A play that needs no introduction, Julius Caesar is a terrific starting place for knowing the art and majesty of William Shakespeare. Whether read as tragedy or history, it is an easy way to begin a love affair with the Bard.
It was the Folger edition of Julius Caesar that grabbed me back in the ninth grade, seeking distraction while flunking all my classes. Something about its brooding cover – a lean Roman figure against a marble backdrop – drew me in. It had it all: Indelible characters, hard-hitting action scenes, layers of ambiguity, and text that you can grasp readily thanks to the Folger practice of laying out the tricky parts on the opposite page.
The plot is easy to grasp, whatever your knowledge of ancient Roman history: A great man named Caesar is about to assume absolute authority over the republic of Rome. This upsets many colleagues. A conspiracy is hatched to bump him off, but what happens next?
The first question to ponder is what drives these conspirators. Are they genuinely concerned with the fate of their republic, or jealous that one of their brother patricians may take the laurel crown for himself? Is it a bit of both? Their words leave room to wonder:
FLAVIUS
These growing feathers plucked from Caesar’s wing
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,
Who else would soar above the view of men
And keep us all in servile fearfulness. [Act I, scene i, lines 77-80]
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| Much like this statue, Caesar in this play is portrayed both as a great man and quite proud of himself, at one point declaring: "Know: Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause/Will he be satisfied." [III, i, 52-53] Image from https://www.livescience.com/julius-caesar |
Only Brutus, the closest of all to Caesar, offers a fig leaf of authenticity to claims of patriotic worry. He knows Caesar and warns “it is the bright day that brings forth the adder,” [II, i, 15] a judgement that has some basis from the glimpses we get of Caesar behind the scenes.
It is a funny thing: Caesar himself gets few lines in this play bearing his name. Rather, it is what others think of Caesar that guides the plot.
Brutus may have a handle on his boss, but he is blinded by an exulted sense of his own virtue, being the proud scion of a noble family. He is undoubtedly influenced by Cassius, the leader of the conspiracy, whose motives are in no ways pure. Cassius craves power and lucre.
Other conspirators are naïve dreamers or grudge holders; none manifest a whiff of civil duty. Who can you root for? Caesar himself is so haughty he speaks of himself in the third person, while the anti-conspiracy leader Mark Antony is a conniving warper of public will. Maybe that is why it seems so modern; everyone has their own game to play and no one is without blame.
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| Caesar meets his end at the Roman Senate on the Ides of March. Brutus urges his fellows beforehand: "Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,/Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds." [II, i, 186-187] Image from https://nosweatshakespeare.com/play-summary-2/julius-caesar/ |
Brutus is closest, but the fumes of sanctimony hang about the folds of his toga. He does have reason for concern, but his manner of addressing the danger of losing freedom to Caesar is by surrendering it to Cassius. The more Cassius badgers Brutus, the more he agrees.
Even Cassius in a private moment admits this:
CASSIUS
Caesar doth bear me hard, but he loves Brutus.
If I were Brutus now, and he were Cassius,
He should not humor me. [I,
ii, 325-327]
Brutus fails to see through Cassius’s obvious sham of writing him anti-Caesar letters with disguised handwriting, accepting it as a legitimate public outcry. We know from the above quote, and for the suspicions we hear Caesar raise with his trusted lieutenant Mark Antony, that Cassius is in ill favor. So he has a motive, if a hazy, selfish one.
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| "But, woe the while, our fathers’ minds are dead,/And we are governed with our mothers’ spirits./Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish..." [I, iii, 87] David Collings as Cassius works on the pride of Richard Pasco's Brutus in a 1979 BBC-TV production of the play. Image from https://david-collings.livejournal.com/20751.html |
One can draw a parallel between Cassius and a later Shakespeare character, Iago, more obviously a villain but a similar misleader and sower of discord for personal ends. Brutus’s parallel to another Shakespeare character is perhaps Hamlet, given the bouts of indecision and bad luck affecting both. But Brutus also seems in the thrall of his own narcissism and casuistry.
He justifies the murder by saying he is rescuing his dear friend from the mental burden of mortality:
BRUTUS
Grant that, and then is death a benefit.
So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridged
His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows and besmear our swords. [III, i, 113-117]
Brutus has many bad ideas in the play; soaking himself in gore to allay the fears of the Roman populace is surely another.
The play opens oddly with its only sustained comic scene, featuring characters we never again encounter. A group of Roman commoners are celebrating Caesar’s defeat of Pompey; two patricians loyal to Pompey call them out for it, after some bickering with a cobbler about his trade.
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| The play opens with a city-wide celebration of Caesar's victory against the army of Pompey, for which they are upbraided by a tribune. "O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,/Knew you not Pompey?" [I, i, 41-42] Image from https://www.facebook.com/CaligulaAtRome/photos/a.313608499004371/313573872341167/?type=3 |
In fact there are several scenes that feel narratively disconnected; short cut-out sequences showing a poet killed by a mob or an inconsequential conversation between a soothsayer and Brutus’s wife. Of course, Shakespeare was writing for the Elizabethan stage and needed to give his principals time to change costumes. But it also feeds the sense of controlled chaos that is this play’s hidden strength. There is an almost cinematic sense of montage in its fractured overlay of short, disconnected scenes.
One reason the play works so well today is the plethora of culturally recognizable lines presented here in context. In the first two acts alone you get these: “Beware the ides of March!” “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves...” “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look....” “...it was Greek to me...” “Cowards die many times before their deaths;/The valiant never taste of death but once...” I’m sure a missed a few.
Another reason is how well the play’s message holds up. Like so much else Shakespeare wrote, it is a seething indictment of the public will. In the opening scene the cobbler happily admits the only reason he marches for Caesar is that a parade will wear out more footwear.
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| "It is not meet you know how Caesar loved you./You are not wood, you are not stones, but men." [III, ii, 153-154] Marlon Brando as Antony milks the crowd into a deadly frenzy in the 1953 film adaptation of Julius Caesar. Image from https://bcmoviediary.com/2018/02/16/julius-caesar-1953/ |
Caesar himself, in the few moments he is on stage, practices on his people’s credulity, feigning disinterest in the crown only to fret when he is warned it may not be offered again.
The conspirators can barely choke down their disgust at this charade:
CASCA
He put it the
third time by, and still as he refused it the rabblement
hooted and clapped their chopped 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
swooned and fell down at it. And for mine own part,
I durst not laugh for fear of opening my lips and
receiving the bad air.
[I, ii, 253-261]
Shakespeare gives every evidence of sharing Casca’s contempt for the crowd, most famously in the play’s best-known scene, where Mark Antony masterfully plays the mourners at Caesar’s funeral into a violent wrath; but more acidly still in the last scene of Act III, when the poet Cinna is murdered for having the same name as one of Caesar’s killers.
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| Though he was hung, not stabbed, Cinna the poet was indeed slain by a mob for the crime of bearing the same name as a conspirator. Above, Norman Lloyd as Cinna faces his doom in a 1937 Mercury Theater production. Image from https://www.therestisnoise.com/2021/05/for-norman-lloyd.html |
The final two acts of Julius Caesar are an anti-climax. We see Mark Antony show he isn’t all good will to Caesar’s people when he reduces Caesar’s public legacies, the same ones which Mark Antony had made such a point of trumpeting during his funeral oration.
We see friction, too; between Antony and his partner-in-rule Octavius, and between Brutus and Cassius, who shows himself a double-dealer when Brutus calls him out for being a thief, first belittling Brutus, then claiming Brutus only misheard him. Brutus is characteristically placated by this; but a grisly end for both soon follows.
Brutus is the only one in the play who isn’t playing some confidence game. Even Pindarus, Cassius’s lowly bondsman, fixes his own freedom by convincing his master that the battle is lost, thus encouraging Cassius’s suicide. Hope is thus quickly lost to deception:
MESSALA
O hateful error, melancholy’s child,
Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men
The things that are not? [V,
iii, 75-77]
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| Nineteenth-century stage actor Edwin Booth as Brutus, at center, looks at his brother Junius (at right) as Cassius. On the left is their brother John Wilkes Booth, who ironically played the assassination-avenging Mark Antony in an 1864 production. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar_(play) |
Shakespeare must have felt strongly about this play; it inspired a sequel, Antony And Cleopatra, which further examines this question of how deception and folly confuses even the best rulers. By 1599, the year believed to mark the debut of the play, Shakespeare’s greatness was something he could be confident in.
He even acknowledges this to you and me, across the chasm of time, when Cassius pauses after Caesar’s death:
CASSIUS
How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown! [III, i, 124-126]
Julius Caesar
gives off enough sparks to please a young reader; but there is much below the
surface to relish and ponder.
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