University of Cape Town – ELL2014F

Peter Anderson

11 May 2015

‘The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus?’:
An Inquiry into the Intrigues of William Shakespeare’s adaptation of Plutarch’sLives into Julius Caesar

“In the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed [Shakespeare] to create previously to his function of representing.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge in “some manuscript notes on Julius Caesar” (1969: 268)

In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599), Shakespeare does not play ‘fast and loose’ with his primary historical source – Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans – so much as he very deliberately seeks to exploits his audience’s foreknowledge of both history and text for the sake of an extended meditation on dramatic fidelity to historical character and ideals. The point here is simple: no audience has ever watched Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedy without having some inkling of its pre-existent content. Indeed, rare among the Bard’s adaptations, the fame of his opus somewhat competes with the prominence of the actual history to which Plutarch’s authoritative compendium attests. Hence the play’s seminal importance to our understanding of Shakespeare’s singular craftsmanship: what does he do with Plutarch’s by-no-means-raw material to create the unmistakably ‘Shakespearean’ achievement that is Julius Caesar?

To answer profoundly, he commercializes it. While keeping in all the famous bits his virgin audience would have recognized both from North’s best-selling translation1 and earlier Elizabethan productions of the story, he ruthlessly conflates years of detail into just over two hours of stage traffic and seemingly just a few months of civil strife within the diegesis. Equally in characterization, he extends memorable character sketches into tripartite evocations of Plutarch’s ‘great men’ as being all countrymen, Romans and friends. Most indelibly, Shakespeare articulates ‘History’ itself as an unprecedented reconciliation of the totemic events of Politics with the lives of the minds of its prime movers; Republicanism and Tyrannicide are expressed as emotional forces, as the painful decisions of Rhetoricians leading to a supposedly inevitable Future. In this sense, we can espouse Julius Caesar as a milestone in one of Shakespeare’s master- projects as a Renaissance playwright: the interiorisation – or the ‘making-real’ – of historical names for the sake of truthful entertainment. In brief, we can trust Plutarch to provide the facts of the matter and Shakespeare to show us what matters in the facts.

1. “[T]he immense popularity of his work is seen in the fact that it ran to seven editions before the end of the seventeenth century.” – T.S. Dorsch in his Introduction to The Arden Shakespeare Sixth Edition of the play (1972: xii)

The relevant sections in Plutarch’s Lives are thus simultaneously Shakespeare’s blueprint and his platform for Julius Caesar. In schematic terms, the last few pages of the ‘Life of Caesar’ constitute almost the whole of the latter’s first three Acts while those of ‘Brutus’ and ‘Antony’, repeating most details, go on to jointly provide the last two. This goes some way indeed to explaining the prevailing opinion of the play as being bifurcated by Caesar’s funeral scene2; indeed it is essentially the juxtaposition of two separate stories: one relating the hollow triumph of a murderous conspiracy, the other the fallout of a failed insurrection. However, the unity of the play is still preserved because “[Caesar’s] assassination is a central point, not a dividing point; before it takes place our interest is focused on the conspiracy in which it is planned, and afterwards on the steps by which it is avenged.” (Dorsch, 1972: xvii) In a play called ‘Julius Caesar’ then, the quasi-mythological titular figure’s only indispensable role apparently is as a figure to be either physically annihilated or politically resurrected. Whereas, of course, in Plutarch, there is hardly a ‘character’ bestowed with more personal agency than Caesar, his imperial exploits and civil wars taking up almost the whole of his preceding biography.

What we can therefore claim is that Julius Caesar is not the hero in his own Tragedy, but rather the abyssal black hole at its center, entrapping every other Roman within his field of reference3. This is an astoundingly modern structural conceit. Caesar is in effect the MacGuffin of his own play: the ‘mysterious object’ that inflames its high-stakes Drama. In terms of adaptation, what this entails “is the transmutation of Plutarch’s three comparatively leisurely narratives into a

2. Some commentators have cited this as a rare point of disparagement: “[A]fter the thrilling oratory and bloody assassination of the first three acts, Shakespeare’s play dwindles into tedious inconsequentiality.” (Charles Spencer of The Telegraph) and “Curriculum-staple Caesar [sic] is a sub-par play of two bewilderingly different halves.” (Anonymous Critic) (Palmer, 2013)

3. One could go on to say that Caesar is then perhaps the only ‘unreal’ (or inaccurate) character in the play, more present by what he represents – the possibility of “Caesarism” – than by his character’s reported constitution. This certainly makes his lack of agency more explicable: “North’s Plutarch did not show a Caesar in decline; with sure insight, Shakespeare decided that his play required exactly a waning Caesar, a highly plausible mixture of grandeurs and weaknesses.” (Bloom, 1999: 105)

single closely knitted swiftly moving drama which has been aptly called “a political thriller”” (ibid.) The entertainment value implied here is key to Shakespeare’s innovations; specifically what critics usually refer to as his ‘grating’ political ambiguity. Valid cases can indeed be made for Shakespeare’s bias for both Republicanism and ‘Caesarism’: “[One can’t] look without a revulsion of indignant contempt at this travestying of a great man [Caesar in Plutarch] as a silly braggart, whilst the pitiful gang of mischief-makers who destroyed him are lauded as statesmen and patriots” claimed George Bernard Shaw4, while the self-professed ‘Bardolater’-critic Harold Bloom rejoinders that “[t]he people are a mob, and both sides in the civil war after Caesar’s death seem worse than Caesar, which does suggest a pragmatic support for [his era’s own controversial dictator-for-life] Elizabeth [I].” (1999: 115) The clearest statement we can therefore make about Shakespeare’s position is that he here did not intend to write a morality play, or, if he did, he failed so badly at writing one that he made his most sympathetic character the man who sticks the final dagger into his ruler’s body, Marcus Brutus5. Instead, Caesar’s assassination should more rightly be viewed as a pure ‘event’, the result of a confused multitude of personal and political grievances each producing their own stab-wound 6 . Thus, Shakespeare’s interpretation of Plutarch’s objective history is really a deepening, a more complex vision, of what would otherwise be the coherent reportage of ancient, non-vital details. He is too loyal to his understanding of his characters’ motivations to let them be relegated to blanket judgements of their ‘deserved’ fates. He is on no-one’s side, definitively, but the story’s.

What amendments Shakespeare does make to Plutarch’s text are likewise almost all moments of assiduous compression for the sake of the narrative’s

4. Quoted in (Bloom, 1999: 105)
5. One is tempted to invoke T.S. Eliot’s famous epigram from Murder in the Cathedral to suit Brutus’s tragic complicity in tyrannicide: “The last act is the greatest treason./ To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” He chooses to defend the Republic at the cost of the betrayal of his father-figure, but only from fear of Caesar’s potential despotism, not his actual function as a ruler: “And since the quarrel/ Will bear no colour for the thing he is,/ Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,/ Would run to these and these extremities…” (II. 1. 28-31.)
6. Subsumed for the public by Brutus under the sloganeering motives of “”Peace, freedom, and liberty!”” (III. 1. 110.)

improvement. The opening celebration of the Lupercalia at which Caesar twice refuses Antony’s offer of a royal diadem Plutarch reports as occurring the previous October but is shown in Act I as part of the immediate run-in to the Ides of March, directly stirring the rebellious motives of Cassius, Brutus and later their fellow conspirators. Caesar’s assassination, funeral, the reading of his will, the dual orations of Brutus and Antony and the primary conspirators’ flight from the city seemingly all succeed each other in the single, avalanche-like day of Act III but Plutarch separates each one by a number of temporary days of peace. Ditto for Acts IV and V in which first two years of uncertain infighting and side settling are skipped over in an act-break to bring us to the second triumvirate’s established reign and the Battle of Phillipi, and then the latter is itself foreshortened by three weeks so as to successively juxtapose Cassius’ and Brutus’ respective suicides. Beyond mere convenience of exposition, this constructive infidelity to history embeds a necessary linear thread in the events and causes surrounding Caesar’s murder. Instead of a simmering cauldron, we are presented with a line of rickety dominoes.

Shakespeare’s true coup however, at least in his original audience’s minds, would have been in his bravura staging of Plutarch’s catch-phrase moments; we’ve hardly been introduced to the person of Caesar before a soothsayer arrives to intone the second-most famous line associated with his downfall: “Beware the ides of march.” (I. 2. 23) And later this immediate sense of foreboding is rhymed in the first lines of Act III on the steps of the Capitol with a direct quote from Plutarch to round out his doom:

Caesar. The ides of March are come.                                                                       Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar, but not gone7(III. 1. 1-2)

7. The relevant source-passage, in John Dryden’s translation, reads: “One finds it also related by many that a soothsayer bade [Caesar] prepare for some great danger on the Ides of March. When this day was come, Caesar, as he went to the senate, met this soothsayer, and said to him by way of raillery, “The Ides of March are come,” who answered him calmly, “Yes, they are come, but they are not past.” (Plutarch, 1932: 890-1)

Caesar’s actual demise, in contrast, reflects public rumour more in its depiction. “Et tu Brute?- Then fall Caesar!” was only ascribed as his final line in earlier contemporary versions of the drama, though Shakespeare does remain partly loyal to his material: “…when [Caesar] saw Brutus’s sword drawn, he covered his face with his robe and submitted, letting himself fall…” (1932: 893). In this way,Julius Caesar is made recognizably accurate whilst still indulging its audience’s theatrical expectations.

More interesting to our present inquiry however are the moments Shakespeare deliberately muddles. In Plutarch, for example, Brutus receives separate encouragements to tyrannicide from anonymous notes left “about his [praetor’s] chair of state… with such sentences in them as, “You are asleep, Brutus,” “You are no longer Brutus”” (1932: 890) as well as from Cassius who seizes upon such personal instigations to advance his own “personal grudge against Caesar.” (ibid.) Shakespeare reverses these catalysts, inventing an intensified deviousness in Cassius’ character by showing him enlist Cinna, at the end of Act I, to place such notes so that Brutus, and history, can interpret them as reflecting the general will of the Republic. Further, in Antony’s famed mid-play oration, a similar skullduggery is at play. Plutarch makes it clear that the reading of Caesar’s will preceded his funeral by a number of days and thus Antony’s incitement of public dissent only rode the rising wave of reawakened appreciation for their fallen ruler’s magnanimity. Shakespeare instead has Antony tease the mourning crowd with the revelation of the will’s content only at the very end of his falsely modest tour-de-force evisceration of the ‘honorable men’ of the conspiracy. Thus, having secured its climax, the scene overflows into Brutus and Cassius’ irredeemable disgrace and the poet Cinna’s blackly comic arbitrary murder. The fudging of facts is then, for Shakespeare, a means of producing a questionable exhilaration in his audience’s collective consciousness. He makes a certain succession of tensions seem more rightful and accurate than the official record actually evidences. And likewise, he bestows an individualized ‘cunning of reason’ – to reappropriate Hegel – in the words and actions of his represented subjects.

This is perhaps what Coleridge intimates in this essay’s epigraph: that it is Shakespeare, through his manifold powers of dramatization, who brings Brutus, Antony, Cassius, and even – to a degree – Julius Caesar into the realm of human relatability as characters, and not Plutarch who simply tells of their deeds, all the while occluding their souls. Again, we must emphasize that Shakespeare holds this advantage because he is, contra Plutarch, primarily a storyteller and secondarily a reporter. As such, his tendency for invention exceeds his allegiance to history, and most clearly so in the play’s speeches. The point is not just the plain observation that Shakespeare had to put almost every versified word into the self-regarding, crowd-affecting mouths of Plutarch’s Romans himself8, but further that this act of ‘giving new voice’ to historical figures effectively bestows them with apparent selves newly worthy of articulation. Cassius’s noted choleric temperament and petty enviousness are transformed into a sort of proto- Machiavellian humanism; an obsession, or so he tells Brutus, with the falsity of Caesar’s demigod status, with the fact that his is an age in which the stars can no longer be faulted for ordaining the positions of men. Caesar indeed is himself portrayed with a touch of ridicule: as in his own writings he constantly addresses himself in third person, boasts of his bestial fearlessness, and spins macho aphorisms into pre-emptive elegies for his own downfall9. This is, of course, not the Caesar anyone expects to watch after reading Plutarch, but, in a sense, Shakespeare’s portrayal is quite matter-of-fact. “Caesar may idealize himself, and yet he is accurate.” (Bloom, 1999: 110) He has invented his own role as a ‘Caesar’ and so can see and know himself from a distance no other Roman can even seek to replicate. Even his death does not diminish his influence on Rome’s future. In relief, Antony’s canny leadership and respectful manipulations are left open for the audience to judge across both this play and his own later joint-showcase with

8. “[Shakespeare] had no model for the Forum speeches of Brutus and Antony … [n]or did [he] find [his] extremely realistic mob ready-made; Plutarch provided some of its actions, but its fickleness and its passions, its humour and shrewdness and blindness, are almost entirely of his devising.” (Dorsch, 1972: xiv)

9. I refer to the almost Hamletian lines: “Cowards die many times before their deaths;/ The valiant never taste of death but once./Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,/ It seems to me most strange that men should fear,/ Seeing that death, a necessary end,/ Will come when it will come.” (II. 2. 32-7)

Cleopatra, who comes off the greater as possibly Shakespeare’s most indelible woman. Most pertinently however, Brutus is Shakespeare’s legitimate child. He is his “first intellectual” (Bloom, 1999: 105), which is to say the first character in Shakespeare’s oeuvre to prefer the conclusions of his (republican) idealism above all material allegiances. He is the final arbiter and true victim of Caesar’s assassination because he commits it out of the most sincere motives and ultimately loses everything he stood to gain or even keep from its lasting success, besides the esteem of his compatriots after which he is eulogized10. In Plutarch he merely pursues the limits of his ambition, his popularity and his discontent with – it is suggested – the overbearing power of his real father, Caesar11. The result of these collected portrayals is simultaneously one of remarkable bathos and, as by now overstated, humanization. Plutarch’s ‘noble lives’ are brought down to earth, but also in the process made authentically intelligent and lastingly ambiguous.

We might find through all such preceding points the simple observation of Dowden’s, quoted by Dorsch, that “[Shakespeare] “was aware that his personages must be men before they were Romans” (1972: xv) and thus, in complement, that he understood Julius Caesar had to be a narrative before it could be a history. In his strange marriage of fidelity to Plutarch’s biographies and faith in his own (pro)creativity for vocalized character however, we can view an equally hybrid balance between the machinations of Politics and the constitutions of the people who effect and are affected by them. Furthermore, it’s precisely this interzone on the zen-diagram of ‘staged fictions’ and ‘distant history’ that preserves the insightful truths a writer like Shakespeare takes his liberties to evince over the admirable comprehensiveness a writer like Plutarch aspires to as a tribute to the wealth of reality’s own stock of inimitable roles. It is

10. “Antony: This was the noblest Roman of them all./ All the conspirators save only he/ Did that they did in envy of Great Caesar;/ He only, in a general honest thought/ And common good to all, made one of them.” (V. 5. 68-72)
11. Bloom yet again: “[S]uch a [dramatized] relationship would have given Brutus too personal a motive for letting himself be seduced into Cassius’s conspiracy, a motive perhaps endless to speculation. Patriotism is Brutus’s dominant theme; his function is to save an older and nobler Rome from Caesarism.” (1999: 117)

therefore quite conceivable that Julius Caesar, for its craft and adaptability, could far outlive its own source material in the world’s cultural consciousness.

Word Count: 2435

Reference List:

Bloom, Harold. 1999. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1969. Coleridge on Shakespeare. London: Penguin Shakespeare Library.

Dorsch, T.S. 1972. ‘Introduction’ to Julius Caesar (Sixth Edition). The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare. London: Methuen & Co Ltd.

Palmer, Scott. 2013. HISTORY SCHMISTORY – CAESAR IS A PLAY ABOUT POWER.Available: http://bagnbaggage.org/history-schmistory-caesar-is-a-play-about- power/ (2015, May 8)

Plutarch. 1932. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Translated by John Dryden. New York: The Modern Library.