Brutus is an honorable man, but Caesar is Caesar: at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, his name is near the point of becoming synonymous with dictatorial power, and his every wish, as Mark Antony points out, has the substance of a command. For the rebels who oppose him, this identification of political authority with personal will is a perversion of republican institutions, and a form of corruption that justifies any means of putting an end to it, even if that means killing a friend. Yet Brutus’s conception of himself as unflaggingly virtuous is one he in fact shares with Caesar, and perhaps reflects the same authoritarian tendency, in grounding the legitimacy of political action in the character of a particular actor. Then again, it is not clear that democratic institutions will always forestall authoritarian tendencies, rather than enable the masses to sanction absolute power in a charismatic leader. Wes & Erin discuss Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
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Transcript
0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast.
0:32 Wes: Brutus is an honorable man, but Caesar is Caesar. At the beginning of Shakespeare's play, his name is near the point of becoming synonymous with dictatorial power. And his every wish, as Mark Antony points out, has the substance of a command for the rebels who oppose him. This identification of political authority with personal will is a perversion of republican institutions and a form of corruption that justifies any means of putting an end to it, even if that means killing a friend. Yet Brutus conception of himself as unflaggingly virtuous is one he in fact shares with Caesar and perhaps reflects the same authoritarian tendency in grounding the legitimacy of political action in the character of a particular actor.
Then again, it is not clear that democratic institutions will always forestall authoritarian tendencies rather than enable the masses to sanction absolute power in a charismatic leader. Today we discuss Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, where does this play stand in your rankings of Shakespeare plays? I almost said Julius Caesar plays. Are there a lot of Julius Caesar plays?
1:51 Erin: There are a couple,
1:54 Wes: yeah. Where is this one for you? What's your favorite Shakespeare play? Remind me. Much Ado.
1:59 Erin: Yeah, that's my favorite. In the, you know, personal opinion, it's not what I think is the best play, obviously, but it is my favorite. And then probably Antony and Cleopatra.
2:10 Erin: And then. I don't know. This is in the top five for me. I love Julius Caesar. I was so excited to do this. It was my first play. I feel like it's everybody's first Shakespeare play.
2:19 Erin: Because so many people read it in school.
2:21 Wes: Well, do they do Romeo and Juliet first in high school, or do they do this one first?
2:25 Erin: My mom made me read this when I was, like, 11. This is her. I think this is her favorite Shakespeare play.
2:30 Wes: She loves trying to tell you. Was she, you know, she was worried about the. You being corrupted by the crown?
2:39 Wes: Are you wearing a little tiara at the time?
2:41 Erin: No. If anything, she was. She was trying to warn me about. About Brutus, which. No, she you know, Anthony's speech, I think, you know, we were talking probably about the art of persuasion or something. I don't know. I just. I remember reading this when I was really young and thinking that it was so amazing and that I was seeing something so. Or reading about something so profound. And then actually. Okay. And then this is. This is a side note that has nothing to do with anything, but it is funny. Okay. So when I. So my mom is not a cat person.
I'm a cat person. When I was 13, because my mom felt sorry for me, she got. She let me get two cats, and it was a girl and a boy, and I was 13, so I named them Caesar and Cleopatra because I thought that was great. And I got them home. And like two days later, it finally occurred to me I was not thinking about this at all. Okay. Two days later, it occurred to me that our next door neighbors had a cat named Brutus. And Brutus was awful and used to frequently try to attack Caesar, who was a little, you know, he. He had some problems. Caesar. Cleo was really sharp.
Caesar was the Caesar of Shakespeare's. Julius Caesar, a little bit in decline, had some physical problems, so. So he was a sitting duck for Brutus.
4:01 Wes: Little epilepsy.
4:02 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. And couldn't hear that. Well, I don't want to hear. Anyway, it was very funny. And then it was commented on by everyone in the neighborhood, and everyone thought I had named my cat Caesar because Brutus lived next door. And it was just the most amazing coincidence. So I love this play.
4:19 Wes: Brutus isn't. Is an honorable cat.
4:22 Erin: He's really not. And Brutus, to this day is my least favorite character in all of Shakespeare.
4:27 Wes: I was curious. I almost started by asking about your opinion of Brutus because I knew it's going to be counterintuitive. What. But before that, you must have taught this play as well because you were a high school teacher.
4:41 Erin: I tried to keep it to myself, but I would always end with Dante's description of Brutus and Cassius in hell, which, you know, it's a documentary as far as I'm concerned.
4:53 Wes: Okay. This must be why I knew you would have a different take. Yeah. So we will get to this. But yeah, the. The representation, of course, of all these characters is ambiguous. Right. So we're not simply meant to take Brutus at face value. But before we get to that, just when you teach this play, what is your. Is there something that you're focused on or how is it. How do you sell it to the kids?
5:19 Erin: I think I Did it with eighth graders. So it's been a long time. But we talked about rhetoric, you know, and different rhetorical devices. And basically the focus is Brutus versus Antony in the big speeches. I taught it as a way to show them different, how different rhetorical devices work. What are rhetorical appeals? What kinds of appeals is Brutus making, and what kind of appeals is Antony making? You know, it's not like I was teaching this to a more sophisticated audience. I think part of the reason why it's used so early on is also just because it's such an accessible play.
I mean, the language is not difficult, but they liked it. And there was a lot of performance in class I would use. So, you know, the boys got to. Got to get up and give their sort of interpretations of the speeches, which was really fun. And. And then always a little sociopath. Wanted to play Cassius. Not really, but, you know,
6:19 Wes: he is sort of the Iago.
6:21 Wes: Of the play, in a way. Well.
6:23 Erin: And all the boys would be like, I want to be Caesar. And then they would figure out that Caesar really didn't have that many lines, which is kind of funny.
6:28 Wes: Of feeble temper. You bring up these different types of rhetorical appeal, and I think that's important, apart from the fact that these speeches are so. Especially Marc Antony's speech, which is so incredible. But there's a lot of incredible speeches in here. There's the question of the effect on people and maybe their. Their character. Right. So the effects of rhetoric, the effects of other types of emotional manipulation, including Cassius's effect on Brutus, the effect of the. That the crown and power might have on Caesar by corrupting him, all these ideas of different ideas of how character might be changed by these different forces, but especially by rhetoric and especially by power.
And then there seems to be a parallel to the idea that character is something like nature and that there's something unnatural when people's character is perverted. So, for instance, during the storm, all these crazy things are happening, like lions strolling in the streets and people's hands on fire and not bothering them.
7:36 Erin: I always loved the hand on fire thing.
7:38 Wes: Yeah, it's funny. So this idea of things going against their nature. Right. That things have natural dispositions to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances, and that I think Cassius suggests. There's different interpretations of the storm that I want to get into, including Casca's. But Cassius's idea seems to be that, in a way, it's representative of the Caesar's corruption of character or the corruption of Caesar's character by power. So that's the part of this that interests me. Just to bring it full, a lot of this is about character. And then I look at the interesting rhetorical part of this in light of how fixed people are in their characters, how corruptible they are.
8:20 Erin: Cassius says quite a bit about this in Act 1, Scene 3. But one of the things that I was thinking about in relationship to nature is the whole play is basically about reading or misreading or interpretation or misinterpretation. And I think the reason why, one of the reasons why Brutus really bothers me is because he really gives no quarter to those parts of human nature that are not about the rational. And the signs that you're referring to, I think, are sort of like outward expressions of this irrationality which is at the heart of the other conspirators anger against Caesar.
Maybe something like, you know, the people's love for Caesar, maybe there's something irrational in that or something sort of beyond reason or super reasonable. And that idea of nature, or what one thinks of as human nature is something which I think Brutus shows time and time again that he has very little understanding of and even maybe of his own nature or his own character. He seems, on the one hand to think that he knows himself really well, and on the other hand he seems completely incapable of knowing himself. I don't know if you would agree with that.
And I think that lack of awareness of hypocrisy perhaps is the central question, because we have this idea of. Of interpretation that somebody might do something which is different from how they actually feel. You know, they might behave a certain way but have secret mot. They might say something and mean something else. And that awareness of hypocrisy, of the human potential for hypocrisy or deception, is one which Brutus has no access to, even as his level of self deception is so intense. You know, maybe. Maybe we all have a bit of Brutus in us and that's why I'm rejecting.
Rejecting him so strongly or dislike him so strongly.
10:07 Wes: So you don't think that only in a general honest thought and common good to all he. Sorry, I was trying to quote Mark Antony here. You don't agree with Mark Antony's assessment at the end of the play. 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. His life was Gentle and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this was a man. What a great little speech. He's he really. If you're going to have a funeral oration, Antony's the one to hire.
10:46 Erin: Yeah, Antony is the bomb.
10:49 Wes: But so I bring that up because. Yeah. So nominally he's an honorable man. And of course, Antony famously makes use of that appellation to great effect in his very ironic funeral oration speech for Caesar, suggesting in a way. Right. It's almost like a reductio absurdum where he's like, they're honorable men, so what they must have done was right. And then he produces evidence to show that it probably wasn't the right thing, therefore they're not honorable men or something like that. Or the conclusion, it might not be that Brutus isn't honorable, but as you say, that he could be honorable and at the same time, I suppose, self deceived or being honorable might not be all it's cracked up to be.
In fact, for Brutus, it seems to be. We learned during the play that he's actually quite stubborn. He's corrupted a little bit by Cassius, but then all the decisions are made by him. We're not going to kill Mark Antony, we're going to attack, we're not going to defend. Basically, Cassius loses all control and Brutus turns out to be quite stubborn. But in a way, there's something autocratic about this idea of honor. As if once I designate myself as honorable, then I can do no wrong. In just the same way that Caesar's wish is everyone's command and Caesar can't feel fear.
There's a kind of parallel here between Caesar's idea that he's immovable, uncorruptible, he's like Mount Olympus, he won't even move for fear. And the self conception that Brutus has of being grounded in goodwill, honor and concern only for the public good and not motivated by envy as Cassius seems to be.
12:37 Erin: Yeah, I think that's all correct. You know, I struggle with Antony's assessment of Brutus at the end, particularly the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, this is. The element's so mixed. That's the problem I have, because I think ultimately what Antony is celebrating in Brutus is that he's a man of principle. He has these principles and he lives by them and he dies by them. And that is, I suppose, the definition of honor or of being honorable. But I think that he's principled, taken to its logical extreme.
So he's not a mixture of elements. He seems to me to be one element only. I mean, you know, I'm using this term elements in a very loose way. Right. But like, he's all rationality. The struggle that he has with himself in the early acts before he decides to murder Caesar seems to me to be about silencing or putting to death that part of himself that is emotional and human and leaving himself with just the part that is rational. But without the human, the rational is irrational. So we see him sort of not being tempered by emotion, not being able to express his emotions, not being able to be swayed by any sort of human feeling beyond what he thinks is right.
And there is something admirable about that. I think Antony is right to celebrate Brutus in a way, but the way that he chooses to celebrate him, by these elements being mixed, this idea that Brutus is this sort of perfectly balanced human being, I think is the wrong thing to celebrate about him. I think he's an imbalanced human being who is something a little inhuman about him. A little robotic, maybe.
14:22 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I didn't. I didn't see him as hyper rational, per se. So. Yeah. So now the question is. Yeah. How do we characterize Brutus's tragic flaw, so to speak? Is it because he doesn't fully understand his own motives? I'm inclined to think that he does have the right motives, or at least let's grant that for the sake of argument. Right. That he does have honorable motives. But somehow that's not enough.
14:51 Erin: Well, what would those honorable motives be?
14:53 Wes: That Caesar was ambitious. Caesar was going to become a tyrant. Caesar was going to become a dictator. They're going to save the republic. So that's one question. Are his motives fully honorable or are they mixed? And Cassius, you might say they're mixed. There's obvious envy there. And even when Cassius tries to express the same sort of point as Brutus, which is we shouldn't treat a human being as if they were a God, he puts it in these terms. I would rather die than worship someone who is like me or Caesar. Caesar is no better than me. Why should he be king and not me?
Right. You get little hints that Cassius is actually driven by envy. And this is the point that Antony is making at the end of the play, which is that Brutus is envy free. And I think that's probably right. So the flaw lies elsewhere. It's a much more obvious flaw with Cassius than with Brutus. And I think the idea with Brutus is that it doesn't matter if you're principled and you're not envious and you have the public good purely in mind. But why? That's the question. Why is that? I mean, in this case, things don't go well. There's something to be said for execution.
And a lot of the poor execution is, like I said, Brutus's fault, like not killing Marc Antony up front and all that stuff which he does out of. Because he wants to be principled. So maybe the idea is at the point where you descend to revolutionary violence or rebellion, then you're playing by different rules. And so if you say I'm such an honorable man that I. Honorable man that I need to upend the current order, then the rules don't translate. The honorable man rules don't translate into the domain of rebellion, where suddenly there's no central power and it's a struggle for power.
It's a much different world than in a world where the law is settled. And. Do you know what I mean?
16:56 Erin: Yes. Regarding this envy question, I think it's possible to read Brutus's motives as being entirely honorable. I do, however, think that he betrays signs of envy, but these are unknown to him. He's too unself aware to know that he envies Caesar. And I think that he, in many ways, is a mirror of Caesar. He has many of the same qualities, which I think you've already alluded to. Or they're sort of like the same type of quality, maybe in theory, but just vastly different expressions of the same qualities.
17:31 Wes: Well, Caesar sees himself as a realist and a pragmatist in the beginning. Right. He's not superstitious. Is that the idea?
17:38 Erin: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think they're, you know, they have these sort of mirrored. Like the play structurally sets them up in these mirrored ways. Like we see them with their wives, where their wives are both telling them, you know, not to do something, and then they do it, or to do something and, you know, to beg them something, and they don't fully listen. I think there are a lot of reasons why Brutus should be or is envious of Caesar. But the main argument for that I could think of is simply that Cassius's appeal to Brutus works. Cassius is aware of his own envy, and he uses tactics which would incite envy in Brutus to get Brutus to act.
18:20 Wes: Brutus is a mirror of Caesar. And then something about, oh, Brutus.
18:23 Erin: Yeah. I had written down a list of things.
18:25 Wes: Cassius being aware of his envy.
18:27 Erin: But here's my list. Yes. Yeah, I had a list of things they had in common. Okay. They both can't sleep. That's the thing I noticed first. I'm just like them, Caesar, just like us. This is more structural but like when they both greet the same group of men, you know, to Brutus, they're conspirators. Caesar greets them as friends. They both are vain. Brutus is vain. Brutus is extremely vain and self centered which is another reason why I think he is prone to envy. And Cassius knows this and exploits it. And Cassius says that basically Brutus is noble but that because Brutus hasn't surrounded himself by other noble people, he's still capable of being infused with a little bit of envy.
And that's exactly what Cassius does. So I think it's there. I think it's there. And Brutus is just so. His belief in his own high mindedness is so, so much about him sort of having these pure motives. But what it reveals to me is that he has an incredibly high opinion of himself and that it bothers him that Caesar is elevated above him. And he sees himself in this way which is similar to like a, like a divine kingship, only it's a sort of divine deposing of kings. Right. He sees himself as part of a lineage. He has the same name and is the ancestor of the man who killed.
Is it Cato or somebody else? He killed somebody and established the republic. And so he sees himself as having almost like a divine right of king deposing in the same way that Caesar with this sort of focus on making sure that Antony, you know, touches Calpurnia during the race. There's definitely. I think one of the reasons why he's causing people to get nervous is that there's this focus on an heir and he feels the lack of an heir. And I think that is listing towards meaning that he wants to establish an empire and a dynasty and to have someone take over the throne after him as a traditional king would.
So yeah, but I just think. I think that Brutus has very little self knowledge because he pushes out of his head anything which he deems unknowable. You know, lacking in nobility or high mindedness. And I think is. He's just not aware of these parts of himself that are ugly.
20:47 Wes: Yeah, I don't see him as envious or vain or self centered in a way. Not exactly. I think he's. Well, there's that Element of melancholy.
20:57 Erin: Everything he says, all his speeches, I, I, I. Seriously, it's in there.
21:03 Wes: I think, well, if you're as great as him, you know, you talk about yourself all the time.
21:09 Erin: What has he done? Nothing.
21:12 Wes: Just kidding. So he's just a great, he's just a great guy. Listeners can't see that. Erin is rolling her eyes. So I think I share your opinion in kind of a vague sense of there's something he's missing. There's something, there's a kind of obtuseness. I think it does have something to do with rationality, but that's not entirely it. I don't think being hyper rational is exactly the, the problem. I think it is probably there's something he doesn't know about himself, but I can say that about everyone in the play. I think it ultimately comes down to this reliance on the idea of being honorable and the pitfalls of that, as I said before, and that's something, of course, that Marc Antony makes great use of.
So there is something almost autocratic about the concept of honor. Honor is supposed to be this kind of immunity amulet, immunity idol for those who watch Survivor. He can't be voted off the island if he has it, so he can do no wrong if he's honorable, which of course is not the case. But.
22:21 Erin: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think at the base of a lot of his speeches are circular logic, syllogisms, stuff like that, where things don't quite line up. So I think you're right that, like, there's a, you know, I'm honorable because I'm honorable. You know, I mean, he says literally at one point, believe me, for mine honor, and have respect to mine honor, that you may believe something.
22:49 Wes: Yes, exactly. It's supposed to be this mark of credibility. And that's, of course, you know, that's his speech that precedes Antony's speech, and that's what Antony fixes on and just slaughters him with that whole honorable idea. But, you know, and the idea of syllogism, I see that in his, like, let's not do an oath speech.
23:10 Wes: In his garden with the others. Because, you know, oaths are for people who are essentially dishonest. You wouldn't need an oath if you weren't defective in some way and you wouldn't even be a Roman if you broke a promise. So there's that circularity. It's almost like it's about identity and about flawlessness.
23:30 Erin: That's right.
23:31 Wes: Whereas everyone's motives in a Sense are mixed. And maybe that's part of your point, you know, saying that he has envy. No one escapes that entirely. He's just such a goody two shoes.
23:44 Erin: Well, exactly, exactly. And he doesn't. People's bad motives being invisible to him means that he also has bad motives that are invisible to him. Right. So his idea is like, oh, I have a lot of these good reasons. What I'm going to do is I'm going to write them down and make a list of them. And then you common people who are so rational, because I'm going to project my belief in my own rationality onto you guys, you're going to read this list and be convinced because I have a lot of great arguments. And Antony, who I think, you know, you mentioned that you think that pretty much every character in the play has things about themselves that they're not aware of.
And I think that's probably right. But I think Antony is the most aware of. He has the most self awareness, I think, of anybody, of any character in the play. And Antony is just like, okay, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to put on a huge show here because I know what people are really like. People really want to show. People really want to be moved emotionally. And nobody's going to take the time to read the 95 theses that he's just nailed to the door of, you know.
24:44 Wes: Yeah, but Antony is just a manipulator in that. He's just a cold coordinated manipulator that's.
24:52 Erin: He knows how to deal with people, you know, I mean his. I'm.
24:55 Erin: I'm just talking about his motives. I'm saying, like he knows what people are. Like he knows how to manipulate people because he knows people.
25:02 Wes: He's. He parties all the time.
25:04 Erin: Yeah, he's the best.
25:06 Wes: Caesar's like, I can't believe Antony's up already.
25:10 Wes: Parties every night. No, I mean literally, he says, I
25:14 Erin: mean manipulation in itself is not a good thing, but in order to be successful at it, I mean, this is one of the things that. I think this will lead us right to the beginning of the play. Actually. This is one of the things that all the conspirators seem to. It's almost like being a Republican means not understanding people weirdly. Whereas, you know, having a cult of personality.
25:32 Wes: Are you a monarchist or something? What the hell, of course I am.
25:35 Erin: I'm Catholic. You know, this is why we shouldn't be allowed into this country. No, no, but like Having a cult of personality around you means you understand people. It's like sort of proof of its own success. I mean, nobody ever talks about the successful stuff that Caesar has done to get to this point. Most notably the battles that he's won and the incredible mind he has in that regard. But merely being super popular, it's its own justification, in a way that calling yourself honorable is not its own justification. Popularity is something which is its own proof of something. It is its own circular logic. You're popular because people like you. That's its own. I don't know what I'm saying. I'm sorry.
26:21 Wes: If this were high school, we know that Marc Antony is in the jock, popular jock crowd. But surprising genius is Brutus just a huge nerd. Yeah, Brutus and Cassius are nerds. This is revenge of the nerds.
26:39 Erin: Right? I mean, I think this is different. This is a little saying. High school puts it in a slightly different. I get your point. One can be popular and people don't necessarily have to like you. But Caesar is beloved. That's the thing. And there is a refusal at the beginning to recognize that he is beloved actually by the Republicans. There's a lack of understanding of the will of the people and the fact that they have seemingly anointed this guy. I mean, I'm not saying that he. That's proof that he should be dictator for life. I'm just saying that that means he has something that they don't have. Right. He has the love of the people, they don't. He's the one who everybody is celebrating. They're not.
27:23 Wes: Yeah, well, and before him, though, Pompey. Just to get us into this first scene. Pompey, right. Pompey was the one. So the first scene seems to suggest that it's. The people are fickle and easily manipulated. At least that's the opinion of the tribunes.
27:40 Erin: That's right. And there's a tremendous amount of snobbery of all the Republicans towards the people. Casca most notably discussing the reaction of the people when Caesar refuses the coronet. I won't say crown, because Casca corrects himself and says this was just a coronet. Let's get our facts straight here, people. It wasn't a crown.
28:02 Wes: Casca, who's, by the way, putting on airs as if he were a commoner, which is right. He talks as if he's a commoner. He talks as if he's in a slightly lower class English register. And in a way, Cassius and Brutus make note of this Brutus says he's grown blunt. I mean, this guy used to be really smart. Now he acts like an idiot. And Cassius says he's just putting that on in order to communicate with people better. It's sauce to his wit or something like that.
28:30 Erin: Something I made note of because Brutus.
28:33 Wes: Sort of thing that. Yeah, Brutus can't do. But it's a particular. You know, it's a very politician type of thing. I'm gonna talk like the common person.
28:39 Erin: Yeah. And Brutus doesn't even understand what Casca's doing in that moment. Like, Cassius has to explain it to him.
28:45 Wes: Although I think he does kind of turn out to be an idiot, though. Yes, Casca does. But.
28:50 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
28:52 Wes: And Cassius will accuse him of that later on because when they talk about the storm, I think it becomes clear that. But Casca's a bit. He's not the brightest guy and he's quite superstitious. And that's where Cassius makes that he says, calls him dull, I think is the word that he uses. But, yeah. So you're saying in this scene, the tribunes. There's the snobbery of the tribunes, which seems pretty. Yeah. Seems pretty clearly that Shakespeare meant to convey that. Right.
29:20 Erin: Yeah. Even though this cobbler, the mender of bad soles. The mender of bad souls is like being pretty funny, being pretty sophisticated. You know, this is the first instance, you know, as usual, in this little first scene, which doesn't feature the main characters, all of the themes are being smuggled in. And so we have this, you know, the Bad Souls homonym. Because he's a cobbler, there's a misinterpretation that results from it. So, you know, the language that produces confusion or the things which have multiple meanings and the tribunes don't.
It's unclear if they're just dumb or if they just don't expect this regular person to be able to make puns like that or to joke in that way. He makes another joke and says that they're going through the streets in celebration of Caesar. To. This cobbler says to wear out people's shoes. Like, he wants to get more work, so he wants everybody to go out and parade to make more work. And then he says, you know, but seriously, we're were on holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph. Which is just a wonderful, funny combination of sort of truth and humor in that these holidays, they generate revenue.
You know, the regular people love holidays like this because they're Good for business. Right. One of the many reasons why maybe Caesar is so popular, but. Yeah. And then immediately Marullus says, you know, you blocks, you, stones, you worse than senseless things, and starts rebuking them because they're so dumb. But they seem to know, you know, that kind of joking. And then the idea that the holiday is good for business and he's just leading people out to wear out their shoes shows a level of sophistication which nobody in the play seems to give credit to the plebs for.
31:07 Wes: Yeah, right. He makes a joke, he's gonna cobble them. He's gonna recover them in the way that he recovers old shoes. He's gonna fix them, so. Cause presumably they're worn out in the. In some sense, the Republic is worn out. But I do think, though, I think that no one really gets an unambiguous representation in this play. And that includes the plebeians.
31:31 Erin: That's right.
31:32 Wes: I think there is something sinister. Right. So they're celebrating. There's a kind of manic quality to what they're doing. And I think part of the mechanism of tyranny is, in a way, they project that sort of grandiose element into a leader, and that's what they kind of want. They want an authoritarian. They want a strong man. And that seems to be consistent with several other scenes in the play. There's kind of a. They even say it, right, When Mark Antony persuades everyone, let's make Mark Antony king. Right. Do you remember that from the crowd?
32:09 Wes: There's an immediate reaching for,
32:16 Erin: sorry, is he single?
32:18 Wes: You right now, dressed as an ancient Roman commoner, yelling from the crowd. This urge to vest all authority in a figure with whom you can identify with a strong leader. I think that's part of this. So they're joking around, but the manic quality of that reflects their. And their urge to have a holiday and their urge to celebrate. It's more than, oh, we've had a hard day at work and now let's let go. Which I think is what one of them implies at one point. It's not just about, we work hard and now we need to let go. It's also, let's eject our. You know, we're working class and we're not going to. Obviously, none of us is going to be king, but let's enjoy that vicariously. Let's enjoy our own ambition vicariously through another. Let's have that feeling of triumph.
33:15 Erin: I like that characterization because I think it aligns with the dressing up the statue, you know, there's a manic quality to that.
33:23 Erin: We're gonna take these statues and dress them even more as if it were the real guy. And then the desire of Flavius and Marullus to disrobe the image is, you know, revealing that Caesar has no clothes taking off.
33:40 Wes: Well, also, Flavius compares them to feathers. Right. So Caesar is going to soar unless they can pluck those feathers. So the adornments off the statues.
33:51 Erin: That's right. I spent some time with that metaphor because I wasn't sure if the feathers were his supporters or the robes. There's ceremonies, I think there's scarves. They're called a couple different things, but I think scarves, okay. The note tells me so I wasn't sure. But it's interesting either way because if the feathers are his supporters, the people, then that metaphor doesn't really work. And if they're the scarves, which are lentils, why? Well, because they're.
34:25 Wes: Why doesn't it work?
34:26 Erin: Because the people are part of him. They're part of his body. So the idea that he's so remote and making himself so far above people, really, he's like a. He's like a huge plane full of people. He's taking them with him in a way, or they're part of him. Scarves, it's a little bit different, but it's. But still the scarves are bestowed upon him by the people. I mean, there is this question throughout of where Caesar gets his authority from, but they seem to be confirming that he's getting some kind of authority from the people, even as they are in this metaphor, implying that he's soaring high above the people.
35:01 Wes: And yeah, Cassius makes the point that Caesar gets his power from Romans being servile and Romans being sheep. So it's not in his. It's not something that's just a property of him. Right. It's purely circumstantial or it's socially constructed or role oriented. Right. There's going to be a lot of that in this. Right. The trappings, the same sort of thing as in King Lear. These roles that they have don't reflect their own essences. They're constructed out of human relationships and so on. In particular, what Cassius wants to say is that there's nothing great about Caesar.
He just looks great because people behave in a servile, worshipful way towards him. So their worship is the thing that makes him sore. And so the images, the robes on the statues reflect that. Right. It's about the imagination. They call the statues images. It's about creating this imaginary fantasy and then behaving as if it were true. And that's where any type of authority, of course, comes from. It's like an implicit compact. If people weren't habituated to saying yes to the person in authority, if they just said no, then the authority would.
Would cease to exist. So Cassius is right about that. And there's a kind of magic to it. It almost feels magical. In the next scene, we're going to get basically, Caesar's wish being his command, right? It feels almost like magic. Caesar says it, it's done. I forget how Mark Antony puts that exactly. Or Casca. Caesar speaks, right? And then the music immediately ceases. And then he calls the soothsayer a dreamer. But in a way, he's a dreamer, right? It's in dreams that our wishes, that the landscape is just immediately shaped by one's will or one's wish.
To be. To have that much power is almost to be in a dreamlike situation. And then, of course, the paranoia naturally sets in.
37:07 Erin: The environment is responsive to Caesar in the same way that it's responsive when Macbeth murders Duncan, if we want to interpret it that way. But here we are given an interpretation for the omens and the portents that are. That are going to follow, but we're given it beforehand. So Marullus says, when he rebukes the plebs, run to your houses, fall upon your knees, pray to the gods to intermit the plague that needs must light on this ingratitude. Just wanted to point that out because before anything actually happens, Marullus calls in a plague, basically, and says, you know, you're going to be punished for being so inconstant in your celebration of Caesar, of switching your allegiance so quickly from Pompey to Caesar.
So we're given a proleptic interpretation of what's about to happen. But insofar as Caesar's dreams can enter reality, shall we say, it does seem that he has an effect. Or his. His impending murder does have a real world effect, in the same way that the environment responds at the death of Duncan in Macbeth. And they're similar, actually descriptions to the omens in Caesar and the responsive nature in Macbeth to Duncan's death.
38:27 Wes: Yeah. So as I've said, right, Caesar speaks and then the music stops. And then he does that thing with Calpurnia, stand in Antonius' way so he can get you pregnant by touching you
38:41 Erin: as he runs, by telling you, Antony is the man, he's the man.
38:46 Wes: He just has to look at you and you might get pregnant. But yeah. And then, Antony, when Caesar says do this, it is performed. This, I think, must be the source of all the kind of way Caesar's represented in the popular imagination for centuries to come. And various films, right. Caesar says it, and then it's immediately performed. I think this is the source of that idea of what Caesar was. And of course, it's not even. In many cases, Caesar never was emperor, but it's the characterizing the later Caesars, later emperors, as having that kind of quality to them. There is, by the way, the film, the 1953 film, which is great. I'm like. There's these statues of, like, Marcus Aurelius and what's Hadrian? And I'm just like, oh, my God.
39:46 Erin: Those are not, you know, most.
39:49 Wes: Historically, it's like putting a statue of Barack Obama in a. You know, In the Civil. Lincoln's office in a Civil War movie. But, yeah.
40:07 Erin: Well, otherwise, what's Lincoln's motivation? He has nothing to do.
40:13 Wes: So it's a great start to the characterization of Caesar. Although he doesn't come across as the. He does come across as kind of feeble, I think, in the way that. No offense to the monarchist here, but in the way that Cassius suggests. And the first mistake, of course, he makes is to. He gets the soothsayer in this great iconic line, beware the Ides of March. And then he asks, what man is that? And Brutus answers the wrong question. Well, he says, a soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March. He doesn't say, oh, yeah, it's this guy over here.
It's a soothsayer guy who. He repeats the line as if Caesar can't hear, and then Caesar wants to see him. As if. I think maybe the idea is the guy won't have the courage to say it to his face. And the soothsayer says it again to his face. And then. I just love this line. He is a dreamer. Let us leave him pass. Because, of course, as I've said, in a way, Caesar is the dreamer in the sense that he is the one for whom wishes immediately become realities.
41:17 Erin: I don't know if I should throw this at you, but I. Anticipating that you would not like my.
41:21 Wes: Just. Just hand it. Hand it to me.
41:28 Erin: Anticipating that you would not like my love of Caesar, I brought a friend to help me make the case that Caesar is.
41:39 Wes: Oh, is it Harold? Harold Bloom?
41:41 Erin: Of course it is.
41:42 Wes: I thought you were gonna hold up. Plutarch's. Lives.
41:43 Erin: Yeah, I could have brought that.
41:47 Wes: Which of course is his source material. I love to imagine Shakespeare reading the Life of Brutus, the Life of Caesar, the Life of. Who's the third guy? Mark Antony and just getting a play out of it, but go ahead.
42:02 Erin: He says that Shakespeare is showing a Caesar in decline and he has a plausible mixture of grandeurs and weaknesses. Basically this is just a love letter. Bloom's whole reading of Julius Caesar is a love letter to Caesar. And he says Caesar's greatness is not in question, whatever his decline and however one reacts to his, his royal ambitions. Caesar is the grandest figure Shakespeare will ever represent. Person of most historical importance. Though sometimes silly, even fatuous, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is an immensely sympathetic character, benign yet dangerous.
He is of course self centered and always conscious of being Caesar, perhaps even sensing his deification in advance. And though he can be very blind, his estimate of Cassius shows him to be the best analyst of another human being in all of Shakespeare. Caesar is accurate and Antony is not about Cassius. He has this. The same speech indicates one of several gathering infirmities, deafness and the increasing tendency for Caesar to regard himself in the third person. But basically I was fascinated to reread that because he reads Brutus's dislike of Caesar as envy and also as an Oedipal conflict.
But, and says like, you know, the Oedipal conflict in Hamlet is nothing compared to the Oedipal conflict between Brutus and Caesar. It's like okay, Harold Bloom, but he sort of casts aside all of Caesar's infirmities and believes that he is this great character which I don't fully see on the page. Caesar's not listening to the warning. His vanity, his fatuousness, all of that is dismissed by Harold Bloom. And Harold Bloom is just like, oh, he's still amazing. He's still the greatest.
43:45 Wes: Yeah, I kind of think Harold Bloom is like the Caesar of Shakespeare.
43:48 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Like of course he's going to love Caesar. Harold Bloom is Caesar.
43:54 Wes: Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't think Caesar is really well characterized in the play. He's kind of got a bit part.
44:04 Erin: Oh, I know it was in relation to you saying that he's. His characterization as including the tendency to speak of himself as a third person, which Bloom points to. But what you had pointed to here, do this, it is performed, you know, the grandeur of his own self conception.
44:24 Wes: Well also his idea that he's fearless, which will come across here.
44:28 Erin: Right, right.
44:29 Wes: Because he's gonna say Cassius is dangerous, but Somehow he can detect danger without feeling fearful. This becomes a very important idea that's repeated in the play. And it's very much parallel to Brutus's idea that he's honorable. These, in a way, are supposed to form the immovable substance of these characters and ground a certain kind of autocratic attitude that they both share as you point their mirrors at each other. In a way. Yeah. I honestly don't think that Caesar is well characterized. And I don't. Not well characterized. Like he didn't do a good job. But I just don't think we get that much of Caesar's character. We see him worried about what's going down.
45:11 Erin: I don't think you can show that much of Caesar and have the play work. It's important that he's not seen too much or else too much might be revealed of him. And we can get a firmer grasp on what he's really like and then have too much sympathy for one side or the other, maybe. I mean, the whole play is obsessed with him constantly. You know, he. He. What's the expression? He lives rent free in everybody's head, you know, long after he's dead. So I think that shows enough or says more about him than his own person does. And I think that's. That's important too, is that he has to be more than his own person. He's more than just this guy with lines. He's an idea. He's a. He's Brutus's evil spirit, you know, which. Which sort of implies that he's like an extension of Brutus in a way or. Yeah. Brutus's mirror.
46:00 Wes: Brutus is his angel, as Marc Antony said.
46:03 Wes: The play should have been called Brutus, of course. No, it's just, you know, he needed two words for the. For the title. What are you gonna. You gonna call it, Marcus? Brutus doesn't work. Brutus. Caesar. Brutus Caesar.
46:21 Erin: Brutus Caesar.
46:22 Wes: Right. Of course. It's. Yeah. Brutus is the protagonist of the play and a tragic protagonist with Cassius as his Iago and Caesar's just Desdemona.
46:39 Erin: That's really good.
46:40 Wes: Except that Brutus doesn't get all jealous. He's, you know. Well, as you said, more robotic. Robotic about it.
46:48 Wes: He gets worried. Brutus is. I see him as he is, you know, I see what you're saying about him because he's so. There's the melancholic aspect and then there's him being in his head. He's kind of in his own thoughts all the Time. He's remote, and that's really important.
47:03 Erin: He doesn't sing songs or play games like Antony.
47:06 Wes: That's right. Wait, is that. No, he says that about Cassius.
47:11 Erin: No, no, no. I do lack some things.
47:14 Wes: Caesar says that about Brutus.
47:15 Erin: No, no, Antony. Brutus says that about Antony. Brutus doesn't know how to have fun. He doesn't have that quick spirit. He says that Antony has. He doesn't even watch the race. Antony's out there having fun.
47:27 Wes: Well, Brutus says, I'm not, like, I'm not into sports, right? So I. So I'm not gonna go see the race. But I think Caesar says to. To Marc Antony about Cassius that, you know, he doesn't go see plays, right?
47:41 Wes: Am I just getting that wrong? Yeah, yeah.
47:43 Erin: But that. That's. That's a slightly different thing.
47:45 Wes: He's too thin, and he's not into partying and having fun like you, Marc Antony.
47:51 Erin: That's right.
47:52 Wes: Yeah. I told you. These are just the nerds. It's Revenge of the Nerds. All right, so we. Unfortunately, we have to stop part one there. I don't know how many recordings we're gonna do of this, but we're gonna do at least two. I think things will speed up. It's kind of like Jaws, right? Once they set out for the shark, it's. It's not so, you know, once we get into all the military stuff, the play is kind of over already. But I think the play actually starts to struggle at that point. [email protected] Otherwise, you can wait a week. Thank you.
48:33 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook, subtextpodcast, and on Twitter enjoysubtext.
