The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works

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The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works Page 140

by William Shakespeare


  This quarry cries on havoc. O proud Death,

  What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,

  That thou so many princes at a shot

  So bloodily hast struck?

  1 AMBASSADOR The sight is dismal;

  And our affairs from England come too late.

  375

  The ears are senseless that should give us hearing

  To tell him his commandment is fulfill’d,

  That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

  Where should we have our thanks?

  HORATIO Not from his mouth,

  Had it th’ability of life to thank you.

  380

  He never gave commandment for their death.

  But since, so jump upon this bloody question,

  You from the Polack wars and you from England

  Are here arriv’d, give order that these bodies

  High on a stage be placed to the view,

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  And let me speak to th’yet unknowing world

  How these things came about. So shall you hear

  Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

  Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,

  Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause,

  390

  And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

  Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads. All this can I

  Truly deliver.

  FORTINBRAS Let us haste to hear it,

  And call the noblest to the audience.

  For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune.

  395

  I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,

  Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.

  HORATIO Of that I shall have also cause to speak,

  And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more.

  But let this same be presently perform’d

  400

  Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance

  On plots and errors happen.

  FORTINBRAS Let four captains

  Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,

  For he was likely, had he been put on,

  To have prov’d most royal; and for his passage,

  405

  The soldier’s music and the rite of war

  Speak loudly for him.

  Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this

  Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

  Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

  410

  Exeunt marching, bearing off the bodies, after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.

  Julius Caesar

  Julius Caesar seems to have been one of the first plays to be performed in the new Globe Theatre in the summer or autumn of 1599: Thomas Platter, a Swiss doctor who was in London from 18 September to 20 October, recorded having seen a performance of ‘the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius’ on 21 September which was in all probability Shakespeare’s play. It is unlikely to have been written earlier since it is not included in the list of plays given by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598), but allusions to it begin to appear in 1600, indicating that it was a popular and influential work. It was not published, however, until it was included in the First Folio in 1623, as the fifth of the tragedies, in an unusually accurate text based apparently on a very clear manuscript, formerly thought to be authorial but now assumed to be a good scribal copy.

  While today Julius Caesar tends to be categorized as a ‘classical tragedy’ or a ‘Roman play’, and discussed in relation to later plays of this kind such as Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, its immediate context in Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist gives it equally strong links with Henry V and Hamlet. By 1599 Shakespeare had written only two ‘straight’ tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, though some of the English history plays had been printed with the word ‘tragedy’ on their title-pages. He seems to have been reading and thinking about Julius Caesar when he wrote Henry V (also generally dated 1599) since in the Chorus to act 5 he compares the triumphant return of Henry to England to the greeting of ‘conquering Caesar’ by the senators and plebeians of ‘antique Rome’ – the material of the opening scene of this play. A further link is provided by Fluellen’s comparison of Henry and Alexander in 4.7 of Henry V: Shakespeare read about Alexander in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, where Alexander is paired with Julius Caesar in Plutarch’s system of providing parallel Greek and Roman biographies. Shakespeare, who used Plutarch extensively in Julius Caesar, seems to suggest that Henry V could be added as a third, English example of a great military leader.

  As Henry V looks forward to Julius Caesar, the latter play looks forward to Hamlet. The difficulty Brutus faces in arriving at his decision to kill Caesar can be compared with Hamlet’s dilemma over killing Claudius, and the way Brutus describes the ‘interim’ between ‘the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion’ in 2.1 is if anything more accurate about Hamlet’s situation than it is about his own. The ‘sheeted dead’ squeaking and gibbering in the Roman streets ‘A little ere the mightiest Julius fell’ are remembered in the first scene of Hamlet, and Polonius recalls acting the part of Caesar in 3.2.

  While Hamlet quickly became a personal tragedy, with many of its political passages cut in performance, the theatrical and critical history of Julius Caesar has seen debate centred on its main political issue: were the conspirators justified in killing Caesar? The question was familiar to educated people in Elizabethan England as a stock topic for debate or ‘disputation’ in schools and universities. In the theatre, where it has been one of the most frequently performed of Shakespeare’s plays, there has been a long tradition of presenting Brutus as a sympathetic hero and endorsing his republican sympathies; critics, and especially editors of the play, have been more inclined to find fault with him and to view the murder of Caesar as a crime or even ‘sacrilege’. Many twentieth-century productions since Orson Welles’s sensational 1937 New York version (subtitled ‘Death of a Dictator’) have modernized and simplified the play’s politics by presenting Caesar as a Fascist leader like Hitler or Mussolini.

  The 1998 Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.

  LIST OF ROLES

  Julius CAESAR

  conspirators against Julius Caesar

  triumvirs after the death of Caesar

  CALPHURNIA

  wife of Caesar

  PORTIA

  wife of Brutus

  LUCIUS

  personal servant to Brutus

  senators

  tribunes of the people

  CINNA

  a poet

  supporters of Brutus and Cassius, and officers in their army

  soldiers with Brutus and Cassius

  PINDARUS

  ARTEMIDORUS

  CARPENTER

  COBBLER

  POET

  SOOTHSAYER

  SERVANT

  to Caesar

  SERVANT

  to Antony

  SERVANT

  to Octavius

  MESSENGER

  FOUR PLEBEIANS

  THREE SOLDIERS

  in the army of Brutus

  TWO SOLDIERS

  in the army of Antony

  GHOST of Caesar

  Commoners, Soldiers and others

  Julius Caesar

  1.1 Enter FLAVIUS, MURELLUS and certain Commoners over the stage.

  FLAVIUS

  Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home!

  Is this a holiday? What, know you not

  (Being mechanical) you ought not walk

  Upon a labouring day, without the sign

  Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou?

  5

  CARPENTER Why, sir, a carpenter.

  MURELLUS Where is thy leather apron, and thy rule?

  What dost thou with thy best apparel on?

  You, sir, what trade are you?

  COBBLER Truly, si
r, in respect of a fine workman, I am

  10

  but as you would say, a cobbler.

  MURELLUS

  But what trade art thou? Answer me directly.

  COBBLER A trade, sir, that I hope I may use with a safe

  conscience, which is indeed, sir, a mender of bad soles.

  FLAVIUS

  What trade, thou knave? Thou naughty knave, what trade?

  15

  COBBLER Nay I beseech you, sir, be not out with me:

  yet if you be out, sir, I can mend you.

  MURELLUS What mean’st thou by that? Mend me, thou

  saucy fellow?

  COBBLER Why, sir, cobble you.

  20

  FLAVIUS Thou art a cobbler, art thou?

  COBBLER Truly, sir, all that I live by, is with the awl: I

  meddle with no tradesman’s matters, nor women’s

  matters; but withal I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old

  shoes; when they are in great danger, I recover them.

  25

  As proper men as ever trod upon neat’s leather have

  gone upon my handiwork.

  FLAVIUS But wherefore art not in thy shop today?

  Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?

  COBBLER Truly, sir, to wear out their shoes, to get

  30

  myself into more work. But indeed, sir, we make

  holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph.

  MURELLUS

  Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?

  What tributaries follow him to Rome

  To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?

  35

  You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

  O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,

  Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft

  Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,

  To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,

  40

  Your infants in your arms, and there have sat

  The livelong day, with patient expectation,

  To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome:

  And when you saw his chariot but appear,

  Have you not made an universal shout,

  45

  That Tiber trembled underneath her banks

  To hear the replication of your sounds

  Made in her concave shores?

  And do you now put on your best attire?

  And do you now cull out a holiday?

  50

  And do you now strew flowers in his way,

  That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?

  Be gone!

  Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,

  Pray to the gods to intermit the plague

  55

  That needs must light on this ingratitude.

  FLAVIUS Go, go, good countrymen, and for this fault

  Assemble all the poor men of your sort;

  Draw them to Tiber banks, and weep your tears

  Into the channel, till the lowest stream

  60

  Do kiss the most exalted shores of all.

  Exeunt all the Commoners.

  See where their basest mettle be not moved.

  They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness.

  Go you down that way towards the Capitol.

  This way will I. Disrobe the images,

  65

  If you do find them decked with ceremonies.

  MURELLUS May we do so?

  You know it is the feast of Lupercal.

  FLAVIUS It is no matter. Let no images

  Be hung with Caesar’s trophies. I’ll about,

  70

  And drive away the vulgar from the streets.

  So do you too, where you perceive them thick.

  These growing feathers plucked from Caesar’s wing

  Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,

  Who else would soar above the view of men,

  75

  And keep us all in servile fearfulness. Exeunt.

  1.2 Enter CAESAR, ANTONY for the course, CALPHURNIA, PORTIA, DECIUS, CICERO, BRUTUS, CASSIUS, CASKA, a Soothsayer; after them MURELLUS and FLAVIUS.

  CAESAR Calphurnia.

  CASKA Peace, ho! Caesar speaks.

  CAESAR Calphurnia.

  CALPHURNIA Here, my lord.

  CAESAR Stand you directly in Antonio’s way

  When he doth run his course. Antonio.

  ANTONY Caesar, my lord.

  5

  CAESAR Forget not in your speed, Antonio,

  To touch Calphurnia; for our elders say,

  The barren touched in this holy chase

  Shake off their sterile curse.

  ANTONY I shall remember.

  When Caesar says ‘Do this’, it is performed.

  10

  CAESAR Set on, and leave no ceremony out. [Music.]

  SOOTHSAYER Caesar!

  CAESAR Ha! Who calls?

  CASKA Bid every noise be still. Peace yet again!

  CAESAR Who is it in the press that calls on me?

  15

  I hear a tongue shriller than all the music

  Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak. Caesar is turned to hear.

  SOOTHSAYER Beware the Ides of March.

  CAESAR What man is that?

  BRUTUS

  A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March.

  CAESAR Set him before me. Let me see his face.

  20

  CASSIUS

  Fellow, come from the throng. Look upon Caesar.

  CAESAR

  What sayst thou to me now? Speak once again.

  SOOTHSAYER Beware the Ides of March.

  CAESAR He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass.

  Sennet. Exeunt all but Brutus and Cassius.

 

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