William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar (1599)

Cassius (Cyril Nri) and Brutus (Paterson Joseph)

[Image source: https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/julius-caesar-the-lowry-salf-8094 . From the 2012 RSC production by Gregory Doran. Photo by Kwame Lestrade. ]


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Plutarch tells us, near the start of his Life of Marcus Brutus

.... his very enemies which wish him most hurt, because of his conspiracy against Julius Caesar, if there were any noble attempt done in all this conspiracy, they refer it wholly unto Brutus; and all the cruel and violent acts unto Cassius, who was Brutus' familiar friend, but not so well given and conditioned as he.*

Shakespeare picked up that expression "well given". In Julius Caesar I.2, Caesar is discussing Cassius with Antony.

Caesar. ... Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look ;
                  He thinks too much ; such men are dangerous.
Antony.     Fear him not, Caesar, he's not dangerous ;
                 He is a noble Roman, and well given.

Caesar apparently senses that this bland response might not represent Antony's whole view of the matter. After clarifying that, as Caesar, he's of course incapable of fearing anyone, he enlarges on his own opinion of Cassius, then says to Antony:

                  Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,
                  And tell me truly what thou think'st of him.

They walk off the stage at this point, so we never find out what Antony truly thinks. But if we had listened in, it might not have helped much. It's always difficult to know what Antony thinks, and perhaps his is not the kind of mind to think in a settled way. Antony the party animal, the playgoer, the sportsman, has a tremendous instinct for what to say at a given moment. Like the other male leads he is convincingly real but full of contradictions: both warm-hearted and cold-hearted, both spontaneous and calculating. He's a big personality.  In the later part of the play we can see the taciturn Octavius watching Antony, working him out.

At the end, Antony pronounces the final impromptu formula on the dead Brutus.

                  This was the noblest Roman of them all :
                  All the conspirators, save only he,
                  Did that they did in envy of great Caesar ;
                  He only, in a general honest thought
                  And common good to all, made one of them.
                  His life was gentle ; and the elements
                  So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up
                  And say to all the world, "This was a man!" (V.5)

There's the distinction in Brutus' favour that Plutarch talked of. We accept it for what it is; like all Antony's pronouncements, with a pinch of salt. But who at this point remembers what Antony had said to the crowd around him when he was showing Caesar's bloody "mantle"?  (Evidently Shakespeare's players were costumed in modern dress, they did not wear togas.)

                   For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel :
                   Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!
                   This was the most unkindest cut of all :
                   For, when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
                   Ingratitude more strong than traitor's arms
                   Quite vanquish'd him ; then burst his mighty heart ... (III.2)

So wasn't the ungrateful Brutus really the most treacherous, the least noble, of the conspirators? The others, at least, were honest enemies. But Shakespeare's play shows that both Antony's speeches can be, well, half-true.  For Brutus is both high-minded, driven (as he thinks) only by the common good; but also, unlike the others, aware of the enormity of his act, though only before he commits it. When the others arrive at his house, their faces concealed though it's still dark, he projects onto them the "monstrous visage" of conspiracy (II.1) -- but who will be leading this conspiracy but Brutus? And later that morning, a chance remark of Caesar's sends a jab to his conscience:

Caesar.      Good friends, go in, and taste some wine with me ;
                   And we, like friends, will straightway go together.
Brutus (aside). That every like is not the same, O Caesar,
                   The heart of Brutus yearns to think upon! (II.2)

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It was the first time Shakespeare had used Plutarch as his major source. His play would be a history, focussed on an assassination. He made the action astonishingly vivid and exciting. It is an ensemble piece showing four characters in action that Plutarch had described in detail: Caesar, Antony, Brutus and Cassius. (Plutarch didn't give Cassius his own Life, but his character and actions are much discussed, mainly in the Life of Brutus.) Another figure who did get a Life, Cicero, puts in a brief appearance.

Evidently it wasn't Shakespeare's chief priority to dramatize Plutarch's portraits but to make a thrilling and convincing play. He doesn't show us the whole of these characters but just glints of them. The action moves too fast for more. The play's conviction, though, arises partly from the feeling that a whole person is concealed in their passing words and gestures.

This is especially obvious with Caesar himself, who has such a small part, and one that strikingly doesn't attempt to illustrate the character's full life, yet conveys so much by hints and glances.

But Antony too is very much a partial portrait. His drunken parties, his corruption and luxurious living, the behaviour that outraged the public as well as the senate, not to mention his extraordinary military courage, are well-documented in Plutarch, but not here. What we do see in full measure is Antony's common touch and his oratorical skill; those are what's relevant to this story. So Shakespeare's Antony is perfectly in tune with Plutarch's Antony, but the revelation is partial.

Shakespeare's Cassius is not quite so in tune. His personal resentment of anyone greater than himself is apparent; so is his venality. But Plutarch also characterizes him as choleric and cruel. Shakespeare's Cassius develops under his hand into something a little different: proud, ill-disciplined, emotional but warm-hearted, and surprisingly submissive to Brutus.

[ I know I am not alone in finding Cassius strangely lovable. As soon as he begins to sound like Juliet, he wrenches the play's moral compass off-course.

Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that 'Caesar'?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name ...

]

Plutarch gave Shakespeare a huge amount of information about the events and characters of Julius Caesar -- and Shakespeare must have been an incredibly retentive reader, because it's remarkable how much detail he contrived to use.

But Plutarch didn't give him everything, and he didn't use everything that Plutarch gave. For instance Plutarch has a speech of Cassius to Brutus, persuading him to join the conspiracy. But when Shakespeare built his Act I Scene 2, he wanted to cover two separate conversations, in the first of which Cassius acts to restore their friendship, and in the second of which he leads Brutus on towards the plot against Caesar. Besides, Shakespeare needed to introduce these characters, to show us Cassius' hostility to tyranny and Brutus' conflicted worrying. And then, he also decided to animate the discussion by interleaving it with the offstage scene of Antony repeatedly offering the crown to Caesar during the Lupercalia. He built with a tremendous sense of drama. Cassius leads both casually and cautiously up to springing the trump card of Brutus' famed ancestor, vanquisher of the Tarquins. The resulting scene is really all Shakespeare's, however much Plutarch is mined for information. Elsewhere, it's true, Shakespeare sometimes follows Plutarch more closely, e.g. in Portia's speech and in the closing speech of Antony's that I quoted earlier. But for the most part Shakespeare has to make both the scenes and the words. Plutarch, for instance, tells us that Antony displayed Caesar's bloody toga and inflamed the crowd, but he doesn't tell us what Antony actually said.

In the course of this making Shakespeare changes Cassius in another way too. He streamlines the plot by making Cassius himself the author of all those anonymous exhortations that Brutus keeps finding. This makes Cassius momentarily flirt with the stage cliché of Machiavellianism, it makes him seem ingeniously manipulative and suggests a momentary parallel with the later character of Iago. But that's not who Cassius really is. Once Brutus is on board, Cassius attempts nothing else in that line. (Brutus is under no illusions that Cassius has "whetted" his purpose, but he doesn't consider himself to have been deceived.)

So the male leads in Julius Caesar contain multitudes. They contain hints, sometimes hardly even hints, of the often contradictory personality features described by Plutarch, plus other features added by Shakespeare himself. They sometimes behave "out of character". They don't know themselves. As prominent Romans, members of the elite, nobles accustomed to command and imperturbable in the face of death, they resemble each other as much as they differ from each other. As in Hamlet, there's something fathomless and inscrutable about them; and that's partly what makes them seem real.

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Shakespeare, by now so practised at writing history plays, deploys a lightning-quick stagecraft to propel us forward. Who else would think of beginning the play as he does, with a scene featuring the two tribunes Flavius and Marullus (who will never reappear) and knockabout comedy about cobblers? It seems very indirect. And yet this scene is very important, because it gives us the crowd, who will return dramatically in Act III, to be swayed back and forth by politicians, to erupt decisively -- and horrifically, in the scene where Cinna the poet is torn limb from limb.

Besides, the way the play dwells on seemingly less important material (cobblers, or later the storm, or the argument about the sunrise) concisely supplies a wonderful sense of space, dispelling any suggestion of closet drama. Shakespeare's action is credible because it interacts with a wider world. Some of the theoretically ancillary material could actually be central: e.g. Portia's one scene, though so closely based on Plutarch, intrudes Shakespeare's ongoing gender debate into the very heart of this drama about a man's man's man's world.

One of the lessons about history plays that Shakespeare had mastered was to avoid filling in background detail. His Caesar, for instance, is solely intent on the present moment and on his daily aches and pains. Neither he nor anyone else troubles to talk about his past military exploits or his past transactions with other characters.

Or consider the moment when Brutus finds himself alone on stage with Cassius, early in I.2.

Students of Plutarch would know that these two go back a long way. Cassius, slightly the elder, was Brutus' brother-in-law. They had been friends for a long time, and Brutus had saved Cassius' skin at least once. But more recently a coolness had grown between them. It was mainly down to Caesar. He had appointed Brutus to the important post of praetor urbanus, Rome's chief magistrate, passing over Cassius despite the latter's recent military exploits. Cassius was fobbed off with the lesser post of praetor peregrinus and strongly resented it. This deepened his dislike of Caesar and it also affected his friendship with Brutus.  But now, because he needs Brutus to join the conspiracy, he's holding out his hand.

Shakespeare doesn't explain all this. It would delay things and bore members of his audience who weren't devoted to the classics. Besides, it's not likely that either would refer to it at this point. When you are making up with someone, the last thing you do is dwell on the past. But Shakespeare, by the lightest of touches, conveys what we need to know. The friends have evidently been out of touch. Brutus, feeling the awkwardness of being with Cassius, offers him an out: "Let me not hinder, Cassius, your desires ; I'll leave you." Cassius expresses his friendship and gently chides Brutus for having been so standoffish recently. (We can easily guess that this is a diplomatic revision of history; it was Cassius who was standoffish.) Brutus understands, and reaffirms his friendship for Cassius, though not in a particularly friendly tone. Perhaps more significantly, he confides his own vexation, without saying what it concerns. It amounts to inviting Cassius to say what's on his mind. For Brutus already senses, as we always do at such moments, that this is no casual encounter, that it's about something. He vaguely guesses, and he lets Cassius see that he guesses, what the topic's going to be.

This moment exemplifies the marvellous naturalism of Julius Caesar. The characters require no expository self-introduction (of the kind standard to medieval drama, for instance). Because they're imagined so fully, we understand them instantly; not their detailed biographies, but the situation they're in at this moment. It's all we need to be swept up into the most convincing realization of a political conspiracy the stage had ever witnessed.

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Maybe that's why, though Julius Caesar is emphatically about Rome and about a few celebrated Roman individuals in 44 BCE, it has proved very capable of resonating in other contexts. Its straightforward, pithy language has bequeathed many tags to the newspapers, to politicians, the pub and the workplace.

In the "Robben Island Bible" (a secret copy of Shakespeare's Complete Works), Nelson Mandela was one of the 32 prisoners who initialled a favourite passage: Mandela's was this:

Caesar.   Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.'          (II.2)

It was for a long time a favourite play for school productions, not least because of the absence of sexual content. Claire Tomalin (A Life of My Own, p. 51) wrote that at her excellent girls' grammar school in Hitchin in 1943 they read Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, but were forbidden to read Romeo and Juliet even though it was on the syllabus for the School Certificate; it was considered unsuitable for girls.

In recent years new productions have proliferated. These are just a few:

Gregory Doran's 2012 RSC production (see pic at head of post) was set in a turmoiled post-colonial African state, with Julius Caesar portrayed as one of the typically corrupt dictators of the era. In the interview I've linked to, Doran recounted the Mandela story and added: "When I was talking to John Kani, the South African actor, he said to me: Julius Caesar is Shakespeare’s African play. I think it was he that told me that Julius Nyerere, who was the first President of Tanzania, had translated the play into Swahili and also that it’s the play that is the most often performed in Africa." This production came to Brooklyn in 2013 and was interestingly reviewed by Teju Cole.

Oskar Eustis' 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production in New York caused a lot of furore and made a lot of column inches by portraying Julius Caesar as an obviously Trump-like figure. But Eustis insisted that the play demonstrates that "Those who attempt to defend democracy by undemocratic means pay a terrible price and destroy the very thing they are fighting to save".

Nicholas Hytner's 2018 production at the Bridge Theatre, London presented Julius Caesar as a modern-dress political thriller. The producer remarked on the play's relevance to a divided Britain: "The leaders of the metropolitan elite are terrified that the state could slide at any moment into tyranny. They’re convinced that they’re working for the common good, but they’re equally concerned for their own position in a system that works well for them. ... But their arrogance is their undoing. Their remoteness from the street blinds them to the fragility of their grip on popular opinion. The liberal establishment is trounced by a demagogue who appeals to the gut, and tells the stories the mob wants to hear. The masses turn on the liberals. The tyrant is replaced by another, younger and more ruthless. Once the body politic is infected with the virus of authoritarianism, it can’t be eradicated.   ... I’ve never before staged a play that has said so much about our present, or warned of such a terrible future."

Phyllida Lloyd's 2019 production at the Donmar Warehouse was set in a women's prison, with an all-women cast, presenting an interesting slant on this highly masculinist play. Mary Beth Rose remarked that the prison setting brought out how the conspirators are driven by a longing for political liberty but remain trapped in their own delusions.



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Antony.       Octavius, lead your battle softly on
                    Upon the left hand of the even field.
Octavius.     Upon the right, I, keep thou the left.
Antony.       Why do you cross me in this exigent?
Octavius.     I do not cross you ; but I will do so.   (V.1)

Another conversation that is cut off in mid flow, this time by the appearance of the enemy.

Evidently this conversation is really about the still-latent power struggle between the two commanders. Both are remembering the battle of Pharsalia (or Pharsalus), Julius Caesar's greatest victory. On that occasion Julius Caesar was on the right and Antony on the left. This time Antony, as in every way the senior soldier, assumes the right hand. But young Octavius is telling Antony he's ready to take the role of Caesar.

(In the ensuing battle Octavius' forces were in fact on the left, as Shakespeare could have worked out from Plutarch telling us that Brutus, who overcame them, was on the right.)

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* These Plutarch quotations come from Thomas North's translation of Plutarch via Amyot, first published in 1579, second edition in 1595.  Skeat's 1875 selection of the half-dozen Lives most relevant to Shakespeare students is available on-line (albeit with a light scattering of OCR errors).

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0078%3Atext%3DBrut.


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"Honourable men". If the republic is a sacred entity then assassination is in a broad sense a kind of honour crime (Sw: hedersbrott) ; the same concept applies even more obviously to Hamlet, Othello...

August Strindberg said he modelled his approach in Gustav Vasa on the domestic scenes in Julius Caesar.

These notes on Shakespeare: Full list