Julius Caesar (2 page)

Despite the fact that he was writing under Elizabeth, a queen-emperor who saw herself as another Augustus, and despite the apparent approval of Essex’s Irish expedition that he worked into the prologue of
Henry V
at exactly the time he was writing
Julius Caesar
, Shakespeare seems to have been genuinely skeptical about the imperial project associated with the name of Caesar. At the same time, he was horrified by the idea of mob rule, as witness the scene when Cinna the poet is lynched because he happens to share a name with one of the conspirators.

The character who invites particular sympathy is Brutus, guardian of republican values, as he wrestles with the question of whether to be or not to be a conspirator. Cassius espouses the philosophy of Epicurus, who believed that the gods do not intervene in human affairs: what will be will be, and so there is no need to pay attention to omens and auguries. From this philosophy it is only a short step to that of Machiavelli—might is right and there is no such thing as a moral order. Brutus, by contrast, is portrayed as a Stoic, a philosophy associated with the idea of duty and the cultivation of mental fortitude as a shield against the vicissitudes of fortune. In each case, though, experience proves the philosophy insufficient. When news comes that Portia is dead, Brutus is “sick of many griefs.” Cassius replies, “Of your philosophy you make no use, / If you give place to accidental evils.” It is much harder in practice than in theory to rise above the accidents and chances that life throws at us.

Stoicism generally argued that adversity should be faced, not escaped, and that suicide was therefore not the answer. That is why Brutus considers that the austere moralist Cato let the side down when he killed himself: “Even by the rule of that philosophy / By which I did blame Cato for the death / Which he did give himself.” But the proposition is soon belied by the unfolding action. Unable to bear the thought of the shame of being led through Rome a prisoner, Brutus takes himself the way of Cato.

Cassius is also forced into the discovery that philosophical theories have a way of being belied by events. When foreboding ravens, crows, and kites hover in place of mighty eagles over his army, he interprets the change as a divine sign and is therefore forced to modify his Epicurean belief that the gods do not speak to mortals: “You know that I held Epicurus strong / And his opinion: now I change my mind / And partly credit things that do presage.” “Partly credit” is good: he has not entirely renounced the Epicurean skepticism about omens and auguries.

One of the most significant manifestations of the Roman influence on sixteenth-century ideas was the philosophy known as neo-Stoicism: as Cicero and Seneca had wrestled with the role of the intellectual in an age of instability or tyranny, so thinkers in the age of Shakespeare sought to reconcile the Stoic idea of indifference to fortune with the Christian conception of divine providence. For a self-consciously intellectual dramatist such as Fulke Greville, friend of Sir Philip Sidney and lord over Stratford-upon-Avon, neo-Stoicism was the foundation for both a theory of drama and a political position. Shakespeare wasn’t like that; he was too nimble on his feet and wary of his back to sign up to any philosophical or political code. But the fact that his plays are the exact opposite of propaganda does not mean that they lack philosophy or politics:
Julius Caesar
spoke to the turmoil of AD 1599 just as much as to that of 44 BC.

A clock strikes, men wear doublets rather than togas, night-watchmen patrol, and there are references to handkerchiefs: such purposeful anachronisms reveal that Shakespeare was a “modern-dress” dramatist, making the past speak to the present. To what degree should political power be concentrated in a single leader? Is the democratic process strong enough to withstand a potential tyrant or are there times when direct action on the street is the only possible course of action? Can we trust politicians to serve the people rather than their own interests? In addressing such questions, the play remains alive and full of troubling force in the twenty-first century.

Shakespeare is always interested in how words are confounded by deeds, how political and philosophical positions collapse under the pressure of action and circumstance. In the end,
Julius Caesar
is a play about decision making and conscience as much as it is an exploration of politics and of Roman value systems.

Shakespeare must have had the heavy folio of North’s Englished Plutarch open on his desk as he wrote. Read the “Life of Marcus Brutus” therein and you see the raw materials on which the dramatist’s imagination set to work:

The glory of the theater is that it can bring the interior character to life. In Act 1, we see the public face of an apparently untroubled Brutus, but at the beginning of Act 2 Shakespeare conjures up the atmosphere of night, takes Brutus from his bed and places him alone on the bare boards of the Globe. The art of soliloquy then allows us to enter into that troubled mind, to weigh the greatness of the danger, to share the deep thoughts of the enterprise:

There’s the question. Anton Chekhov, perhaps the greatest dramatist since Shakespeare, said that the business of the dramatist is not to provide solutions but to pose problems in the correct way.
Julius Caesar
doesn’t give us easy answers about the relationship of public duty to private will. Shakespeare was content to dramatize the problem and leave the rest to his audience.

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else.
Julius Caesar
, however, exists only in a Folio text that is exceptionally well printed, showing every sign that the copy from which the compositors were working was legible and clear. The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including
Julius Caesar
, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus “Marcus
BRUTUS
, sometime friend of Caesar, then conspirator against him”).

Locations
are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which
Julius Caesar
is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (
“
another part of the city
”
). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of
Julius Caesar
the action takes place in Rome apart from Brutus’ camp near Sardis and the final battle at Philippi.

Act and Scene Divisions
were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
running scene
count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention
running scene continues
. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

Speakers’ Names
are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio.

Verse
is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.

Spelling
is modernized, but older forms are very occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.

Punctuation
in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a period (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.

Entrances and Exits
are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. “[and
Attendants
]”).
Exit
is sometimes silently normalized to
Exeunt
and
Manet
anglicized to “remains.” We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.

Editorial Stage Directions
such as stage business, asides, indications of addressee and of characters’ position on the gallery stage are only used sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as
directorial
interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a smaller typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an
Aside
?
(often a line may be equally effective as an aside or as a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a
may exit
or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.