Allowing Antony to live is one of Brutus's most momentous political miscalculations, as subsequent events make clear, and his insistence that the assassination can somehow be a sacred act, when it is in fact a plain political murder, is typical of the disjunction between his stoic idealism and the reality that constantly agitates him, both externally and internally.
Plutarch reports the quarrel [], but Shakespeare's interpretation of it is entirely his own. Like his original, Shakespeare's Cassius is "choleric" and "hot stirring" Plutarch , , as Brutus is well aware. When Brutus immediately counters Cassius's objection that Brutus has treated him dishonorably with an accusation that Cassius is dishonest TLN , Brutus therefore speaks either out of obtuse self-righteousness or with the design to make Cassius even angrier—or perhaps both.
Beside himself with rage and frustration, Cassius draws his dagger and demands that Brutus use it against him, urging that Brutus might as well kill him in fact, since he is already killing him with his words. Brutus replies by ordering Cassius to calm down and then reiterating the difference between them, as he sees it:.
Be angry when you will, it shall have scope; Do what you will, dishonor shall be humor. Portia is dead" TLN Brutus has to know that this information, conveyed in this way, will make Cassius completely submissive out of concern for him, as in fact it does, and Brutus presses his advantage by urging that Cassius "Speak no more of her" TLN Having drawn Cassius in with the announcement of Portia's death, Brutus immediately shuts him out again by ordering him not to talk about it any more.
Both comments maintain Brutus's dominance and keep Cassius off balance. For comments on the apparent textual crux produced by Brutus's seeming ignorance of Portia's death, see the Textual Introduction. When Messala reports it, Brutus responds with perfect stoic rectitude TLN , thereby eliciting astonished admiration for his godlike endurance from both Messala and Cassius TLN This is surely the very reaction Brutus had counted on, as Geoffrey Miles suggests in his analysis of Brutus's stoic constancy as "a genuinely noble ideal which nevertheless rests on unnatural suppression of feeling and on 'artful' presence, both directed toward satisfying the opinions of others" Lucius is the only person who consistently defers to Brutus, and he therefore seems to call forth feelings of solicitude in Brutus that Brutus shows to no one else, even his wife, who challenges him to be more candid with her TLN ff.
Yet as a stoic idealist, Brutus believes he should give way to no feeling, as the stoic and ex-slave, Epictetus, recommends:. If you are fond of a jug, say "I am fond of a jug! If you kiss your child or your wife, say that you are kissing a human being; for when it dies you will not be upset. When they are encamped near Sardis, Brutus shows his ambivalence in a brief scene of extraordinary imaginative insight on Shakespeare's part.
Brutus again demands the boy's attention late at night, insisting that Lucius play his lute while Brutus reads. Yet noticing Lucius's tiredness, Brutus is irresistibly drawn to care for him: "What?
Thou speak'st drowsily. When Lucius falls asleep while trying to play, Brutus tenderly removes the lute, so Lucius will not accidentally damage it TLN When Brutus finds a book he had been looking for in the pocket of his gown, Lucius's response makes clear that Brutus had blamed him for the book's disappearance: "I was sure your lordship did not give it me" TLN When Brutus calls out, after the ghost's departure, Lucius suddenly wakes, and assuming that Brutus had scolded him, he blames his lute: "The strings, my lord, are false" TLN Lucius would not instinctively defend himself if he were not in the habit of needing to, and Brutus seems to treat him with alternate tenderness and severity in order to correct the former in himself with the latter.
Caesar and Brutus are the principal rivals in Julius Caesar , though by no means the only ones, and Shakespeare's incisive characterization of these two as alter egos in their stoic ambition and vulnerability is a comment on their aristocratic emulation, which motivates all the main characters in Julius Caesar.
Shakespeare encountered this kind of contest in Plutarch, who tells the famous story of the young Alexander's controlling an unmanageable horse as an instance of Alexander's fierce rivalry with his father, Philip, because Philip had declared the animal to be unbreakable.
In other words, Alexander was determined to conquer something his father could not. Plutarch repeats this motif in his story of the young Caesar, who wept in frustration when he read of Alexander's deeds, because Alexander had conquered so much more than Caesar had at the same age Plutarch The parallel episodes point to a similar conception of upper-class male rivalry in both Greece and Rome.
The difference, Gordon Braden argues, is that when Rome's territorial ambition produced ever-diminishing returns, the patrician warrior was compelled to turn inward for something to conquer, as Plutarch wrote of Caesar, whose desire for "glory" made him discontented with what he had achieved: "This humour of his was no other but an emulation with himself as with another man" This distinctively Roman development helps to account for the widespread ideal of stoic perfectionism in Roman culture.
The stoic sage, Braden concludes, "is so far ahead in the competition that he can never be caught" Shakespeare seems to have drawn the same conclusion about stoicism from his reading and conceivably from what he knew of competition at the Elizabethan court, where neo-stoicism was the height of fashion in the s.
Long before he read Plutarch's Lives , Shakespeare had explored in an early comedy, Love's Labor's Lost , the way noblemen compete and deceive themselves. In this play, four aristocratic young men take an ascetic vow to live in stoic self-denial for a year, only to find themselves incapable of keeping their promise.
Shakespeare refers this failure not to classical sources but to the Bible. He is alluding to Matthew 7. Or how sayest thou to thy brother, Suffer me to cast out the mote out of thine eye, and behold a beam is in thine owne eye? Hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. Geneva translation. The Christian idea that Berowne alludes to had been influential in centuries of Christian drama before Shakespeare, especially the morality play, which used personified abstraction to imagine the self as divided against itself the soul and its five "wits," for example in the process of temptation.
Self-deception depends on self-division, which morality plays dramatized as an external reality by staging various parts of the self as different "characters. His extraordinary rhetorical facility immeasurably enriched what he read in Plutarch and North. Though Plutarch mentions that the speeches were stylistically distinct, he records neither one, so they are entirely original with Shakespeare.
Brutus "counterfeited that brief compendious manner of speech of the Lacedaemonians" Plutarch , whereas Antony "used a manner of phrase in his speech, called Asiatic, which carried the best grace and estimation at that time, and was much like to his manners and life: for it was full of ostentation, foolish bravery, and vain ambition" These are small hints on which to base two such memorable and brilliantly contrasting passages, conforming to the laconic and Asiatic styles respectively, as Plutarch reports.
It is possible, as Geoffrey Bullough notes 5. For other critics of the play's imagery, see the separate "Survey of Critical Responses. Consider, for example, a series of deliberate rhetorical images in Cassius's attempt to persuade Casca to join the conspiracy:.
Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf, But that he sees the Romans are but sheep; He were no lion, were not Romans hinds. Those that with haste will make a mighty fire Begin it with weak straws. What trash is Rome, What rubbish and what offal, when it serves For the base matter to illuminate So vile a thing as Caesar! The first image may derive from a proverb, "He that makes himself a sheep shall be eaten by the wolf" Dent S , but Shakespeare changes the emphasis to have Cassius say that Caesar is a wolf only because the Romans are sheep.
By the same token, Caesar is a mighty fire only because the Romans allow themselves to be combustible weak straws, trash, rubbish, offal, and base matter. Unlike Cassius, however, Antony is not trying to persuade his companion, Octavius, to anything in this speech; Antony is sorting out the power relations between the triumvirs who have assigned themselves to punish Caesar's assassins.
In the process of deciding who should be put to death, Octavius immediately asserts his dominance by proscribing Leipdus's brother and ordering Antony to add the brother's name to the list. Lepidus asserts himself so far as to insist that Antony's brother, Publius, also be proscribed, but Lepidus tacitly reinforces Octavius's dominance by offering an affront to Antony instead of Octavius.
Though Antony acquiesces in his brother's proscription, he establishes his dominance over Lepidus by ordering him to fetch Caesar's will, and when Lepidus meekly departs in compliance, Antony launches into two insulting animal similes against Lepidus. While Antony's bravado establishes his dominance over Lepidus, it does nothing to enhance Antony's status with Octavius, to whom Antony tacitly defers, despite his bravado, which includes a vain assertion of his seniority in years TLN Antony fails to see the irony that he establishes his status with Octavius only by making Lepidus out to be a pack animal.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith, But hollow men, like horses hot at hand, Make gallant show and promise of their mettle; But when they should endure the bloody spur, They fall their crests, and like deceitful jades Sink in the trial. Brutus's image implies that he is the rider, and Cassius is the kind of horse who shows a great deal of spirit before a competition, only to fade when his rider needs him most.
Brutus is not idly comparing Cassius to a horse; Brutus is venting rage that he believes, in keeping with stoic assumptions, he should not feel, and the bitterness of his simile helps to clarify the strain he is under.
His effort to portray Cassius as an animal and himself as a superior human being actually reveals his vexed passions in a way he does not suspect. This language is particularly striking on the night before the assassination of Caesar, when Casca meets Cicero and Cassius in succession 1. Though Cicero was an ambivalent stoic sometimes even identified as anti-stoic , he was one of ancient Rome's most influential purveyors of stoicism, while Cassius is a self-proclaimed Epicurean TLN , and each speaks in this scene consistently with his philosophical profession, yet the scene is about more than philosophy.
Though both Cicero and Cassius respond without concern to the fearsome storm on the eve of Caesar's assassination, the play does not make clear that their dismissive interpretation of the weather is definitive or even coherent. Moreover, the ambiguity of language throughout the scene suggests an interpenetration of inner and outer reality that makes the boundary between them impossible to discern.
The winds are so "scolding," the ocean so "ambitious," the clouds so "threat'ning" that the gods must be at odds with one another or inclined to destroy the world because it is "too saucy" TLN Cicero's sardonic reply indicates how little the storm affects him and how little he regards Casca for submitting to his fears: "Why, saw you anything more wonderful? Reacting strenuously to Cicero's implicit skepticism, Casca cites more amazing wonders he has seen, some of them taken by Shakespeare from Plutarch, who confirms Casca's view of them: "destiny may easier be foreseen, than avoided, considering the strange and wonderful signs that were said to be seen before Caesar's death" Casca concludes with an emphatic statement of his and Plutarch's point:.
But then, as if changing the subject, Cicero in fact introduces the very subject whose presence has been heavy by its absence from Casca's fearful assertions: "Comes Caesar to the Capitol tomorrow? OK, fine, but what is it exactly that makes the play a "tragedy"? Well, there are some basic rules and conventions that govern the genre of Shakespearean tragedy, so take a look at our list below:. We know what you're thinking — since Julius Caesar portrays major events from Roman history, why don't we categorize it in the genre of Shakespearean "history play"?
Well, here's how most scholars define the Shakespearean history play: a drama portraying English historical events history according to Shakespeare, we should point out that resonate with current political issues, including matters of kingship, constitution, and rebellion.
So Julius Caesar meets the second criterion it portrays historical events that resonate with 16th-century English political concerns, like the question of how a country should be governed , but it's still a play about Roman history. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By William Shakespeare.
In many ways, Brutus is the ultimate patriot; he places his country above all else, even his deep love of Caesar. But in failing to question the motives of others and assuming everyone is as virtuous and selfless as he is, Brutus makes fatal errors. He lets Cassius manipulate him into killing Caesar without determining if Caesar is actually as ambitious as Cassius claims. After realizing his mistakes, Brutus commits suicide.
Writers over the centuries have been divided over whether the assassination of Caesar represented an idealistic assertion of Republican ideals or the blackest act of betrayal and treason. For example, one of the conventions of tragedy is that the hero is tempted into committing a dark or forbidden act, a mistake with terrible and irrevocable consequences.
While Shakespeare does not portray Caesar as an admirable character, the fact that the story is told in the form of the tragedy makes us see the killing as a nightmarish and terrible act.
Cassius pushes Brutus down this path, and Cassius is consistently portrayed as dishonest, vindictive, and manipulative—and he specifically misleads and manipulates Brutus. A ruse amongst several men has been devised; they tell they need his review of an important petition within which one brother pleads for lenience on behalf of his banished brother.
Caesar does not favor the petition, as is to be expected, but finds himself surrounded by a group of conspirators that stab him, one by one. As the group murder reaches the final men, Caesar sees that even his old friend Brutus has betrayed him. He utters the famous line "Et tu, Brute? Though the group of conspirators maintains that Caesar's assassination was for the best of the entire Roman community, the powerful Mark Antony quickly steps up and vilifies the assassins.
His speech over Caesar's dead body brings the common people to tears and mourning, and persuades them to form into a mob that drives the conspirators from Rome. As Brutus and Cassius quarrel over the new misfortune that has befallen them after their regicide, they discover that their intentions truly did align and agree that they did mean to kill Caesar to promote justice within Rome.
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