Student Question
Why does Shakespeare open the tragedy of Julius Caesar with humor?
Quick answer:
Shakespeare opens with humor in "Julius Caesar" to provide contrast and tension with the tragedy. The humorous exchange between commoners and tribunes, featuring puns by a cobbler, highlights social disruption caused by Caesar's rise. This humor not only entertains but also foreshadows the impending tragedy. Additionally, the opening humorously references Thomas Dekker's "The Shoemaker's Holiday," which preceded the play, engaging Elizabethan audiences familiar with both works.
Shakespeare often juxtaposes humor and tragedy. In fact, almost all of his major tragedies include "light" scenes that both cut through the tension and provide dramatic contrast with the gut-wrenching scenes that characterize plays like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, and others. Commoners especially exhibit a wry, sometimes coarse, but often perceptive wit in Shakespeare's plays. In the case of Julius Caesar , the play opens with Flavius and Marullus , two tribunes, encountering a crowd of commoners celebrating Caesar's victory. They confront a cobbler, who responds with a number of puns that would have resonated with Shakespeare's audiences: the cobbler describes himself as a "mender of bad soles," and says that he is leading the crowd of commoners to create more business for himself by wearing out their shoes walking about Rome. In this case, Shakespeare seems to show that the rise of Caesar has...
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disrupted the social bonds and hierarchies that undergirded Roman society. By making these jokes, and carrying them even further--saying, for example, that he could "mend" Marullus--the cobbler is behaving above his station. Shakespeare's audiences would have found this funny, and the mild humiliation that the tribunes experienced would have underscored their alarm at Caesar's popularity. So in this case, humor is used to create dramatic tension.
How does Shakespeare use humor in the opening scene of Julius Caesar?
Immediately preceding the first production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in 1599 was a romantic comedy called The Shoemaker's Holiday by Thomas Dekker (c.1572-1632). Some scholars believe he had a hand in editing some of Shakespeare's plays. Patrons to the theatre during the Elizabethan Age might see productions back to back; frequently the actors would perform one play in the morning and another at night. Those watching the opening to JC would clearly recognize that Shakespeare was spoofing the preceding play, ever so briefly through the character of the cobbler, before getting down to the serious business of conspiring against and murdering Caesar.
Shakespeare often uses simple people for comic relief in his plays. Fools, jesters, merchants, etc. In Act I of Julius Caesar, several "commoners" are milling about in the streets, not working, celebrating Caesar's latest victory. An exchange of words takes place between these commoners and Flavus and Marullus, who call them "idle creatures" and chide them for not working. They parry back and forth and, believe it or not, the exchange would have been quite humorous in Shakespeare's time. For example, the cobbler puns: "I am a mender of bad soles" - foreshadowing, in a humorous way, that there are going to be some "bad souls" in the play that will need mending. Read carefully the words of the "second commoner" and look for hidden meaning in his words. Shakespeare uses humor to foreshadow the tragic events that are to follow in the play.