In a grim replay of the scene in which Caesar is hacked to death in the Capitol, an innocent poet is savagely murdered onstage. It’s hard not to conclude that the haze of Elizabethan censorship hanging in the air at this time seeps into the play at such moments. But it’s also hard not to wonder at how little sympathy Shakespeare shows either for Cinna the Poet or for the other writer who appears in the play and gets caught in the maw of politics, the unnamed poet who tries to insert himself into the political action by attempting to reconcile the feuding Brutus and Cassius. When Cassius tries to excuse the poet’s intrusion, explaining that’s what poets foolishly do—“ ’tis his fashion”—Brutus will have none of it:
I’ll know his humor when he knows his time.
What should the wars do with these jigging fools?
Companion, hence!
(4.3.135–37)
The message seems to be that it’s a wise poet who knows his place and time, who doesn’t go looking for trouble in a dangerous political world. As Ben Jonson, no stranger to trouble, put it a few months later: “Take heed, / The days are dangerous, full of exception, / And men are grown impatient of reproof” (Every Man Out of His Humour 1.1.123).
Even as censors and sympathizers were combing Hayward for “bugswords” or coded terms, Shakespeare may have been reflecting on other aspects of Heyward’s History that had been largely overlooked. One was its emphasis on a political aspirant’s pursuit of popularity. The meaning of the word “popularity,” familiar to us today in the sense of “being admired by many,” has undergone a sea change since Shakespeare’s day. In the mid-sixteenth century, it was used to describe a radical form of democracy that was the opposite of tyranny. Then, in the late 1590s, a new sense of the word emerged, having to do with courting popular favor. Shakespeare was one of the first to employ it in this sense. It appears only twice in his work, within a very narrow time frame, first in The First Part of Henry the Fourth (1596) and then again in Henry the Fifth. By now, this highly charged notion of “popularity” had become loaded, and the word itself best left unspoken by playwrights wary of censors. But the issues underlying this complex term nonetheless suffuse the play he was now writing, for Shakespeare returns to the problem of popularity in Julius Caesar relentlessly—from the opening scene of holiday and triumph to Casca’s eagerness to enlist the support of a Brutus who “sits high in all the people’s hearts” (1.3.157), to the posthumous reading of Caesar’s will and his extraordinary generosity to the commoners. Shakespeare was well aware, as Hayward was learning to his peril, that popularity was dangerous, made all the more so by Elizabeth’s and Cecil’s deep anxiety about Essex’s cultivation of the people.
It was Francis Bacon who had recently begged Essex to banish popularity from his thoughts, “to take all occasions to speak against popularity and popular causes vehemently.” It was Bacon who criticized Essex for embracing public displays of piety “knowing there were no such strong and drawing cords of popularity, as religion.” And it was Bacon again, a few years later, who wrote a biographical sketch (in Latin and never intended for publication) that acknowledged that “greatness of mind he undoubtedly had in a very high degree; yet such as aspired more after personal aggrandizement than merit towards the public. For he referred everything to himself, and was himself the true and perfect center of all his own actions.” His great flaw, Bacon concludes, was his “desire of popularity.” But the subject of Bacon’s biographical sketch wasn’t Essex, as one might expect, but Julius Caesar. From the Chorus to Henry the Fifth that compares Essex to a conquering Caesar to Bacon’s unpublished character study—which surely had Essex in mind—the similarity between these aspiring, charismatic, martial men was obvious to many. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare is not so much interested in drawing a one-to-one comparison—that was never his style—but in steeping classical history in contemporary political concerns.
While writing Julius Caesar, Shakespeare also paid close attention to those passages in Hayward’s History that reproduced the language of Continental theorists who sought to justify the overthrow of bad rulers. It was dangerous, for example, for Hayward to have Henry tell his followers that he could not decide “whether they be termed rebels or subjects” until they made clear that their “allegiance was bound rather to the state of the realm than the person of the prince.” From a monarchist’s perspective, for Hayward to suggest that one could be loyal to the state yet not to its ruler was treasonous. But, like the precise civil lawyer that he was, Hayward had carefully juxtaposed these passages with others that refuted these arguments, point for point. If anything, his work came down on the side of the monarchy. It wasn’t Hayward’s fault that censors and other “deep searchers” ignored these royalist counterarguments. Shakespeare didn’t. One of the lessons Shakespeare had confirmed by reading Hayward was the dramatic advantage of juxtaposing competing political arguments, balancing them so neatly that it was impossible to tell in favor of which the scales tipped. He would put the insight to good use as he explored the tragic collision of Brutus and Caesar, individuals who embodied irreconcilable political positions. Julius Caesar, then, would repeat the arguments for deposing tyrants, even as it offered powerful arguments for those bitterly opposed to regicide. Shakespeare also understood that, given the nature of Elizabethan censorship, which was far more concerned with the printed word than with what was spoken onstage, there were things that he could get away with that Hayward couldn’t.
When the Plebeians gather to hear Brutus’s justification for the killing of Caesar, we overhear two of them gossiping: “This Caesar was a tyrant.” “That’s certain,” the other affirms. “We are blest that Rome is rid of him” (3.2.70–71). The word “tyrant” and its cognates, so central to republicanism, sound a steady drumbeat in the play, reinforcing the view that Caesar was justifiably slain. As early as the first act, Cassius asks, “Why should Caesar be a tyrant then?” (1.3.103). Brutus similarly invokes the language of tyrannicide, leading the fight against “high-sighted tyranny,” while Cinna leads the cry “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead” over Caesar’s fallen body (2.1.118; 3.1.78).
Rulers revealed their tyrannical tendencies by how they came to power or by how they exercised it. And one of the most keenly debated issues in Shakespeare’s play is whether Caesar is tyrannical in one, the other, or both of these respects. Cassius argues that Caesar is tyrannical in his pursuit of power, wondering aloud, Is “this man… now become a god?” and demanding of Brutus, “Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed / That he is grown so great?” (1.2.15–16, 149–50). Caesar’s suppression of opponents, the frequent comparisons of Brutus to his ancestor Junius Brutus who first banished kings from Rome, and most of all Brutus’s conclusion that Caesar is like “a serpent’s egg / Which, hatched, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,” and who therefore must be killed “in the shell” (2.1.31-34), tilt the play heavily toward the Plebeians’ conclusion. A Caesar who speaks of himself in the third person, who considers the Senate his own, and who in his next-to-last words compares himself first to the northern star, which has “no fellow in the firmament,” and then to an unmovable Mount Olympus (3.1.61, 75), was indeed a tyrant, or would have been so if given the chance.
Yet even as Shakespeare carefully constructs this pro-republican case, he just as skillfully undermines it, altering his source material to achieve a neater balance, omitting, for example, Caesar’s unlawful appropriation of royal powers and prerogatives. Indeed, Caesar’s refusal to place himself first and foremost proves his undoing, for when he is approached by a petitioner intent on warning him about the assassination plot, he insists that “what touches us ourself shall be last served” (3.1.8). Even Brutus, for all his moral certitude, admits that he knows “no personal cause to spurn at him” (2.1.11). The case against republicanism and legitimate deposition is also reinforced by Shakespeare’s portrayal of the conspirators, who, with the exception of Brutus, are more driven by jealousy than principle. Despite Brutus’s exhortation that
they kill Caesar “boldly, but not wrathfully,” and that they “carve him as a dish fit for the gods” rather than “hew him as a carcass fit for hounds” (2.1.173–75), what we actually see onstage is a savage murder, the conspirators’ arms bathed in blood “Up to the elbows” (3.1.108). By the end of Antony’s funeral oration, the same Plebeians who minutes earlier had called Caesar a tyrant, now remember him as “royal Caesar” and rush off to set alight the houses of the “traitors” who assassinated him (3.2.245, 255).
One measure of Shakespeare’s success in employing this balanced dramatic structure is that four centuries later critics continue to debate whether he sides with or against Brutus and his fellow conspirators. Shakespeare didn’t conceive of his tragedy in Aristotelian terms—that is, as a tragedy of the fall of a flawed great man—but rather as a collision of deeply held and irreconcilable principles, embodied in characters who are destroyed when these principles collide. It would take another couple of centuries before Friedrich Hegel, in his Philosophy of Fine Art, described the kind of tragedy Shakespeare was writing, one that hadn’t been attempted since works like Antigone in the great age of Sophoclean Athens.
What Shakespeare brought to the play was not just cerebral. There’s a visceral quality to the play that keeps it from turning into an intellectual exercise—a defect of many other contemporary plays about ancient Rome. It’s most palpable in those bloody scenes where the conspirators hack Caesar to death and the Plebians dismember Cinna the Poet before our eyes. Shakespeare was no stranger to butchery. It’s likely that as a youngster he accompanied his father to local butchers to purchase skins for making gloves. One seventeenth-century Stratford tradition even held that Shakespeare had been “bound apprentice to a butcher” before running off to the London stage. And John Aubrey was told that when Shakespeare “was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but whenever he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make a speech.” As an adult, when he had to write speeches that conjured the brutality of assassination, his childhood recollections served him well. Perhaps only a talented whittawer’s son might liken Caesar’s death to that of a slaughtered animal: when Polonius brags in Hamlet that in his university days he “did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’ th’ Capitol; Brutus killed me,” Hamlet replies: “It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there” (3.2.103–6).
THOUGH THE UNRIVALED MASTER OF THE ENGLISH HISTORY PLAY, SHAKESPEARE nonetheless decided at this time to abandon this comfortable genre and return to the political landscape of classical Rome, which he had previously explored in Titus Andronicus and Lucrece, two of his most popular works. No doubt the Hayward affair merely nudged Shakespeare in a direction he was already moving. He put away his well-worn copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles. Hayward’s bestseller, its lessons learned, was shelved as well. And Shakespeare buried himself more deeply in North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. If others were following Tacitus in writing about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he would begin by returning to the starting point of this decline, the moment when the republic was replaced by imperial rule.
Shakespeare’s decision to do so reminds us of how intensely politics preoccupied him at this moment. What’s too often forgotten, though, is that there’s a difference between being fully engaged with politics and history and espousing a particular political view. When it comes to the assassination of Julius Caesar it was especially difficult for writers to disguise their political sympathies, as Shakespeare managed to do: Dante, after all, had sent Brutus to the bowels of hell, while Milton would praise him as a republican hero. Which is another way of saying that Shakespeare’s nuanced handling of the assassination at this tense moment was, paradoxically, both daring and cautious. Daring, because, to depict the killing of Julius Caesar at a time of official hypersensitivity about seditious writing, had to be risky. At the same time, his choice of working through Plutarch—who had been largely overlooked as a source by London’s professional playwrights—was a careful and canny one. He knew, as did everyone else who was within earshot of the court, that Queen Elizabeth herself had been absorbed in translating Plutarch (“On Curiosity”) just a few months earlier. Even as Tacitus leaned toward republicanism, Plutarch was at heart a monarchist. And, it’s worth noting, Shakespeare named his play after Caesar (who appears in only a few scenes, and except for his ghost is gone midway through the play), rather than Brutus, hero to republicans, who occupies center stage throughout. It was, again, one thing to stage such a play, another to publish it. There would be no quarto editions of this popular play in Shakespeare’s lifetime: twenty-four years would pass before Englishmen and -women could buy and read Julius Caesar.
Shakespeare’s main source, Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, had first been published in 1579 by a French immigrant, Thomas Vautrollier. Vautrollier apprenticed Richard Field, who, after his master died, took over the business and, among other things, published a revised and expanded edition of Plutarch’s Lives in 1595. Field and Shakespeare had been schoolmates in Stratford’s grammar school. Their fathers had known each other professionally: Field’s was a tanner and Shakespeare’s at one point appraised his inventory. The young Field had arrived in London a decade before Shakespeare and may have helped him find his way there. When Shakespeare decided to publish Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, he turned to Field. They were close enough friends for Shakespeare to casually insert Field’s name into Cymbeline, when the disguised Imogen is asked the name of her master and says that it’s “Richard du Champ” (4.2.380)—that is, Richard Field (Field used to call himself “Ricardo del Campo” in his Spanish publications). Shakespeare probably worked from a copy of Plutarch given or lent to him by Field, an expensive and beautiful folio that cost a couple of pounds.
Shakespeare had thumbed through a copy of Plutarch’s Lives as early as 1595: searching for characters’ names for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he had lifted a handful from its pages. By late 1598, he began to read the Lives in earnest. Henry the Fifth is the first play to bear the marks of that engagement, not just in the obvious ways, such as in Fluellen’s digressive comparison of Henry V to Alexander the Great (imitating Plutarch’s pairing of Greek and Roman leaders). In Henry the Fifth Shakespeare turns toward biography more directly than he had ever done before. And to this end, Plutarch’s brief lives made available to him a model for conveying interiority, something he as yet failed to do in a sustained way in his plays. A chasm divides a revenger like Titus Andronicus from Hamlet, or even the self-revelations of Richard III from those of Brutus. Plutarch enabled Shakespeare to bridge that divide.
Reading Plutarch closely also seems to have shaken Shakespeare’s preconceptions of Brutus and Caesar—both of whom are mentioned now and again in his earlier plays. These earlier allusions suggest that Shakespeare had not really thought very much about the famous assassination and accepted the commonplace that it was a heinous act. When a decade earlier Queen Margaret, in The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, cast about for an example of something as terrible as the murder of her son (and England’s heir), the analogy she drew was to Caesar’s death at the conspirators’ hands. Shakespeare even seems to have subscribed early in his career to the belief that Brutus was Caesar’s illegitimate son and that the assassination had also been an act of patricide: “Brutus’ bastard hand / Stabbed Julius Caesar” (Second Part of Henry the Sixth, 4.1.137–38). But Shakespeare’s engagement with Plutarch seems to have shifted his interest in this chapter of Roman history from the familial to the political and made him impatient with his earlier take on this story.
Something extraordinary was beginning to happen as Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in the spring of 1599. The various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare’s own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other. Brutus’s and Antony’s long funeral orations notwithstanding, Shakespeare was writing in an exceptionally spare and compressed style. The play’s twenty-five hundred lin
es, for a change, were almost all in verse, and it was eight hundred lines shorter than Henry the Fifth. It’s as if all his energies were self-consciously focused on a new and different kind of invention. Though Shakespeare couldn’t resist introducing new words, he does so less frequently here than in any other play (though we have Julius Caesar to thank for the first recorded appearance of “gusty,” “chidden,” “unscorched,” “insuppressive,” “misgiving,” and “honeyless”). In contrast to all the inconsistencies and second thoughts that characterized the writing of Henry the Fifth, the streamlined Julius Caesar feels as if it was written without interruption in a few short weeks.
The result was a significant breakthrough. Take for example the extraordinary lines of Brutus, deep in thought, as he sets in motion one of the most consequential events in Western history. It’s one of Shakespeare’s first great soliloquies and conveys a sense of inwardness new to the stage:
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 16