Shakespeare William - Julius Caesar

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Hlose Snchal Julius Caesar
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeares Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Erin Sullivan and Hlose Snchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings) and Peter Kirwan (overview)
The Directors Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Edward Hall, David Farr, and Lucy Bailey Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theater Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Universit de Genve, Switzerland
Jacqui OHanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Womans Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK 2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition Copyright 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York. M ODERN L IBRARY and the T ORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc. Royal Shakespeare Company, RSC, and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company. The version of Julius Caesar and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare:Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. eISBN: 978-1-58836-883-6 www.modernlibrary.com Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: Simon Winnall/Getty Images v3.1 Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth Is secretary of state, recommended the study of history with an eye to its contemporary applications: in the reading of histories as you have principally to mark how matters have passed in government in those days, so have you to apply them to these our times and states and see how they may be made serviceable to our age.

It was in this spirit that Sir Thomas North produced his translation of Plutarchs Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, the main source for Shakespeares dramatizations of the events leading to the deaths of Julius Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius, Marcus Antonius and his beloved Cleopatra, and Caius Martius Coriolanus. Julius Caesar, performed at the Globe Theatre in 1599, was the first of the three plays in which Shakespeare followed Plutarch closely in exploring key moments of transition in the history of Rome. Unlike Plutarch, though, Shakespeare begins with the people rather than the politicians. The common tradesmen are taking a days unofficial holiday in celebration of the return of the conquering Caesar. But the victory in question is not an imperial one: Julius Caesar has defeated another Roman general, Pompey the Great, in a civil war. The play will end with renewed civil war.

Elizabethan political culture was much exercised by the dangers of, on the one hand, the civil strife concomitant upon uncertainty over the transmission of power and, on the other, the potential for tyranny if too much power were invested in an individual. In the opening scene the Tribunesofficial spokesmen for the popular willare worried that the military supremo is proving too popular. They demand the removal of the tokens honoring Caesar that have been draped over the statues in the Capitol. We learn a little later that for their pains in doing so they have been put to silence. This kind of detail lends support to Orson Welless influential 1930s production of the play with its jackbooted Caesar and its handling of Antonys funeral oration as something out of a Nuremberg Rally. We should, however, be cautious in fully endorsing such a reading.

The conspirators are not disinterested idealists. Brutus, the most thoughtful of them, does not initially focus his fears on Caesars ambitions; such a prospect is conjured into him by Cassius cunning rhetoric. [T]he quarrel, remarks Brutus in soliloquy, Will bear no colour for the thing he is. He only persuades himself to join the conspirators by fashioning the argument that the act of crowning Caesar might itself be the egg that, when hatched, would unleash tyranny upon the state. The historical irony for Rome, and the personal tragedy for Brutus, is that the conspiracy itself proves to be the thing that divides the city and lets slip the dogs of a civil war that only ceases at the end of Antony and Cleopatra, when Octavius becomes Augustus and ushers in the imperial phase of Romes history. For over a thousand years, Rome was the city of the world.

The Romans ruled the greatest empire that had ever been seen. Even after its decline and fall, the name of Rome lived on for centuries by providing the Western world with models of excellence in every dimension of human life from military technology to political sophistication to theory of moral character to cultural glories such as architecture and epic poetry. Shakespeares England was a small, vulnerable, upstart nation near the northwestern edge of the known world. When Queen Elizabeth came to the throne, the country was in a state of near psychotic self-division as a result of her fathers break from that latter-day Roman empire, the universal Catholic church. But in the course of her reign, aristocrats, intellectuals, seamen, poets, and theater people forged an amazingly bold new vision: that one day, their tiny island-nation might become a second Rome. They laid out the building blocks for the future.

Naval power held off the might of Spain and planted the name of the Virgin Queen on distant shores. Politicians honed a system of checks and balances between the two houses of parliament and the monarchya system based on the Roman model of senators, tribunes, and emperor, but with a more flexible legal system, based on common law precedent rather than a fixed code of rules. Educators opened grammar schools for the middle classes, steeping the future administrators of nation and empire in both the Latin language and the Roman character of firm backbone and stiff upper lip (known technically as Stoicism). And Shakespeares actors staged epic dramas in which they told the heroic history both of their own nation and of the Romans who were their ideal. So it was that when Britannia came to rule the waves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Shakespeares Julius Caesar was central to the education and character formation of aristocrat, politician, and imperial civil servant alike. Mark Antonys great speech that sways the popular willFriends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your earswas learned by rote in school and analyzed as the exemplary piece of persuasive oratory (not least because of its witty trope of denying its own forceI am no orator).