Brutus and Other Heroines

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by Harriet Walter


  All this made his first soliloquy extremely tricky. I thought I knew what he was feeling, but he never quite expressed it, and it was therefore almost impossible to convey to the audience. I even wondered if it was a speech that Shakespeare had written for another play and had it knocking around in a bottom drawer waiting to slot it in somewhere, so inappropriate was some of it to the situation.

  For a start, by the time he was assassinated, Caesar had already destroyed the whole notion of Republicanism. He had abolished elections, limited the powers of the law courts, stopped free speech… the list goes on. So Rome was already a dictatorship. But Brutus keeps referring to a potential dictatorship that might arise if nothing is done to stop it. He says Caesar ‘may do danger’ (my emphasis), and that ‘lowliness is young ambition’s ladder’. What has that got to do with the well-established fifty-six-year-old Caesar? Following through with the ladder metaphor, he talks of people pulling the ladder up behind them, ‘so Caesar may’ and, ‘lest he may, prevent’.

  Another metaphor he uses is that of letting loose ‘the adder… that craves wary walking’, and he resolves to think of Caesar ‘as a serpent’s egg / Which, hatch’d, would, as his kind, grow mischievous’, and so best to ‘kill him in the shell’.

  None of these reasons is strong enough to justify murder. You don’t kill someone because they might become a monster. A man like Brutus could never be persuaded to assassinate a leader and a friend unless things had reached a point of no return, but Shakespeare robbed him (and me) of the most powerful arguments.

  The one thing I could seize on was the imminent danger that Caesar is to be crowned King the next day. It is hard to convey to a modern audience the dread that the word ‘King’ held for the Romans. Caesar as King would be worse even than Caesar the dictator, because kings form dynasties. Their unelected sons become kings after them, and inherited power was the antithesis of Republicanism. Once the crown was on Caesar’s head there would be no going back. It must be now and ‘It must be by his death’.

  Out of my frustration at Brutus’s equivocation I discovered that that was the point. Shakespeare was interested in a man ‘with himself at war’. He wanted to show a man of conscience, a decent man, one whom we would quite like to take over the country, searching his heart and trying to stoke himself up to a terrible act by way of some pretty spurious arguments. So I reconciled myself to the fact that the speech tells us more about Brutus than about what is really happening.

  ‘Brutus is an honourable man’…

  …is almost an advertising slogan that Brutus himself has bought into. The number of times he refers to his own honour seems to protest a little too much. Cynics say that is because he is as nakedly ambitious as the next man but won’t admit it to himself, but I am not a cynic and I don’t believe Shakespeare wants to tell that particular story about the hero/anti-hero of the play. I think Brutus is certainly not without ambition and fears it in himself. He frequently restates the slogan of his honour because he wants to live up to his ideal and needs a reminder to keep himself on track. He sees with clarity that

  The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins

  Remorse from power.

  He wants to believe that moral integrity and leadership can coexist so he strives to become the change he wants to see in the world. Being a cynical, power-hungry villain is easy by comparison.

  Brutus so desperately needs to think himself honourable that he has to disguise murder as something more acceptable to his conscience. To the conspirators he advocates carving Caesar’s body as ‘a dish fit for the gods’. He so needs the world to think him honourable that he gives a tutorial on how to spin a word (my emphasis):

  Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers…

  Which so appearing to the common eyes,

  We shall be call’d purgers, not murderers.

  This same need informs his argument against killing Mark Antony:

  Our course will seem too bloody.

  He is also no stranger to duplicity, urging the conspirators to go to the Capitol looking ‘fresh and merrily’:

  Let not our looks put on our purposes,

  But bear it as our Roman actors do.

  It is hard, within the body of the text, to find any proof of love between Brutus and Caesar. Shakespeare doesn’t give them a scene together or any other chance to demonstrate it. The only clues are in Brutus’s protestations to Cassius of his love for Caesar, and Caesar’s enshrined dying words, ‘Et tu, Brute’, designed to bed themselves into Brutus’s conscience forever. In our 2012 version Caesar was played as a monstrous manipulator punishing or petting in equal, unpredictable measure. The prison character was called Frankie, and her prison identity was ambiguous. Some saw her as alpha bitch, some as top prison rebel, in and out of solitary, some as mother/father figure. Her true identity would be revealed in the last seconds of the play.

  Whoever she was, it was clear that she had top status, with Brutus/Hannah close behind. We decided that she had directed the play, and this accounted for her continuing watchful presence long after Caesar’s death, just as the ghost of Caesar hovers over Shakespeare’s play.

  At the point of doing the bloody deed, all Brutus’s protective words desert him. Murder is murder. He will find it harder to believe in his own honour from now on. In contrast to Macbeth, whose first treacherous act tips him down an irreversible slide to evil, Brutus just becomes more and more desperate for a good end to justify the means.

  I often thought of Barack Obama—that rare creature: a morally intelligent leader—and how some of his well-intentioned decisions have not always been the best political ones. When Brutus argues against Cassius’s idea of killing Mark Antony as well as Caesar, and when, later, he gives Mark Antony permission to speak at Caesar’s funeral, he inadvertently sets in motion the destruction of everything he and his co-conspirators have fought for. He hopes that allowing Mark Antony to live and to speak will demonstrate to the world that theirs will be a reasonable and transparent government. Cassius is the shrewder, less trusting politician; and the play tragically proves him right.

  Brutus also misjudges the crowd when he has his chance to justify the assassination. The real Brutus was a lawyer, and Shakespeare gives him all the advantages of a great legal orator. If we look at the following speech, we find the rule of three frequently used for climactic effect. We see antithetical slogans with plenty of good soundbites for memorising:

  Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more,

  and

  Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?

  We see the neat pay-off of word set against word, and in particular his own buzz-word, ‘honour’, which he can assume the crowd attaches to him:

  believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe.

  He offers them his own tears for his friend, but hatred for Caesar’s ‘ambition’ (which I found a totally unhelpful understatement with which to put my case)—and in the speech below I have marked how he breaks out of the rule of three to add a fourth by way of emphasising how Caesar’s ambition oversteps the bounds.

  Finally he uses a rhetorical structure to emotionally blackmail any disbelievers into buttoning their lips and joining the cause.

  Romans (1), countrymen (2), and lovers (3)!

  Hear me for my cause, and be silent, that you may hear (1): believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe (2): censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses, that you may the better judge (3).

  If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:

  —Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.

  Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?

  As Caesar l
oved me, I weep for him (1); as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it (2); as he was valiant, I honour him (3): but, as he was ambitious, I slew him (4). There is tears for his love (1); joy for his fortune (2); honour for his valour (3); and death for his ambition (4).

  Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended (1).

  Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If any, speak; for him have I offended (2). Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended (3). I pause for a reply…

  Then none have I offended.

  It is a brilliant speech, but not brilliant enough.

  The crowd are won over, but Mark Antony wins them back by hitting so many more of the people’s buttons than Brutus ever could. The revolution against Caesar was essentially an upper-class revolution and so failed to get the people behind it. The upper class were more or less under house arrest, and, being close to power, they keenly felt the lack of it. By contrast, Caesar had been clever enough to keep the lower classes relatively well fed and content. The conspirators’ mistake was in not recognising that these people bore Caesar no grudge, and even loved him. Mark Antony was able to play on this and kick the country into civil war.

  Men Don’t Cry

  Masculinity is a carapace that protects men in battle: hard but inflexible, strong yet brittle. It permits no expression of feelings, doubt or weakness.

  Grayson Perry

  When we had asked the female prisoners in Holloway what they thought women could bring to Julius Caesar that men wouldn’t, several answered ‘emotion’.

  We next see Brutus at the height of the war. His feelings are raw. He may have killed his leader only to supplant him with an even worse order. The only way he can live with this thought is to believe his way of honour can win. It must. Then he learns that his closest ally Cassius has been sanctioning bribes, and the two men have a stormy row in Brutus’s tent.

  This is the most brilliant scene in the play, and the fact that it was acted by women gave it a double life. On the one hand two men, whose brotherly bond only soldiers can know; on the other two women shouting at one another, physically threatening and pushing each other. Physical closeness has very different connotations for men and women, as does overt aggression—something females practically never show in friendship and certainly would not easily recover from in the way that Brutus and Cassius do.

  We actresses focused on each of our character’s passionate views. Brutus/Hannah is full of idealistic anger:

  shall we now

  Contaminate our fingers with base bribes,

  And sell the mighty space of our large honours?

  Cassius (prisoner name: Noma) lashes out in defence of pragmatism:

  In such a time as this it is not meet

  That every nice offence should bear his comment.

  Women actors brought out the school playground nature of the male posturing…

  CASSIUS:

  I am a soldier, I,

  Older in practice, abler than yourself

  To make conditions.

  BRUTUS:

  Go to; you are not, Cassius.

  CASSIUS:

  I am.

  BRUTUS:

  I say you are not…

  CASSIUS:

  …I said, an elder soldier, not a better:

  Did I say ‘better’?

  BRUTUS:

  If you did, I care not.

  But it also showed how emotionally entangled these warrior men are. The following extract reminds one of a marital row.

  CASSIUS:

  You love me not.

  BRUTUS:

  I do not like your faults.

  CASSIUS:

  A friendly eye could never see such faults.

  BRUTUS:

  A flatterer’s would not, though they do appear

  As huge as high Olympus.

  It culminates in a great histrionic demonstration by Cassius and a threat of suicide—

  There is my dagger,

  And here my naked breast…

  Strike, as thou didst at Caesar; for, I know,

  When thou didst hate him worst, thou lovedst him better

  Than ever thou lovedst Cassius

  —proving that men do use emotional blackmail in their arguments just as they accuse women of doing.

  It has the right effect. Cassius’s alter-ego, Noma, had been a self-harmer. For any audience close enough to see, she had a criss-cross of scarring all up her arms. Hannah rushes in to take the knife off her (or the sharpened toothbrush handle as used in prisons) and rocks her in her arms. This action matches the men’s tender words. Brutus is about to reveal that Portia has just committed suicide in despair at how the war is turning out. To also have the blood of his closest friend on his hands would have been too much to bear.

  The audience don’t need to know of all these layers beneath the scene. In fact they shouldn’t know. Shakespeare drops the bombshell of Portia’s death simply and quietly after the row has died down. It may retrospectively explain Brutus’s fierceness, but Shakespeare deliberately delays our feelings of sympathy for Brutus.

  Phyllida further delayed the audience’s sympathy by staging a ‘breakout’ moment (as we called them). In the tiny turnaround time between the end of the row and Brutus’s announcement of Portia’s death, some of the inmates started giggling and talking loudly outside ‘the tent’. Hannah was so 200 per cent engaged in the project for all her own personal reasons and this was such a highly charged moment in the play that I/Hannah broke out of character, rushed up to the disruptors and blasted them with something different every night depending on my whim. It was deliberately inappropriate and startling. I won’t analyse the effect on the audience because I am not entirely sure what it was, but it shifted the ground and upped the stakes and reminded people that a theatre can be an unsafe and unpredictable place. Was that Brutus? A prisoner? or Harriet Walter losing the plot?

  I am not sure whether the incident helped or hindered me in getting back to Brutus’s grief as he tells Cassius of Portia’s death. It was a wonderful moment to play. This simple line coming from left field during their conversation: ‘Portia is dead.’

  Cassius is stopped in his tracks: ‘Ha! Portia!’

  Brutus repeats, ‘She is dead.’

  It is stated unhistrionically. Then Brutus gives way to tears but very abruptly cuts off with ‘Speak no more of her. Give me a bowl of wine.’ Back to business. Where are the generals? Come in, chaps. Let’s talk strategy. But then Shakespeare does this extraordinary thing, and, as often happens, something puzzling in the text forces up an interesting discovery. General Messala asks Brutus whether he has heard any news of his wife. Brutus says no. Is this a mistake? Was this scene written earlier than the one before and Shakespeare had forgotten to edit it out? What is this about?

  The general hums and haws, and Brutus says, ‘Out with it’: ‘As you are a Roman tell me true.’ The general then tells him Portia is dead, and Brutus reacts in the strangest way:

  Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala:

  With meditating that she must die once,

  I have the patience to endure it now.

  And then I understood. Messala’s next words are:

  Even so great men great losses should endure.

  Brutus has used the moment to demonstrate to his men a patrician self-restraint that we know is not the whole picture. It rings bells even now when men are trained not to cry and certainly not in public. Tears cloud the judgment and leaders need to be clear.

  As a woman playing the part of a man under such cultural pressure not to show his feelings even when his wife had died, I developed a new empathy with the opposite sex. It also became demonstrably clear over the rest of the scene that Brutus’s grief did indeed cloud his judgment despite his stiff upper lip.

  Boys’ Toys

  From this moment the play rushes headlong to its conclusion—at least it should rush. In many producti
ons it plods. Scene changes and clunking armour slow the pace, and we sit and watch the swish, thunk, duck, swipe of well-toned, sweating actors grunting in fights to which we probably know the outcome.

  We had plenty of athletic, well-toned women in our company, so it wasn’t that we couldn’t have staged these battles traditionally, but most of us switch off in those predictable battle scenes. Phyllida had always known she wanted music to play a large part in the production, so for our first time round in 2012/13* we had a brilliant drummer, an extraordinary Greek electric guitarist with a crimson streak in her hair, a bass guitarist who was also a comedy writer, and my servant Lucius, who was also a boxer and writer and played a mean saxophone.

  In preparation for war, the drummer, dressed in combats and shades, sat on a raised movable platform with a single drum and started playing a low and steady drumroll. The rest of the cast raced on with different drums and cymbals and, as they were set up on the platform, the drummer added each sound into the build-up until an entire drum kit was assembled (presumably the prison had authorised the hire). The army then leapt on to the moving platform. Flashing lights and blasting electric guitars were added as it swirled around the space with soldiers falling to their deaths or leaping up to climb up the prison stairway frame. One critic wrote that he had seldom seen so much testosterone on a stage.

  Our Clean Break friends pointed out that even for a play the inmates would not be allowed to use anything sharp that could be used as a weapon, so we used what would have been available to us; boys’ toys from the prison nursery unit, i.e water-pistols and plastic machine guns. Put those in the hands of amateur actor/prisoners with the rare excuse to let off steam and we hoped to create an illusion of barely contained danger.

  Suicide

 

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