Part 3

The verse of _Julius Cæsar_ is less monotonously regular than that of the earlier plays; it is more flexible and varied, more musical and sonorous, but it lacks the superb movement of the verse in _Othello_, _The Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_. End-stopped, normally regular iambic pentameter lines often occur (as, for instance, I, i, 37, 41, 44, 62, 76), but everywhere are variations and deviations from the norm, and there is an unusual number of short lines and interjectional lines of two or three stresses. See Abbott's _A Shakespearian Grammar_, §§ 511, 512.

RHYME

Apart from the use of rhyme in songs, lyrics, and portions of masques (as in _The Tempest_, IV, i, 60-138), a progress from more to less rhyme is a sure index to Shakespeare's development as a dramatist and a master of expression. In the early _Love's Labour's Lost_ are more than one thousand rhyming five-stress iambic lines; in _The Tempest_ are only two; in _The Winter's Tale_ not one. _In Julius Cæsar_ are found only thirty-four rhyming lines.

PROSE

If "of the soule the bodie forme doth take," it is small wonder that attempts have been made to explain Shakespeare's distinctive use of verse and prose. Of recent years there have been interesting discussions of the question "whether we are justified in supposing that Shakespeare was guided by any fixed principle in his employment of verse and prose, or whether he merely employed them, as fancy suggested, for the sake of variety and relief."[1] It is a significant fact that in many of Shakespeare's earlier plays there is little or no prose, and that the proportion of prose to blank verse increases with the decrease of rhyme. In _Julius Cæsar_ three kinds of prose may be distinguished: (1) The prose of homely dialogue, as in the talk of the common people in I, i, and III, iii. (2) The prose of serious information as to the nature of a situation, as in Casca's description of the offer of the crown to Cæsar. This kind of prose reaches its highest development in Brutus's famous speech, III, ii, with its dignified defense and laconic exposition of his honesty of purpose. (3) The prose of formal documents, as in the letter of Artemidorus, II, iii, 1-8.

[Footnote 1: Professor J. Churton Collins's _Shakespeare as a Prose Writer_. See Delius's _Die Prosa in Shakespeares Dramen (Shakespeare Jahrbuch_, V, 227-273); Janssen's _Die Prosa in Shakespeares Dramen_; Professor Hiram Corson's _An Introduction to the Study of Shakespeare_, pp. 83-98.]

VIII. THE CHARACTERS

JULIUS CÆSAR

The characterization of this drama in some of the parts is not a little perplexing. Hardly one of the speeches put into Cæsar's mouth can be regarded as historically characteristic; taken all together, they seem little short of a caricature. As here represented, Cæsar appears little better than a braggart; and when he speaks, it is in the style of a glorious vapourer, full of lofty airs and mock thunder. Nothing could be further from the truth of the man, whose character, even in his faults, was as compact and solid as adamant, and at the same time as limber and ductile as the finest gold. Certain critics have seized and worked upon this, as proving Shakespeare's lack of classical knowledge, or carelessness in the use of his authorities. It proves neither the one nor the other.

It is true, Cæsar's ambition was gigantic, but none too much so for the mind it dwelt in; for his character in all its features was gigantic. And no man ever framed his ambition more in sympathy with the great forces of nature, or built it upon a deeper foundation of political wisdom and insight. Now this "last infirmity of noble minds" is the only part of him that the play really sets before us; and even this we do not see as it was, because it is here severed from the constitutional peerage of his gifts and virtues; all those transcendent qualities which placed him at the summit of Roman intellect and manhood being either withheld from the scene or thrown so far into the background that the proper effect of them is lost.

Yet we have ample proof that Shakespeare understood Cæsar thoroughly, and that he regarded him as "the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times." For example, in _Hamlet_, he makes Horatio, who is one of his calmest and most right-thinking characters, speak of him as "the mightiest Julius." In _Antony and Cleopatra_, again, the heroine is made to describe him as "broad-fronted Cæsar"; and in _King Richard the Third_ the young Prince utters these lines:

That Julius Cæsar was a famous man: With what his valour did enrich his wit, His wit set down to make his valour live: Death makes no conquest of this conqueror. [III, i, 84-87.]

In fact, we need not go beyond Shakespeare to gather that Julius Cæsar's was the deepest, the most versatile, and the most multitudinous head that ever figured in the political affairs of mankind.

Indeed, it is clear from this play itself that Shakespeare did not proceed at all from ignorance or misconception of the man. For it is remarkable that, though Cæsar delivers himself so out of character, yet others, both foes and friends, deliver him much nearer the truth; so that, while we see almost nothing of him directly, we nevertheless get, upon the whole, a just reflection of him. Especially in the marvelous speeches of Antony and in the later events of the drama, both his inward greatness and his right of mastership over the Roman world are fully vindicated. For in the play as in the history, Cæsar's blood hastens and cements the empire which the conspirators thought to prevent. They soon find that in the popular sympathies, and even in their own dumb remorses, he has "left behind powers that will work for him." He proves, indeed, far mightier in death than in life; as if his spirit were become at once the guardian angel of his cause and an avenging angel to his foes.

And so it was in fact. Nothing did so much to set the people in love with royalty, both name and thing, as the reflection that their beloved Cæsar, the greatest of their national heroes, the crown and consummation of Roman genius and character, had been murdered for aspiring to it. Thus their hereditary aversion to kingship was all subdued by the remembrance of how and why their Cæsar fell; and they who, before, would have plucked out his heart rather than he should wear a crown, would now have plucked out their own, to set a crown upon his head. Such is the natural result, when the intensities of admiration and compassion meet together in the human breast.

From all which it may well be thought that Cæsar was too great for the hero of a drama, since his greatness, if brought forward in full measure, would leave no room for anything else, at least would preclude any proper dramatic balance and equipoise. It was only as a sort of underlying potency, or a force withdrawn into the background, that his presence was compatible with that harmony and reciprocity of several characters which a well-ordered drama requires. At all events, it is pretty clear that, where he was, such figures as Brutus and Cassius could never be very considerable, save as his assassins. They would not have been heard of in after times, if they had not "struck the foremost man of all this world"; in other words, the great sun of Rome had to be shorn of his beams, else so ineffectual a fire as Brutus could nowise catch the eye.

Be this as it may, there is no doubt that Shakespeare knew the whole height and compass of Cæsar's vast and varied capacity. It may be regretted that he did not render him as he evidently saw him, inasmuch as he alone, perhaps, of all the men who ever wrote could have given an adequate expression of that colossal man.

It is possible that the policy of the drama may have been to represent Cæsar not as he was indeed, but as he must have appeared to the conspirators; to make us see him as they saw him, in order that they too might have fair and equal judgment at our hands. For Cæsar was literally too great to be seen by them, save as children often see bugbears by moonlight, when their inexperienced eyes are mocked with air. And Shakespeare may well have judged that the best way to set us right towards them was by identifying us more or less with them in mental position, and making us share somewhat in their delusion. For there is scarce anything wherein we are so apt to err as in reference to the characters of men, when time has settled and cleared up the questions in which they lost their way: we blame them for not having seen as we see; while in truth the things that are so bathed in light to us were full of darkness to them, and we should have understood them better, had we been in the dark along with them.

Cæsar, indeed, was not bewildered by the political questions of his time; but all the rest were, and therefore he seemed so to them; and while their own heads were swimming they naturally ascribed his seeming bewilderment to a dangerous intoxication. As for his marvelous career of success, they attributed this mainly to his good luck, such being the common refuge of inferior minds when they would escape the sense of their inferiority. Hence, as generally happens with the highest order of men, his greatness had to wait the approval of later events. He indeed, far beyond any other man of his age, "looked into the seeds of time"; but this was not, and could not be known, till time had developed those seeds into their fruits. Why then may not Shakespeare's idea have been so to order things that the full strength of the man should not appear in the play, as it did not in fact, till after his fall? This view will both explain and justify the strange disguise--a sort of falsetto greatness--under which Cæsar exhibits himself.

Now the seeming contradiction between Cæsar as known and Cæsar as rendered by Shakespeare is what, more than anything else, perplexes. But a very refined, subtile, and peculiar irony pervades this, more than any other of Shakespeare's plays; not intended as such, indeed, by the speakers, but a sort of historic irony,--the irony of Providence, so to speak, or, if you please, of Fate; much the same as is implied in the proverb, "A haughty spirit goeth before a fall." This irony crops out in many places. Thus we have Cæsar most blown with arrogance and godding it in the loftiest style when the daggers of the assassins are on the very point of leaping at him. So too, all along, we find Brutus most confident in those very things where he is most at fault, or acting like a man "most ignorant of what he's most assured"; as when he says that "Antony can do no more than Cæsar's arm when Cæsar's head is off." This, to be sure, is not meant ironically by him, but it is turned into irony by the fact that Antony soon tears the cause of the conspirators all to pieces with his tongue. But, indeed, this sort of honest guile runs all through the piece as a perfusive and permeating efficacy. A still better instance of it occurs just after the murder, when the chiefs of the conspiracy are exulting in the transcendent virtue and beneficence of their deed, and in its future stage celebrity; and Cassius says,--

So often shall the knot of us be call'd The men that gave their country liberty. [III, i, 118-119.]

and again, a little later, when Brutus says of Antony, "I know that we shall have him well to friend." Not indeed that the men themselves thought any irony in those speeches: it was natural, no doubt, that they should utter such things in all seriousness; but what they say is interpreted into irony by the subsequent events. And when such a shallow idealist as Brutus is made to overtop and outshine the greatest practical genius the world ever saw, what is it but a refined and subtile irony at work on a much larger scale, and diffusing itself, secretly, it may be, but not the less vitally, into the texture? It was not the frog that thought irony, when he tried to make himself as big as the ox; but there was a pretty decided spice of irony in the mind that conceived the fable.

It is to be noted further that Brutus uniformly speaks of Cæsar with respect, almost indeed with admiration. It is his ambition, not his greatness, that Brutus resents; the thought that his own consequence is impaired by Cæsar's elevation having no influence with him. With Cassius, on the contrary, impatience of his superiority is the ruling motive: he is all the while thinking of the disparagement he suffers by Cæsar's exaltation.

This man Is now become a god, and Cassius is A wretched creature, and must bend his body If Cæsar carelessly but nod on him. [I, ii, 115-118.]

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs. [I, ii, 135-137.]

Thus he overflows with mocking comparisons, and finds his pastime in flouting at Cæsar as having managed by a sham heroism to hoodwink the world.

And yet Shakespeare makes Cæsar characterize himself very much as Cassius, in his splenetic temper, describes him. Cæsar gods it in his talk, as if on purpose to approve the style in which Cassius mockingly gods him. This, taken by itself, would look as if the dramatist sided with Cassius; yet one can hardly help feeling that he sympathized rather in Antony's great oration. And the sequel, as we have seen, justifies Antony's opinion of Cæsar. The subsequent course of things has the effect of inverting the mockery of Cassius against himself.

The final issue of the conspiracy, as represented by Shakespeare, is a pretty conclusive argument of the blunder, not to say the crime, of its authors. Cæsar, dead, tears them and their cause all to pieces. In effect, they did but stab him into a mightier life; so that Brutus might well say, as indeed he does at last,--

O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet! Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords In our own proper entrails. [V, iii, 94-96.]

The Nemesis which asserts itself so sternly in the latter part of the play may be regarded as a reflex of irony on some of the earlier scenes. This view infers the disguise of Cæsar to be an instance of the profound guile with which Shakespeare sometimes plays upon his characters, humoring their bent, and then leaving them to the discipline of events.

BRUTUS

Coleridge has a shrewd doubt as to what sort of a character Shakespeare meant his Brutus to be. For, in his thinking aloud just after the breaking of the conspiracy to him, Brutus avowedly grounds his purpose, not on anything Cæsar has done, nor on what he is, but simply on what he _may become_ when crowned. He "knows no personal cause to spurn at him"; nor has he "known when his affections sway'd more than his reason"; but "he would be crown'd: how that might change his nature, there's the question"; 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; And therefore think him as a serpent's egg Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell. [II, i, 28-34.]

So then Brutus heads a plot to assassinate the man who, besides being clothed with the sanctions of law as the highest representative of the state, has been his personal friend and benefactor; all this, too, not on any ground of fact, but on an assumed probability that the crown will prove a sacrament of evil, and transform him into quite another man. A strange piece of casuistry indeed! but nowise unsuited to the spirit of a man who was to commit the gravest of crimes, purely from a misplaced virtue.

And yet the character of Brutus is full of beauty and sweetness. In all the relations of life he is upright, gentle, and pure; of a sensitiveness and delicacy of principle that cannot bosom the slightest stain; his mind enriched and fortified with the best extractions of philosophy; a man adorned with all the virtues which, in public and private, at home and in the circle of friends, win respect and charm the heart.

Being such a man, of course he could only do what he did under some sort of delusion. And so indeed it is. Yet this very delusion serves, apparently, to ennoble and beautify him, as it takes him and works upon him through his virtues. At heart he is a real patriot, every inch of him. But his patriotism, besides being somewhat hidebound with patrician pride, is of the speculative kind, and dwells, where his whole character has been chiefly formed, in a world of poetical and philosophic ideals. He is an enthusiastic student of books. Plato is his favorite teacher; and he has studiously framed his life and tuned his thoughts to the grand and pure conceptions won from that all but divine source: Plato's genius walks with him in the Senate, sits with him at the fireside, goes with him to the wars, and still hovers about his tent.

His great fault, then, lies in supposing it his duty to be meddling with things that he does not understand. Conscious of high thoughts and just desires, but with no gift of practical insight, he is ill fitted to "grind among the iron facts of life." In truth, he does not really see where he is; the actual circumstances and tendencies amidst which he lives are as a book written in a language he cannot read. The characters of those who act with him are too far below the region of his principles and habitual thinkings for him to take the true cast of them. Himself incapable of such motives as govern them, he just projects and suspends his ideals in them, and then misreckons upon them as realizing the men of his own brain. So also he clings to the idea of the great and free republic of his fathers, the old Rome that has ever stood to his feelings touched with the consecrations of time and glorified with the high virtues that have grown up under her cherishing. But, in the long reign of tearing faction and civil butchery, that which he worships has been substantially changed, the reality lost. Cæsar, already clothed with the title and the power of Imperator for life, would change the form so as to agree with the substance, the name so as to fit the thing. But Brutus is so filled with the idea of that which has thus passed away never to return that he thinks to save or recover the whole by preventing such formal and nominal change.

And so his whole course is that of one acting on his own ideas, not on the facts that are before and around him. Indeed, he does not _see_ them; he merely dreams his own meaning into them. He is swift to do that by which he thinks his country _ought to be benefited_. As the killing of Cæsar stands in his purpose, he and his associates are to be "sacrificers, not butchers." But that the deed may have the effect he hopes for, his countrymen generally must regard it in the same light as he does. That they will do this is the very thing which he has _in fact_ no reason to conclude; notwithstanding, because it is so _in his idea_, therefore he trusts that the conspirators will "be called purgers, not murderers." Meanwhile, the plain truth is, that if his countrymen had been capable of regarding the deed as a sacrifice, they would not have made nor permitted any occasion for it. It is certain that, unless so construed, the act must prove fruitful of evil; all Rome is full of things proving that it cannot be so construed; but this is what Brutus has no eye to see.

So too, in his oration "to show the _reason_ of our Cæsar's death," he speaks, in calm and dispassionate manner, just those things which he thinks ought to set the people right and himself right in their eyes, forgetting all the while that the deed cannot fail to make the people mad, and that popular madness is not a thing to be reasoned with. And for the same cause he insists on sparing Antony, and on permitting him to speak in Cæsar's funeral. To do otherwise would be unjust, and so would overthrow the whole nature of the enterprise as it lives in his mind. And because in his idea it ought so to be, he trusts that Antony will make Cæsar's death the occasion of strengthening those who killed him, not perceiving the strong likelihood, which soon passes into a fact, that in cutting off Cæsar they have taken away the only check on Antony's ambition. He ought to have foreseen that Antony, instead of being drawn to their side, would rather make love to Cæsar's place at their expense.

Thus the course of Brutus serves no end but to set on foot another civil war, which naturally hastens and assures the very thing he sought to prevent. He confides in the goodness of his cause, not considering that the better the cause, the worse its chance with bad men. He thinks it safe to trust others because he knows they can safely trust him; the singleness of his own eye causing him to believe that others will see as he sees, the purity of his own heart, that others will feel as he feels.

Here then we have a strong instance of a very good man doing a very bad thing; and, withal, of a wise man acting most unwisely because his wisdom knew not its place; a right noble, just, heroic spirit bearing directly athwart the virtues he worships. On the whole, it is not wonderful that Brutus should have exclaimed, as he is said to have done, that he had worshiped virtue and found her at last but a shade. So worshiped, she may well prove a shade indeed! Admiration of the man's character, reprobation of his proceedings,--which of these is the stronger with us? And there is much the same irony in the representation of Brutus as in that of Cæsar; only the order of it is here reversed. As if one should say, "O yes, yes! in the practical affairs of mankind your charming wisdom of the closet will doubtless put to shame the workings of mere practical insight and sagacity."