Chapter 11

Tyrants

Julius Caesar, Leontes, and Duke Frederick

I would like to speak about Shakespeare’s tyrants in this chapter. Of course, there are a great many more tyrants than we can consider here—for example, Antiochus in Pericles and Creon in The Two Noble Kinsmen. Some, like Richard III and Macbeth, who are both also villains, we have already talked about. Julius Caesar is not directly a villain, since he is not involved in anyone’s murder, but he speaks in the haughty language of villains, and his death brings about a bloody civil war in Rome. Julius Caesar resembles the villains of the tragedies and history plays because of his insistence on his autocratic will to the exclusion of any personal or compassionate motives. Leontes and Duke Frederick are tyrants in comedies, which limit the scope of their villainy, although Leontes’s mad jealousy of his wife Hermione leads to the deaths of his son Mamillius and his court counselor Antigonus, and to the supposed deaths of Hermione and her daughter Perdita. We can see the workings of The Winter’s Tale as a tragicomedy. In As You Like It Duke Frederick, the usurper, banishes Rosalind, the daughter of Duke Senior, who takes with her into exile Frederick’s own daughter, Celia. What happens with the Duke is paralleled by the relation of Orlando to his older brother, Oliver, who plots his death.

Julius Caesar echoes Richard III in the devious and staged way in which Richard, Duke of Gloucester, with the help of Buckingham, “reluctantly” accepts the kingship (III, vii). Caesar, of course, never becomes king, but Casca’s report of what happens in the market place (I, ii) suggests a similar kind of political manipulation:

I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown—yet ’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets—and, as I told you, he put it by once; but for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again; but to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. (235–41)

Casca is represented as “a blunt fellow” (295), not at all subtle, but the scene he describes so satirically is pure theater.

As in Richard III, there are three separate attempts to crown Caesar. Casca continues:

And then he offered it the third time. He put it the third time by; and still as he refused it, the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopt [chapped] hands, and threw up their sweaty nightcaps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown, that it had, almost, choked Caesar; for he swounded and fell down at it. (241–48)

Among many physical infirmities, Caesar (like Othello) has the falling sickness, or epilepsy, which ends his attempted coronation by Antony: “He fell down in the market place, and foamed at mouth, and was speechless” (253–54).

Casca understands that, except for the falling-sickness, it is all histrionic and an empty show:

If the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him, according as he pleased

and displeased them, as they use to do the players in the theater, I am no

true man. (258–61)

Richard and Julius Caesar both have contempt for the people, although their hypocritical affection has no curb. This is a forecast of issues that will be central to Coriolanus.

Julius Caesar is loaded with portents that give the play, like Macbeth, a sense of cosmic importance. Also, great attention is paid to Caesar’s physical infirmities. Neither of these two enhancements of the tragic effect are needed in Richard III, but they are extremely important to Cassius. He goes to great length to describe several occasions on which the mighty Caesar proved himself to be a mere mortal. Cassius is passionate in his attempt to win Brutus to the conspiracy:

I had as lief not be, as live to be

In awe of such a thing as I myself.

I was born free as Caesar; so were you:

We both have fed as well, and we can both

Endure the winter’s cold as well as he. . . . (95–99)

This kind of argument seems supremely irrelevant in a political discussion. What difference could it make that Brutus and Cassius have “fed as well” as Caesar, or that they can, like Caesar, “Endure the winter’s cold’? Yet Brutus listens to Cassius intently and is eventually persuaded to join the conspiracy.

Cassius’s account of the swimming match with Caesar in the Tiber hardly seems to have any political content, but to Cassius it is supremely important as a way of demonstrating his own superior manliness:

For once, upon a raw and gusty day,

The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,

Caesar said to me “Dar’st thou, Cassius, now

Leap in with me into this angry flood,

And swim to yonder point?” Upon the word,

Accout’red as I was, I plungèd in

And bade him follow: so indeed he did.

The torrent roared, and we did buffet it

With lusty sinews, throwing it aside

And stemming it with hearts of controversy. (100–9)

Cassius recounts this story to Brutus with verve and panache, particularly the part that shows how much stronger he is than the effeminate Caesar:

But ere we could arrive the point proposed,

Caesar cried “Help me, Cassius, or I sink!”

I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,

Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder

The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber

Did I the tired Caesar. And this man

Is now become a god, and Cassius is

A wretched creature, and must bend his body

If Caesar carelessly but nod on him. (110–18)

So, alluding to the Aeneid, Cassius becomes the heroic warrior Aeneas who rescued his aged father Anchises (imaged now as the once-mighty Caesar) from the ruins of Troy.

Cassius’s next narrative is even more demeaning to Caesar:

He had a fever when he was in Spain,

And when the fit was on him, I did mark

How he did shake; ’tis true, this god did shake.

His coward lips did from their color fly,

And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world

Did lose his luster; I did hear him groan;

Ay, and that tongue of his, that bade the Romans

Mark him and write his speeches in their books,

Alas, it cried, “Give me some drink, Titinius,”

As a sick girl. Ye gods! It doth amaze me,

A man of such a feeble temper should

So get the start of the majestic world,

And bear the palm alone. (119–31)

So what bearing could Caesar’s “feeble temper,” or weak constitution, have on the political fate of Rome? All the while Cassius and Brutus are speaking, they hear shouts from the market place “For some new honors that are heaped on Caesar” (134). Brutus strives to be a rational man, but he is certainly moved by what Cassius recounts and by the shouts of the Roman populace.

In no other play of Shakespeare, except perhaps Richard III, is the tyrant (or villain) endowed with so many physical infirmities as Caesar is. This sets up a sharp contrast between Caesar the man and Caesar the great Roman warrior who wants to be king (or emperor). Shakespeare goes out of his way to add details that hardly seem to be necessary; for example, when Caesar is speaking to Antony about Cassius, we are startled by a new revelation:

I rather tell thee what is to be feared

Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.

Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,

And tell me truly what thou think’st of him. (211–14)

Shakespeare invents this detail of Caesar’s being deaf in his left ear. In context, there seems to be a dramatic contrast between Caesar’s rhetorical bluster—”for always I am Caesar”—and his glaring physical inadequacies.

Like Iago (as in Othello I, iii) or Edmund (as in King Lear I, ii), Julius Caesar is a creature of strong and determined personal will, a significant mark of the tyrant. Act II, scene ii is a domestic scene with Caesar entering in his “nightgown,” or dressing gown. Calphurnia, his wife, has dreamt of his murder, and she insists “You shall not stir out of your house today” (9). But Caesar is insistent and he speaks of himself in an oddly impersonal way (always in the third person):

Caesar shall forth. The things that threatened me

Ne’er looked but on my back; when they shall see

The face of Caesar, they are vanishèd. (10–12)

This seems to validate Cassius’s argument that the man Caesar, whom all Romans adore, has merged with Caesar as a political institution, with its threat of tyranny. Calphurnia offers a strong argument, amplified by frightening portents, for her husband’s need to stay at home.

But Caesar remains unpersuaded, and he speaks again in fatalistic, Stoic terms:

What can be avoided

Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?

Yet Caesar shall go forth; for these predictions

Are to the world in general as to Caesar. (26–29)

In other words, Calphurnia’s dreams have no personal validity.

Throughout this scene, Caesar speaks with a kind of oratorical bluster or rant. He utterly rejects what his augurers have told him:

Caesar should be a beast without a heart

If he should stay at home today for fear.

No, Caesar shall not; Danger knows full well

That Caesar is more dangerous than he.

We are two lions littered in one day,

And I the older and more terrible,

And Caesar shall go forth. (42–48)

He enters so wholeheartedly into the personification with Danger that it seems as if he objectifies himself as a system of personifications rather than as a fallible human being. When he finally decides to take Calphurnia’s advice and stay at home, Decius, a Roman conspirator, appears to accompany him to the Senate House.

We know from the previous scene that Decius is confident that he can deliver Caesar to the Capitol because he is so easily subject to flattery. Decius boasts: “For I can give his humor the true bent” (2.1.210). Caesar’s immediate reaction to Decius is to assert his imperial prerogatives:

Tell them that I will not come today.

Cannot, is false; and that I dare not, falser:

I will not come today. (2.2.62–64)

The emphasis here is on Caesar’s implacable and incontrovertible will, as he declares flatly: “The cause is in my will: I will not come” (71). But this feeds easily into Decius’s flattering reinterpretation of Calphurnia’s dream, followed by his assertion: “the Senate have concluded/ To give this day a crown to mighty Caesar” (94). There is no way Caesar can resist this temptation, which has no basis in fact. He makes the fatal decision to go to the Senate, along with the many bustling conspirators who intend to murder him.

Caesar is at his most imperious in the scene of his assassination (III, i). It is here, in the assertion of his unchallengeable will, that he closely resembles Shakespeare’s villains. He speaks in a grandiose style, as if he already were the Emperor of Rome. For example, when Artemidorus presents a petition, presumably to warn him about the conspiracy, Caesar answers magisterially: “What touches us ourself shall be last served” (8). The conspirators have planned their strategy well, beginning with Metellus Cimber’s plea for his banished brother. Caesar’s answer is so extravagant in rejecting any human fallibility in himself that we are astounded by his effrontery:

Be not fond

To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood

That will be thawed from the true quality

With that which melteth fools—I mean sweet words,

Low-crookèd curtsies, and base spaniel fawning. (39–43)

Caesar’s provocative vaunting endows the assassination with a powerful and immediate cause.

Caesar’s long speech to Metellus Cimber ends with gross and injurious insults:

Thy brother by decree is banishèd.

If thou dost bend and pray and fawn for him,

I spurn thee like a cur out of my way.

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause

Will he be satisfied. (44–48)

Ben Jonson in Timber thought the last two lines were ridiculous,1 but there is an inflation of rhetoric throughout this speech. Shylock, too, confronts Antonio with a similar dog image:

You that did void your rheum upon my beard

And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur

Over your threshold! (The Merchant of Venice l.3.114–16)

This is an insult Antonio repeats a few lines further.

Caesar’s claim to a god-like impassivity grows stronger as he humiliates Metellus Cimber. Caesar is not a man like other men, subject to emotional influences:

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 [changeless] quality

There is no fellow in the firmament. (58–62)

He luxuriates in images of his will as being of star-like constancy, and it is at this point that the conspirators stab him.

Like Caesar, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale plays the tyrant in his mad rage over what he supposes is the infidelity of his pregnant wife, Hermione. Here, too, there is a close stylistic link between tyrant and villain. Leontes is directly responsible for the deaths of his son Mamillius and his counselor Antigonus, and also, he thinks, for the deaths of Hermione and his daughter. So his paranoid rage has grave consequences. Once he slips into jealousy, Leontes speaks with a passionate energy, especially evident in his feverish repetition of words. As he exclaims in an aside:

Too hot, too hot!

To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.

I have tremor cordis [palpitations of the heart] on me; my heart dances,

But not for joy, not joy. (1.2.108–11)

Leontes’s fit comes upon him suddenly, without any transition or build up.

He sees evidences of adultery that are invisible to the audience:

But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,

As now they are, and making practiced smiles

As in a looking glass; and then to sigh, as ‘twere

The mort [death] o’ th’ deer—oh, that is entertainment

My bosom likes not, nor my brows. (115–18)

This is like the closet scene in Hamlet (III, iv), where Hamlet attributes a hot and heavy lustfulness to Claudius and his mother that we never actually witness:

Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed,

Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse,

And let him, for a pair of reechy [smoky, filthy] kisses

Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers,

Make you to ravel all this matter out. . . . (183–87)

Tyranny and villainy are closely allied as Leontes moves immediately to have his chief counselor, Camillo, poison his best friend, Polixenes. Again, Leontes is inflamed with grossly sexual signs of his wife’s affair with his friend:

Is whispering nothing?

Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?

Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career

Of laughter with a sigh (a note infallible

Of breaking honesty)? Horsing foot on foot?

Skulking in corners? (284–89)

It’s obvious that Leontes can’t possibly see all that he is describing—for example, “Kissing with inside lip”—but as he imagines these lascivious acts, he becomes wilder in his jealousy. He reviles the good Camillo for defending Hermione:

I say thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee,

Pronounce thee a gross lout, a mindless slave,

Or else a hovering temporizer, that

Canst with thine eyes at once see good and evil,

Inclining to them both. (300–4)

Camillo informs Polixenes that Leontes wants to murder him, and they both flee.

As Leontes’s jealousy becomes more uncontrollable, he asserts his naked will as opposed to all rationality and good counsel. By Act II, scene i he is speaking like Iago or Richard, Duke of Glooucester. He doesn’t need anyone else’s opinion, as he angrily exclaims:

Why, what need we

Commune with you of this, but rather follow

Our forceful instigation? Our prerogative

Calls not your counsels, but our natural goodness

Imparts this; which, if you, or stupefied,

Or seeming so, in skill [reason], cannot, or will not,

Relish a truth like us, inform yourselves,

We need no more of your advice. (161–68)

Notice how breathless and broken the syntax is and also how Leontes, like Caesar, refers to himself with the imperial “we.”

There is a strong emphasis on Leontes’s tyranny in Act II, scene iii, and Act III, scene ii, with the word and its correlates repeated at least ten times. Paulina speaks of Leontes’s “tyrannous passion” (2.3.27) and develops the idea in direct confrontation with the King:

I’ll not call you tyrant;

But this most cruel usage of your queen

(Not able to produce more accusation

Than your own weak-hinged fancy) something savors

Of tyranny, and will ignoble make you,

Yea, scandalous to the world. (114–19)

But Leontes is impervious to any persuasion, as we can tell from his illogical argument: “Were I a tyrant,/ Where were her life?” (120–21). Hermione’s trial in Act III, scene ii, of course, is directed at her life, which, along with the actual death of her son Mamillius, she seems to lose.

In the trial scene Leontes goes through the motions of justice in order to avoid the accusation of tyranny. At the very beginning, he declares:

Let us be cleared

Of being tyrannous, since we so openly

Proceed in justice, which shall have due course,

Even to the guilt or the purgation. (4–7)

This is a show trial, like that of Queen Katherine in Henry VIII. Hermione pleads eloquently in her defense:

if powers divine

Behold our human actions—as they do—

I doubt not then, but Innocence shall make

False Accusation blush, and Tyranny

Tremble at Patience. (27–31)

But there is no way of reaching Leontes, even through the timid medium of personification.

The oracle from Delphos cannot convince the King:

“Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a

jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten. . . .” (130–33)

It is only with the death of his son Mamillius that Leontes realizes “Apollo’s angry, and the heavens themselves/ Do strike at my injustice” (143–44). But then Hermione faints and Paulina pronounces her dead: “This news is mortal to the Queen” (145). Does Paulina already have a long-range plan to wait sixteen years while the penitent Leontes grieves, then bring Hermione back to life?

Paulina drives home the point of the disastrous effects of Leontes’s tyranny. She holds, as it were, his feet to the fire:

What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me? . . .

Thy tyranny,

Together working with thy jealousies,

Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle

For girls of nine—O, think what they have done,

And then run mad indeed, stark mad. . . . (173, 177–81)

From this moment on, she becomes Leontes’s spiritual counselor and nurtures his penitence and eventual revivification.

But she is merciless in her attack on the King:

But, O thou tyrant,

Do not repent these things, for they are heavier

Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee

To nothing but despair. (205–8)

Despair is a serious spiritual condition, indicating a lack of belief in God’s providence. It usually leads to suicide, but The Winter’s Tale asserts its healing, tragicomic perspective by producing, after sixteen years, a thoroughly happy ending, in which Hermione comes alive and is joyously reunited with her husband; her daughter Perdita reappears and is married to Florizel, the son of Polixenes; and, to cap it all off, Paulina is wed to Camillo.

Some of the same ideas about the irrationality, capriciousness, and harmful effects of tyranny are also seen in Duke Frederick in As You Like It. He is a usurper of the kingdom of his brother, Duke Senior, who now lives, like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, in idyllic exile in the Forest of Arden. When Orlando, the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys, wins the match against the Duke’s wrestler, Duke Frederick is displeased:

I would thou hadst been son to some man else.

The world esteemed thy father honorable,

But I did find him still mine enemy. (1.2.214–16)

Celia apologizes for her father’s “rough and envious disposition” (231), but we never discover the cause of the Duke’s displeasure. He is “humorous” (256), or capricious, and Orlando is banished from the kingdom.

He ends the scene with a resigned couplet:

Thus must I from the smoke into the smother [smothering smoke],

From tyrant Duke unto a tyrant brother. (277–78)

Rosalind, Duke Senior’s daughter, must leave too, but Celia, Duke Frederick’s daughter, insists on accompanying her to the Forest of Arden. Like all tyrants in Shakespeare, the Duke does not deign to offer any explanation: “Thou art thy father’s daughter, there’s enough” (1.3.56), and “Firm and irrevocable is my doom” (81).

Orlando’s older brother, Oliver, appears in the first scene of the play, and there is an ingenious twinning of Oliver and Duke Frederick as tyrants. Oliver has neglected to bring up his younger brother, Orlando, as a gentleman, according to the will of his father. Orlando protests his debasement:

Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them? What prodigal portion

have I spent that I should come to such penury? (1.1.36–38)

Oliver strikes him and Orlando fights back, threatening his brother with injury. Speaking always with haughty disdain, Oliver asserts his superiority: “Wilt thou lay hands upon me, villain” (54)? “Villain” was a standard term for a serf or bondman, but there is also wordplay on “villain” as an evildoer. Orlando refuses to accept the demeaning term:

I am no villain. I am the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys; he was my

father, and he is thrice a villain that says such a father begot villains. (55–57)

But Oliver has a plan about how to get rid of his troublesome brother. In his conversation with the Duke’s wrestler, Charles, Oliver slanders Orlando:

I assure thee, and almost with tears I speak it, there is not one so young and

so villainous this day living. I speak but brotherly of him. . . . (147–49)

So the wrestler is entreated, like a paid assassin, to get rid of him. Oliver’s final soliloquy shows him as a committed villain who will stop at nothing: “I hope I shall see an end of him; for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he” (157–59).

Oliver and Duke Frederick, both tyrants, come together in Act III, scene i. The Duke has dispatched Oliver to find his brother Orlando on pain of banishment and forfeiture. Oliver’s protests are, of course, completely misdirected:

O that your Highness knew my heart in this!

I never loved my brother in my life. (13–14)

Even the hard-hearted Duke is scandalized:

More villain thou. Well, push him out of doors,

And let my officers of such a nature

Make an extent upon his house and lands. (15–17)

None of these dire predictions have any consequence, since Oliver is mysteriously redeemed and becomes the lover of Celia, and the Duke is also converted to a religious life. The tyranny of Oliver and the Duke is thus neutralized by the unpredictable comic action. Tyrants are not necessarily villains, although they share many characteristics, especially an indomitable will that separates them from their fellow human beings. They are ruthlessly self-determined. Julius Caesar is almost a caricature of an overweening creature of will. His lofty insistence on his not-to-be-questioned power easily plays into the hands of the conspirators and leads to his murder. Leontes and Duke Frederick, both tyrants in comedy, are quite different from Julius Caesar. We already anticipate the happy ending in comedy, so we are sure that neither Leontes nor Duke Frederick can continue in their tyrannical behavior. Comedy as a genre needs the perturbations provided by tyrants and other blocking characters, but we know that they cannot prevail.

Note

1. See the Arden edition of Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell, London, 1998, pp. 136–37.