Julius Caesar

Summary:

Julius Caesar returns triumphant to Rome, having defeated his military rival Pompey in combat. During his victory parade, Cassius, a member of the Roman senate, attempts to convince Brutus, another Senator and friend of Caesar’s, to join a conspiracy to kill the former general, claiming that he seeks to abolish the Senate and accept power as Emperor. After much deliberation, Brutus joins the conspiracy, and during a Senate session on the Ides of March they assassinate Caesar. While they claim to have acted for the good of Rome, Caesar’s friend Mark Anthony incites the common people and turns them against the conspirators, sparking a civil war between the conspirator’s faction led by Cassius & Brutus, and the loyalist faction headed by Mark Anthony & Caesar’s adopted son Octavius. The two sides meet in battle and, facing a costly loss, both Cassius and Brutus commit suicide rather than return to Rome as prisoners.

What It’s About:

How far would you go to protect your ideals?

Julius Caesar is a fascinating play to sit down and read as, while most people are actually fairly unfamiliar with the text itself (especially in recent years it’s seen fairly few adaptations and no major cinematic ones), nearly everyone knows the events the play depicts. Few people could tell you about the drama of Antony’s oratory during the funeral scene, but everyone knows what happens in the Senate chambers before it - Caesar surrounded, stabbed, ‘Et tu Brute?’ and then, civil war. As a result, certain conceptions have worked their way into the public unconscious about the play - even if you haven’t read it, you still kind of think you know what happens.

I can’t sit here and say that those conceptions are wrong, but - they probably are. First and foremost, for a play named after and nominally about Caesar, he’s not in it all that much. The man has a grand total of 3 scenes, and is dead by the 3rd act - hardly the meaty role you’d want to plug a leading man eating up half your budget into. And yet, despite the relatively short stage time, Caesar looms large over the play - characters are always speaking about him, discussing his accomplishments or, later, his legacy, and defining their own actions in relation to him. As Cassius comments, he “doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus (1.2.135-136)” - and yet much like that famous wonder of the ancient world, it feels at times like the play suggests that Caesar is hollow, and does not quite live up to his legend. Historically, it’s believed that Caesar suffered from a number of infirmities, notably deafness and epilepsy, and the play makes pains to include both faults within his short stage time. Moreover, for all Caesar’s boasting and bravado, it is just that - boasting. His actions are talked about at great length, and yet the Caesar of the play is not one of action, but rather one of talk and deliberation. We do not get to see the general who conquered all of Gaul - instead we see the politician who upended the Roman state and died unceremoniously with a knife in his back. All this leaves us with a role which certainly has some meat (it’s almost trivially easy for the actor in the Caesar role to steal the show), but ultimately feels empty.

This is of course due to the fact that the real protagonist of the play is Brutus, the purported paragon of Rome who suffers great moral deliberation over his decision to kill Caesar. From a purely historical perspective, Brutus is a divisive character - some paint him as a savior of democracy fighting against a would-be tyrant, while others portray him as a betrayer and, in the case of Dante’s Divine Comedy, cast him into the literal pit of Hell. Shakespeare, as he tends to do, splits the difference; his portrayal of Brutus is neither villain nor paragon, but ultimately human. Brutus is a friend of Caesar’s, and at the start of the play considers him a brother and a comrade-in-arms. And yet, he’s also passionately dedicated to the ideals of the Roman Republic; most specifically, to the idea of democratically elected leaders and the general rule of law ahead of a cult of personality. Brutus’s conflict between his friendship and his values provides the moral center for the play, and he has a number of soliloquies weighing the potential consequences of his actions, turning them over in his mind. Even after he makes his choice and kills Caesar, he is literally haunted by the decision, with Caesar’s ghost appearing late in the play to announce his doom. In many ways, Brutus serves as a predecessor to the complicated and morally conflicted heroes who would come to be Shakespeare’s stock in trade; Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello all are inheritors to this legacy, and Brutus serves to link these later dramas to Shakespeare’s earlier, historical work. He’s by far the most morally complicated character in this play, and the fact that his legacy was so hotly debated in Shakespeare’s time, and remains so to this day, in many ways proves the strength of this story as an allegory which echoes across history (more on that later).

If This Were A Movie:

The closest allegory to this play in terms of modern sensibilities would be something along the lines of an HBO limited miniseries - think John Adams and you’re not too far off. In the same way that these series tend to provide a new spin on familiar events, Shakespeare was depicting a story that even at the time was well known in the public unconscious; every schoolboy learned the lives of the great Romans and the history of the Empire. You weren’t watching to be surprised, but rather to see what interesting, somewhat lurid HBO-spin would be put on it.

Also much like these modern historical miniseries, Shakespeare knew when to play fast and loose with historical facts. There are a number of dramatic tricks at play here, most notably that the timeline of the play is greatly accelerated compared to historical events. But the single most significant departure is Brutus himself; while we can’t say for certain what his motivations were in killing Caesar, most accounts agree that they were hardly so altruistic, and Brutus hardly so noble as is depicted here. But as always, Shakespeare was first and foremost a storyteller; he knew never to let accuracy get in the way of a good tale.

The Line From The Play That You Know:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. - 3.2.71

This line kicks off Mark Antony’s impassioned speech following Caesar’s death. Brutus foolishly allows him to speak to the crowd of assembled commoners, whom he’s only just succeeded in calming down, and then yields the pulpit to Antony to give what he assumes is a eulogy. Instead, Antony whips the crowd into a bloody frenzy, igniting the civil war which takes up the later acts of the play. It deserves mentioning here that much of the play’s allegorical significance lies in the hands of the director, and the decisions he makes with this scene and others like it. Is Antony simply delivering a passionate remembrance of his friend, or is he trying to manipulate the crowd? Decisions like this shape our opinion of him, and the loyalist faction as a whole.

The Line You Should Know:

As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honor him; but as he was ambitious I slew him. - 3.2.23-25

This line, from the same scene as above, is Brutus attempting to explain his actions to the assembled crowd, justifying Caesar’s death to them as he’s justified it to himself; that he had no choice but to kill him in order to preserve the values of the Roman Republic. He succeeds, too, at least until he lets Antony take the pulpit. It’s notable here that Antony’s lines are delivered in verse while Brutus’s are in prose - that is, Antony’s speech is written with rhythm and meter in mind, whereas Brutus’s is not. There are whole essays written about the significance of verse and prose in Shakespeare’s work, but here it makes Antony’s speech sound just like that - a speech. Brutus, by contrast, comes across much more plain-spoken, as prose-based characters often do. The effect serves to give more fire to Antony’s words and make them seem more persuasive, but as mentioned above this can be used to cast him in a sinister light as well.

Notable Adaptation:

That’s right, Me and Orson Welles is an adaptation of Julius Caesar.

Ok, it’s not, but the film is about Welles’ 1937 Mercury Theater production of the play, which famously reframed the setting in reference to the rise of facist powers in Europe at the time. Specifically, the stark lighting and the salutes as seen in the photo below called to mind the Nuremberg rallies, and the costuming and set dec of the play was specifically meant to evoke Mussolini and facist Italy. This was not the first time the play was used to make a political point, nor would it be the last, but it’s notable for the stark choices Welles made, especially around Scene 3.3, which depicts Cinna the poet being beaten to death because he happens to share a name with one of the conspirators. Welles cast it as an all-to-real look at mob violence, and according to first-hand accounts it was a powerful scene for the time.

If you’re looking for an actual trailer, the below staging from 2018 by the National Theater looks incredible; I’ve only seen clips, but as with the above it certainly leans into the political context of the day.

General Notes:

There is an obvious and frankly facile reason I’m talking about this play right now; I’ve mentioned a few times at this point that adaptations love to put this play into a modern context, and at this moment in American history, it has never felt more appropriate to do so. While it appears that the worst of the storm is weathered, with Joe Biden inaugurated and a peaceful transition of power having occurred, there were times over the last 2 months where that outcome did not feel so likely, none more so than January 6th when protestors stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to thwart the confirmation of a democratically elected President. As I read it over the past week, I certainly felt a better understanding for Brutus’s deliberations than I had before, as he sat there weighing the fate of a would-be tyrant.

Of course, directors were drawing this parallel long before the attempted coup; the National Theater adaptation a few paragraphs up certainly hints at it, but a 2017 staging by the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park program dispenses with all subtlety and does everything but rename the character Donald. That staging, as you might imagine, saw a great deal of controversy. Protestors disrupted the staging on numerous occasions, and a handful of major corporate sponsors even pulled their funding. “How,” pundits and right-wing news sites asked, “can we allow for a play that advocates for violence and the assassination of the president?”

The only issue of course being that it doesn’t. You can surely make the argument that a play depicting the assassination of a sitting president through a thinly veiled wink is in enormously poor taste, but to say that Julius Caesar advocates for assassination is to deliberately and willfully misread the play. For one, this argument fails to see that much of the play advocates for Julius Caesar as a powerful and beloved leader of the people. For all his faults, he is treated as a hero by the common populous, and is nonetheless a decorated war hero. The moral crux of the play is Brutus deliberating on his decision to kill Caesar; portraying a Caesar without any virtues - a nakedly fascist, arrogant, and power hungry Caesar - essentially neuters the first half of the play of all drama and meaning.

But perhaps more importantly, the play can hardly be said to advocate for assassination given that the conspirators FAIL. Not only do Brutus and Cassius end up dead, driven out of Rome by Mark Anthony and Octavius at the head of the loyalist faction, but also Rome then proceeds to go on to abolish the Senate and become an Empire! Caesar did not become the tyrant Brutus feared, but his adopted son Octavius goes on to betray Antony, seize power for himself, and is shortly crowned the first Roman Emperor. To say that this play advocates for assassination is to ignore the massive and ultimately fatal consequences it delivers to the conspirators, to say nothing of the fact that as Shakespeare’s audience knew, and as we all should know as well, it all ends up ultimately being for naught. As the Public Theater said during all this controversy, the play is, if anything, a condemnation of fighting for democracy via undemocratic means - a reminder that political violence from any side ultimately sows the seeds of its own destruction.

A Monologue For the Road

I realized I’d gotten to the end of this and we hadn’t heard from the man himself, so let's end on the would-be king.

I could be well moved, if I were as you;

If I could pray to move, prayers would move me.

But I am constant as the Northern Star

Of whose true-fixed and resting quality

There is no fellow in the firmament.

The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks;

They are all fire, and every one doth shine.

But there’s but one in all doth hold his place.

So in the world: ‘tis furnished well with men,

And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive;

Yet in the number 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 banished

And constant do remain to keep him so. 3.1.59-74