’⁵ But the terrible event which ensues shows us his human vulnerability again; Caesar had neither the pure ruthlessness of a tyrant, nor the political sagacity to survive in a transitional period. Nevertheless there is a sense in which Caesar transcends his opponents. It is not really that he is more trustworthy, but that he thinks more broadly. If not by any means sublimely puissant, he still takes a truly high, lonely view; he thinks in terms of the northern star, the gods; his mind moves easily to the outskirts of the Roman domain where the exiles languish. He knows the magnitude and the necessary solitude of the responsibility of governing Rome, his eyes, in Yeats's phrase ‘fixed upon nothing’. It is for this reason that his ghost can haunt Brutus, repeating the ominous place-name, Philippi, where the home-sick republicans are to go under.

III

The way Shakespeare succeeds in maintaining sympathy with the republicans while almost analytically showing their mistakes is the most remarkable feature of Julius Caesar. The interest is partly that of recording the internal strains and complexities of a faction as it works itself out to defeat. Mutual loyalty, though impaired, keeps humanly alive right throughout, in contrast with the contradictions in the narrowly based alliance of the triumvirs. Brutus and Cassius, men of mixed temperaments, interact dramatically. We are not to suspect that Cassius, though most unscrupulous in his shrewdness, is politically insincere. He does, it is true, reinforce his influence with calumnies, but he naturally loves freedom. Nor is Brutus, on the other hand, committed entirely to open dealing. He admits in his first speech that his private worries have veiled his look, and his decision to participate in the use of force involves him in hypocrisy. A main theme is the disguise and misinterpretation of motive that must go on in a situation menaced by violence. The cross-assessments and counter-estimates, the generalisations on men and their worth, are not mere constructions of ambiguous ‘characters’ on Shakespeare's part, but fall essentially into a dialectic of suspicion. The overtone is one of uneasiness, where nothing but drastic evidence will serve and mistakes quickly multiply. As Cicero is made to comment,

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time:
But men may construe things, after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

This ‘purpose of the things themselves’ is felt in Julius Caesar, not as a supernatural fate, but as a power at once human, because the result of human actions in the past, and terribly inexorable. For respect for the logic of events does not mean that judgements of value are mere idealism. As Norman Rabkin says, Brutus's faults of perception ‘undercut but do not vitiate the nobility of the character he demonstrates’,⁶ with the consequence that the coming Augustan peace is felt as peculiarly dubious. The play projects no welcome for it; the verse warms only to the values which it cannot foster.

In their discussion of principles provoked by the mob's adulation of Caesar off-stage, Brutus and Cassius define the serious Roman idea of honour. As distinct from the chivalrous honour ridiculed by Falstaff, ‘the name of honour’ here is associated by Brutus with what is ‘toward the general good’, as well as with courageous defiance of death. An honourable man puts first the interests of the whole state. Brutus's error is to conceive of ‘the general’ too narrowly, to concentrate on the patrician tradition of the past, on the capital city as the important arena, on a superficial experience of others as being all reasonable men of good will. It may be said that he assumes what is good for the public with a patronising disregard for what it wants, but he is not dogmatic. Honour is the subject of Cassius's story too, but his sarcasm soon establishes that Caesar's notion of honour is a purely competitive one; to

          get the start of the majestic world,
And bear the palm alone.

Cassius's attitude to Caesar is more than envy; he despises his philosophy as well as his physique. His dislike is only sharpened by the fact that Caesar's idea of political honour derives from personal sporting contests. Brutus picks up the bitterness when the second ‘general shout’ suggests to him applauses

For some new honours that are heap'd on Caesar.

It is left to Cassius to clinch the point in his most important speech. A heavy emphasis is given to the dishonour in death which is in prospect if the republicans acquiesce in the court of events. This indignity he represents as an extreme disaster where manhood is crushed by an oppression that is monstrous.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

Cassius's bitter image of an autocracy where men (the vocative ‘man’ is not just expletive in this context) have no freedom of vision but to ‘peep about’ is effective, but his irony lacks a certain dimension. Caesar's power and opportunity depend on the fact that their world is no longer narrow, as Shakespeare surely means us to remember when later in the speech Cassius uses the literal epithet ‘wide’. Now more rhetorical, he evokes the grand extension of Rome in time and space and yet still remains unconscious of the crucial inference.

                                                                                                    Age, thou art sham'd!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fam'd with more than with one man?
When could they say, till now, that talk'd of Rome,
That her wide walks encompass'd but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.

The word which betrays Cassius is ‘walks’; he still, as the slip tells, confounds the state with the city. This defect is cleverly built into the expression of sentiments that are too obviously admirable. By setting the Colossus against a universal scale Cassius succeeds in reducing him three times to his real size, a meaning reinforced by the pointilliste emphasis of the verse. There are only five words in the passage quoted that are not monosyllabic.⁷ The pun on Rome and room contains Cassius's contempt for the moral littleness of a society which could accept tyranny, but the ambiguities of ‘room enough’ are very dramatic. In the existing diffused state of the Roman dominions, could the political entity be preserved by more than one controller? Plutarch thought not. In this sense the tradition that, for Cassius, is Rome is no longer enough; it is sadly irrelevant to changed circumstances. Despite its noble antiquity the republicans' ‘Rome’ is empty of current significance, in hard political terms.⁸ Shakespeare soon lets us know that Brutus too has missed this momentous point, when he affirms that he, in the deceptive objectivity of the third person,

                    had rather be a villager
Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time
Is like to lay upon us.

There is something of the villager in Brutus, if his outlook is parochial and nostalgic. Military power based on provincial conquest and demagogic power able to work the urban mob have made the republicans' situation more hopeless than they can admit. Nevertheless they are not presented as pathetically obsolete or ludicrously effete. Cassius, if not far-sighted, remains shrewd, and Brutus's thought has power, exerting a transforming influence in decisive scenes. But both leaders are doomed, as the supernatural omens clearly denote. Even after Cassius's boast that his strength of spirit cannot be bound by tyrants' chains, because of his freedom to kill himself, the stage direction contradicts him. Thunder still. The menace of fact is persistent.

IV

Act II of Julius Caesar is devoted mainly to the establishment of Brutus's charismatic quality. Shakespeare gives him a more positive personality than he could find in Plutarch (‘a marvellous lowly and gentle person’—the Plutarch references can be found easily in the Arden edition). Cassius had said that Brutus's favour, ‘like richest alchemy’, will change the apparent offensiveness of the conspiracy ‘to virtue and to worthiness’. Shakespeare softens the impact of the speeches in which Brutus justifies his consent to the act of assassination by framing them in dialogues with the boy, Lucius, whose innocent sleepfulness Brutus envies.

Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber:
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies
Which busy care draws in the brains of men;
Therefore thou sleep'st so sound.

His reluctance to disturb his servant is an aspect of the sensitivity which keeps him restless with scruples. His ‘cause of grief’ is his detestation of the means that must be used to redress ‘the time's abuse’. Of the necessity of Caesar's death he is convinced before he speaks. He does not believe that Caesar intends to be remorselessly tyrannical, but he knows that he is ambitious to be sole ruler, and that ‘might change his nature’, for absolute power lends itself to ineradicable abuse. If that fear is not sufficient motive, he taunts the conspirators,

So let high-sighted tyranny range on,
Till each man drop by lottery.

But the ‘dreadful thing’ of murder, which the ‘mortal instruments’ must carry out, and the furtive, hypocritical aspects of organizing it, he detests; he cannot give himself to the deed with a completely good will; his conscience worries him with nightmarish vividness. All this is creditable in Brutus (comparisons with Macbeth here are wide of the mark; Antony later admits that Brutus was not personally ambitious). Brutus's repugnance to secrecy and violence is admirably natural, but he is not, to the regret of some critics, a conscientious objector; he bravely commits himself to the assassination, though with genuine shudders. I cannot agree with L. C. Knights that Brutus is ‘a man who tried to divorce his political thinking and his political action from what he knew, and what he was, as a full human person’.⁹ For fullness of humanity requires a favourable political context. Brutus already felt his humanity menaced by Caesar; inactivity at this critical stage did not save Cicero from being later put to death by the triumvirs, as is emphasised. Sophisticated passivity is no viable alternative, however much one deplores what they did. Brutus's struggle to overcome his squeamishness pointedly enhances our acceptance of the ‘even virtue’ of their enterprise. At the same time we realise that in a world of opportunists it will only amount to a gesture. Brutus totally lacks a credible policy, imprudently trusts his opponents and makes culpable misjudgments on the course of events. That these are more than mistakes of detail we already discern in the speech in which he rules out an oath for the adherents to the faction. They need no other formality than having given their word as Romans in private,

Than honesty to honesty engag'd,

for breach of promise convicts a noble Roman of being illegitimate. Brutus's idealism is not essentially at fault, but his focus is badly blurred. His influence is impracticably conservative. His appeals invariably take the form of reminders about patrician ethical tradition. The patriotism refers to the small city-state of the past where it is conceivable to assess the nobility of ‘every Roman’. The conspirators' horizon is the city-boundary, their prospect a retrospect. That distracting minute of chat in Act II, Scene i, between Decius, Cinna and Casca about the dawn, while Brutus and Cassius whisper, symbolically describes these limits; they do not know where in the urban landscape lies the east. Casca, pointing his sword, traces, like a well-informed but unimaginative weather-forecaster, the sun in March, ‘a great way growing on the south’ to its position in May, ‘up higher toward the north’; so, he argues,

                                                  the high east
Stands, as the Capitol, directly here.

Too soon their leaders will indeed experience ‘the high east’ on the provincial plains where they will face defeat, but Casca is confined to close-ups, his range foreshortened. By way of contrast, Caesar, Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius are all seasoned frontiersmen, ruthless tacticians conditioned by far-flung commands.

Cassius alone of the republicans seems to glance at the real threat, the strength of Caesar's supporters, when he urges that Antony, the ‘shrewd contriver’, should also be executed;

                                        and you know, his means,
If he improve them, may well stretch so far
As to annoy us all; …

this unspecified allusion may be to Antony's links with Octavius as well as to his rhetorical skill, but Cassius does not press his case. Brutus overrides it with his alarm that the people would condemn them for more killing than was strictly required and with his assurance that Antony would be powerless without his leader. Shakespeare means us to understand how ineptly Brutus mistakes the real centre of power, even confusing the general will with the shouts of the city-populace, but his insistence that bloodshed should be kept to a minimum is given, and carries, of course great weight. Paradoxically the blundering statement, ‘Antony is but a limb of Caesar’, suggests to Brutus his vital distinction between sacrificers and butchers, carvers and hewers, purgers and murderers. This speech,¹⁰ though it has something of the sinister ring of the propagandist's set of euphemisms to modern ears, should not be read as moral self-deception on Brutus's part, as though he could believe that to regard assassination as a ceremony would lessen the amount of blood spilt. The killing is not to be ritualised so much as disciplined in order to underline to the people the republicans' control of their vicious passions, especially their wrath, by their ‘hearts’, that is, by a reasoned ethic based on common feeling. The speech reaches its climax in what is a profound, if bitterly ironic, truth.

We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar,
And in the spirit of men there is no blood.
O, that we then could come by Caesar's spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it.

Against political force, whatever one's personal feelings towards those in power, there is no alternative resort but counter-force. This must be recognised, even though one must also insist on minimising the violence as much as possible. This is the point of the conspirators' ‘purpose necessary, and not envious’, but where Brutus's apologia falls down is in his failure to mention the guarantee of effectiveness. On any pragmatic test, their resistance to the spirit of Caesar shows up poorly. In a practical sense there is little chance that Caesar's spirit can be ‘come by’ after a single killing, as Antony's action confirms when, immediately after the assassination, he sends to Octavius. Brutus is only justifying what amounts to a tactic. His blindness is in not seeing that as such it could not serve. But this culpability of Brutus's is mitigated by the general foreboding which Shakespeare gives him with full seriousness of style throughout the scene, as when he undertakes to construe in his wife's presence

All the charactery of my sad brows.

There is no undramatic dwelling on the brooding, and the scene ends briskly with a piece of striking stage-transformation. Ligarius, an actually sick man, appears, wearing a kerchief, the sign of his sickness, only to discard it on hearing that Brutus has in hand the expected ‘exploit worthy the name of honour’. The feverish adherent speaks with an extravagance that is at once enthusiastic and ominous.

                                                  Soul of Rome!
Brave son, deriv'd from honourable loins!
Thou, like an exorcist, hast conjur'd up
My mortified spirit. Now bid me run,
And I will strive with things impossible,
Yea, get the better of them. What's to do?

This metamorphosis of Decreptitude into Resolution symbolises most economically the immense prestige of what Brutus stands for, the ancestral sanctions, the governing spirit working within the law, the civic pride. Yet the comparison with the magic of the necromancer is significantly unhappy. The accent is still that of hectic euphoria, hinting involuntarily that the question is not of what can cure a sickness, but of what is in reality dead.

After the murder the republicans assert joyfully that it is tyranny that is dead. Brutus calms their fitful fear of the mob with the ceremony, invented by Shakespeare for the occasion, of smearing their arms and swords with Caesar's blood. For Brutus the act is a sign of their common and open responsibility, but the visual indecency of its performance as a stage-spectacle convicts him here of inadequate sensitivity. Death looks ubiquitous in prospect, and there is nothing but dramatic irony in Brutus's revolutionary cry:

Then walk we forth, even to the market-place,
And waving our red weapons o'er our heads,
Let's all cry, ‘Peace, freedom, and liberty!’

The antique style of giving a direction and his unquestioning respect for the destination are so typical of Brutus. Subsequently in the market-place he addresses the people in a speech of quaint balances and patronising lucidity. He appears as a precise constitutionalist, sadly over-confident of his influence on events, his idealism spent in tired phrases. ‘Who is here so rude, that would not be a Roman? … The question of his death is enroll'd in the Capitol; …’. There could be no fitter comment on his incapacity than the total misunderstanding evident when the crowd takes up the cry, ‘Let him be Caesar’. The conspirators can in fact go no further, and the point of view in the play has already shifted to take in Mark Antony, who cleverly improvises to get the situation under control. Antony had previously demanded to learn the reasons why Caesar was considered dangerous, but as soon as Brutus, against Cassius's advice, had agreed to let him speak at the funeral Antony was content not to hear the reasons: ‘… pity to the general wrong of Rome’ was all that had been mentioned to him. His repudiation of the conspiracy first emerges in the episode where, left alone, he apostrophises Caesar's body with an apology for his seeming gentleness with

                                                            … these butchers.
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.

Antony turns Brutus's vocabulary cruelly against him in his absence. The sincerity of his loyalty to his dead leader is not in doubt, for he is determined not to do justice to the republicans. The military note predominates terribly as he foretells the merciless character of the widespread war which he is in fact willing to initiate.

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
… And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry havoc …

The curse is pronounced with a revenger's relish. It is also appropriate that the ghost of Caesar is to retain ‘a monarch's voice’. With Antony, as the moral response is at once lowered to barbarism, so the topographical range is correspondingly broadened (‘these confines’ are only the base from which the dogs of war are to be let slip). Octavius' servant enters to confirm that Caesar had already sent for his nephew;

He lies to-night within seven leagues of Rome.

The phrasing, though it is unwarranted by Plutarch, seems to suggest an army pausing on the march. Plutarch says that Octavius was studying at Apollonia, tarrying for Caesar, ‘because he was determined to make war with the Parthians’. It was Lepidus whose troops moved into the city of Rome the next night after the assassination. At any rate, Antony instructs the man to tell Octavius,

Here is a mourning Rome, a dangerous Rome,
No Rome of safety for Octavius yet.

The pun, an unconscious echo of Cassius's pun, again serves to keep in our imaginations the wider territorial room in which the militarists can group their forces. Shakespeare evidently wanted to hold over the entry of the soldiers till his scene had moved far from Rome. A similar, if this time incidental, effect can be noted from a passage in Antony's long demogogic speech to the people. He works on their imperialist sentiment as he displays Caesar's rent mantle.

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

Actually Antony had not been present at this victory over the Belgae, but powerful nostalgia for the field makes the conspirators' disloyalty seem treacherously ungrateful, and their perception of their own interests quite myopic. Once the mischief of the mob is set afoot by Antony's verbal incendiarism, which one sees as a classic example of oratorical manipulation, Shakespeare exaggerates the rapidity of events. Brutus and Cassius are reported to have fled before there is time to light the fires. Octavius and Lepidus are installed in Caesar's home, and Antony is willing to set up the triumvirate with them instantaneously, although Plutarch tells of a year's conflict between them. On the other hand the take-over of Rome by Lepidus's army is played down. The point is to dramatise that the furious mob gets no scope beyond what is implemental to the wishes of the friends of Caesar. The political aimlessness of the mob is enacted in the incident in which Cinna the poet is subjected to a disorderly catechism and then apparently torn to pieces for bearing the same name as one of the conspirators. The farce of mistaken identity is given a savage edge in this triumph of destructive unreason.

From this random victimisation we are turned to the cool but even more shocking scene (Act IV, Scene i) in which the three masters of the situation arrange in private the deaths of those who sympathise with their opponents. The grimly bargained proscriptions (Antony agrees to tick off his nephew's name—in Plutarch, an uncle's—in return for Lepidus's consent to the elimination of his own brother) convey immediately the energy and ruthlessness of the new government. Antony then sends Lepidus off to fetch Caesar's will so that they can misappropriate some of the funds which had been bequeathed, or so Antony had proclaimed, to the citizens (money-matters arise frequently from now on). As soon as Lepidus's back is turned, Antony falls to criticising him, not for ‘the primal eldest curse’ he has just earned, but for being unoriginal. He is an ass, a horse, a natural slave, and expendable.

                                                  Do not talk of him
But as a property.

The triumvirs' alliance is purely an expedient, an affair of commodity, and already the time is anticipated when thieves will fall out. Antony assumes in himself too easily the qualities of leadership which he slights Lepidus for lacking. Octavius points out that Antony took Lepidus's opinion on the proscriptions and also ‘he's a tried and valiant soldier’, still the most relevant consideration at that juncture. Octavius has the last word in this scene, indicating by a calculating distrust how little he is convinced by Antony's showing.

And some that smile have in their hearts, I fear,
Millions of mischiefs.

He gives expression here to an astuteness to match that of Cassius, which, together with his unusual self-command, constitutes his qualification for the leadership.

V

The real break in the structure of Julius Caesar, as most producers recognise,¹¹ occurs here, before the quarrel-scene between Brutus and Cassius. The shift of scene from Rome decisively ends the excitement and introduces a note of clipped pathos. The characters are men in uniform. In the vague place of Sardis, far from public buildings, on the outer edge of their world, the bleakness of the republicans' prospects is suggested, not only by the unfamiliar place-name, but also by the stiff military phrases which formerly articulate men are reduced to using for greetings: ‘Stand ho! Speak the word along.’ In the argument with Cassius, Brutus still insists on a guarantee of unimpeachable conduct.

                                        What, shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers, shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes,
And sell the mighty space of our large honours
For so much trash as may be grasped thus?

Caesar's support for robbers is adumbrated here for the first time in the play (it is found in Plutarch). Brutus does not necessarily mean that it was purposive support; much injustice is involved in a system tending to one-man rule, and Brutus possibly glances at Caesar's friends' conduct since his death to make the charge more plausible. But its straight dramatic point is to rebuke Cassius for venality. The emphasis falls on the gesture of grasping a contemptible handful of trash, with which Brutus contrasts ‘the mighty space of our large honours’. His pleonasm is that of the false sublime. Their cause is near to inanity in their present predicament. Their language retains potency only in reference to the past. It is only remembrance of their former comradeship that lets Brutus drop his protests, as is demonstrated when Cassius invites him to strike at his breast, as he had done at Caesar's. Their common theme now is longing for the old Rome. The poetry takes on a tone of stern valediction. The twice-told report of Portia's death, unless it indicates authorial revision, points up Brutus's laconic endurance of sorrow. The uncertainty as to whether it was seventy or one hundred senators that the triumvirs had put to death is a kind of gruesome pedantry darkened further by the certainty that Cicero was one of them. The fatal decision to march to meet the enemy at Philippi is made as if it were their last chance.

We, at the height, are ready to decline.

The melancholy mood comes into its own as Brutus bids everyone repeatedly, ‘Good night’, and Lucius plays his sleepy tune. Even Plutarch's ‘horrible vision of a man’, which showed plainly ‘that the Gods were offended with the murther of Caesar’, is toned down by Shakespeare into a dubious subjective apparition of Caesar himself shaped by the weakness of Brutus's eyes. Its message is fatalistically repeated by Brutus, but with calmness. If it is, as it says, Brutus's own ‘evil spirit’ (and it is heard by no one else), its relation to the Gods' opinions is left ambiguous. Brutus's subsequent behaviour is not that of a guilty man; it is not like Macbeth's after he has seen the ghost of Banquo. Caesar's ghost provides just another pointer to the unavoidable outcome; it signifies power rather than judgment. The definitive sense in which the spirit of Caesar is mighty yet is soon to be explained. The plot of the play turns, as Goethe says all Shakespeare's plots turn, upon the hidden point of conflict between ‘the peculiarity of our ego, the pretended freedom of our will’ and ‘the necessary course of the whole’ event.¹² The republican leaders quite foresee their defeat as probable, but remain patiently unrepentant. Brutus assures Cassius,

                    think not, thou noble Roman,
That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome;
He bears too great a mind.

One may object to this self-estimate as somewhat vain without recoiling from the speaker. The context is one of solemn farewell and Brutus is refusing the alternative of survival as a prisoner. The ceremonial scene presented as they iterate their ‘everlasting farewell’ assures us that their parting is ‘well made’. They have nothing to regret; their stand is not ultimately meaningless. In accordance with this attitude, Cassius in his last deed makes his servant Pindarus a freeman for assisting him in his suicide. Shakespeare gives to this bondman, whose soliloquy is entirely his own idea, a strangely exhilarating couplet, which breaks the slow monotony of sacrifice. He naïvely rebels against the whole Roman situation: he has known Rome enough.

Far from this country Pindarus shall run,
Where never Roman shall take note of him.

The audience cannot help responding to this healthy reaction. Pindarus's perfunctory dislike of Romans is perfectly natural, but we still feel that Cassius has deserved partly to be exempted. And Shakespeare has two magniloquent tributes in reserve for him; one from Titinius,

The sun of Rome is set. Our day is gone;
Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.

and then, from Brutus,

The last of all the Romans, fare thee well!
It is impossible that ever Rome
Should breed thy fellow.

The idea that the tragedy marks the demise of a historical tradition could not be more obviously stated. Both Brutus and Cassius die with a mention of Caesar's posthumous revenge, but Brutus's resignation and his final recollection of the doubtful will with which he had killed Caesar do not mean crudely that he got what he deserved. More neutrally, he got what was coming to him.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, though far from biassed in favour of Caesar's assassins, no doubt contributed to republican sentiment in 17th-Century England. But the play is not a tract for those who need an unmistakeable commitment. The tone of the verse, often praised for its augustness, restraint and classical spirituality, is in fact predominantly one of hopelessness. The nobility it celebrates had become too shrunken for grandeur. But the conspiracy against Caesar is not shown merely as the mistake of men who did not understand politics well enough to bring off a complex success; it emerges as a last stroke of defiance in a society which had become impervious to political subtlety. Julius Caesar mourns the supercession of a political tradition by armed force. The conditions for the old politics cannot be re-established by assassination. As in Hamlet, free consciousness is confronted by a primitive demand and destroys itself in a revenge-feud. But there is nothing modern about Julius Caesar. There is no wasted future to lament, only an irrelevant past and a vacant centre. The city of Rome was no longer the real landscape of government, but on the perimeter of her world the ignorant armies clashed, sounding the prelude to empire. There the political dramatist, like the free Pindarus, nimbly gets out.

Notes

1. Robert B. Heilman. ‘To know Himself: An Aspect of Tragic Structure’, in A Review of English Literature, V (April, 1964; p. 41).

2. John Anson has argued in his ‘Caesar's Stoic Pride’, in Shakespeare: Julius Caesar (Casebook, ed. P. Ure, 1969, p. 215), reprinted from Shakespeare Studies II (1966), that in his whole presentation of Caesar's illness Shakespeare ‘is attempting to represent the pathological constrictiveness of Stoic morality’.

3. In The Massacre at Paris Marlowe, or the actors, had made the wicked Guise talk of himself as Caesar. Elizabethan ambivalence with regard to Caesar is examined in G. Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, V (1964).

4. V. n. to Act III, Scene 1, 11. 47-48, in the Arden edition, p. 65, for a review of this controversy.

5. Loc. cit., p. 218.

6. N. Rabkin, ‘Structure, Convention, and Meaning in Julius Caesar’, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXIII, 244 (1964).

7. Mark Van Doren, in his 1939 essay on Julius Caesar, reprinted in L. Dean's Twentieth Century Interpretations of Julius Caesar (1968), pp. 8-16, argues that ‘the music of monosyllables’ is no one speaker's monopoly in the play, the purpose at all times being ‘to pour into the ear an unimpeded stream of eloquence, a smooth current of artful sound’, p. 11. But Shakespeare uses it very discriminatingly in fact.

8. R. A. Foakes, in ‘An Approach to Julius Caesar’, in Shakespeare Quarterly, V, 267-268 (1954), notes that the words ‘Rome’ and ‘Roman’ occur 72 times in the play and, after Act III until Antony's tribute to Brutus, ‘only in the mouths of the rebels’. One could compare the way the words ‘British Empire’ occurred only in the mouths of certain politicians between, say, 1945 and 1955.

9. L. C. Knights, ‘Personality and Politics in Julius Caesar’, in Further Explorations (1965); reprinted in P. Ure's ‘Casebook’, p. 138.

10. Act II, Scene i, 11. 162-183; Brents Stirling, in his ‘Ritual in Julius Caesar’ (1956), reprinted in P. Ure's ‘Casebook’, p. 164, argues that Brutus is being evasive; he needs ‘ceremony which will purify the violent act of all taint of butchery’, but one must remember that the metaphors refer to keeping down the numbers likely to be killed by them, if carried away by anger.

11. Many critics, however, see the entrance of Antony's servant in Act III, Scene i as the turning point of the play; v. L. Kirschbaum, in his ‘Shakespeare's Stage Blood’, in PMLA, LXIV (1949), reprinted in P. Ure's ‘Casebook’, p. 157. But I believe the conspirators' discomfiture in Rome must follow the murder without a break.

12. G. H. Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe (1855) ii, Ch. 6. Goethe's ‘Oration on Shakespeare’ (1771) is translated there by George Eliot evidently.