44 BC When he enters the Capitol on that fateful morning, Shakespeare’s Caesar meets the soothsayer who had warned him to ‘Beware the Ides of March’. ‘The Ides of March are come’, he quips. ‘Aye, Caesar; but not gone.’
This encounter comes straight from Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, as do the portents the night before the murder: thunder and lightning, Calpurnia’s bad dreams, the augurers failing to find a heart in the sacrificed beast (Plutarch’s list runs on to include ‘multitudes of men all on fire’).
So what does Shakespeare add to the historical account? He takes a series of events, already ‘dramatic’ in the newspaper sense, and shapes them into real drama. Caesar is killed in the Capitol, rather than the Theatre of Pompey. The assassination, the competing speeches in the Forum by Brutus and Mark Antony (missing in Plutarch), and the reading of Caesar’s will all take place on the Ides of March, whereas the murder, the funeral and the will are spread out between 15 and 20 March in Plutarch.
It’s those great speeches that schoolchildren used to have to memorise, and for the good reason that – despite all the portents – they determine the characters’ fortunes thereafter. Brutus (a much more ‘honourable man’ in the play than in its source) painfully sets out his dilemma: ‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.’
Antony cloaks his true intentions from the outset, saying that he ‘comes to bury Caesar, not to praise him’, then – harping on the phrase ‘honourable man’ with increasing sarcasm – proceeds to play the crowd, refusing to read Caesar’s will, moving them to pity and rage at the sight of the corpse, then calling them back to hear the will after all, when they start off on their tour of mayhem. In all, Antony gets 135 lines to Brutus’s 47 (in the last seven of which he is politely introducing Antony to the crowd). It isn’t fair, but it’s politics. ‘Now let it work’, says Antony. ‘Mischief, thou art afoot. / Take thou what course thou wilt!’
A curious footnote on the date. When Caesar’s own reform of the Roman calendar came into force, the Ides of March fell on the 14th, not the 15th of the month.