'Like Brutus, like himself

The Roman idea of constancy in Julius Caesar, with its blend of Senecan steadfastness, Ciceronian consistency, role-playing, and concern for public opinion, is perhaps most sharply summed up in the traditional phrase: to be 'like oneself. The phrase is only used in the last act, and it is in these final scenes that the meaning of constancy is most clearly defined, as Brutus faces its final test, death.

The problems involved in being constant are sharply highlighted in Brutus' double response to the death of Portia. At the end of the quarrel in 4. 2, Brutus, who has been rigidly self-contained in the face of Cassius' passion, bursts into surprising rage at the poet's interruption. Cassius teases him with the lapse from his customary 'philosophy', and Brutus responds (with an odd blend of stark grief and Stoic pride), 'No man bears sorrow better. Portia is dead' (4. 2. 201). The revelation, which forces us to re-evaluate what had up to this moment seemed Brutus' inhuman coldness, is the play's most dramatic demonstration of constancy as the repression of pain. It is illuminated, too, when we learn that Portia, who was so proud of her ability to 'bear . . . with patience' (2. 1. 300), died of '[i]mpatience' of Brutus' absence (4. 2. 204), and by a method horribly appropriate to the Stoic suppression of emotion: swallowing fire (206-10).

A little later, the question of Portia's death is raised again. This time Brutus claims ignorance:

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.

(241-9)

In this public response Brutus is at once maintaining decorum, the behaviour appropriate to 'a Roman' and to Brutus, and staging a Senecan 'example of constancy' for the benefit of others like Messala. But in the process of maintaining formal constancy he is forced to dissemble his true feelings and tell a flat lie. The ambiguity of Cassius' half-admiring, half-appalled comment hinges on the meaning of 'art'. Its primary, ostensible meaning is 'The learning of the schools' (OED 3)—that is, 'I am as well trained as you in Stoic ethical theory, but I couldn't bear to put it into practice like this.'⁴⁰ There is, however, a secondary meaning shared only between Cassius and Brutus: 'Studied conduct or action . . . artfulness' (OED 13)—'I thought I was a good hypocrite, but how can you bear to act at a moment like this?' Many critics, equally appalled, have explained away the duplicate revelation as a confusion produced by rewriting.⁴¹ I see it rather as central to Shakespeare's portrayal of constancy: as a genuinely noble ideal which nevertheless rests on unnatural suppression of feeling and on 'artful' pretence, both directed toward satisfying the opinions of others.

The possibility of suicide for Brutus himself is first raised in his conversation with Cassius in 5. 1. I have already looked at this problematic passage in relation to the ambiguity of North and the question of 'that philosophy'; here I would note how Shakespeare links these ambiguities to questions about decorum. Brutus shifts from a fumbling first-person attempt to explain his position ('I know not how, / But . . . ') to a firm third-person declaration that 'Brutus . . . bears too great a mind' to be led in triumph. The illeism suggests that he has slipped from Stoic philosophy to Roman decorum. Philosophy may claim that it is more constant to endure defeat, but as 'Brutus' and a 'noble Roman' he cannot endure such humiliation; to live on in defeat would be for him, as for Cato in Cicero's discussion (1. 112), a violation of decorum. To preserve the integrity of his persona, he must die.

The link between death and decorum is heavily stressed in the scenes which lead up to Brutus' death. Titinius dies with the words: 'this is a Roman's part' (5. 3. 88). In 5. 4 this idea of playing a part to the end, and dying in character, is linked with an echoing insistence on names. Young Cato 'proclaim[s his] name about the field' (3) until he is cut down and Lucillius declares that he will 'be honoured, being Cato's son' (11). Lucillius himself meanwhile is more literally playing a part: 'And I am Brutus, Marcus Brutus, I' (7).⁴² When his pretence is discovered, he tells Antony,

I dare assure thee that no enemy
Shall ever take alive the noble Brutus.
The gods defend him from so great a shame.
When you do find him, or alive or dead,
He will be found like Brutus, like himself.

(5. 4. 21-5)

The context, with its motifs of names, honour, and acting, throws a light on the implications of the traditional Stoic formula. Acting 'like himself, Brutus, as much as Lucillius, can be seen as a man playing the role of Brutus.⁴³

Senecan constancy and decorum finally mingle in Brutus' death scene. His justification for death is Stoic: it is 'more worthy' to choose death, actively asserting one's freedom, than to wait to be killed (5. 5. 24).⁴⁴ Under the Stoicism, though, there is a sense that death is positively welcome. When Brutus declares, 'my bones would rest, / That have but laboured to attain this hour' (41-2), he implies the 'teleological fallacy' (life is merely a preparation for death); but we also hear a note of sad futility (has my labour come only to this?) and of relief that the labour is over. The same note of relief is heard in his last words: 'Caesar, now be still. / I killed not thee with half so good a will' (50-1). At the same time he reveals his continued concern with honour and reputation, assuring his followers that he will 'have glory by this losing day' (36), and reassuring himself that Strato, the instrument of his death, is 'a fellow of a good respect' whose life has 'some smatch of honour in it' (45-6). After his death, Strato and Lucillius sum up:

MESSALA. . . . Strato, where is thy master?
STRATO. Free from the bondage you are in, Messala.
The conquerors can but make a fire of him,
For Brutus only overcame himself,
And no man else hath honour by his death.
LUCILLIUS. So Brutus should be found. I thank thee, Brutus,
That thou hast proved Lucillius' saying true.

(53-9)

This coda brings together the themes of constancy, decorum, honour, and death. Brutus' suicide has proved his Stoic constancy: asserting his freedom and his invulnerability to external evils, he has set his spirit free and left only his despised body to the conquerors. He has died, in Seneca's term, for the sake of dignitas: by dying well he escapes the peril of an evil life, ensures he cannot be forced to change or compromise, and remains himself to the end. Thus he preserves not only Senecan constancy but also decorum. Lucillius recalls for us his earlier prediction; Brutus has been 'found . . . like himself, consistent in character to the end.

Nevertheless, the hints of relief and regret in Brutus' dying words remind us that the role he has been playing, with increasing strain, was not necessarily his true self. He has maintained his role to the end and died in the way Lucillius and others expected. Roman opinion will honour him for dying 'like himself'—but, as he himself said, every like is not the same.⁴⁵

The death of Brutus embodies the complexity of 'constancy' in Julius Caesar. He simultaneously fulfils the demands of Stoic ethics, remaining 'constant as the Northern Star' in the face of defeat and death, and of Roman decorum, maintaining 'formal constancy' and playing his part consistently to the end; in both ways he has been 'always the same' in life, and will remain so in fame after his death. Both ideals, however, involve the strain of pretending to be what he is not, and concealing and suppressing his human weakness. It is not surprising that Brutus welcomes death. Only in death can he end the strain of pretence, and achieve in fact the condition he aspires to: absolute changelessness and immovability, a complete freedom of the mind from the body's weakness, and a complete identification between himself and his public role. Ultimately, to play 'a Roman's part' is to die.

Notes

^lJulius Caesar, New [Cambridge] Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1949), note ad loa; he does not explicitly make the connection with Cicero. 'Formal' means 'in outward form or appearance' (OED lc), but with overtones of more pejorative senses: merely in outward appearance (2c), preoccupied with forms (8). Compare the use of 'form' with implications of pretence and deceit in 1. 2. 299 ('puts on this tardy form') and 4. 2. 40 ('this sober form . . . hides wrongs').

²OED 'Tire' v³ 2b ('To attire, clothe duly'); cf. 'tiring-house', the theatrical term for the backstage area. I have not seen this pun previously noted.

³ Few critics have looked in detail at these lines. One exception is Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore, 1983), 164, who notes the contradiction between 'resplendent transcendence' and 'the duplicitous form of the actor', but distracts from the central problem by creating unnecessary difficulties over the contrast between genuine and assumed looks.

⁴. . . Robert Ornstein, 'Seneca and the Political Drama of Julius Caesar', Journal of English and Germanic Philology [JEGP] 57 (1958), 51-6, is not on constancy, but relates to a comment in Seneca's De beneficiis (2. 20) on Brutus' political naivety.

⁵ Earlier critics regretted the stiffness of the characters ('more orators than men': Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (London, 1939; New York, 1955), 153). But MacCallum's perception in 1910 (Shakespeare's Roman Plays) of a distinction between character and role in Caesar ('he must affect to be what he is not', 231) and Brutus ('a kind of pose', 241) has been taken up by most later critics, many of whom see role-playing as related to the political and ethical nature of Rome. Some of the more important discussions are L. C. Knights, 'Personality and Politics in Julius Caesar' (1965; repr. in his 'Hamlet' and Other Shakespearean Essays (Cambridge, 1979), 82-101); Peter Ure, 'Character and Role from Richard III to Julius Caesar', in his Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, 22-43; Matthew Proser, The Heroic Image in Five Shakespearean Tragedies (Princeton, 1965), 10-50; Stampfer, Tragic Engagement, 77-99; John W. Velz, ' "If I Were Brutus Now": Role-playing in Julius Caesar', Shakespeare Studies 4 (1969), 149-59; Kaufmann and Ronan, 'Julius Caesar', esp. 20 ('Stoicism is a form of acting'), 37-43; Simmons, Pagan World, ch. 3 ('Julius Caesar: Our Roman Actors', 65-108); Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-playing in Shakespeare (Toronto, 1978), 152-61; Goldberg, Politics of Literature, ch. 4 ('The Roman Actor', 164-76); Ralph Berry, 'Communal Identity and the Rituals of Julius Caesar', in his Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (London, 1985), 75-87; Edward Pechter, 'Julius Caesar and Sejanus: Roman Politics, Inner Selves and the Power of the Theatre', in E. A. J. Honigmann (ed.), Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Manchester, 1986), 60-78.

⁶ R. A. Foakes, 'An Approach to Julius Caesar', Shakespeare Quarterly [SQ] 5 (1954), 259-70, was perhaps the first to note the thematic importance of knowledge and error: 'All is the result of a self-deception, an obsession with names and an ignorance of reality' (270). The epistemological theme has been developed by Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1963); Mildred E. Hartsock, 'The Complexity of Julius Caesar', PMLA 81 (1966), 56-62; René E. Fortin, 'Julius Caesar: An Experiment in Point of View', SQ 19 (1968), 341-7; D. J. Palmer, 'Tragic Error in Julius Caesar', SQ 21 (1970), 399-409 (which Stoically derives error from passion); Wilders, Lost Garden, ch. 5 ('Knowledge and Judgement', 79-101). Chang ('Renaissance Historiography') and Rice ('Judgment') relate the theme to Renaissance scepticism, and Vawter, 'After Their Fashion', to Stoic views on fate and divination (an emphasis rather different from mine).

⁷ 'Brutus's Philosophy', Notes and Queries 215 (1970), 128.

⁸ Mark Sacharoff, 'Suicide and Brutus' Philosophy in Julius Caesar', Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972), 115-22, lays out the problems but comes to no convincing conclusion; R. F. Fleissner, 'That Philosophy in Julius Caesar Again', Archiv 222 (1985), 344-5, unconvincingly suggests that 'that philosophy' is Cato's not Brutus'; Wymer, Suicide and Despair, 152, argues that, in the light of Neostoic disapproval of suicide, Shakespeare could still have considered Brutus a Stoic; Martindale and Martindale argue that 'Shakespeare deliberately blurs the issue' (Shakespeare and the Uses of Antiquity, 168), though they see this as a weakness in the play.

⁹ Monsarrat, Light from the Porch, 139-44 (141, 143, 144). In a long footnote (141-2 n.) Monsarrat effectively dismantles Vawter's claim that the historical Brutus was a Stoic.

¹⁰ Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, 224.

¹¹Phaedo 61c; see also Wymer, Suicide and Despair, 10-11.

¹² The pun is noted by Dover Wilson and Arthur Humphreys (Oxford Shakespeare edn., Oxford, 1984).

¹³ See Jane Bligh, 'Cicero's Choric Comment in Julius Caesar', English Studies in Canada, 8 (1982), 391-408, who surveys earlier comments to the same effect.

¹⁴ On imagery, see G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London, 1931; 3rd edn., 1951), 32-62 (The Torch of Life') and Charney, Shakespeare's Roman Plays, ch. 3. Knight's The Eroticism of Julius Caesar' (63-95), though eccentric, brings out the elements of irrationality and disorder which conflict with Roman order in the play, and recent criticism has increasingly focused on these: e.g. Spevack's introduction ('What truth . . . exists in the play is connected with the "irrational" ', 26); Mark Rose, 'Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599', English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989), 291-304 (The world of this play is fundamentally mysterious', 298).

¹⁵ This causal relationship is not always recognized: e.g. Vawter cites Casca's words as showing that constancy is impossible, but does not add that they also show why it is so desirable ('Division', 184).

¹⁶ There is no hint for this speech in Plutarch. The possible influence of earlier theatrical versions of Caesar as a bombastic Senecan tyrant-figure was explored by Harry Morgan Ayres, 'Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in the Light of Some Other Versions', PMLA 25 (1910), 183-227, and Joan Rees, 'Julius Caesar: An Earlier Play and an Interpretation', SQ 4 (1955), 135-41.

¹⁷ 'Move[d]' is also used in this sense at 1. 1. 61; 1. 3. 120; 3. 1. 236; 3. 2. 224. The sense of 'persuaded' is clearest in 1. 3; elsewhere it has clear emotional overtones. Kaufmann and Ronan, 'Julius Caesar', 24, note the centrality of the word 'move', without distinguishing its senses; Michael E. Mooney, ' "Passion, I See, Is Catching": The Rhetoric of Julius Caesar', JEGP 90 (1991), 31-50, comments on its use in contexts of persuasion.

¹⁸ Levitsky, 'Elements', 242, is clearly wrong to assume that Brutus is criticizing rather than praising Caesar, but the misreading does suggest the potential moral ambiguity of his praise. On Brutus and reason, see Vawter, 'Division', 182, though his comments are extreme.

¹⁹OED and editors define 'budge' as 'flinch', but the idea of movement is clearly implied.

²⁰ See Kaufmann and Ronan, 'Julius Caesar', 40.

²¹ Shakespeare elsewhere uses 'sides' (of the body) in the context of repressing powerful emotions: e.g. TN 2. 4. 92; Lear (F text) 2. 2. 370.

²² Brutus' phrasing is suggestively ambiguous. The following lines make it clear that he means 'I am indifferent to death if it comes accompanied by honour' ; but the more literal reading, that honour (fame, popular approval) is as 'indifferent' as death, is clearly also a plausible Stoic position.

²³ Benjamin Boyce, 'The Stoic Consolatio and Shakespeare', PMLA 64 (1949), 771-80, deals with Shakespeare's often ironic use of such Stoic responses to death.

²⁴ The phrase is Harley Granville-Barker's, Prefaces to Shakespeare (London, 1963; first pub. 1930), ii. 227.

²⁵ On the motif of sickness see Knight, Imperial Theme, 40-2 ('Nearly everyone in the play is ill'); Foakes, 'Approach', 198-9.

²⁶ Anson, 'Politics of the Hardened Heart', 14-18. This paragraph is strongly indebted to Anson, though I diverge from his subsequent argument.

²⁷ Vawter ('Division', 177) and most editors, like the OED, take 'apprehensive' to mean 'intelligent' (OED's sense 4); I prefer, with Humphreys, to take it as meaning primarily 'capable of perception' (OED 2). It seems incongruous in this context for Caesar to praise human beings in general for being intelligent.

²⁸ Critics who have noted the parallelism of Caesar and Brutus include Norman Rabkin, 'Structure, Convention and Meaning in Julius Caesar', JEGP 63 (1964), 240-54, and Simmons, Pagan World, 87.

²⁹ Foakes, 'Approach', 267-9; Berry, 'Communal Identity', in Awareness. Word counts here and elsewhere are taken from Marvin Spevack (ed.), A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, 6 vols. (Hildesheim, 1968-70).

³⁰ This passage is well discussed by Simmons, Pagan World, 95-8.

³¹ On 'honour' I am indebted to Norman Council, When Honour's at the Stake: Ideas of Honour in Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1973), ch. 3 (60-74). Gary Miles illuminatingly discusses the actual importance of honour in Roman culture, though he oddly concludes that Shakespeare failed to understand, or at least to communicate, 'why his Roman subjects identified public performance and personal worth as completely as they did' ('How Roman', 282).

³² Leggati has some shrewd comments on the ways in which 'appearances matter' in the play (Shakespeare's Political Drama, 141-3).

³³ On rhetoric, see Gayle Greene, ' "The Power of Speech To Stir Men's Blood": The Language of Tragedy in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar', Renaissance Drama 11 (1980), 67-93; John W. Velz, 'Orator and Imperator in Julius Caesar: Style and the Process of Roman History', Shakespeare Studies 15 (1982), 55-75; Anne Barton, 'Julius Caesar and Coriolanus: Shakespeare's Roman World of Words', in Philip H. Highfield Jr. (ed.), Shakespeare's Craft (Carbondale, Ill., 1982), 24-47 (who argues that rhetoric in this play is 'unequivocally poisonous', 40); and Mooney, 'Rhetoric'.

³⁴ See Kaufmann and Ronan, 'Julius Caesar', 40.

³⁵ William O. Scott, 'The Speculative Eye: Problematic Self-Knowledge in Julius Caesar', Shakespeare Survey 40 (1988), 77-89, discusses this passage, though with the effect of darkening rather than illuminating it. Like other commentators Scott compares Tro. 3. 3. 90-118, where the same idea is treated with more overt irony.

³⁶ Barbara L. Parker, ' "A Thing Unfirm": Plato's Republic and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar', SQ 44 (1993), 30-43 (36), links this episode with a passage in Plato's Republic (4. 434) where carpenter and cobbler typify the masses who must not be allowed to meddle in government. If she is right, the play opens with an allusion to Plato's view that a just community depends on each citizen consistently playing a single role, and hence a gesture towards the Platonic assumptions at the root of the whole constancy tradition. (This is not to accept Parker's wider interpretation of Shakespeare's politics as Platonic.)

³⁷ Foakes, 'Approach', 264-7; Madeleine Doran, 'What Should Be in that "Caesar"?: Proper Names in Julius Caesar', in Shakespeare's Dramatic Language (Madison, 1976), 120-53; Berry, Awareness, 79 (the name as 'a kind of externalized self).

³⁸ Velz, 'Ancient World', 10. Velz also discusses the device in 'If I Were Brutus Now', but his political interpretation (someone must 'be Caesar') is different from mine.

³⁹ The inconsistencies of Casca's characterization have often been criticized (e.g. by Granville-Barker, Prefaces, ii. 212), but in a play so concerned with constancy they are surely as deliberate as those of Cleopatra. For his changes of opinion, note e.g. 2. 1. 142, 152.

⁴⁰ For the use of 'art' to mean (Stoic) philosophy, compare Thomas Lodge's The Wounds of Civil War (ed. J. W. Houppert, Regents edn., London, 1969), where Marius' question, 'What mean have they left me to cure my smart?' is answered by the echo 'Art' (3. 4. 46).

⁴¹ Most earlier 20th-cent. editors saw this passage as an earlier version of the scene intended to have been replaced by 4. 2. 195-210, and often bracketed it (e.g. Dover Wilson, T. S. Dorsch (Arden, London, 1955)). More recent editors tend to accept that both versions were intended to stand (e.g. the complete Oxford; Humphreys, 79-81), though Spevack, in a confusingly inconclusive discussion, seems to incline towards the duplication theory (149-50). Thomas Clayton, ' "Should Brutus Never Taste of Portia's Death but Once?": Text and Performance in Julius Caesar', Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 23 (1983), 237-58, surveys the debate and convincingly defends the existing text.

⁴² Other editors give the line (unassigned in F) to Brutus himself; the difference does not seriously affect my argument.

⁴³ Foakes ('Approach', 267) notes the importance of the episode but not the significance of 'like himself; Brower (Hero and Saint, 233) connects the phrase in passing with Brutus' 'noble role' but does not develop the insight.

⁴⁴ This Stoic idea is not explicit in Plutarch's account.

⁴⁵ Wymer, Suicide and Despair, ch. 7, esp. 150-4, discusses Brutus' suicide in terms very close to my own, noting the sense of 'tragic . . . self-defeat' (135), the tension between inwardness and public persona, and the un-Roman sense of 'dejection [and] weariness' (154).

Source: '"Untired Spirits and Formal Constancy': Julius Caesar," in Shakespeare and the Constant Romans, Clarendon Press, 1996, pp. 123-48.