NOTES
JULIUS CAESAR
Rebecca W Bushnell
While few Shakespeareans
might be willing to admit it, Julius
Caesar long maintained
its prominence in the canon because it is the easy tragedy. The play was
featured
in the American high school curriculum for decades chiefly for its brevity and
simple
vocabulary. But the play was also easy to teach for what it lacks:
sexual jokes and racial controversy. The play excites few titters from
the back of the
classroom, and it does not raise controversial issues. Of course, Julius Caesar
has also
attracted students and theater goers for what it does stage: well-developed
male characters, suspense, and explicit violence, including a spectacular
assassination and several bloody suicides . However, that I know of no high
school that still
teaches Julius Caesar suggests that the play may be losing its primacy for some
of the
same reasons that made it popular: when teachers now seek “relevant”
literature, even
the appeal of Julius Caesar’s violence fades next to that of Romeo and Juliet’s
sex and
gang wars or the racial and gender politics of Othello and The Merchant of
Venice.
Julius Caesar’s critical fortunes have always been mixed. Eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century critics deplored what they saw as the play’s formal
inadequacies:
a loose structure, multiple protagonists, and an anticlimactic ending.
Twentieth century
critics were the first to come to the play’s defense, arguing for the
brilliance
of its characterizations and its “organic unity”
This stagnation in Julius Caesar scholarship may at first appear
inexplicable, since
Julius Caesar was long considered an exemplary “political” tragedy and recent
criticism
has been all about politics. Günter Walch has noted the oddity that “Julius
Caesar, even though it has been referred to as a play about revolution, has yet
to play
a major role in any recent national or international discussion of the stage or
in
literary criticism”. But when for Shakespeare critics politics
became something other than classical republicanism or early modern theories of
monarchy, the play’s currency began to fade.
One sign of the change was
the publication of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan
Sinfield’s Political Shakespeare in 1985. There “political” criticism signified
attention
to “the marginalized and the subordinate of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture”
(p. 6)
as well as “the operations of power” (p. 3), and, implicitly, a widening range
of
“political” relationships and situations. In the ensuing years Shakespeare
criticism
with “politics” or “political” in the title proliferated. In the summer of 2001
an MLA
On-Line Bibliography search with the descriptors “Shakespeare” and “politics”
(beginning
in 1981) generated 434 items. Items dating before 1985 tend to address “matters
of state” in the Roman plays and the histories; after 1985, books and essays as
often
discuss the “politics” of spectacle, sexuality, desire, the body, and madness,
and in
plays such as Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Julius
Caesar’s “politics” of honor, republican values, and tyrannicide may have lost
their
appeal in such a critical new world.
Scholarship on Julius
Caesar seems to have lost its way in the wake of the profound
changes in the field since the early 1980s, and it is time to think about its
future
in the context of a new political criticism that recognizes the play’s concern
with
matters of state, yet does not merely revive the old pieties. This essay
reviews strategies
of “political” reading of Julius Caesar practiced in the past two decades,
which
are notable for their contradictions. Thus recognizing the play’s tendency to
generate
conflicting political interpretations, I argue that we accept this as the
character of its
politics. What the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics saw as the play’s
weaknesses
– its fragmentation, anachronisms, and discontinuities – match this political
incoherence, and contribute to the play’s uncanny power to undermine any
ideological
certainty.
For this reason, this essay
will not offer a coherent “reading” of the play, but instead
will highlight its disparate political rhetoric, vocabulary, and ideologies. In
resisting
any pressure to read Julius Caesar as a seamless action and single political
statement,
we can attend instead to the significant discontinuity of its politics: its
fractured
nature as an urban drama and a drama of state, a play of republican values and
Tudor
morality, and a play of two places – Rome and London. As Barbara J. Bono has
observed, the instability in Julius Caesar’s Roman setting reproduces “the
shifting
340 Rebecca W. Bushnell
political and economic alliances under the English Tudor dynasty, where the
Londonbased
court sought to undermine the privileges of the hereditary feudal nobility
while finding itself in increasing uneasy alliances with the urban classes”
(Bono 1994:
454). The eclecticism of early modern English theatrical style, and in
particular the
style of the Roman play, was the ideal vehicle for representing that Tudor
world, where
the institutions, traditions, and languages of court, city, and regions
coexisted and
often conflicted, and political and social identities changed rapidly. The
political
resonance of Julius Caesar emanates from these conditions of transformation and
contradiction.
Whose Politics?
In recent years we have
come to see the political world of early modern England as a
vibrant, dispersed, and self-contradictory arena, engaging Anglican and Puritan
churchmen and courtiers, women and men, commoners and the citizens of London,
as well as kings and queens. When looking at the operations and language of the
government and the court, scholars have opened our eyes to the conflicts within
legal,
ecclesiastical, and court policy and discourse, breaking up the image of an
official
orthodoxy. They have also helped us to see politics operating at regional and
local
levels, as well as in the contested territory of the New World. The return to
topicality
also deepened our sense of the complexity of Tudor and Stuart England. For Leah
Marcus, when she practices “local reading,” “a ‘local’ Shakespeare is a figure
of massive
instability, a contradiction in terms, a puzzle which keeps coming undone,”
because
of the ideological instability characteristic of “local” politics and “events,
gossip, personalities” in city, country, and court.
We now thus speak of
histories and not just one history of early modern England,
where, in Richard Helgerson’s words, writers across the nation, “belonged to
different
discursive communities and, as a result, wrote England differently” (Helgerson
1992: 5). Critics may argue over whose side Shakespeare took – that of court or
city,
king or commoner – but the point lies in the differences, not just among
writers, but
also embedded in a single text. Jean Howard makes the crucial point that
plays for the public stage were not, by and large, overtly homiletic, committed
to the
straightforward promulgation of dogma. Frequently composed by several hands and
cobbling together a variety of discursive and narrative conventions, the drama
often accommodated ideologically incompatible elements within a single text.
Rather than as signs of aesthetic failures, these incompatibilities can be read
as traces of ideological struggle, of differences within the sense-making
machinery of culture. (Howard 1994: 7)
Looking for Politics in Julius Caesar
As do the other Roman plays, Julius Caesar poses the problem of reading through
two
moments in time and space – republican Rome, and England in the 1590s. In its
own
time such a doubleness effectively “decentered” the present, when Tudor London
sought its own image in the mirror of Rome’s politics. Clifford
Ronan has described this kind of spatial and temporal disjunction, surfacing in
anachronism and ideological conflict, as defining the style of the English
Roman play.
In early modern England, Rome was visible in its survival in ruins and fragments,
both monumental and textual . But while these fragments memorialized
Rome’s power, they also symbolized its decay, and the sign of Rome in early
modern Europe was the fragment that imperfectly recalled the whole. Julius
Caesar
epitomizes that notion of Rome, when it stages Rome falling into ruins through
faction, violence, and civil war, a fracturing that occurs on every level, in
action, form,
and language. Despite (or perhaps because of ) this sense of imminent ruin,
political readings of Julius Caesar have characteristically sought to extract
its single political “essence” or idea: whether it is to be a play about
religion, republicanism, monarchy, urban politics, or aristocratic
factionalism. The play itself may invite us to do so when the characters themselves
invoke political abstractions as a guide to action. So, for one reader, the
play may become a statement about republican values, while for another it evokes the ideals of the Platonic republic or draws on the
ethics of tyrannicide. Another critical strategy imitates the play’s characters
in seeking to define the classical “idea of Rome.” Robert Miola identifies Rome
as “the central protagonist of the play”, when he sees Shakespeare
using the “symbolic geography” of a Rome divided by the Tiber to create an
image
of a city split by civil war, exposing flaws in human judgment and the contradictions
of heroism (p. 113). Similarly, Gail Kern Paster follows the idea of Rome as a
city,
where “the social mandate for heroic self-sacrifice collides with the heroic
mandate for
self-realization conceived in civic terms” (Paster 1985: 58).
But what city is portrayed
in Julius Caesar, and whose city is it? For
Dennis Kezar,
the city’s location is the Globe Theatre: when, in the play’s opening scene,
“we find
a remarkably individuated cobbler able to pun with the best of Shakespeare’s
English
tradesmen,” “the Tribunes alternately seem like London aldermen policing
sumptuary
laws and Puritan anti-theatricalists censuring the license, social confusion,
and
spectacle of the public theater” (Kezar 1998: 44–5). René Girard (1993) views
the
blood of sacrifice in this play as Roman blood – and the blood of all human
sacrificial
rituals, but for Richard Wilson, this blood is that which ran from the
butcher’s
stands into the streets of Eastcheap, so that “Brutus corresponds to those
puritan city
fathers of Shakespeare’s London who campaigned not only to close the
playhouses, but
also to force Eastcheap’s butchers to kill cattle out of sight of customers”
(Wilson
1996: 26). According to Wayne Rebhorn, however, Julius Caesar’s Rome is
England’s
court, and belongs to its combative aristocrats, when he argues that the play
reflects
a pattern of aristocratic competition or “emulation” in late sixteenth-century
England.
And, indeed, it may be all of these, for the very shifting ground of the play
itself
allows audience and reader to change or adapt their understanding of its places
and
political actions, from the intimate scenes set in Brutus’ home to the very
different
“public” crowd scenes. The former scenes suggest that this is a play concerned
with
aristocratic honor and factional conflict, whereas the latter evoke the streets
of London
and its restless mobs. Similarly, at some points in the play the discourse of
politics
sounds very English, with talk of kings, crowns, and commons, whereas, at other
points, the political world is very clearly inhabited by senators, patricians,
tribunes,
and plebeians. Several scholars have explored the anachronisms in the play’s
religious
vocabulary, with its references to rites, pulpits, and ceremonies that had
strong
contemporary associations. But other of Julius Caesar’s
political terms, if unfolded, would reveal similar multiple meanings, linked to
the
incommensurate nature of the Roman and Tudor worlds and the shifting ground of
political discourse in the early modern period. The rest of this essay bears
down on
those moments of the play where England and Rome seem most to clash, in order
to
focus on the political differences that surface in its language.
Tyrant and King
One of the most explosive words in the play is “tyrant,” juxtaposed with the
name
of “king.” The question of tyranny is at the heart of Casca’s and Cassius’
tense
conversation in which they are testing each other’s position on Caesar.
Cassius’ commentary on the night’s prodigies point to an unnamed man
“prodigious grown,” who
could be the monster that aroused them. Casca broods that indeed “the senators
tomorrow / Mean to establish Caesar as a king; / And he shall wear his crown by
sea
and land, / In every place save here in Italy.” Cassius’ response interprets
this statement
as an implicit declaration of Caesar as a tyrant, when he calls upon the gods
who “tyrants do defeat,” declaring he knows how to free himself, by suicide,
from
“that part of tyranny that I do bear.” When Casca agrees, Cassius once again
shifts
the ground, demanding “why should Caesar be a tyrant then: / Poor man, I know
he
would not be a wolf, / But that he sees the Roman are but sheep; / He were no
lion,
were not Roman hinds?” (1.3.71–106). It can be argued that the central question
of
the play is whether Caesar is in fact a “tyrant” and how this is related to the
idea of
his being named a “king.” After stabbing Caesar the conspirators are quick to
shout
that by this act “Tyranny is dead!” (3.1.78), and after Brutus’ speech after
the assassination, one of the plebeians is very ready to assent that “This
Caesar was a tyrant”
(3.2.69). But only a few lines later the plebeians revert to the praise of him
as “noble
Caesar” and “royal Caesar” (3.2.243–4).
In these moments the play
brings to the surface two related issues vigorously
debated in early modern political thought: the distinction between kings and
tyrants
and the justification of tyrannicide. I have argued elsewhere that Julius
Caesar uses the
concept and “name” of tyranny in a contradictory fashion, when it shows the
characters
self-consciously manipulating conflicting definitions of “tyrant” and “king,”
characterizing
Caesar as a beast or monster while they also call him a tyrant for coveting
divine power (Bushnell 1990: 143–4). Early modern British writers and political
thinkers spent a great deal of time constructing the difference between the
king and
the tyrant, even when they recognized that etymology, history, and theory
undermined
that distinction (ibid: ch. 2). In his Education of the Christian Prince
Erasmus insisted
on the difference, stating that “only those who govern the state not for
themselves
but for the good of the state itself, deserve the title ‘prince.’ His title
means nothing
in the case of one who rules to suit himself, and measures everything to his
own convenience: he is no prince, but a tyrant. There is no more honorable
title than ‘prince’
and no terms more detested and accursed than ‘tyrant’ ” (Erasmus 1968: 160–1).
Yet
political discourse of the period also suggested that a “king” could slide all
too easily
into a “tyrant”: Thomas Smith wrote in his De republica anglorum that,
since from the
first all kings were called “tyrannis” and all ruled absolutely, because they
“did for the
most part abuse in the same . . . that kind of administration and the maner
also, at
the first not evil, hath taken the signification and definition of the vice of
the abusers,
so that now both in Greeke, Latine and English, a tyrant is counted he, who is
an
evill king and who hath no regard for the wealth of the people” (Smith 1982:
55).
Defining the nature of the “tyrant,” and arguing the question of whether a
tyrant is
one who rules unjustly or illegitimately, became an important task, insofar as
arguments
about who was a tyrant and what should be done about him or her always
returned to this problem of naming .
Julius Caesar destabilizes
this debate by evoking the context of the political values
and vocabulary of late republican Rome. In the Roman republic the word rex was
almost synonymous with tyrannis: both were words that the republican Romans
hated
– and that they knew how to use in political propaganda . An audience at the
Globe at the turn of century would have recognized the arguments against Caesar
as a tyrant, while they may not have agreed on the justification for tyrannicide.
What would have appeared more
difficult to grasp was the conspirators’ insistence that Caesar should be
feared because he wants to be king. Caesar was legally declared “dictator” in
48 BC, an act meant to give him extraordinary power in a time of crisis. In 44
BC he became what Plutarch calls “perpetual dictator,” and as Plutarch judges,
“this was a plaine tyranny” (Plutarch, “Life of Julius Caesar,” ch. LVII, p.
92). However, as Plutarch relates, “the chiefest cause that made [Caesar]
mortally hated was the covetous desire he had to be called king, which first
gave the people just cause, and next his secret enemies, honest colour to bear
him ill will” (ch. LX, p. 94). Plutarch comments further on the irony
that what was really hateful was Caesar’s coveting of the symbols of royalty:
he scoffed
that it was “a wonderful thing that [the people of Rome] suffered all things
subjects
should do by commandment of their kings; yet they could not abide the name of
king, detesting it as the utter destruction of their liberty” (Plutarch, “Life
of Marcus
Antonius,” ch. XII, p. 164).
In thus displacing the
scene of tyrannicide to a late republican setting, where
the words “king” and “tyrant” had both connected and radically different
meanings
and political values, Julius Caesar could further destabilize the conventions
of
early modern political thinking about the “natural” differences between kings
and
tyrants, and with that, the appropriate political response to political
ambition. Robert
Miola notes the complex characterizations of both Caesar and the conspirators:
“In Julius Caesar no trustworthy source of sovereignty arises to direct Rome;
there
is only the politics of the marketplace, a confusing cacophony of claims and
counterclaims. In this world, the origins of civil government and sovereignty
lie in
the possession of power, pure, simple and amoral” (Miola 1985: 288). But the
play
also brings into direct conflict a Roman world where all claims to be king were
suspect and a Tudor one where it was dangerous to inquire too closely into
monarchical
privilege.
Liberty
When Caesar has been assassinated, and Cinna’s first words are “Liberty!
Freedom!
Tyranny is dead!”, Casca quickly proclaims: “Some to the common pulpits and cry
out, / Liberty, freedom and enfranchisement.” Brutus calls on his co-conspirators
to
bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood, and “Then walk we forth, even to the
marketplace,
/ And waving our red weapons o’er our heads, / Let’s all cry ‘Peace, freedom,
and liberty’.” They are to be remembered, says Casca, as “the men that gave
their
country liberty” (3.1.78–118). The cry for liberty here seems to come as a
natural
consequence of the overthrow of tyranny.
Liberty: this is a word
that falls on modern ears with a familiarity bred by three
centuries of revolutions that have used the call to liberty as a rallying cry.
But what
would that word have meant at the Globe Theatre at the end of the sixteenth
century?
Certainly it would have signified the opposite of bondage or captivity, the
personal
state of being free to move at will and being free of ownership by another
person
(OED). For a sixteenth-century English man or woman, of course, the state of
being
in “bondage” was more of a metaphor or legal term than a reality (see Smith
1982:
135–42, on the question of the status of “bondage” in his time), so the idea of
freedom
to act at will would have been foremost in people’s minds. As such, the notion
of
liberty could also bear an unfavorable connotation, as in the phrase “taking
liberties”
or going beyond what is proper or allowed. Examples of both meanings surface in
close quarters in The Comedy of Errors, that play so rife with images of
“bonds,” good
and bad. When Adriana chafes at her husband’s neglect, Luciana defends the
principle
that “A man is the master of his liberty.” But when Adriana then questions why
women should not have equal liberty, Luciana warns that “headstrong liberty is
lash’d
with woe” (2.1.1–15). And so indeed, in just the previous few lines, Antipholus
of
Syracuse has nervously noted that in Ephesus you will find “disguised cheaters,
prating
mountebankes, / And many such-like liberties of sin” (1.2.111–12).
Liberty was also defined in
spatial terms, as a “freedom” granted within boundaries:
so, for example, in Measure for Measure, it is said that Barnadine “hath
evermore
had the liberty of the prison” (4.2.156). Following Steven Mullaney, scholars
of the
early modern English stage have remembered that the Globe itself was located in
Southwark, or in one of London’s “liberties,” which were exempt from the jurisdiction
of municipal authorities. Many recent readers of Shakespeare have eagerly
expanded on the contradictions inherent in this definition of liberty, where a
“liberty”
was a circumscribed place of “license,” an authorized space for the containment
of
forbidden pleasures and criminal activity (see Wilson 1993: 48).
If we judge merely from Shakespearean usage, less common was the use of the
term
liberty in a political context, as “exemption or freedom from arbitrary,
despotic, or
autocratic rule or control” (OED). It is notable that Shakespeare almost always
uses
the word liberty in conjunction with personal liberty, i.e., for individuals,
except in
Julius Caesar, where he speaks of Rome’s liberty. In the world of Elizabethan
political
thought, the notion of the “liberty of the subject” was as complex as – and
related
to – the concept of resistance to tyranny and to the monarch’s power. Among the
six
traditions of political resistance, all with “distinct vocabularies,
conventions, styles of
argumentation, and intended audiences,” Donald Kelley has identified as many
notions of liberty: “classical” resistance referred to “Roman formulas of
self-defense
and popular sovereignty,” “the communal” form recalled the “hard-won
‘liberties,’
religious as well as secular, of the medieval communes,” and “ecclesiastical”
resistance
defended the “spiritual libertas ecclesiae.” In Protestant political discourse
the concept
was similarly fraught with ambiguity. As Kelley writes, “there was an obverse,
symmetrical ambivalence to the notion of ‘liberty’, which referred alternately
to the
libertas christiana idealized by Luther and to the arrogant human freedom –
whether
the ‘free will’ of which Luther was so contemptuous or the political license of
which
he was so suspicious” (Kelley 1990: 7–8; on Luther’s “liberty of conscience”
see Allen
1951: 20). All these ideas were to emerge in the next century’s explosive
conflict over
the defense of the “liberty of the subject” (see Sommerville 1986: ch. 5).
Shakespeare would have
found the word “liberty” in North’s translation of Plutarch,
in the account of the conspirators’ meeting before the assassination. When
Brutus says
he will not be present when Caesar will be named king by the Senate, Cassius
asks
what he will do if he is sent for: “ ‘For myself then,’ said Brutus, ‘I mean
not to hold
my peace, but to withstand him and rather die than lose my liberty.’ Cassius
being
bold, and taking hold of this word: ‘Why,’ quoth he, ‘what Roman is he alive
that
will suffer thee to die for thy liberty’ ” (Plutarch, “Life of Brutus,” ch. X,
p. 113). In
“The Life of Julius Caesar” it is also said that, after the assassination,
Brutus and his confederates on the other side, being yet hot with this murther
they had
committed, having their swords drawn in their hands, came all in a troop
together out
of the Senate, and went into the market-place, not as men that made countenance
to fly,
but otherwise boldly holding up their heads like men of courage, and called to
the people
to defend their liberty. (Ch. 44, pp. 101)
Not surprisingly, liberty
or libertas was defined differently in the republican Rome
where Brutus is said to have spoken these words. First, libertas was understood
as
meaningful only in the context of Roman law. It was identified with rights
granted
by Roman citizenship, and as such, it was not to be confused with licentia, a
confusion
that the English term liberty allowed. In a political language in which the
deliberate
and rational exercise of positive rights granted by law defined libertas,
libertas
necessarily excluded licentia (see Wirszubski 1968: 7). Further, as a political
condition,
libertas was not possible in the state of monarchy: in Charles Wirszubski’s
words,
in the context of Roman republicanism,the opposite of libertas is regnum,
which, if used in its proper sense, invariably implies absolute monarchy. The
relationship between king and people is considered to be analogous to the
relation between master and slaves. Consequently Monarchy is called dominatio; and
subjection to monarchy servitus. Freedom enjoyed by the State negatively means
absence of dominatio, just as freedom enjoyed by an individual negatively means
absence of dominium. (Ibid: 5).
So it is in these terms
that the late republican Roman characters of the play can speak
of becoming “bondmen” and losing their liberty if Caesar is to be named a king
by
the Senate. But that statement really would not have made sense in the context
of
early modern England (unless you remember that every English man was in a sense
in “bond” to the crown, and his land was in “fee” to a higher lord and to the
king –
see Smith 1982: 138–9).
The moment that Julius Caesar depicts, the last gasp of republican Rome, was a
time in which the traditional notion of liberty had come to lose much of its
power.
Patricians, senators, and plebeians were not unified under the law’s definition
of their
libertas, and the value of libertas was endangered in a state torn apart by
internal conflict.The patricians and senators were more concerned with
sustaining their own
honor and dignity than the values of republicanism, and libertas meant little
to the
plebeians oppressed by war and disorder (see Wirszubski 1968: 95). The gap in
Julius
Caesar between the intrigues of the patrician “heroes” and the actions of the
people
may be just one marker of this breakdown, adapted from Plutarch’s history.
In borrowing the word “liberty” from its context in North’s translation of
Plutarch,
Shakespeare reproduces for his audience a “foreign” definition of the word: a
“liberty”
that was precluded by monarchy, and possible only within the positive laws of
republican
Rome (while in its Roman context it was also changing its meaning in new
political circumstances). In this sense it exists in the play as a sign of an
alien political
ideology that was itself unstable. Shakespeare’s audience would have also heard
“liberty” in their own way. It would have resonated in the urban vocabulary of
London,
with all of its associations with the “liberties” of Southwark. In the
conspirators’ cry
for “liberty,” too, the audience may have understood the call for freedom from
tyranny,
especially with its echoes of the “liberty of conscience,” but they would have
also
sensed the negative connotation of lawlessness lurking, indeed, close to the
surface.
Thus “liberty” would have had a dangerous ambiguity in this particular time and
place.
Plebeians and Commoners
Commentators on Julius Caesar tend to agree that it does not present a
favorable view
of Rome’s people, who are fickle in their allegiance to their leaders and
easily roused
to violence. But they do not concur as to who these people are. The plebeians
of Rome?
London’s urban mob? Or the audience of Shakespeare’s theatre? And what did they
signify in the context of early modern English ideas of the status and political
role of
the “people”? The confusion is invited by the play text itself when the stage
directions use
different names for these people. The opening stage directions identify
“certain
Commoners” who pass over the stage, whom Flavius and Marullus call “mechanical”
when they chastise them for walking “upon a labouring day without the sign / Of
your profession” (1.1.3–5). In 1.2.264 the people of Rome are referred to as
the “common
herd.” In his funeral oration over the body of Caesar, Antony calls them the
“commons,” who will dip their napkins in Caesar’s blood upon hearing of Caesar’s
love for them (3.2.130). However, the stage directions for 3.2 announce: “Enter
Brutus and goes into the pulpit, and Cassius, with the plebeians.” And the speech
prefixes in this scene read “Pleb,” as is the case in the following scene
(where the stage directions have announced “Enter Cinna the poet and after him
the Plebeians”). The reader thus registers the fact that “plebeians” and not
“commoners” listen to the funeral oration and later riot
in the streets and murder Cinna. The commoners of the opening scene are
relatively
tame holidaymakers, the kind of witty craftsmen familiar from English city
comedies
like The Shoemaker’s Holiday (see Dorsch 1955: 5). When they reappear as
“plebeians”
they lack such signs of “local color” and appear far less passive. They expect
an audience
and “satisfaction” from the men who murdered Caesar, and then, at Antony’s instigation,
they erupt into violence.
The difference in the stage
directions and speech prefixes would have been imperceptible
to the play’s audience, but someone did insert them for the reader of the Folio
text. We cannot solve the question of authorial intent (i.e., who wrote the
speech prefixes), but we can ask what it might have meant for someone to put
them there. What
did “commons” or “commoners” – terms that do appear in the actors’ speeches –
mean
to a contemporary audience? Were the terms “commons” and “plebeians” merely
synonymous for a person of low rank, or did they suggest something different?
In England at the turn of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth
century the
words “commoners” or “commons” could signify members of a community (and
implicitly
a city or town) “having civic rights,” burgesses or citizens who were not
aldermen
or sheriffs (OED). Thus, in his Boke Named the Governour (1531), Thomas Elyot
could
write: “In the citie of London and other cities, they that be none aldermen, or
sheriffes
be called communers” (Elyot 1937: 1). More broadly, “commoner” or “commons”
could
mean anyone below the rank of peer (as in the “House of Commons”). The term
“commons” thus had a social significance, identifying one not noble and
possibly connoting
“low” or “base.” But it also had a politica1 meaning, especially in an urban
context, implying the possession of certain responsibilities and rights.
The question of the
political status of the “commons” was indeed a vexed one at
the time. In his De republica anglorum Thomas Smith indicated that the kind of
men
represented by Julius Caesar’s “commoners,” that is, the carpenter and the
cobbler who
speak in the opening scene would have had no political voice. They appear to
belong
to the category that Smith calls “the fourth sort of men which doe not rule”:
The fourth sort or classe amongst us, is of those which the olde Romans called
capite
censij proletariaij or operae, day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes
or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, all artificers, as Taylers,
Shoemakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers, Bricklayers, Mason, & c. They have no
voice nor authoritie in our commonwealth and no account is made of them but
onelie to be ruled, not to rule other,
and yet they be not altogether neglected [since he recognizes that in cities
and villages,
because of the absence of yeomen, they may hold some offices and serve at
inquests].
(Smith 1982: 76–7; see also Palliser 1983: 390–1, on the relationship between Smith’s
work and William Harrison’s Description of England ) In this categorization
Smith opposes this group to burgesses and citizens and to yeomen, freemen who
are not gentlemen but who “have a certain preeminence and more estimation than
laborers and artificers” (Smith 1982: 74).
When the discourse of social divisions and political rights was thus uncertain,
the
use of the term “commons” would have been neither neutral nor unambiguous. Its
connotations were further complicated by its associations with the notion of
the
“commons” as land, the farming land at stake in the ongoing wars over
enclosure. In
her discussion of the representation of the “common people” in the context of
the
rural uprising of the sixteenth century, Annabel Patterson notes how the
“commons”
involvement with the issue of enclosure might be connected with the concept of
“common” or “natural inheritance” of land (Patterson 1989: 43). In his funeral
oration
Antony indeed alludes to this when he tells the people that in his will Caesar
has
given them “his private arbours and new-planted orchards” for their “common
pleasures”
(3.2.236–46). The “commons” of Julius Caesar may thus represent a distinctly
urban set of commoners, resembling the mobs that began to play a role in
English
politics toward the end of the sixteenth century (see Wilson 1993: 25–6), but in
their
name they also carry the burden of representing the English commons at large,
who,
however officially disfranchised, were endowed with recognized rights and
responsibilities
and who had already become politicized over the matter of enclosure.
In contrast, the word
“plebeian” must have had little of the contemporary resonance
of “commons.” The term appears to have entered into English in the sixteenth
century through the translation of Roman history, as a formation from the Latin
“plebs.” English writers did tend to define the term by analogy to their own
class and
political system. In his strenuous effort to prove that a “respublica” and
“commonweale”
does not signify rule by the common people, as contrary to “order,” Thomas
Elyot contended that “Plebs in englisshe is called the communaltie, which
signifieth
only the multitude, wherin be contayned the base & vulgare inhabitantes,
nat auanced
to any honour or dignite: . . . that Plebs in latine is in englisshe
communaltie: &
Plebeii be communers. Plebs in latin & cominers in englisshe be wordes only
made
for the discrepance of degrees: wherof procedeth ordre” (Elyot 1937: 1). Thomas
Smith
also saw the political divisions of Rome and England as parallel in terms of
their
“orders,” but put it quite differently: “When the Romanes did write senatus
populusque
Romanus, they seemed to make but two orders, that is, of the Senate and people
of
Rome, and so in the name of the people they contained equites and plebem: so
when we
in England do say the Lordes and the commons, the knights, the knights
esquires,
and other gentlemen, with citizens, burgeses and yeoman be accompted to make
the
commons” (Smith 1982: 68). Smith was also aware of the difference between the
Roman
plebs and the English commons, when he wrote elsewhere of the conflicts “among
the
Romans of Patritij and plebei, thone striving with thother for a long time,
those that
were patricij many years excluding those that were plebei from bearing rule,
till at last
all magistrates were made common among them” (p. 65). That is, Smith recognized
that by the third century bce the plebeians had in fact achieved a kind of
political
equity with the patricians, by creating their own political order with its own
assemblies,
offices, and officials in the form of the tribunes, who played an important
role
in Rome’s republican “mixed polity” (see Erskine-Hill 1996: 142; also Hammond
and
Scullard 1970: 845), which differed significantly from the political
organization of
Tudor England.
That Shakespeare knew this
aspect of Roman history is shown by Coriolanus, his
one sustained dramatization of republican politics and the relationship among
plebeians,
tribunes, and patricians. In this later play Shakespeare’s plebeians are more
than just an urban mob: they have a voice in Rome and a role in the naming of
the consul (see Erskine-Hill 1996: 143–4). As Annabel Patterson has described
them,
the plebeians or “citizens” in Coriolanus do have voices: the play “allows the
people
to speak for themselves as a political entity, with legitimate grievances, and
with a
considerable degree of political self-consciousness” (Patterson 1989: 127).
Both
Erskine-Hill and Patterson, who want to take Shakespeare seriously as a student
of
republicanism, scrupulously avoid discussing the commons in Julius Caesar. In
so
doing, however, they cannot see that the “plebeians” of Julius Caesar do also
stand in
that play as the sign of a people that “will be satisfied” (3.2.1), with an
aura of the
plebeians of republican Rome.
The dissonance signaled by
the different labels of “commons” and “plebeians” in
speeches, stage directions, and speech prefixes does reflect a significant
discontinuity
in the representation of Julius Caesar’s “crowd,” and, on a deeper level, an
inconsistency
in contemporary English ideas of the people’s role in political life.
Shakespeare’s
“common” voices – the cobbler, the carpenter, and the “plebeians” – may all be
embraced by the term “commons,” which in Shakespeare’s time conveyed at once
the
possession of some civic rights and responsibilities, yet at the same time a
lack of
status or positive political role. The play itself, in turn, figures these
“commons”
inconsistently. They are cheerful, more or less respectable members of the
city, wishing
to celebrate Caesar’s return, but quickly silenced by their own
representatives. They
are also the “tag-rag people” (1.2.258) or “rabblement” (1.2.244), who, in
Casca’s
account, throw up their “sweaty nightcaps” at Caesar’s public refusal of the
crown,
thus naively signaling their appreciation of republican sentiments. But in 3.2
they
are also the people who must be appeased and whose response to the
assassination
must be managed. The “plebeians” say that they “will be satisfied” (3.2.1):
they
require an audience and Brutus must “render” to them the “public reasons” of
Caesar’s
death (3.2.7). It is only in the hands of Antony that they are transformed from
the
apparently rational political actors at the opening of 3.2, who will compare
the
“reasons” of Brutus and Cassius, into a raging and murderous mob. This
incoherence
in the staging of Julius Caesar’s “commoners” thus raises critical questions
about the
people’s proper role in city and the state, as measured against the values of
both
England and republican Rome – questions to which Shakespeare would return eight
years later, when he wrote Coriolanus.
Country and Commonwealth
The actions of commoners and noblemen, patricians and plebeians, take place
indeed
in a “Rome” which is a city on the Tiber, a “country,” and a “commonwealth.”
All three constructs of the play’s political arena are evoked at the end of
Brutus’
speech to the people, when he introduces Marc Antony entering with the body of
Caesar:
Here comes his body, mourn’d by Marc
Antony, who, though he had no hand in his
death, shall receive the benefit of his dying, a place in the commonwealth, as
which of
you shall not? With this, I depart, that, as I slew my best lover for the good
of Rome,
I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my
death.
(3.2.41–5) While the word “Rome” functions as a kind of talisman in the
play, and the terms
“country” and “countrymen” are repeated frequently, this is the only time we
hear the
word “commonwealth,” a word that (along with its cognate “commonweal”) had a
distinctly different connotation from “country.” Both to cheer themselves and to advance their
cause, the conspirators naturally represent themselves as acting for their
“country”: they want to be the men that “gave their country liberty” (3.1.118).
When Brutus defends his actions to the Roman people, he claims that he did what
he did for his love of Rome, for “who here is so vile that he will not love his
country?” (3.2.33). the younger Cato’s final desperate cry on the battlefield
of Philippi for himself and when impersonating Brutus is that “I am a foe to
tyrants, and my country’s friend” (5.4.5–7). The term “countrymen” occurs in Julius Caesar more frequently than in any other Shakespeare play
(while“country” appears most often – 27 times – in Coriolanus). We remember the word
“countrymen” most vividly from its uses in act 3, scene 2, where Brutus and
then
Antony call upon their “friends, Romans and countrymen” to hear them. Brutus
uses
the word three times in addressing the plebeians, and Antony four times,
interchanging
it with the affectionate term of “friend.” Given the word’s use in this context
of public rhetoric and pleading, and knowing that Antony uses it cynically, we
tend to hear “country” and “countrymen” as words tinged with patriotic fervor,
but they are also contaminated by Antony’s hypocrisy.
Like liberty, country and countrymen are such familiar words that we rarely
stop to ask what they might mean. In Shakespeare’s time country could still
mean simply
“a tract or district having more or less definite limits in relation to human
occupation”;
that is, one could talk about “the country” of a landowner or a county. But it
had also come to signify the territory of land identified with an independent
state, or
a single race, language, or people, or by extension, one’s native land (OED).
The shift
in meaning was certainly visible in the first half of the sixteenth century in
Thomas
Starkey’s A Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset where, as Thomas
Meyer
notes, “in contrast to the more usual meaning of district or county, Starkey
used the
word to apply to the whole of England” (Meyer 1989: 121). Country and
countrymen
thus implied a shared identity and attachment to a place, and their increasing
usage in this way matched a growing sense of England as a country united by
language
and race.
A
commonwealth, however, is something different: a political construct much
debated in the sixteenth century. While the notions of commonwealth and country
overlapped in the sixteenth century, insofar as both terms signified a state or
body
politic, a commonwealth was, as The Oxford English Dictionary puts it,
“especially
viewed as a body in which the whole people have a voice or an interest.” The
debate
about the meaning of the commonwealth was particularly intense at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, when men such as Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, and
Robert
Crowley debated the nature of “the very and true commonweal,” a concept rooted
in
medieval ideas of social duty, cooperation, and the common good (Allen 1951: 3;
see
also Skinner 1978: 221–8). In the latter part of the century Thomas Smith used
the
term to embrace all forms of government, including monarchy, oligarchy, and
democracy,
but he also defined it in a way that emphasized the “common,” as “a society or
common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common
accord and covenants among themselves, for the conservation of themselves as
well
in peace and in warre” (Smith 1982: 57). Not surprisingly, in Shakespeare, the
word
appears most often in 2 Henry VI, in connection with the members of the
“commons”
and their complaints, both in act 1, scene 3 and in act 4 (where George Bevis
boasts
that “Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the commonwealth, and turn it, and
set
a new nap on it” (4.2.5–6)). It was left for the dissenters of the seventeenth
century
to re appropriate the word as a synonym for a republic or a democracy, but it
had never
lost that odor of the “common.”
We can probably account for
the occurrence of the word in Brutus’ speech by
looking at Plutarch’s telling of the aftermath of the assassination in “The
Life of
Marcus Antonius.” There it is said that after the assassination in the Senate,
Antony
preferred a law that all things past should be forgotten, and that they should
appoint
provinces unto Cassius and Brutus: the which the Senate confirmed and further
ordained
that they should cancel none of Caesar’s laws. Thus went Antonius out of the
Senate
more praised and better esteemed than ever man was, because it seemed to every
man
that he had cut off all occasion of civil wars and that he had showed himself a
marvelous
wise governor of the commonwealth, for the appeasing of these matters of so
great
weight and importance. (Plutarch, “Life of Marcus Antonius,” ch. XIV, p. 165)
It is significant,
then, that the phrase emerges out of a context in which the Roman
republic was seen to work effectively for common good. It is also ironic, since
in fact
Antony is about to do precisely the opposite thing, in fomenting civil war. The
word
stands in the text, jostling with “country” and “Rome,” as a trace of an
understanding
of Roman republican values and English dreams of a “very and true commonweal.”
It is a trace of a world in which people and the patricians work for the
“common
weal,” but a world almost obliterated by irrationality and factionalism.
Julius Caesar is thus a play in which we can see English politics in action, not
through the representation of the acts of kings or queens but, rather, in the
conflict
and evolution of political values, embedded in language, character, and event.
What
is most fascinating about the play is how, in its evocation of the political
culture of
republican Rome, it embeds new forms of political discourse and political
action,
which drew on the languages of the past and transformed them in the coming
decades
in England. Liberty, tyranny, commonwealth, and commons: these became the
watchwords
of a new political age at mid-century.
This is not to say
that Julius Caesar itself is either a radical or even a prophetic play in its depiction
of tyrannicide and the failure of the conspiracy that brought Caesar down. Its
events and action are too contradictory to offer a clear moral lesson on either
side of the case. It does, however, carry the marks of the political fractures
– and openness – of its historical moment. Such a way of reading Julius Caesar
may not restore it to favor in the high school curriculum (this may be a lost
cause), but it can let us see it, not as a classical monument or a tired
classic, but as a dynamic political text that gives us a glimpse of the English
commonwealth in debate and on the move.
( Rebecca W Bushnell)
