This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  So Don John is believed by the characters and by the plot because two contesting storylines run through Much Ado and give it narrative torque. One impulse reinstates male bonds and is therefore, implicitly, anti-comic; the other educates men into accepting primary allegiances with women, and thus conforms to comic necessity. Don John spins the play towards tragedy, and momentarily it obeys, bringing out a friar and a crazy plan to make a difficult marital situation better by pretending a woman is dead. That worked so well in Romeo and Juliet – a play already well known by the time of Much Ado. Like other villains, and not just in comedy, Don John represents an alternative worldview from that which comes to dominate. But as these alternative visions fight it out, we can see that Don John’s version does have some traction on the play’s psyche. The play’s men are anxious for the excuse that lets them off the obligation and commitment of marriage: Don John proffers that excuse. Ultimately he’s believed because the play’s male characters all – Benedick excepted – have a weakness for his particular misogynistic view of the world.

  In the end, Don John’s plot is foiled by the most unlikely agents – the buffoonish Dogberry, played by the Chamberlain’s Men’s favourite clown, the actor Will Kemp, and his dim assistants. In some ways they are unworthy opponents – but in another way, their very foolishness is the triumph of comedy. Don John knows that his blocking misogyny is on the losing side in this romantic comedy. He needs to bide his time and beef up his villainy. There’s not long to wait before another Italianate world, more hospitable to his particular anti-romantic malevolence, will present itself, and this time there will be no pesky watchmen to interrupt: Othello.

  CHAPTER 10

  Julius Caesar

  Shakespeare’s tragedies tend to follow certain rules. First, they’re named after their prominent hero: Macbeth, King Lear, Othello. Occasionally they have double protagonists: Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra. The shape of a tragedy is essentially biographical, ending in the death of this central character or characters. We instinctively know when Macduff kills Macbeth, or when Lear’s heart breaks, that there are only minutes left before the play is over. The play cannot last without its eponymous life-force. Not so Julius Caesar. In this play, Shakespeare experiments with a tragedy organized around a decentred titular figure, who is killed right in the middle of the drama. What’s more (or less), Caesar himself appears in only five scenes of the play, although he returns, both as a ghost and as the abiding memory for the other characters, after his death in Act 3. The climax of this play is in the middle. Julius Caesar builds up to, and then explores the aftermath’s shock waves of a climactic event – a political assassination. The shape of this play is unusually unteleological, that’s to say, it’s not the end it is trying to get to, but the middle.

  That may seem pretty obvious, but it is a quite different structure from that employed by Shakespeare for similar story types in other plays. Shakespeare deals with regicide, or the assassination of a political leader, repeatedly, but two examples, one earlier and one later than Julius Caesar, will serve here. Richard II, the earlier play, ends with Richard’s own death, which, as discussed in Chapter 4, has two immediate effects on the play’s politics. First, it constructs the narrative as a tragedy, organized around the life and death of the title character. And secondly, it means that there are no immediate consequences of the regicide. Although the new king Henry professes himself guilty and repentant – ‘my soul is full of woe’ (5.6.45) – there is no time left in the play to unpick the aftermath of the coup. So Richard II is all about the build-up to the assassination of a leader. Macbeth, a later play, gives us an alternative look at the same kind of myth, in a play all about consequences. King Duncan is murdered at the beginning of Act 2, and the rest of the play traces, unflinchingly, the unravelling of both political and psychological integrity. Macbeth is a play about assassination which is all about its aftermath, so it forms the structural and ethical opposite of Richard II. In between these two narratives of political murder we have Julius Caesar, balanced around its own central depiction of the corpse of Caesar as a kind of fatal pivot, between anticipation and aftermath.

  Related to these structural questions is the question of titling. Both Richard II and Julius Caesar are named for the murdered ruler; Macbeth, of course, takes its name from the assassin. Mid-twentieth-century critics were curiously preoccupied with the question of whether Julius Caesar ought more properly to be called ‘The Tragedy of Brutus’, and certainly the scene in which Brutus muses in soliloquy on the murder that is to come anticipates Macbeth in some interesting ways. Alone in his orchard, Brutus begins his speech about Caesar with its conclusion: ‘It must be by his death’ (2.1.10). He goes on to justify the killing, not by what Caesar has already done, but by what he might go on to do:

  therefore think him as a serpent’s egg,

  Which, hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous,

  And kill him in the shell.

  (2.1.32–4)

  If Brutus is hatching the murder of Caesar at this minute, Shakespeare is hatching the play Macbeth. And like that later regicide, Brutus cannot bring himself to name the deed: ‘It must be by his death’ (2.1.10) compares directly with Macbeth’s ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ (1.7.1–2), where the prominent use of the pronoun ‘it’ completely elides the unsayable noun that he is planning. As Brutus puts it:

  Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar

  I have not slept.

  Between the acting of a dreadful thing

  And the first motion, all the interim is

  Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

  (2.1.61–5)

  The insomniac Macbeth who ‘does murder sleep’ (2.2.34) is already in Shakespeare’s sights. Brutus’ wife Portia aspires to political partnership, to Lady Macbeth-dom, but she is caught in the role of women in the English history plays: pushed out from political life, like Hotspur’s wife in 1 Henry IV. Part history, part tragedy, the very structure of Julius Caesar propels its wider ethical equivocation. Like the Roman populace it dramatizes, the play itself shifts, away from the conspirators and towards their revengers. The balance of dramatic power changes like the balance of political power, and no individual character rises to displace Caesar as the play’s central focus.

  One of the standard classroom exercises for Elizabethan schoolboys was to argue in utramque partem, or both sides of an issue (as discussed on Richard II), and it was probably a wonderful inadvertent training for playwrights. One such set topic was whether Brutus was justified in killing Caesar. Dante had placed Brutus at the very centre of Hell, along with Cassius and Judas, in his Inferno. So the question of the ethics of Julius Caesar’s assassination was already a live issue in the reception of classical history at the end of the sixteenth century. And this moral dilemma is already self-consciously in the minds of Caesar’s killers: the play, that’s to say, knows about the reception of its story even as it purports to be running through it in real time. We all – characters and audience alike – know this story before it begins. Caesar, Brutus and the rest are subject to a particular form of overdetermined fame – and so the play embodies a kind of double perspective or parallax view. It is both now – present tense – and then – past; it is both a history, meaning the events in the past, and a present retelling of that past. ‘Let’s be sacrificers, but not butchers’ (2.1.166), Brutus tells his fellow conspirators. The question of how to present and interpret the act is intrinsic to its planning and commission. The murder of Caesar was always a piece of political theatre, a series of sound bites, something always already staged.

  Julius Caesar is both event, and commentary on that event, as the assassins acknowledge over Caesar’s bleeding corpse:

  BRUTUS: Stoop, Romans, stoop,

  And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood

  Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords;

  Then walk we forth even to the market-place,
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  And, waving our red weapons o’er our heads,

  Let’s all cry ‘peace, freedom, and liberty!’

  CASSIUS: Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence

  Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,

  In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

  BRUTUS: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport,

  That now on Pompey’s basis lies along,

  No worthier than the dust!

  CASSIUS: So oft as that shall be,

  So often shall the knot of us be called

  The men that gave their country liberty.

  (3.1.106–119)

  No sooner has the assassination of Caesar taken place than it is subject to narrative and interpretive retelling. The murder is immediately repackaged as a play. Those states unborn and accents yet unknown are the England and the English in which the play is being performed in 1599: present and future are ironically collapsed, as the bloodstained assassins pose like trophy hunters for the camera of history.

  From the very beginning of the play, Julius Caesar has been deeply conscious of how its events need to be interpreted. Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, has a portentous dream which is a striking example of this expository process:

  She dreamt tonight she saw my statue,

  Which like a fountain with an hundred spouts

  Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans

  Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it.

  And these does she apply for warnings and portents

  And evils imminent, and on her knee

  Hath begged that I will stay at home today.

  (2.2.76–82)

  Our own knowledge that Caesar will indeed be murdered gives this dream the curious quality of simultaneous prophecy and recall that comprises visions of the future in historical drama. But within the play, Decius nimbly reinterprets the dream as metaphor:

  This dream is all amiss interpreted.

  It was a vision fair and fortunate.

  Your statue spouting blood in many pipes,

  In which so many smiling Romans bathed,

  Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck

  Reviving blood, and that great men shall press

  For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance.

  This by Calpurnia’s dream is signified.

  (2.2.8, –90)

  His interpretation is deliberately wrong, aiming to persuade Caesar that he should indeed go to the Capitol, where he will be turned into exactly that fountain of blood in which his murderers bathe their hands. But Decius is persuasive. Interpretations are not so much correct or incorrect, as persuasive or ineffectual: what is important is what is believed.

  Decius’ retelling of Calpurnia’s dream shows us how interpretations cloud and eclipse their apparent actions. We’re somewhere in the territory of the provocative post-modernist Jean Baudrillard’s famous contention that the Gulf War did not take place: what we all saw on television was merely a stand-in, endless media simulacra behind which there was nothing at all. And often Shakespeare stages that very nothingness behind our interpretations, refusing to give us any access to the event itself, only its subsequent and contested readings. The play opens in this mode. Brutus and Cassius’ discussion of Caesar’s tendency towards tyranny and despotism is punctuated by offstage shouts and cheers. The two men interpret this soundtrack as the people offering the crown to their leader. Caesar – offstage – rejects the repeated offer, but this does not reassure Brutus and Cassius about his ambitions. Since we don’t see the scene for ourselves, we can’t judge whether this is simply politic on Caesar’s part – he wants the crown but knows he must be seen not to want it – or genuine – he does not want to be king. When Casca gives his own gloss on events, reporting that ‘to my thinking he was very loath to lay his fingers off’ (1.2.241–2) the crown, the impossibility of adjudication has been replaced with unnecessity: what do people (want to) believe?

  So, these insistent interpretative examples – what we might call the play’s hermeneutic consciousness – mean we are already primed for the play’s most famous act of reinterpretation, Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech in Act 3. Antony’s skill is to persuade the crowd away from Brutus’ explanation of the murder by introducing new information about Caesar. He tells them about Caesar’s will, which has left 75 drachmas to each Roman citizen, as well as his parks and villas by the Tiber as a recreation ground. Interestingly, we never get corroboration of this – the will that Mark Antony brandishes is a prop, rather than a proof. We cannot see for ourselves, but, as Mark Antony’s speech itself enacts, we can be persuaded that it is true. This long scene slows the play down after the violence of the murder. Mark Antony sets out the incompatibility of the evidence of Caesar’s generosity against the claims made about his ambition by Brutus, all the while famously emphasizing that ‘Brutus is an honourable man’ (3.2.83). Simple repetition of that phrase enacts the work of reinterpretation here, as each time the phrase is uttered it seems to mean something slightly different, until it has completed the 180-degree turn to mean its opposite: Brutus is, for Antony, very far from honourable.

  Julius Caesar’s self-consciousness about interpretation gets a final twist in a scene often cut in modern performance. After the death of Caesar, the next onstage murder is very different from the choreographed tableau of weighty historical significance in the Capitol. A character that we have not previously met or heard of is intercepted by four plebeians. He is interrogated briefly about who he is and why he is abroad. He gives his name and vocation: Cinna the poet. The name Cinna already echoes in the play as the name of one of the conspirators: the man’s hapless attempts to escape by saying he is Cinna the poet not Cinna the conspirator are ineffectual. He is set upon by the mob with cries of ‘Tear him, tear him!’ (3.3.35). There is no stage direction, but it’s generally assumed that Cinna the poet is murdered in an act of pointless communal bloodletting that symbolizes the depravity of the times.

  It’s easy to see, perhaps, why this play about the self-conscious retelling of Roman history might have a cameo role for a poet. Cinna the poet has his brief stage moment within a context of contested interpretation, irrupting into the play in a short, choppy sequence that contrasts sharply with Mark Antony’s deliberately extended, dilated oratory of the previous long scene. After the overdetermined death of Caesar, about which characters within the play and in a much more extensive cultural discourse have talked and interpreted so much, we get a bewilderingly random death. Cinna’s death is thus part of a structural contrast. It is about action without words, or about the failure of language to effect action. Cinna’s attempts to plead for his life are shortened and abrupt – far from the measured eloquence of what we have just witnessed. But the immediate result of Antony’s clever and elevated rhetoric before the Roman citizenry is presented as the barbarity of mob violence; the plebeians who heed his reinterpretation of Caesar’s murder are the same men who attack Cinna.

  Cinna’s is also a death that recaps what we have just seen in miniature. His first words about a dream align him with Caesar and Calpurnia:

  I dreamt tonight that I did feast with Caesar,

  And things unlucky charge my fantasy.

  I have no will to wander forth of doors,

  Yet something leads me forth.

  (3.3.1–4)

  The plebeians set upon him as a pack and ‘tear him’, just as the conspirators set on Caesar. In some ways, then, this scene echoes what we’ve just been through: a minor aftershock after a cataclysmic political earthquake. The echo may be parodic in effect. There is a humour in the scene, as well as, or in conjunction with, its abrupt or absurd horror. The plebeians fire a sequence of questions at Cinna: ‘What is your name?’ ‘Whither are you going?’ ‘Where do you dwell?’ ‘Are you a married man or a bachelor?’; followed by a series of mutually contradictory instructions: ‘Answer every man directly’, ‘Ay, and briefly’, ‘Ay, and wisely’, ‘Ay, and truly,
you were best’ (3.3.5–12). The stage business is bleakly comic. It’s easy to see that it is scripted with no gaps for his answers so that Cinna can’t get a word in edgeways. When he replies to all the questions in one speech, he looks superior, and the plebeians look foolish, even farcical. Karl Marx’s dictum on how history repeats itself seems to work well here. Marx recalled that ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Does Cinna the poet represent the repetition, as farce, of the tragic Caesar? Is the humour of this scene a kind of relief after the extended stress – for actors and audience – of what has gone before, or does it establish the serious jesting savagery of mob rule? Is it, that’s to say, a contrast with, or a clarification of, what has gone before? Does the senseless butchery of Cinna make Brutus and his co-conspirators look more like sacrificers, or does it echo their wild bloodlust? The death of Cinna the poet is cued by those previous interpretative acts as symbolic – but of what? The scene misses that explanatory analysis and commentary so carefully elaborated in other scenes of the play. No one has time to interpret its significance, so the murder of Cinna is left hanging, an emblem without its motto, a parable without the gloss.