Dangerous Thoughts: The First Act of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

“[I]f Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.”

As a dramatic account of the origins and limits of political authority, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) guides us to think of a way to live freely even under the threat of tyranny.[1] Yet, the central problem examined by the Bard’s play is “Caesar,” rather than tyranny.  Contrary to his detractors’ claims, Caesar is not a tyrant, but the supreme representative of his people.  Caesar is the people’s most formidable response to tyranny.  That this response is ultimately inadequate, or that the aristocracy will inevitably find it unacceptable, is what makes for the difficulty of thinking through the problem of Caesarism.

The problem of Caesarism is coeval with the problem of political authority, which involves by necessity the One, the Many and the Few.  The third party is what makes it challenging to think through the One and the Many.  To flesh out the meaning of our three coordinates, we could say that the aristocracy is at once the reconciler and the divider of a King and his People at large, Plebeians, or “countrymen” (1.1.57): it is the Few “noblemen” who make it possible for the King to rise to his seat of authority and for the Many to see themselves in the King; yet, at the same time, the Few are the ones who question and ultimately undermine the authority of the King.  Kings are toppled by the few “giants” in spirit who, being aware that no King is their superior by nature, cannot suffer being treated as mere mortals vis-à-vis a King raised de facto to heavenly heights.  Thus, the Few bring both stability and instability to a polity: they support the unity reassuring the People and they undermine that unity by not trusting or believing in it, as Plebeians do.  In the eyes of the Few, the One is at once necessary and expendable: necessary to avoid anarchy (the worst of tyrannies) and expendable insofar as the Few do not take their bearings from the One, as the Many do.  The Few know themselves as natural equals to the One they perceive as but one of the few, even as he serves as paradigmatic form in which the Few govern the Many.  The One emerges as the divine perfection of the heroism of the Few, suggesting overlap between monotheistic and polytheistic discourse.  So where is the problem? Why does the aristocracy not simply cherish its royal mask?  The answer lies in the power of compulsion, or of popular passions.  When given free reign, our common passions become self-destructive, projecting themselves—on Icarus’s wings—into a “solar” unity imagined to satisfy every urge and provide for unqualified safety without need for any mediation, especially that of “noble spirits,” the Few who, thereupon, discern the One as eminent threat to their integrity and indeed as the mightiest incarnation of the threat of tyranny.

The problem of tyranny emerges in the wake of the total eclipse of the Few.  Caesarism per se does not entail it, even though Caesar’s rule alone does not suffice to avert the rise of tyranny.  The antidote to tyranny is not found in Caesar alone, but in Caesar’s story penned by poets enlightened to the nature of political authority.  The Bard’s response to the threat of tyranny is his own work.  Our own challenge as readers is to partake in the poet’s response, reflecting on the heart of political life, on the reality of the human condition in a broad context including both human and divine things as irreducible poles of life.  Shakespeare’s realism reduces neither pole to the other, without inviting a progressive or Machiavellian-like “synthesis” of divinity and humanity.  The failure of the aristocracy to resolve the problem of tyranny does not lead the poet to seek a new solution by lowering the bar for heroism, making it possible to establish a nation in which virtually all of its citizens are equally heroic.[2]

In Act. 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Caesar ignores the oracle warning him of imminent danger and proceeds to preside over the Ides of March/Mars, a March 15 celebration of imperial glory.  Yet, from Marullus, Shakespeare’s tribune, we have already learned that at present people are celebrating “the Feast of Lupercal” (1.68), in honor of Rome’s foundation.  The Lupercal (etymologically referring to the mythical “defensive she-wolf” or luperca who suckled Romulus and Remus, children of Mars, the god of war) preceded the Ides of Mars by one whole month, evoking Rome’s “synthesis” of two elements, the Etruscan and the Alban, respectively representing the sacred and the profane (not entirely coincidentally, the profane/vulgar sense of “she-wolf” in Latin was “prostitute”).  Both the Etruscan and the Alban-Latin element—the latter mythically retraced to Troy, via Aeneas (2.112)—would be subjugated by and integrated into Rome, making up for the strength (ῥώμη) and vitality (in Phoenician-stemmed Etruscan, ruma is “breast”) of the new city/nation.  In all but fusing the Lupercalia and the Ides of March together, Shakespeare is binding the problem of the foundation of empire to that of empire’s glory.

The Ides of March, to which Caesar and the reader are alerted by Shakespeare’s oracle, are the Roman Idus Martii (“the [mid-month] day of Mars”) over which presides Anna Perenna, the goddess of “the perennial year”.  Plutarch himself had reported that, on that day, emperor Caesar had been assassinated.  What is noteworthy about the Ides of March is that they mark a transition from the old world to the new one (even as the day following the Ides was typically viewed as unpropitious, or nefas): the old must die so that the new may live.  Life is cyclical and political life is no exception.  Accordingly, in Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar must die so that a new Caesar may take his place—unless Caesar had the decency of listening to oracles, or premonitory dreams, signs of what is beyond or beneath the political surface of life.  But alas he doesn’t.  Why, as Pontifex Maximus or “Pope,” Julius Caesar bridges the human and the divine, no longer needing to heed oracles.  Yet, the statesman who does not take divine transcendence seriously is fated to participate in a cyclical ritual, playing the role of the party that must be sacrificed for the common good, even as a new Caesar will be reborn at once from the ashes of the old.

No sooner is Caesar murdered than the logic of murder engulfs the whole political scene, leading to the suicide of Marcus Brutus and Cassius.  And as Mark Anthony, leader of the “restoration,” evokes Brutus as “the noblest Roman of them all” (5.5.68), Shakespeare leaves us with the supreme suggestion that political order demands the ultimate sacrifice of its best (optimi) defenders.  Those seeking to secure political order against all danger—those who give their lives to secure public safety, or to defend freedom—stand as scapegoats on the political landscape.

Is there a way out of “scapegoating in the name of freedom”?  Shakespeare suggests there is, insofar as his play invites reflection on a freedom open to oracles and dreams (including nightmares, most notably women’s) and so on a politics open to religious transcendence.  Had Caesar listened carefully to oracles, he could have avoided a tremendous bloodbath.  The same can justly be said of Brutus.  Self-sacrifice in the name of political freedom, or in the name of securing the political boundaries of freedom, is avoided where political freedom is secured within the boundaries of divine transcendence.

The deducible implication is that the only sane polity is one that sustains its problems open to a divine solution.  In other words, there is no sane political solution to political problems.  These problems entail by definition strife between opposing parties.  The winner will necessarily generate new opposition, most remarkably to the extent that he pretends to have vanquished all opposition.  The attempt to provide a political solution to political strife is forgetful of and distracting from real underlying problems.  Turning back to those problems, the good statesman will aim at remaining in civil opposition to competing parties, rather than ridding himself of them.  Only where conflict is civil or moderate, can it avoid yielding to “winners and losers” obscuring the nature of true success, this being supra-political, or theological.[3] Political life aimed at establishing its consummation empirically shuts itself to its theological foundations, thereby decaying into barbarism.  That is why “success” can never be gauged as a function of might: political triumph never coincides with right simpliciter.  Hence the importance of Shakespeare’s work.  For if genuine political success is defined by the political arena’s openness to a theological dimension, that openness is sustained by a certain kind of poetry, or the education it provides as the only way out of war.

Cassius’s first encounter with Brutus spells out the political problem justifying the assassination of Caesar: the man-turned-emperor is no worthier, indeed less worthy, than some of his subjects, including Cassius, who had previously saved Caesar from drowning (2.100-11).  And yet, Caesar is now proclaimed a god, which is to say, the highest politically-significant authority.  Caesar is himself high-priest and listens not to soothsayers’ “dreams”.  How is it possible that a man has been raised to the status of a god?  It is not merit, but chance that raised him to his present heights.  This observation alone should strike a chord in Brutus’s heart, for Brutus is vehement about loving virtue (true honor as opposed to “the name of honor”) more than he fears death (2.86, 89).  There would then seem to be no justification for Caesar being where he is.  And yet, as the play unfolds, we begin to see that while Caesar’s ascent relies on chance, more than chance is at stake; for a higher necessity, a higher good justifies Caesar, albeit not merely as emperor (holder of empire), but as self-sacrificing lamb, if not as outright scapegoat: Caesar both rises and falls in the interest of Rome as long as no alternative comes forth to open political authority to the divine,

As the play’s very opening intimates, there is nothing glamorous about Caesar, or about being a Caesar.  Indeed, even a commoner—albeit a philosophical one in disguise—can save Caesars from themselves, correcting their inebriating walk of life (1.7-15).  The stream of passion, even of exaltation characteristic of freedom’s apotheosis, is “mended” by an ironic discourse calling us back “home” in the midst of “great danger” (14-18, 24-25, 33).  But where is home if not in the streets, in the face of danger, where the “philosopher-cobbler” leads common men to show them the nature of souls (or “soles”) under the pretext of rejoicing in their triumph (22-33)?[4] Yet, that mender of souls, presents himself as mender of mere “soles” who is out to celebrate the new by forgetting the old.  The new is Julius Caesar who rises over the defeat and death of Pompey, once celebrated by the very men now celebrating his defeater and successor.

Marullus, a tribune, advises the cobbler and his followers to steer away from the public sphere and return to their “houses” to “pray to the gods to intermit the plague” (54-55). The tribune is in effect advising commoners to go back to their homes as “houses of gods,” or as true temples (gudhus, in Gothic, is “god-house”)—places where the earthly and the heavenly can be reconciled through gratitude (55-61, 63); for in gratitude, we cease replacing the old with the new in a perennial cycle of death, of defacing of masks pretentiously concealing the hiatus between the human and the divine (65-76).  Gratitude exposes masks to the otherworldly, instead of leading us to extol one mask after another “in servile fearfulness” (76).

Gratitude secures political openness to the theological by drawing us away from the compulsion to overcome the past.  Hence Shakespeare’s apparent conflation of the Lupercalia (February 15) and the Ides of March (March 15), the first celebrating purification (from the beastly), the second transition from old to new.  To beware of the Ides of March is to beware of the transition from old to new, insofar as the transition occurs in a cyclical context determining relapse into a stain begging for renewed purification.  Purification serves then as prelude to a new staining calling for a new purging.  No sooner is the old mask off than a new one emerges in the interest of political stability.  Caesar imagines the Ides of March as marking his own new triumph, without realizing that the triumph fates him to be “defaced” in the interests of empire’s preservation in openness to transcendence.  It is the people’s failure to awaken to politics’ openness to divine transcendence that drives them into the hands of a new Caesar, only to invite his own defacing, or his being devested of authority.  In this respect, supreme authorities are but the puppets of their nations, every political triumph being subjected to purgation, or defacing.  Hence Shakespeare’s conjoining the two Roman holidays, the Lupercalia and the Idus Martii, “the mid-month of Mars”.  In the midst of victory won through war stands purgation, not necessarily trapped in the cycle of politics, serving as means to open politics to divinity, or rather for us to return to the true nature of politics.  Shakespeare would then be asking us to understand political success, even the salvation of political order, in terms of openness to “the theological,” a dimension of reality that is commonly associated with dream, especially premonitory ones.

The second dialogue of the play is entertained between Cassius and Brutus, the first speaking right after Caesar’s rejection of the soothsayer as a “dreamer” to “pass” (2.24; does Caesar view divine transcendence as a thing of the past, an anachronism?  Does Caesar see himself as displacing old gods?).  The conversation is centered upon the problem of vision and invites the thought that Brutus stands for an ethics missing a metaphysical eye or interiority, while Cassius stands for metaphysics alienated from ethics.  In the course of the conversation, Brutus concludes that his interlocutor would lead him into the dangerous arena of interiority, of meaning, a realm that presumably only soothsayers should be concerned with (63-65).  Cassius is thereupon forced to shift from vision to common or “vulgar” hearsay as means to discover the meaning of our ordinary conduct and so of ethics (66).  For common speech need not be “dangerous” (78), given that it can be ironic (72, echoing the irony of the cobbler).  Common speech can show us truth without endangering our ordinary conduct, or undermining ethics, proving that ethics need not fear metaphysics.  Yet, Brutus still fears all that is not ordinarily established, all that eludes positive right, or even the status quo; he fears popular passions (78 after 71) as he does his own interiority, “love” itself (36, 73) and perhaps even his own dreams (24-31).[5]  And his fear is awakened by his beloved Julius Caesar’s ascent to glory in the eyes of the people (78-82).[6]

Cassius’s own lesson is about “honor”—“the subject of [his] story” (92)—which is neither divine, nor vulgar, recognized as it is neither by the fates, nor by common mortals (115-138).  What frightens Brutus is the loss of a middle ground between divinity and sheer mortality, between monolithic giants (“like a Colossus”) and “petty men” (136).  His middle ground is fragile, always endangered by excesses, but he dares not face those excesses, for he shuns danger, all that transcends the ordinary (what is more dangerous than thought and love!), which includes ordinary virtue, or boldness (95-115 anticipating 296).  Yet, Cassius succeeds in unsettling Brutus, by inspiring him to seek virtue even among commoners: Cassius kindles in Brutus a dangerous common spirit that nourishes us to majestic heights (149, 170-72).  So does Brutus learn to trust the common within the nominally noble (71, 162).  But such a trust entails recognition of our common/vulgar nature as eminently compatible with civil society and its gods: man must be political by nature.  Are we then to suppose that, through hearsay, Brutus has overcome his alienation from metaphysics?  Has he come to discern the inherence of ethics in the “natural” fiber of reality?  Or does he merely believe in it?  Does he seek in nature a mere justification for his ethics?  Does Cassius’s own metaphysics ultimately serve to secure the status quo?

The conversation between Cassius and Brutus ends with the return of Caesar from the Lupercalia racing celebration of cyclicity as sustaining the glory of Rome.  Caesar returns, yes, for Rome has “room enough” for many a Caesar, apparently both the good (kings) and the evil (tyrants—153-61).

Julius fears danger, thought above all, as incompatible with the status quo (194-97).  What he has an ear for is only a partial “thought,” one that ignores the sinister, or danger (211-14, anticipating 3.42): thought obsequious to authority is the only thought deemed true, where danger is assumed to be the enemy of authority (2.192-95).  The only good political subject is a slavish one.  As if there were no constitutional difference between the noble and the vulgar.

A dialogue between Cassius and Casca follows, exposing the farcical character of both politics (233-48) and religion (249-73) under Caesar: both stately authority and soothsaying are feigned, functioning as forms of domination over servile souls (237-40, 318 and 270-73), souls reduced to dreaming (feigning thought) that what is beyond Caesar’s authority is but “infirmity” (269).  The upshot of the farce is 1. corruption of language, where language now serves as mask camouflaging the vacuity of the status quo (276-82), and 2. the crushing of all objection to the status quo (in this context, Marullus and Flavius are “put to silence”—284).  And yet, a revolt is brewing among those dining prudently (287-94, after the “spirit” of 29 and 147) on the providential dangerous food (living thought) that Caesar has grown to take for granted, if not abhor (289-98 after 149-50).  For prudence makes revolution digestible (295-300).  Brutus learns his lesson, once again: revolutionary rhetoric is acceptable and possibly successful (305 after 295) as long as it abides within the home of prudence (301-05), speaking in others’ mouths, or as long as it is carried out through others’ hands (306-20).  Blaming others for what we do is a conditio sine qua non for revolution.

Scene 3 opens with thunder and lightning.  Unmoved (3.3) by the incendiary rhetoric of revolutionary Cassius (1-13), which gives meaning to human things from above, or ex machina (14-32), Cicero recognizes the primordiality of “the purpose of the things themselves” (35)—a quiet, un-disturbing (38) meaning that is neither heavenly (11-13 anticipating 45-52), nor earthly/superficial (30).  While Caesar has only a “right” ear to hear and Cassius has a left (“sinister”) “good ear” that hears in the dark (compare 3.42-43 and 2.298), Cicero may well hear from both, even as he is not swayed by either; even as he may discern the real motor of political life neither in “our stars,” nor in “ourselves” (our mortal selves) alone (140-41, after 138), but in a covenant between the two, as between divine providence and human prudence, lest both be smothered in madness (the divine in the name of “fates”—139—and the human in the name of safety, or fear of losing it).  The opposition that in the Hamlet is notoriously announced between Being and non-Being—between opposing the fates and yielding slavishly to them—re-emerges here as the opposition between “jealous” or suspicious (71 and 162) gods and men rebelling to them.  As does Cassius, who “tempt[s] the heavens,” ignoring the view shared by both Caesars and their flattered crowds, that “It is the part of men to fear and tremble / When the most mighty gods by token send / Such dreadful heralds to astonish us” (53-56).  Refusing to bow to any “dull” (57) preestablished political-theological order, “Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius” (90), standing as another, competing Caesar, a “lion” (75-80, 106) made strong by gods to defeat tyrants (91-92).  Divine, paternal minds (82-83, 95) enter into us providentially to save us from our “womanish” condition (2.29, 147, 294, 3.83-84 and 95), allowing us to “shake off at pleasure” (99) and rise with thunder and lightning, with “the power to cancel [our] captivity” (102).

It would be pointless to invoke the overturning of tyranny, to attempt a coup, a revolution, as long as one’s people are but sheep begging to stand beneath a wolf, or unarmed servants begging a “lion” master to spare them all danger (104-15).  Yet, Cassius relies on “the noblest-minded Romans” (122)—minds governed with our paternal spirits (83 anticipating 146)—the only worthy part of the aristocracy, to save Rome from being reduced to the “trash” (108) of but one tyrant (99-103).  The best men see the heavens as reflecting their own prowess, or the divine as fuel for the human properly understood, which is to say, for the heroic (126-30).  The night is fearful because its men are fearful (137).  But men of fearful countenance must emerge from their “house” (150, 154), the house of the good, the gudhus, the temple of old, “gods-house,” refuge of men appearing to “good countrymen” (as Flavius had called them) as “sitting high”—as does Brutus “in the praetor’s chair” (157-60, 143).

Cassius’s “metaphysics” fuels revolutionary opposition, not to tyranny as such, but to political mediocrity.  What Cassius cannot bear is the reduction of the noble to the common or vulgar.  Caesar is not the source, but the mirror or sign of the problem, even as he masks the problem in the interest of coexistence between the Few and the Many (tyranny ensues from the death or defacing of a Caesar).  Nevertheless, Caesar becomes a problem for those Few abhorring even the slightest reminder of their mediocrity.  How can the Few fight back, revendicating their dignity?  Cassius answers by awakening Brutus out of his superficial “ethics”—his thoughtless acceptance of the status quo.  Brutus’s nominal authority is key to Cassius’s plan to overturn Caesar.  Cassius’s defense of nobility requires both a superficial metaphysics and a superficial conventional authority; for it requires the application of the otherworldly (all that is hidden in the night) to the worldly.  As a mere reflection of worldly passions, Cassius’s metaphysics acquires meaning by animating a revolution, a rebellion of the Few against subjection to Caesar.  As if meaning were the product of a war for freedom; as if nobility proved itself in the act of effacing its mask, or of replacing the mask of the Few (the One in which the Many find their safety and comfort) with an ideology justifying the emerging of the Few out of the Many.  The new One masks not the Few, but the inadequacies of the Many, their ordinary haplessness, by mobilizing them into a new war, their new struggle to establish a new aristocracy.  While the new battle is fought by the Many, these Many fight merely and unwittingly on behalf of the Few whose proper adversary is the One.

What Cassius’s revolution reveals about political life is that the real battle is not between plebes and gods, but between the aristocracy—the patricians (from patres) or fathers of humanity (civil society)—and the Father in whom they reveal their authority to the Many.  The real battle is between the Few “spiritual giants” and their One divine guarantor—between “the philosophers,” as it were, and the theology they need in order to save the People from themselves.  As long as the gigantomachia is fought, political order is maintained, which is to say that tyranny is averted.  No sooner, however, do the Few reduce the One to themselves (impiously exposing unity as a mask), or does the One eclipse the Few as expendable (as if the One were the unmediated mask of plebeian power) than the threat of tyranny yields to tyranny itself.

Is this what is happening in Act 1 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar?  Almost.  It is out of failure to overcome the One that the Few resort to a new authority.  On the other hand, Caesar tolerates the dangerous Few as long as they do not desecrate his public effigy (1.192-214 and 283-84).  Caesar falls short of abolishing the aristocracy: as a god, he preserves the Few as ancillae theologiae, as servants of his “theological” authority.  The king is therefore not a tyrant, as Cassius would have it, even though his presence threatens to lead to tyranny.  And it will, thanks to Cassius himself.  No sooner does Caesar become unbearable to the Few than these expose his mortality in public (this is what the assassination is primarily about), thereby unleashing anarchy, the worst of tyrannies.  And of course, faced with tyranny the plebes beg for a new Caesar who, alone, might save them from themselves, their own tyrannical passions.

As far as we can tell, at present, what role do Shakespeare’s plebes play in civil society?  That of the passions and so a passive one.  The plebes as such receive the grace 1. of their heroic Fathers through their divine summit, and 2. of that summit through its noble entourage.  For any common “villager” to actively partake in the vitality of civil society is for him to rise in nobility, to gain a noble status.  Yet, this is practically impossible in a conventional sense whereby the plebeian contends with the aristocrat in power: the limits of “social mobility” being defined from on high, the aristocracy will at most concede a “lottery” (by which to join the ranks of the Few) giving the plebes the illusion of freedom.  Nor will any uprising of the proletariat against the old “patriarchal” establishment lead to any successful revolution, but the ascent from the proletariat to a natural aristocracy.  This is what education entails in its classical sense: the rise (through noble-minded guidance, whence the term ēdūcere) of the common folk from its passive condition to the “circle of fathers” who, among each other, think.  But to think “among each other” is to think in dialogue, which is what interpretation—from inter-patres, or “among the fathers”—is really all about.

The author of the Julius Caesar is indeed a thinker and interpreter educating his reader to enter into the “circle of fathers” constituting our natural aristocracy.  In promoting a natural aristocracy, Shakespeare—as representative of a classical education—“complicates” the triadic structure of civil society, opening it to a transcendent dimension, or to the formal distinction between appearance and reality.  Inherited nobility is no longer assumed to be true or “natural” nobility, just as the noble spirit is no longer equated with the noble countenance.  Yet, here emerges a further problem.  Is apparent nobility to be dismissed as a mere lie—as an imposture?  This is the problem over which Platonists and Nominalists (“Sophists”) have argued for centuries; a problem that is still with us, today.

NOTES:

[1] Hereafter, all citations from Shakespeare’s text follow the verse enumeration given in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare.  San Diego, New York, etc.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

[2] In his The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt and Company, 1973), Erich Fromm offers us an exemplary modern reading of heroism, writing: “The hero is the one who has the courage to go to the frontier without succumbing to fear and doubt.  The average man is a hero even in his unsuccessful attempt to be a hero; he is motivated by the desire to make some sense of his life and by the passion to walk as far as he can to its frontiers” (299).  Making some sense of one’s life is a matter of letting oneself be “driven to seek adventure” through the “creation” of ends or ideals (“intellectual and artistic creativity”) to pursue with “genuine interest” (ibid.).  It is unclear how the modern hero is anything more than a devotee to his own idols.

[3] Modern secular liberalism parrots (distorts) Shakespeare’s classical liberalism when seeking a solution to all brutish warfare in the establishment of universal equality of right.  This end demands a “system” guaranteeing that everyone have equal opportunity to have a say in the political arena.  Necessarily, the question of merit comes to be reduced to one of fitness vis-à-vis the “system”.  Social integration spells virtue as equality of right emerges as equalizing or leveling of right.  The eye of God in Heaven, eternal seat of discourse, is replaced by a “Big Brother” correlative on Earth.

[4] Compare the “truly” of verse 30 and the “indeed” (in-deed) of verse 31 (after 14): the meaning (19) of the cobbler’s conduct is not self-evident (13).

[5] Is the death Brutus claims not to fear, devoid of love?  Is the love he fears one exposing Brutus to the meaning of death, to what lies behind the face of death?  Does death serve as a pretext for Brutus not to love?  But, in fact, how is death bearable without love?  How is ethics sustainable without metaphysics?  If not as a mere façade?

[6] Brutus would then fear what he does and possibly cannot help doing.

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