SHAKESPEARE’S use of North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives has been studied by a large number of critics and editors.1 He had read some of the Lives as early as 1595, for there is a verbal echo of the first of them in his account of the amours of Theseus.2 He had read the Life of Caesar, and may even have been considering a play on the subject by the time he wrote Henry V.3 Then in 1599 he utilized the Lives of Caesar, Antonius, and Brutus for the main incidents in Julius Caesar; but it is possible that its structure owes something to a lost play.4 In the bad quarto of 3 Henry VI the words ‘Et tu, Brute’ read like an interpolation from a play about the assassination of Caesar; and in the The Massacre at Paris, also a bad quarto, there is apparently an allusion to Caesar’s words on the morning of his assassination: ‘Yet Caesar shall goe forth./Let mean conceits and baser men feare death’ (996–7). There are, nevertheless, enough verbal echoes of Plutarch’s three Lives to make it reasonably certain that North was Shakespeare’s main source. The first three acts draw upon all three Lives, and the remaining acts are based mainly on the Life of Brutus. Shakespeare follows North even in his mistakes, as one might expect – Decius Brutus, Caius Ligarius – but he omits, amplifies, and alters. It has often been pointed out that he takes considerable liberties with historical facts. There was a gap of four months between the triumph mentioned in the first scene and the feast of the Lupercal; and the disrobing of Caesar’s images by the Tribunes took place later at the time of the projected coronation. In the play, for obvious dramatic economy, these widely separated events take place on the same day. To take another example, Brutus made two speeches after the assassination, one in the Capitol and one in the market-place, and Antony did not make his speech until the following day, after the reading of the will. Shakespeare telescopes Brutus’ speeches into one, and makes it successful with the mob, so as to have a dramatic reversal, and to magnify Antony’s triumphant manipulation of the citizens. Antony’s speech is delivered immediately after Brutus’, and the reading of the will becomes part of the speech. Octavius did not, in fact, arrive in Rome until some weeks later; and Shakespeare omits his quarrels with Antony before the setting up of the triumvirate.
The quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius is a typical example of Shakespeare’s method of altering the facts to increase the dramatic effectiveness of the scene. According to Plutarch, Brutus did ‘condemne and noted Lucius Pella’ on the day after the quarrel with Cassius; and Cassius was annoyed, not because he knew the man, or had pleaded for him, but because he had let off with a caution two of his own friends attainted and convicted of similar offences, that is, of ‘robbery and pilfery’. Shakespeare makes the offence bribery and opens the scene with a reference to it. The interference of Phaonius, the counterfeit cynic philosopher, which brings the first quarrel to an end, is utilized by Shakespeare; but whereas Phaonius merely quotes Homer –
My Lords, I pray you harken both to mee,
For I haue seene moe yeares than suchye three –
Shakespeare has no reference to Homer, but North’s doggerel verse may have suggested to him the idea of making the intruder a poet who rhymes vilely:5
Love, and be friends, as two such men should be;
For I have seen more years, I’m sure, than ye.
(IV. iii. 129–30)
But the quarrel is over by the time he appears on the scene. A little later, Shakespeare twice mentions Portia’s death – although the first account may have been meant to supersede the second – and the revelation of the bereavement makes the audience regard Brutus more sympathetically, despite his self-righteous attitude. At the end of the scene Shakespeare introduces the ghost, transferring its appearance from Abydos to Sardis, and making it Caesar’s ghost, and not merely Brutus’ evil spirit.6 Plutarch’s Brutus is ‘thinking of weighty matters’, not listening to a song. The two battles in which Cassius and Brutus lose their lives are run together.
Equally significant are the changes made by Shakespeare in the characters. He emphasizes Caesar’s physical weaknesses and his hubris, but at the same time he makes him nobler than he is in Plutarch’s portrait. For example, Caesar’s reason for refusing to read Artemidorus’ warning – ‘What touches us ourself shall be last serv’d’ – is apparently Shakespeare’s invention. According to Plutarch, ‘Caesar tooke it of him, but coulde neuer reade it, though he many times attempted it, for the number of people that did salute him’. Sir Thomas Elyot says that Caesar, ‘beinge radicate in pride’, neglected to read the scroll, ‘not esteminge the persone that deliuered it’.7
Brutus is given some humanizing touches – his care for Lucius, for example – and Shakespeare closely follows Plutarch’s report of Portia’s speech to her husband; but he is made self-righteous, self-deluded, and overbearing, substituting ideas for realities. Casca’s character, on which depends much of the effectiveness of the report of the scene where Caesar refuses the crown, is largely Shakespeare’s invention. (The historical Casca was not ignorant of Greek.)
Although Shakespeare borrows numerous phrases from North’s prose – from all three Lives – he follows it less closely than he was to do in the other Roman plays.
It is probable that Shakespeare had also read a translation of Appian’s Auncient Historie and exquisite Chronicle of the Romanes Warres, both Civile and Foren (1578) as there are several details apparently derived from this source. There is a reference to Caesar’s falling sickness immediately after his refusal of the crown.8 There is the same ambiguity as in Shakespeare about the motives of the conspirators, who killed Caesar ‘eyther for enuie … or as they said, for the loue of their countryes libertie’. Brutus acted ‘either as an ingrate man … or very desirous of his countrys libertie, preferring it before all other things, or that he was descended of the auntient Brutus’.9 Plutarch, however, suggests that the conspirators other than Brutus were motivated by ‘some priuate malice or enuy’. Appian uses the phrase that on the day of his assassination ‘Caesar came forth’, and Shakespeare uses it five times in the corresponding scenes.10 Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral is unlike the one given in the play but, as Professor Schanzer pointed out,11 Shakespeare may have derived hints from Appian’s account of Antony’s theatrical delivery of his oration. Indeed, Shakespeare’s character, in this play, has little relation to Plutarch’s ‘plaine man, without subtilty’ and considerable resemblance to the complex character depicted by Appian – loyal, histrionic, emotional, ruthless, and cunning. Appian describes Antony’s uncovering of Caesar’s body:12
Then falling into moste vehement affections, vncouered Caesars body, holding vp his vesture with a speare, cut with the woundes, and redde with the bloude of the chiefe Ruler.
Shakespeare likewise speaks of Our Caesar’s vesture wounded’. Plutarch describes the same incident but without the verbal parallel. Antony took
Caesars gowne all bloudy in his hand … shewing what a number of cuts and holes it had vpon it. – He vnfolded before the whole assembly the bloudy garments of the dead, thrust through in many places with their swords.
According to Appian, the people carried the litter ‘as an holye thing, to be buried in an holy place’ and there ‘they buryed the body, and abode al night about the fyre’.13 Plutarch mentions that the mob burnt Caesar’s body ‘in the middest of the most holy places’. Shakespeare fuses the two sources in the line:
We’ll burn his body in the holy place.
(III. iii. 255)
Appian and Shakespeare agree on the spelling of Calphurnia’s name, North usually spelling it ‘Calpurnia’. Finally, Antony’s prophecy of civil strife may be based on Appian’s account of an earlier occasion, when Antony prophesied:14
By inspiration, forespeaking warres, murders, attendures, banishments, spoyles, and all other mischiefe to come vppon them, protesting greate execrations to them that were the cause of it.
But Shakespeare probably knew Kyd’s Cornelia, translated from Garnier’s Senecan tragedy.15 Here, too, he would have found descriptions of the horrors of civil war, with particular emphasis on unburied bodies. Kyd16 tells us that
in the flowred Meades dead men were found;
Falling as thick (through warlike crueltie)
As eares of Corne for want of husbandry.
(I. 198–200)
spilt such store of blood in euery street,
As there were none but dead-men to be seene.
(II. 142–3)
Cassius complains of Rome that
o’re our bodies (tumbled vp on heapes,
Lyke cocks of Hay when Iuly shares the field)
Thou build’st thy kingdom.
(IV. 8–10)
Italy and other countries
Are full of dead mens bones by Caesar slayne.
(IV. 110)
Discord and Bellona urge on the slaughter. There is a stench of blood, dismembered bodies, ‘wretched heapes’ of wounded men crying in vain for mercy. This description uses the words ‘ranging’ and ‘confines’, as Antony does.17
Antony’s prophecy has an analogue at the end of the anonymous play, Caesar’s Revenge, when Discord, come from Hell, accompanied by Caesar’s ghost, expresses their satisfaction at the slaughter:
I, now my longing hopes haue their desire,
The world is nothing but a massie heape
Of bodys slayne, the Sea a lake of blood.
So Antony refers to
Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Até by his side come hot from hell.
(III. i. 271–2)
Professor Schanzer points out18 that this play, like Julius Caesar, contains three tragedies – the tragedy of Caesar’s hubris, ending with his assassination, an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, and the tragedy of Brutus. In Caesar’s Revenge the revenge tragedy predominates; in Julius Caesar that of Brutus. The hubristic tragedy of Caesar’s fall is itself an inheritance from the plays of Muret, Grévin, and Garnier, through the author of Caesar’s Revenge and Shakespeare himself may have been influenced by one or other of plays now lost. At least we can say19 that the treatment of Brutus’ tragedy in Caesar’s Revenge resembles Shakespeare’s
in being psychological, consisting in Brutus’ mental torments which the memories of his ingratitude to Caesar make him suffer. Just before the first appearance to him of Caesar’s ghost Brutus exclaims in soliloquy:
Caesar upbraues my sad ingratitude.
He saued my life in sad Pharsalian fields,
That I in Senate house might work his death.
O this remembrance now doth wound my soul
More than my poniard did his bleeding heart.
And upon the ghost’s appearance Brutus expresses his longing for death… Caesar’s ghost… foretells Brutus: ‘Thine own right hand shall work my wish’d revenge’, which may have suggested the words that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of his Brutus at the discovery of Cassius’ suicide:
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.
At the end of the play Brutus appears, still pursued by the ghost, and kills himself in despair.
Brutus’ remorse, the identification of the evil spirit with Caesar’s ghost, the linking of the suicide of the conspirators with the ghost’s presence on the battlefield, and Brutus’ melancholy may have influenced Shakespeare’s treatment – though all these points were natural ways of developing the tragedy of Brutus.20
Another minor source was first pointed out by Professor Harold Brooks.21 The warning schedule of Artemidorus and Caesar’s remark to the Soothsayer are both influenced by Caesar’s ‘complaint’ in A Mirror for Magistrates. According to Plutarch, Caesar said to the Soothsayer:
The Ides of Marche be come: So be they, softly aunswered the Soothsayer, but yet are they not past.
The version in Appian, ‘but they be not yet gone’ is closer to Shakespeare’s; but that in A Mirror is closer still:
(Quod I) the Ides of Marche bee come, yet harme is none.
(Quod hee) the Ides of Marche be come, yet th’ar not gone.
(374–5)
Shakespeare certainly drew on a number of different sources for his account of the portents preceding Caesar’s assassination, some of which he used again in Hamlet:
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As stars with trains of fire, and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.
(I. i. 115–20)
Here we have five portents mentioned – ghosts in the streets of Rome, stars with trains of fire, dews of blood, disasters in the sun, and an eclipse of the moon. In Julius Caesar itself we have thunder and lightning, an earthquake, a tempest dropping fire, a slave with a burning brand, a lion in the Capitol, ‘Men, all in fire’ walking the streets, an owl hooting at noonday in the market-place, ‘exhalations, whizzing in the air’, Calphurnia’s dream, a lioness whelping in the streets, ghosts, a war in the heavens, ‘Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol’, comets, and a beast without a heart. It is interesting to compare Plutarch’s account:
For, touching the fires in the element, and spirites running vp and downe in the night, and also the solitarie birdes to be seene at noone dayes sitting in the great market place; are not all these signes perhappes worth the noting, in such a wonderfull chaunce as happened? But Strabo the Philosopher writeth, that diuers men were seene going vp and downe in fire: and furthermore, that there was a slaue of the souldiers, that did cast a maruelous burning flame out of his hande, insomuch as they that saw it, thought he had bene burnt, but when the fire was out, it was found he had no hurt. Caesar himselfe also doing sacrifice vnto the goddes, found that one of the beastes which was sacrificed had no hart: and that was a strange thing in nature, how a beast could liue without a hart.
Plutarch proceeds to describe the warning of the Soothsayer, and Calpurnia’s dreams of Caesar being slain, and the falling of the pinnacle on his house. At the end of the Life of Caesar, Plutarch mentions other portents:
Againe, of signes in the element, the great comet which seuen nightes together was seene very bright after Caesars death, the eighth night after was neuer seene more. Also the brightnes of the sunne was darkened, the which all that yeare through rose very pale, and shined not out, whereby it gaue but small heate: therefore the ayer being very clowdy and darke, by the weaknes of the heate could not come foorth, did cause the earth to bring foorth but raw and vnrype fruits, which rotted before it could rype.
Of the portents used by Shakespeare, Plutarch mentions only nine and he does not state that the bird in the Capitol was an owl. Shakespeare omits some of Plutarch’s portents; but for his remaining ones he had recourse to other sources. In the last book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (xv) there is a long account of the portents, thus translated by Golding:
For battels fighting in the clouds with crashing armour flew,
And dreadfull trumpets sounded in the aire, and hornes eeke blew,
As warning men before hand of the mischiefe that did brew.
And Phoebus also looking dim did cast a drowzie light
Vpon the earth, which seem’d likewise to be in sorie plight:
From vnderneath amid the starres brands oft seem’d burning bright.
If often rained drops of blood. The morning starre lookt blew,
And was besotted heere and there with speckes of rustie hew.
The Moone had also spots of blood. The screechowle sent from hell
Did with hir tune vnfortunate in euerie corner yel.
Salt teares from iuorie images in sundrie places fell,
And in the chappels of the gods was singing heard, and words
Of threatning. Not a sacrifice one signe of good affoords,
But great turmoile to be at hand hir hartstrings doo declare,
And when the beast is ripped vp, the inwards headlesse are.
About the Court, and euerie house, and churches in the nights
The dogs did howle, and euerie where appeered ghastlie sprights,
And with an earthquake shaken was the towne.
(879–96)
Ovid, in addition to mentioning several of the portents in Plutarch’s list, mentions several of the other Shakespearian portents – the war in heaven causing dews of blood, the earthquake, and the owl. The spots of blood on the moon may have suggested Shakespeare’s lunar eclipse, although Lucan, as we shall see, has a description of such an eclipse.
In another well-known passage about Caesar’s murder, Virgil in Georgics I lists a number of portents:22
Quum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit
Impiaque æternam timuerunt sæcula noctem …
Armorum sonitum toto Germania cælo
Audiit; insolitis tremuerunt motibus Alpes.
Vox quoque per lucos vulgo exaudita silentes
Ingens; et simulacra modis pallentia miris
Visa sub obscurum noctis; pecudesque locutæ;
Infandum! sistunt amnes, terraeque dehiscunt,
Et maestum illacrimat templis ebur, æraque sudant …
Per noctem resonare lupis ululantibus urbes,
Non alias cælo ceciderunt plura sereno
Fulgura; nec diri toties arsere cometæ.
Here we have an eclipse of the sun, earthquake, ghosts, wolves howling in towns, thunder and lightning, and comets. Shakespeare’s thunder and lightning may have been suggested by this passage; and his lion may have derived partly from Virgil’s wolves and partly from Lucan’s wild beasts in the streets of Rome. For Shakespeare seems also to have been acquainted with Lucan’s description of the portents connected with Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, possibly in Marlowe’s translation, although this was not yet published when Julius Caesar was first performed:23
Strange sights appear’d, the angry threatning gods
Fill’d both the earth and seas with prodegies;
Great store of strange and vnknown stars were seene
Wandering about the North, and rings of fire
Flie in the ayre, and dreadfull bearded stars,
And Commets that presage the fal of kingdoms.
The flattering skie gliter’d in often flames,
And sundry fiery meteors blaz’d in heauen:
Now spearlike, long; now like a spreading torch:
Lightning in silence, stole forth without clouds,
And from the northren climat snatching fier
Blasted the Capitoll: The lesser stars
Which wont to run their course through empty night
At noone day mustered; Phoebe hauing fild
Her meeting hornes to match her brothers light,
Strooke with th’earths suddaine shadow waxed pale,
Titan himselfe throand in the midst of heauen,
His burning chariot plung’d in sable cloudes,
And whelm’d the world in darknesse, making men
Dispaire of day …
Crownes fell from holy statues, ominous birds
Defil’d the day, and wilde beastes were seene,
Leauing the woods, lodge in the streetes of Rome …
Soules quiet and appeas’d sigh’d from their graues,
Clashing of armes was heard, in vntrod woods,
Shrill voices schright, and ghoasts incounter men.
Lucan describes other portents, including prodigious births and a sacrificial beast with strange entrails. It will be observed, in the lines quoted, that he has a striking eclipse of the moon, and a parallel to ‘stars with trains of fire’. He provides what is perhaps the nearest parallel to the lion in the Capitol; but it should be mentioned that Plutarch describes how Cassius’ lions were let loose at the siege of Megara.
Some portents, too, are mentioned by Appian, including Calphurnia’s dream in which she saw Caesar ‘all to be goared with bloude’, ‘manye fearefull tokens’ in the sacrifices, and ‘there was no harte, or as some say, no heade of the entrailes’. Caesar then asks the diviner to sacrifice again, but with no better result.24 Some of these portents appear also in Caesar’s Revenge. Other possible sources for the portents have been suggested. Those preceding the fall of Jerusalem in Nashe’s Christ’s Tears25 and others described by Dekker in Canaan’s Calamitie26 are not connected with Caesar, and they are less close to Shakespeare’s than the ones discussed above.27