Julius Caesar

Overview

Written in 1599, probably the first play performed at the new Globe. A Swiss traveller, Thomas Platter, saw it that September and noted that the acting was excellent and there was a dance at the end.

The source is Plutarch again, in North’s translation: the Lives of Caesar, of Brutus and of Antony, braided together. Shakespeare compresses the chronology severely, running events of 44 to 42 BCE into what feels like a few days, and invents almost nothing except the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius, which is the best thing in the play.

It is the shortest of the tragedies, the plainest in language, and for that reason the one most often read first in schools. The plainness is deliberate: this is Roman speech, spare and public, and it is a deliberate contrast with the English history plays Shakespeare had just finished.

The structural oddity is well known. Caesar is killed in the middle of Act 3 and has about a hundred and fifty lines in total, fewer than Brutus, Cassius or Antony. The play is named for him and is not about him, which is arguably the point: he is dead halfway through and dominates the second half entirely.

What happens

Act 1. A public holiday. Tribunes chase commoners off the street for celebrating Caesar’s triumph over Pompey’s sons, and strip the decorations from his statues.

At the feast of Lupercal a soothsayer calls out to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar dismisses him. Cassius works on Brutus, playing on his ancestry, his reputation and his fear that Caesar will be crowned, and telling stories designed to make Caesar look physically weak: that he nearly drowned in the Tiber and had to be carried, that he cried like a sick girl with a fever in Spain. Casca reports that Antony offered Caesar a crown three times and he refused it three times, each time more reluctantly, and then fell down in a fit.

Caesar, watching Cassius, tells Antony he would rather have fat men about him, and that Cassius thinks too much and reads too much and is dangerous.

A night of portents: a lion in the Capitol, a slave whose hand burns without being scorched, men on fire in the streets. Cassius forges letters in different hands and has them thrown in at Brutus’ window.

Act 2. Brutus in his garden, alone, before dawn. The soliloquy in which he decides is the play’s moral centre and it is remarkable for what it concedes: he grants that Caesar has never let his affections rule his reason, that he knows no personal cause, and that the case must therefore be made by supposing what he may become. He settles on the image of the serpent’s egg, to be killed in the shell.

The conspirators arrive. Brutus makes two decisions that destroy him: he refuses an oath, on the ground that honest men need none, and he overrules Cassius on killing Antony, saying they should be sacrificers and not butchers.

Portia, his wife, demands to know what is wrong and shows him a wound she has given herself in the thigh to prove she can keep a secret. Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife, dreams of his statue running with blood and begs him not to go; Decius reinterprets the dream as a sign that Rome will be revived by him, adds that the senate means to offer him a crown, and suggests that staying home will look like fear. Caesar goes.

Act 3. The Capitol. A petition, a refusal, Caesar’s speech comparing himself to the northern star, constant and unmoved, and then the stabbing. Casca first, the rest after, Brutus last, and Caesar’s Et tu, Brute.

Antony comes in, shakes each bloody hand, and asks to speak at the funeral. Brutus agrees, over Cassius’ objection, on the condition that Antony speak after him and say nothing blaming them. Left alone, Antony promises Caesar’s corpse that civil war will follow.

Then the forum. Brutus speaks in prose, explaining his reasons: not that he loved Caesar less but Rome more, and asking who would be a slave. The crowd is convinced and offers to crown him.

Antony speaks in verse. He begins by conceding everything, repeats that Brutus is an honourable man until the word has rotted, produces Caesar’s will and refuses to read it, produces the body and points out each wound by name, tells them not to be stirred to mutiny, and then reads the will: seventy-five drachmas to every citizen, and the private gardens left to the people. The crowd goes out to burn houses.

The last scene of the act is forty lines long and is the most frightening thing in the play. The crowd meets Cinna the poet, asks his name, and when he says Cinna, they say tear him for his bad verses. He explains he is Cinna the poet, not Cinna the conspirator. They kill him anyway.

Act 4. Rome, and the new triumvirate marking names on a list. Antony, Octavius and Lepidus agree which of their own relatives will die, and Antony, the moment Lepidus is out of the room, describes him as a man fit to be sent on errands and proposes to drop him.

Then the tent at Sardis. Brutus and Cassius quarrel violently over bribery and money, Cassius offers Brutus his dagger and his breast, they are reconciled, and only afterwards does Brutus mention that Portia is dead, having swallowed fire. Against Cassius’ advice he insists on marching to Philippi rather than making the enemy come to them, and makes the speech about the tide in the affairs of men.

That night Caesar’s ghost appears and says it will see him at Philippi.

Act 5. The battle. Cassius, short-sighted, sends a friend to find out whether approaching horsemen are friends, sees him surrounded with shouting, assumes the worst, and has his servant kill him with the same sword he used on Caesar. The horsemen were friends and the shout was for a victory.

Brutus, defeated, asks several men to hold his sword and finally finds one who will. Antony pronounces him the noblest Roman of them all, the only conspirator who acted for the common good, and Octavius, who has the last word, orders him buried with honour.

How to read it

Read Brutus’ orchard soliloquy in Act 2 scene 1 line by line. He talks himself into a murder while admitting he has no evidence, and the structure of that self-persuasion is the thing the play is really examining.

Then read the two funeral speeches side by side and mark the devices. Brutus argues, and uses prose, and is abstract. Antony narrates, uses verse, shows objects, repeats a phrase until it reverses, and gives them something to want. He also claims at every turn to be doing nothing of the kind.

Do not skip Cinna the poet. It is the shortest scene and it is the answer to everything the funeral speeches are about.

Watch what Caesar is actually like. He is deaf in one ear, epileptic, superstitious, vain, and speaks of himself in the third person, and he is also decisive and physically brave. Shakespeare gives you enough to conclude either that he was about to become a tyrant or that he was not, and no more.

Read the quarrel scene in Act 4 as the thing Shakespeare added. It is not in Plutarch in this form, it does nothing for the plot, and it is where the two men become people.

And keep the audience’s knowledge in mind. Every Elizabethan watching knew that Octavius would defeat Antony and become Augustus, and that Rome would be ruled by one man for the next five hundred years. The conspirators kill a king to prevent a monarchy and deliver one.

Questions it raises

• Brutus admits he has no personal cause and kills on the strength of what Caesar might become. Is that ever justified?
• Was Caesar going to accept the crown? Does the play let you decide?
• Antony claims not to be a persuader and produces a riot. What makes the speech work?
• Brutus spares Antony and lets him speak. Are these principled errors or the same error twice?
• The crowd tears apart a man for his name. What is the play saying about popular judgement?
• Antony calls Brutus the noblest Roman. Is that true, generous, or politically useful?