[15 January 1947]
Tonight I hope to reassure the less musical, because I’m going to talk and talk and talk. Julius Caesar is one of the best known and most performed of Shakespeare’s plays. Like Hamlet, the play is a puzzle. It doesn’t conform to the idea of Aristotelian tragedy in presenting a noble man with a conspicuous flaw, nor to Elizabethan melodrama in presenting a conspicuous villain. Some critics think Shakespeare combined two plays in Julius Caesar. Certainly he combined two plots. Shakespeare’s two significant tragedies preceding Julius Caesar—we can forget Titus Andronicus—are Richard III and Romeo and Juliet.
It was natural in the thirties of this century for theatrical directors to make Caesar a Fascist dictator and the conspirators noble liberals. That’s a misreading, I think, but there are things to be said for it. It draws attention to Julius Caesar as a historical play, and it helps us bear in mind Shakespeare’s continuing interest in the genre. The last play he wrote was a historical play, Henry VIII, an excellent collaboration with Fletcher. In the later Roman plays, history is superficial in the sense that it could be changed without changing the characters. But time and history are essential in Julius Caesar. What is Shakespeare’s interest in writing the play? He sets himself the problem, in depicting Roman society, of whether he can understand Roman history and society as he has English history. At that time, people in Europe grew up more with Roman history, but it is still difficult for Shakespeare. There is a poetic problem alongside the technical one: what kind of rhetoric must the characters use? How must they speak? In the English chronicle plays, characters speak romantically out of the Herod character of the miracle plays and the miles gloriosus of Marlowe. Julius Caesar is unique for a plain, direct, bleak, public style of rhetoric. The language of the characters often consists of monosyllables. Brutus, for example, at the end of his first meeting with Cassius, says,
For this time I will leave you.
To-morrow, if you please to speak to me,
I will come home to you; or if you will,
Come home to me, and I will wait for you.
(I.ii.307–10)
Brutus says to his servant Lucius, “I should not urge thy duty past thy might. / I know young bloods look for a time of rest” (IV.iii.261–62). Calphurnia says, in warning Caesar not to leave his house,
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
(II.ii.22–24)
Contrast this speech with its imitation in Hamlet, when Horatio says,
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.
(I.i.113–16)
Julius Caesar has great relevance to our time, though it is gloomier, because it is about a society that is doomed. Our society is not doomed, but in such immense danger that the relevance is great. Octavius only succeeded in giving Roman society a 400-year reprieve. It was a society doomed not by the evil passions of selfish individuals, because such passions always exist, but by an intellectual and spiritual failure of nerve that made the society incapable of coping with its situation, which is why the noble Brutus is even more at sea in the play than the unscrupulous and brutal Antony. The Roman-Hellenic world failed to evolve a religious pattern that was capable of grasping the world, of making sense of what was happening. The Platonic-Aristotelian politics of the good life proved ineffective for the public world, and Stoic-Epicurean thought proved incapable of saving the individual. The play presents three political responses to this failure. The crowd-master, the man of destiny, Caesar. The man who temporarily rides the storm, Antony. And Caesar’s real successor, the man who is to establish Roman order for a time, Octavius. Brutus, who keeps himself independent, is the detached and philosophic individual.
Julius Caesar begins with a crowd scene. First things in Shakespeare are always important. There are three types of groups of people: societies, communities, and crowds. A society is something I can belong to, a community is something I can join, a crowd is something I add to. A society is defined by its function. A string quartet, for example, is a society with a specific function, to play works of music composed for a string quartet. It has a specific size, and you cannot change its size without changing the society. An individual is irreplaceable in his function to his society.
A community is an association of people with a common love. If you get a collection of people all of whom, say, love music, they form a community of music lovers. A cello player in a string quartet, for example, who hates music but plays because he must eat and playing a cello is all he knows, is a member of a society. He is not a member of the community of music lovers. A community has no definite size. If what they love is good—for example, God—the optimum size of a community is infinite. If what they love is bad—for example, marijuana—the optimum size is zero. In a community, also, “I” precedes “we.”
The third form of a plurality of people is a crowd. Its members neither belong to nor join it, but merely add to it. The members of a crowd have nothing in common except togetherness. The individual is a contradiction in a crowd. The “we” precedes the “I.” In itself the crowd has no function. When does a crowd or a mass or public develop? (1) When there are an insufficient number of societies and the individual can’t find a meaningful function, so that he feels like a cog in a machine, or if he cannot belong to a society—he’s unemployed, for example. (2) If communities disappear, individuals cease to love anything in particular and become incapable of making a choice between loves. Why can’t they choose? In order to choose, there must be a number of values in terms of which a choice becomes meaningful. Lose those values, and one becomes incapable of a choice between loves. Combine that condition with an absence of society, and individuals become members of the crowd or the public. It has nothing whatever to do with education. Knowing a lot does not make one believe in anything. Knowledge can’t make people believe in a society or give them a function in it. The educated and the rich can become members of the crowd and the public.
Describing the characteristics of the public, Kierkegaard writes in The Present Age:
The real moment in time and the real situation being simultaneous with real people, each of whom is something: that is what helps to sustain the individual. But the existence of a public produces neither a situation nor simultaneity. . . . The man who has no opinion of an event at the actual moment accepts the opinion of the majority, or if he is quarrelsome, of the minority. But it must be remembered that both majority and minority are real people, and that is why the individual is assisted by adhering to them. A public, on the contrary, is an abstraction. . . . A people, an assembly or a man can change to such an extent that one may say: they are no longer the same; a public on the other hand can become the very opposite and still be the same—a public. . . . A public is neither a nation, nor a generation, nor a community, nor a society, nor these particular men, for all these are only what they are through the concrete; no single person who belongs to the public makes a real commitment; for some hours of the day, perhaps, he belongs to the public—at moments when he is nothing else, since when he really is what he is he does not form part of the public. Made up of such individuals, of individuals at the moments when they are nothing, a public is a kind of gigantic something, an abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing. But on this basis any one can arrogate to himself a public, and just as the Roman Church chimerically extended its frontiers by appointing bishops in partibus infidelium, so a public is something which every one can claim, and even a drunken sailor exhibiting a “peep-show” has dialectically absolutely the same right to a public as the greatest man.
Kierkegaard says that if he tried “to imagine the public as a particular person,”
I should perhaps think of one of the Roman emperors, a large well-fed figure, suffering from boredom, looking only for the sensual intoxication of laughter, since the divine gift of wit is not earthly enough. And so for a change he wanders about, indolent rather than bad, but with a negative desire to dominate. Every one who has read the classical authors knows how many things a Caesar could try out in order to kill time.
Kierkegaard then turns to the relationship of the public and the press, the public’s “dog”: “In the same way the public keeps a dog to amuse it. That dog is literary scum. If there is some one superior to the rest, perhaps even a great man, the dog is set on him and the fun begins.” Eventually the public tires and says the press may stop, but “the public is unrepentant, for it is not they who own the dog—they only subscribe.”
With the proper gift, a man can turn the crowd into a mob—in other words, a passionate crowd. The mob is a pseudosociety that sets out to do something, but what it wishes to do is often both negative and general. The Cinna the Poet incident in Julius Caesar provides a very good illustration.
3. Pleb. Your name, sir, truly.
Cin. Truly, my name is Cinna.
1. Pleb. Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.
Cin. I am Cinna the poet!Iam Cinna the poet!
4. Pleb. Tear him for his bad verses! Tear him for his bad verses!
Cin. I am not Cinna the conspirator.
4. Pleb. It is no matter; his name’s Cinna! Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.
3. Pleb. Tear him, tear him! Come, brands, ho! firebrands! To Brutus’, to Cassius’! Burn all!
(III.iii.28–42)
The function of the mob, to destroy, is general. It is incapable of making differentiations upon which a society depends.
The negative impulse is easier for an orator to instill in a crowd. A crowd is passive, and therefore notoriously fickle. In Henry VI, Part Two, during Jack Cade’s rebellion, both Clifford and Jack Cade speak (IV.viii), and the crowd changes its mind with each speech. In Julius Caesar, Brutus speaks—the crowd approves. Antony speaks—“We’ll hear him, we’ll follow him, we’ll die with him!” (III.ii.214). A comparison of the scenes from the two plays shows Shakespeare’s dramatic development. In Henry VI, Clifford and Cade both speak in the same way. In Julius Caesar, the speeches of Brutus and Antony are differentiated, so we can see not only that the crowd is fickle, but also that Brutus doesn’t understand how to move them, because he tries to allay their feelings, while Antony does understand how to move them, because he tries to excite their feelings—a successful technique. Directors should make the citizens supporting Brutus different from those supporting Antony.
In a community, defective lovers require political leaders. Shakespeare’s successful leaders are Henry IV, Henry V, Richard III, Caesar, Antony. His unsuccessful leaders are Richard II, Henry VI, Brutus. A successful leader needs the theatrical gift of arousing emotions, of moving and persuading others, without appearing self-interested and moved himself. Just before the assassination, when Artemidorus tries to press his suit because it’s one that “touches Caesar nearer” than the others, Caesar replies, “What touches us ourself shall be last serv’d” (III.i.7–8). Richard III first refuses a crown. Caesar, Casca tells us, twice puts back the crown Antony offers him—reluctantly though, he wants it a bit. Henry V and Antony assume a bluntness of manner. Antony tells the crowd,
I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts.
I am no orator, as Brutus is,
But (as you know me all) a plain blunt man
That love my friend.
(III.ii.221–24)
President Roosevelt used his smile and cigarette holder to show his disinterest, Churchill both uses gestures and keeps his hands in his pockets. Obviously one shouldn’t sneer at such devices. A good leader understands that emotion precedes effective action. A study of anthropology, for example, is not a good beginning for eradicating race prejudice—one must arouse a passion for treating one’s neighbor as one’s self. A teacher must be a clown and arouse in his pupils a love of knowledge—the more love there is in the pupil, the less work for the teacher—he mustn’t annoy or discourage the pupil. “Disingenuous compliances,” Dr. Johnson called it. The love of power in a good politician—one whom one respects—is subservient to his zeal for a just society. Power is uppermost for a bad politician, a demagogue. He is like a writer who writes because he wants to be famous, rather than because he wants to write well. A good politician and a good teacher labor to abolish their own vocations.
The Peloponnesian War created a vacuum by the end of Greek society. The Third Punic War enlarged Roman society and created classes, the Lumpenproletariat. As Hegel wrote, “Minerva’s owl takes flight in the evening,” philosophy always arrives too late to give advice. The Greek’s ethical cosmology formulated by Plato and Aristotle held that God, the unmoved Mover, and Nature are co-eternal and unrelated. In Aristotle, matter, in an effort to escape from the innate disorder of its temporal flux, falls in love with the Mover. In Plato an intermediary party, the Demiurge, loves the Ideas and then imposes them on matter. Matter is the limiting cause of evil, and the first task of man is to contemplate Ideas and will the good. It was assumed that sin is ignorance and that to know the good is to will it. But what can be done about the ignorant who are sinful, or those who are sinful because, even with knowledge of the good, they do not will it? Impose order on them. But if the way of wisdom is to withdraw from the temporal flux, how can the wise impose such order and control society? The best thing is to have the philosopher get hold of the king and advise him. Plato tried that, however, and it didn’t work.
Ancient political philosophy is either archaistic or futuristic. Either the philosopher has to discover a timeless order, or a Hercules-savior must step in to save society from change. Aristotle’s practical observation of a small middle class as the best rulers doesn’t tell how society can be kept from growing and therefore changing. The successful man of action tended to be given a demiurgic, semidivine status. With the decline of the city-state and the development of agrarian Rome, the ideal of a wise man became detachment. The ideal took two slightly different forms, the philosophy of Epicurus, which Cassius professes, and the philosophy of the Stoics, such as Zeno, with which Brutus associates himself.
The man of action in the play is Caesar, the savior on horseback who appears to have arrived. Having become a legend, Caesar has to live up to the role. “Beware the ides of March,” the Soothsayer tells him. Caesar’s answer, “He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass.” (I.ii.24–25), illustrates the necessity for confident speech in a ruler. Such speech may not necessarily be a manifestation of pride, though it may become so. A general or an assertive leader in a time of sudden financial depression, for example, must give people the impression that he has no fear, or they’ll lose heart, too. Like Caesar with the Soothsayer, he must exaggerate his confidence. Great men in politics like flatterers to give them confidence, which they can then radiate back. Sometimes they lose their sense of intuition and fail, a point that Caesar has perhaps reached. It is unfortunate for a ruler to be fatalistic, to make a religion of necessity, as Caesar begins to do when he rejects all warnings, “Seeing,” as he says, “that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come” (II.ii.36–37). The most successful know the role fortune plays, they believe in the stars.
Antony has a sanguine character and he’s also politically quite skillful, though not as skillful as he thinks he is. In a crisis he’s in his element. He’s in politics for fun, he craves excitement. He’s not good at slow, patient plotting. After he has successfully turned the plebians into a mob, he says, almost indifferently,
Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt.
(III.ii.265–66)
Octavius or Caesar would never make such a playboy remark. Antony’s bored. Later we’ll see the tragedy of a bored man and bored woman. Antony impolitically gives himself away to Octavius in revealing his feelings about Lepidus:
Octavius, I have seen more days than you;
And though we lay these honours on this man
To ease ourselves of divers sland’rous loads
He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold.
(IV.i.18–21)
Octavius would never talk that way. He is far too guarded and calculating, as he demonstrates in his sudden decision to take the right wing just before the battle of Philippi:
Ant. Octavius, lead your battle softly on
Upon the left hand of the even field.
Oct. Upon the right hand I. Keep thou the left.
Ant. Why do you cross me in this exigent?
Oct. I do not cross you; but I will do so.
(V.i.16–20)
Octavius is a very cold fish.
Cassius is a choleric man—a General Patton. He is passionate, shorttempered, sentimental. He is also politically shrewd. Before the assassination, he sees that Antony will be dangerous to the conspiracy and argues that he should be killed. Later he tries to conciliate Antony—“Your voice shall be as strong as any man’s / In the disposing of new dignities.” (III.i.177–78)—at the same time that he warns Brutus of the danger of letting Antony speak at Caesar’s funeral. He also doesn’t want to fight at Phillipi, “to set / Upon one battle all our liberties” (V.i.74–75), as Brutus does, and he probably has the better military knowledge. He is a follower of Epicurus, as he says explicitly at the end of the play (V.i.76–77). Epicurean thought was largely determinist and materialist, it sought to achieve the condition of imperturbability, ataraxia, it was moderate, and it rejected, as Lucretius especially did, the irrational and the superstitious as a destroyer of life. Its aim was to show that life was rational and that there was nothing to fear. Cassius is thus a comic character, because his emotional temperament is quite opposite to his Epicurean philosophy. Early on in the play he says that “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves” (I.ii.140–41), and when Casca becomes superstitious about a thunderstorm, Cassius calmly and learnedly interprets the storm as an encouragement to the conspirators to act against Caesar (I.iii.57–99). Before the battle of Philippi, however, Cassius becomes superstitious:
You know that I held Epicurus strong
And his opinion. Now I change my mind
And partly credit things that do presage.
(V.i.76–78)
And his desperate suicide is based on a misinterpretation.
There are no lymphatic characters in the play, “men that are fat,” as Caesar says, “Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights” (I.ii.192–93). It’s too rough a time. Brutus is a melancholic. “I am not gamesome,” he tells Cassius, “I do lack some part / Of that quick spirit that is in Antony” (I.ii.28–29), and he tells his wife Portia that she is as dear to him “as are the ruddy drops / That visit my sad heart” (II.i.289–90). Brutus at the same time strives for the Stoic virtue of ataraxia, of freedom from disturbance and perturbation. He says to the conspirators, to encourage and calm them,
Good gentlemen, look fresh and merrily.
Let not our looks put on our purposes,
But bear it as our Roman actors do,
With untir’d spirits and formal constancy.
(II.i.224–27)
His detachment is most evident during the quarrel with Cassius, when he doesn’t reveal that Portia has just died until he and Cassius have reconciled:
Cass. I did not think you could have been so angry.
Bru. O Cassius, I am sick of many griefs.
Cass. Of your philosophy you make no use
If you give place to accidental evils.
Bru. No man bears sorrow better. Portia is dead.
(IV.iii.143–47)
When Messala enters with hints of news about his wife, he pretends not to know about her death in order to serve as an example to his troops.
Mes. Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell;
For certain she is dead, and by strange manner.
Bru. Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala.
With meditating that she must die once,
I have the patience to endure it now.
Mes. Even so great men great losses should endure.
Cass. I have as much of this in art as you,
But yet my nature could not bear it so.
(IV.iii.187–95)
Brutus maintains the same calm in the presence of Caesar’s ghost:
Bru. Well; then I shall see thee again?
Ghost. Ay, at Philippi.
Bru. Why, I will see thee at Philippi then.
[Exit Ghost.]
Now I have taken heart thou vanishest,
Ill spirit, I would hold more talk with thee.
(IV.iii.284–88)
The one thing that can throw the detached man into perturbation, as Brutus shows, is the prospect of action:
Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
(II.i.61–65)
There is really a will in Brutus to commit suicide, and when he finally does so, he has to run on someone else’s sword to establish contact with others.
Cassius is childishly envious—I swim better! The conspirators don’t really have a good motive. Brutus, as a man of thought and feeling, wants to play the man of action. He is haunted by two ghosts. The invisible ghost that haunts him is his ancestor Brutus, who drove Tarquin “from the streets of Rome” (II.i.53–54)—he thinks of him just before he speaks of the “phantasma” that precedes the taking of action. The visible ghost that haunts Brutus is Caesar’s. Brutus really has nothing against Caesar, “no personal cause to spurn at him” (II.i.11), and nothing has happened that he condemns. He kills a man he is fond of, a man of action whom he can never replace. Brutus and Cassius are Shakespeare’s criticism of the ideal of detachment, an ideal that ends up in an absorption with the idea of death, and an ideal that is ultimately suicidal. Toynbee writes in A Study of History that the “logical goal” of Epicurean and Stoic ataraxia was “self-annihilation.”
We can see in A. E. Housman’s poetry a good contemporary example of the morbid outcome of the ideal of detachment. In one of the poems in A Shropshire Lad, he writes,
From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.
Now—for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.
In another poem, which refers to Rome, Housman writes,
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble,
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
Time is up, and what’s more you’re not likely to enjoy yourself if you overstay your welcome!
Epictetus argued that the peace Caesar can bring is limited in nature, but that philosophers can give peace in all:
Behold now, Caesar seems to provide us with profound peace, there are no wars any longer, nor battles, no brigandage on a large scale, nor piracy, but at any hour we may travel by land, or sail from the rising of the sun to its setting. Can he, then, at all provide us with peace from fever too, and from shipwreck too, and from fire, or earthquake, or lightning? Come, can he give us peace from love? He cannot. From sorrow? From envy? He cannot—from absolutely none of these things. But the doctrine of the philosophers promises to give us peace from these troubles too. And what does it say? “Men, if you heed me, wherever you may be, whatever you may be doing, you will feel no pain, no anger, no compulsion, no hindrance, but you will pass your lives in tranquillity and in freedom from every disturbance.” When a man has this kind of peace proclaimed to him, not by Caesar—why, how could he possibly proclaim it?—but proclaimed by God through the reason, is he not satisfied, when he is alone?
The detachment of Stoic philosophy cannot really admit love or pity, you must never sacrifice eternal calm, though you must do your best to help your fellow man. What are the modern forms of detachment? Professionalism—keep at the job. And go to psychoanalysts for a perfect personality.
Brutus is related to Hamlet. Hamlet knows he’s in despair, but Brutus and other characters in Julius Caesar don’t know. In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard emphasizes that unconscious despair is the most extreme form of despair, and he sees it as a condition of paganism. He praises the great “aesthetic” achievements of pagan societies, but rejects the pagan’s aesthetic definition of spirit:
No, it is not the aesthetic definition of spiritlessness which furnishes the scale for judging what is despair and what is not; the definition which must be used is the ethico-religious: either spirit / or the negative lack of spirit, spiritlessness. Every human existence which is not conscious of itself as spirit, or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not thus grounded transparently in God but obscurely reposes or terminates in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.), or in obscurity about itself takes its faculties merely as active powers, without in a deeper sense being conscious whence it has them, which regards itself as an inexplicable something which is to be understood from without—every such existence, whatever it accomplishes, though it be the most amazing exploit, whatever it explains, though it were the whole of existence, however intensely it enjoys life aesthetically—every such existence is after all despair. It was this the old theologians meant when they talked about the virtues of the pagans being splendid vices. They meant that the most inward experience of the pagan was despair, that the pagan was not conscious of himself before God as spirit.
“Hence it came about,” Kierkegaard continues,
. . . that the pagans judged self-slaughter so lightly, yea, even praised it, notwithstanding that for the spirit it is the most decisive sin, that to break out of existence in this way is rebellion against God. The pagan lacked the spirit’s definition of the self, therefore he expressed such a judgment of self-slaughter—and this the same pagan did who condemned with moral severity theft, unchastity, etc.… The point in self-slaughter, that it is a crime against God, entirely escapes the pagan. One cannot say, therefore, that the self-slaughter was despair, which would be a thoughtless hysteron proteron; one must say that the fact that the pagan judged self-slaughter as he did was despair.
T. S. Eliot writes, in “Coriolan,”
Cry what shall I cry?
All flesh is grass:
.......
Mother mother
Here is a row of family portraits, dingy busts, all looking
remarkably Roman,
Remarkably like each other, lit up successively by the flare
Of a sweaty torchbearer, yawning.
O hidden under the . . . Hidden under the . . . Where the
dove’s foot rested and locked for a moment,
A still moment, a repose of noon, under the upper
branches of noon’s widest tree
Under the breast feather stirred by the small wind after noon
There the cyclamen spreads its wings, there the clematis
droops over the lintel
O mother (not among these busts, all correctly inscribed)
I a tired head among these heads
Necks strong to bear them
Noses to break the wind....