As a writer, there are basically two resources I always want to pull from: Hitchcock and Shakespeare. The former, in my view, forged the language of modern thriller cinema, and I spent all of last semester deconstructing his work under the masterful tutelage of Dr. Drew Casper. Suffice to say, I feel pretty good about my Hitchcock expertise. You want to know about “Psycho”? I’ll tell you about “Psycho.” And don’t even get me started on “Notorious,” “Rear Window,” “The Man Who Knew Too Much (the later remake),” and so forth.
And yet, Shakespeare is painfully absent from my knowledge base. I’m only strong on “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” and “Romeo and Juliet,” and that last one barely counts. More than that, though, I’ve never really understood the depths of what his work means. When it comes to Hitchcock, I can tell you all about his obsessions: cosmic indifference, doppelganger, the dark night of the soul, and moral cynicism. Shakespeare is a different story. I can feel that this guy’s work matters, but I want more than that. I want to personally connect to the themes. I want to know this stuff.
So, I’m going to read Shakespeare’s plays. As many of them as I can, that I haven’t read before. I’ll watch a performance of them, as well, if I can. And I thought you’d appreciate coming along for the ride. So let’s begin!
First up is…
Julius Caesar.
Summary: “Julius Caesar” is the story of Caesar’s assassination and the political and military fallout resulting from it. Its principals are Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Mark Antony, and Octavian.
-Overall, I adored this thing. It flew by. The first three acts are like a great Hitchcockian thriller, wrapped up by a tragic war film. Also, do you realize how many timeless lines come from this thing? “Et tu, Brute?” “Friends, Romans, Countrymen!” “Beware the ides of March,” “The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves,” “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” And in case you doubt that last one, I just heard Eminem quote it in “Cold Wind Blows,” off of his most recent album. For any one work of fiction to achieve that much recognition hundreds of years later is a miracle. Only Shakespeare could pull this kind of thing off.
-Curiously for a play called “Julius Caesar,” Julius Caesar is not the protagonist. Some debate this, but in my opinion there can be no question about it. Caesar is only in a handful of scenes, and he’s offed in the third act (note: Shakespeare works on the five act structure). The guy who gets more stage time—and the one with the real conflict—is Brutus, Caesar’s most famous assassin.
Brutus is a great character, one that strikes me almost immediately. The basics of his conflict are heart-rending: the love of his friend comes directly at odds with his patriotism and belief in republic. Brutus has gotten, shall we say, a poor shake from the annals of history; Dante consigned him to the lowest possible level of Hell in the “Inferno,” and placed him—I kid you not— inside Satan’s mouth. More on that later.
-A key theme here is the distinction between the same act perpetrated for different reasons. Cassius, who sort of represents the rest of the conspirators, is a jealous douche bag, and his motives for the assassination are suspect as hell. When pressed by Brutus early in the play, Cassius launches off on some song and dance about how he saved Caesar’s life once, and that proves he isn’t so tough, and blah blah blah. Brutus dumb-foundedly ignores him, almost blown away by the ridiculousness of what he’s saying. Shakespeare is making a deft point here: Brutus and Cassius both killed Caesar, but only one of them murdered him.
-And then there’s Mark Antony, who could not receive a worse treatment. He’s depicted (I think) as sniveling, manipulative, and almost cowardly. When Caesar is first killed, Antony is supplicant to the assassins to the point of discomfort; you can almost hear Brutus furrowing his brow and saying, “No, seriously, we’re cool.” Then, quite conveniently, when Brutus leaves him to handle an angry mob, Antony spins on his heels and drops the famous “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech, rallying the people to avenge Caesar’s memory. Antony would have you believe the sight of Caesar’s body just overwhelmed him and he couldn’t help himself. I say he’s full of crap, and he was planning a reversal all along.
His monologue, I feel, is wrongly commemorated as a great moment of stirring oration. It’s great writing, no doubt, but there’s nothing classically noble about it. As I read the thing, I wretched back in disgust, especially when contrasted with Brutus’ speech to the mob that preceded it. Brutus appealed with reason, and asked the people to digest an uncomfortable, unpleasant truth that was necessary for the betterment of all (I’m paraphrasing and colloquial-izing here):
“He was a great man, and no one loved him more than I, but we can’t let anyone rob us of our freedom. Sometimes our personal feelings must come second.”
Antony screams rhetoric, pressing nostalgia wrapped in guilt-tripping nonsense:
“Caesar…remember how nice he was? Remember that time he was a cool dude? He always thanked the janitor for doing a nice job. One time he rescued a puppy from a burning building. It seriously happened. Now he’s dead. He’s DEAD, damn it!”
It’s a moment of utter falsehood, a callow brigand’s clever little self-serving ploy. There’s more Richard III than Henry V in Mark Antony, I think.
But more than anything else we’ve considered here, I think there’s one lingering issue in this work…
-How does Shakespeare, the man, really feel about Caesar’s assassination? It’s hard for us to appreciate this now, but Caesar’s death was a sore subject, especially in Italy, for hundreds of years. Dante saw it as the act that permanently destabilized Italy’s government, and led to decade after decade of infighting and eventually the decline of the Roman empire. I would argue that these things happened in spite of Brutus’ attempt to stop them, but I digress.
I think Shakespeare found himself in league with Brutus. That he is portrayed as noble and self-sacrificing is inarguable, so at least the Bard was sympathetic to his protagonist’s dilemma. True, the play is vague in addressing how sound his reasoning was in killing his friend, and you could argue Brutus made an irretrievably rash decision. If you treat him as a guy who got tricked by jealous schemers—an Othello of sorts—then the assassination was a horrid blunder made for the right reasons. That is certainly dramatically satisfying enough.
But I don’t agree with this interpretation. I think Shakespeare saw Caesar’s death as a necessary evil, and in writing “Julius Caesar,” he sought to examine the terrible weight that statesmen take on themselves when they dive in front of harm’s way to protect their people. In striking down his best friend, Brutus attempted to safeguard the Roman people from tyranny. He failed, and this is why Octavian exists in the play: to remind us that Caesars are like weeds. Nonetheless, I think it’s nonsense to suggest that Brutus’ fears were incorrect, or that his decision was rash. He killed Julius because he was afraid the man wanted to rule Rome, and he was right.
Unfortunately, and this may be the crux of the play, being right can’t always save you.
RATING: 10 out of 10
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