The Death of Julius Caesar

Shakespeare’s forerunners

Polonius I did enact Julius Caesar. I was kill’d i’th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me.

(Hamlet III. ii)

And so we move to the most popular of the three acts of Caesar’s story: his death, subject of both the earliest and the latest of our plays. The challenges presented by this part of the story are different and, as regards the character of Caesar, greater. Plays on Catiline make him either a supporter of the status quo or a villain; in the Civil War plays, he appears as an overturner of the state, with whatever degree of honorable reluctance. But for this final phase, he is both the revolutionary and the established head of state. Writers throughout our time-period struggled to translate the Roman situation into their own, non-republican terms: as we have seen in previous chapters, Caesar was often seen as a proto-king, a predecessor of the monarchs of Europe. On the other hand, some argued that in Rome the Senate is equivalent to the king, and thus Caesar is, in modern terms, an anti-monarchist. (This ploy is used in Sir William Alexander’s play, discussed below, where Brutus has a speech to the effect that the Senate is their rightful ruler and so Caesar is a usurper; see Kewes 2002: 158.) Dying at the hands of his fellow senators, Caesar might appear as a tyrant or as a victim (see, for a full treatment of the debate, Miola 1985). Either attitude may be found in the drama, and sometimes both.

Caesar first appears on stage in a Latin tragedy, Julius Caesar, by the French scholar Marc Antoine Muret (also known by the Latin form of his name, Muretus) c. 1544 - a play in which the young Montaigne, his pupil, possibly performed (see Clark, chapter 24, p. 366).7 The play was translated, rather freely, into French by another of his pupils, Jacques Grevin, as Cesar (1561). The two establish a general pattern for plays on the subject by setting up two irreconcilable viewpoints and giving time to each: scenes alternate between Caesar, restless and still ambitious, and the conspirators Brutus and Cassius, determined to restore republican liberty. Both plays include the assassination in their scope, but do not show it on stage: they establish the solution most of their successors will follow by locating it between acts (Acts IV and V in Muret, III and IV in Grevin). Muret ends with the ghost of Caesar announcing his translation to the heavens; Grevin ends with Mark Antony threatening revenge. Though both authors give the last word to Caesar’s side, they show some sympathy for both parties. Muret takes the unusual step of making the outcome satisfactory to everyone: Brutus and Cassius congratulate themselves for liberating Rome, and the ghost gloats over the retribution that awaits them. Both attitudes were available.

The earliest fragment of an English dramatist’s work on Caesar is the epilogue (all that survives) of Richard Eedes’s Caesar Interfectus (1582), a deft specimen of the Renaissance educational technique of argument in utramque partem, on both sides: Caesar was wrong to seize power, right to wield it with clemency; Brutus was right to restore liberty, wrong to kill Caesar. Orlando Pescetti’s assassination tragedy, Il Cesare (1594), ends with three choruses, one of male citizens celebrating liberty, one of women deploring war, and a third of soldiers praising Caesar and demanding vengeance. The first play to side unequivocally with the killers seems to be Brutus (1596), an early Latin work by the German scholar Michael Wirdung (Virdungus). Here Caesar, assassinated, begins the play as a revenging Senecan ghost, up from the Underworld to bring chaos to the world; bereft of Cassius, who has killed himself before the play begins, Brutus quotes from his own letters to Cicero and kills himself without repenting the assassination.

All of these plays are academic in nature - the work of scholars, most of them young, none of them professional playwrights, and all scrupulous in their adherence to the neoclassical unities of time, place, and action. Two plays already mentioned, both baggier in their structure, also find room for the assassination - at least by anticipation. Act IV of Garnier’s Cornelie is divided between the two sides, the first scene a dialogue between Cassius and Decimus Brutus, working each other up on the subject of Caesar’s tyranny, the second between Caesar and Antony, Caesar rejecting Antony’s advice to kill all his potential enemies and declaring that he is ready to die instead. Caesars Revenge, in Acts III-V, condemns Caesar for ambition but comes down harder against Brutus, who ends the play bound for Hell.

Shakespeare

At least some of these dramas were probably known to Shakespeare when he came to write his own play, first performed in 1599. Approaching the play from the perspective of Caesar in drama reveals how far Shakespeare recognized the same patterns and decisions as other dramatists of the assassination, and where his particular originality lay. Like almost everyone who includes women in the cast (many do not), he limits them to Portia and Calpurnia. There were other possibilities: Cleopatra herself was in Rome at the time, as Cicero makes clear (Att. 14.6): not one playwright includes her, though it might have made for some interesting scenes. Like others, Shakespeare includes dialogues between Brutus and Cassius, Brutus and Portia. Later playwrights often included a scene between Caesar and Brutus, of one sort or another (the first, it seems, was Marie Anne Barbier, in 1710): Shakespeare’s predecessors did not, and neither did he. Sometimes we can see something like a residue of an earlier dramatic idea in Julius Caesar, for example in the relations of Caesar and Antony. Many playwrights, from Grevin onwards, chose to pair them as a rival alliance to Brutus and Cassius, inventing for them (with no explicit classical precedent) their own scene a deux; Shakespeare does not use this idea, but there is a glimpse of it in the short exchange between the two men at the end of the Lupercalia scene in Act I.

There is a difference, however. In most plays which show Caesar in private conference with Antony, he is urged to act more sternly against trouble-makers like Brutus (so, for example, in Grevin and Garnier, and the later Scudery, Barbier, and Conti); Shakespeare’s Antony, by contrast, reassures Caesar about Cassius. Shakespeare takes remarks by Caesar quoted by Plutarch as isolated aphorisms and puts them into a dialogue; the result produces an impression of Caesar’s ability (he detects the danger), and also his self-deception, as he immediately insists he does not fear it. Other choices made by his predecessors find no place at all in Shakespeare’s play. Most dramatists give Caesar at least one soliloquy; Shakespeare does not - he is only ever on stage alone for long enough to speak three lines (II. ii.1-3). This is a significant decision. The soliloquizing Caesar may display a range of moods - restless (in Muret), or nervous (in Grevin), or anxious (as in the just-post-Shakespeare play by Sir William Alexander); whatever his mood, he will sound confiding, giving the audience a glimpse of his private self. The act of soliloquizing produces a certain sense of intimacy for the audience; the nature of the soliloquy also provides one simple way of indicating whether Caesar does or does not have right on his side. As we shall see, the Duke of Buckingham, rewriting Shakespeare’s play at the end of the seventeenth century, availed himself of both advantages when he made his insomniac Dictator soliloquize in private on the tyranny of his own ambition. But Shakespeare’s Caesar is never private. Even with the people in whom he comes closest to confiding, his wife and Antony, he refers to himself in the third person, using his name like a title; Shakespeare was inspired, perhaps, by Caesar’s own writing in his commentarii, but the effect, on stage, is rather different:

Caesar should be a beast without a heart

If he should stay at home today for fear.

No, Caesar shall not.

(II. ii.42-4)

I rather tell thee what is to be feared

Than what I fear: for always I am Caesar.

Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf [... ]

(I. ii.211-13)

Shakespeare invented this deafness for him. An impression results not of a virtuous ruler or of a ruthless tyrant, the traditional choice, but of a powerful presence with a blank behind it. This Caesar is monumental, a Colossus; but he is also a hollow man, an unintegrated sum of fixed image and aging matter. By showing him unaware of his own vulnerability, Shakespeare increases the audience’s awareness of it. He might have had in mind for the character the famous passage from Seneca’s Thyestes, beloved in the Renaissance, on the dangers of such a life - here in the splendid translation by Sir Thomas Wyatt, from the generation before Shakespeare:

[throat]

For him death grip’th right hard by the crop That is much known of other, and of himself, alas! Doth die unknown, dazed, with dreadful face.

(Wyatt 1978: 94)8

Caesar dies declaiming his own name.

Brutus, by contrast, does soliloquize. At the beginning of Act II, he reveals his uncertainty in a long soliloquy about the killing, and how to justify it: the argument he reaches is that Caesar, though no tyrant at present, might later become one. However unsatisfactory this argument might appear - in the eighteenth century, one ‘‘T. Killigrew” pointed out that it ‘‘will lustefie my killing any man’’ (Blakemore Evans 1958: 231) - Shakespeare’s concept of a brooding, hesitant Brutus was a dramatic innovation. In most assassination dramas, Brutus delivers a soliloquy at some point before the killing; Shakespeare’s predecessors, however, make these soliloquies quite straightforward in nature. In Muret’s play, as in Grevin’s, Brutus berates himself at length for not living up to his ancestors and ridding Rome of a tyrant:

Quousque tandem, Brute, virtutem tuam Dormire pateris otiosam degener?

(II.98-9)

(How long then, degenerate Brutus, will you allow your virtue to slumber in idleness?)

In most of the pre-Shakespearean tragedies, Brutus takes the lead, proclaiming his outrage and determination before Cassius can get a word in. In Pescetti’s play, indeed, he tries to stir up Cassius against Caesar:

O Cassio, credi

Tu, ch’io non sappia, ch’in cotesto tuo Petto non meno ardir si chiude, e serra,

Ch’in quel di Giulio? E che cotesto braccio Non e del suo men nerboruto, e forte?

Di me nulla diro [...].

(I, p. 24)

(O Cassius, do you think I do not know that there is no less ardor closed and confined in this breast of yours than in that of Julius? That your arm is no less sinewy or strong than his? I say nothing of myself....)

Plutarch, however, insists that the initiative for the killing came from Cassius. I quote here from the translation by Sir Thomas North, used by Shakespeare: ‘‘Cassius being a choleric man and hating Caesar privately, more than he did the tyranny openly, he incensed Brutus against him’’ (Caesar 8.3; Spencer 1964: 91). Shakespeare follows Plutarch: Brutus’ soliloquy follows a prolonged persuasion scene from Cassius - in which Cassius sounds rather as Pescetti’s Brutus did in the passage above. Adding to this impression of a manipulated Brutus, Shakespeare invents the detail that the anonymous ‘‘writings’’ he finds, apparently from unknown citizens, urging him to kill Caesar (writings mentioned by Plutarch), are all secretly written by Cassius himself (I. ii.314ff.). Most later tragedies will take the Plutarchan line: Cassius is the instigator, Brutus the follower - increasingly tormented, as the tradition develops, by the whole prospect of killing.

Shakespeare’s Brutus, however, is a more complex creation than either his robust forebears or his squeamish successors. His anxiety before the killing is not matched by any remorse after it; he delivers no soliloquies after the event. And he takes the lead in an extraordinary scene where the conspirators ritually wash their hands in Caesar's wounds:

Stoop, Romans, stoop,

And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood Up to the elbows and besmear our swords.

(III. i.105-7)

There seems to be no classical source for this. A few years after Shakespeare, a messenger in Sir William Alexander’s play describes the conspirators bloodying their hands: it is shocking even in a messenger’s speech, much more so on stage, and this speech from Shakespeare's Brutus appalled some readers in the eighteenth century. The Duke of Buckingham, rewriting the play, removed it; Alexander Pope, editing, reassigned it, with no textual authority, to Casca: ‘‘In all the editions this speech is ascribed to Brutus, than which nothing is more inconsistent with his mild and philosophical character’’ (quoted in Furness 1913: 145 n. 122).

Pope’s editorial nemesis, Lewis Theobald, laughed at him for this, but most of the eighteenth-century translators would follow him, though indirectly (they used the Shakespeare edition by Pope’s friend Warburton) - La Place, LeTourneur, and Voltaire (see below) in French; Wieland in German. LeTourneur, in a stage direction, actually exempts Brutus from the action: ‘‘Tous, excepte Brutus, trempent leurs epees dans le sang de Cesar’’ (‘‘All, except Brutus, soak their swords in Caesar’s blood’’) (LeTourneur 1836: 113). But Shakespeare’s Brutus takes the lead in bloodthirstiness. Then, once out of Rome, he assumes a disquietingly Caesarian habit of referring to himself magniloquently, as a model:

There is no terror, Cassius, in your threats:

For I am armed so strong in honesty That they pass by me as the idle wind,

Which I regard not.

(IV. iii.66-9; compare Caesar on his own star-like constancy, III. i.60ff.)

Think not, thou noble Roman,

That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome.

He bears too great a mind.

(V. i.110-12)

Shakespeare does not shrink from the hard logic of the revenge plot, by which the perpetrator takes on the role of the victim. Brutus, like Caesar, falls for and by his own reputation.

Other unusual features of Shakespeare’s assassination play emerge from reading it as one of many. One is the way it begins. Other playwrights offer a range of possibilities for this: a soliloquy by Caesar (Muret and Grevin); an allegorical figure, Senecan-style (Caesars Revenge begins with the figure of Discord, gloating); a debate among the gods (Pescetti and Alexander); a dialogue between Brutus and Cassius (Scudery and Conti’s Giulio Cesare); or between Caesar and Antony (Voltaire). Other dialogue arrangements also occur: the Dutch playwright Someren begins with Calpurnia and the Soothsayers. But no other play begins remotely like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with a crowd scene, minus either gods or any major characters, setting out the political situation not by describing but by showing it - the popularity of Caesar with the plebeians, the resentment he inspires in the political class. The next scene is again unique. Most of our plays begin on the morning of the assassination; Shakespeare begins at the annual festival of the Lupercalia, one month before (combined, in a telescopic movement, with the triumph over the Pompeians, actually five months earlier than that). to this decision, Antony makes his first appearance not, as in most plays, privately conferring with Caesar, but in public and ‘‘for the course’’ (so the stage direction in the First Folio) - that is, in some version of nearnakedness, ready to strike at the crowd with strips of goatskin as he runs the sacred fertility race. Caesar, with his first words in the play, commands his wife, Calpurnia, to stand in Antony’s way, and Antony to be sure to touch her. Shakespeare took the idea of the scene from Plutarch, but used it with a difference: Antony is not asked to touch Calpurnia in any of the classical sources. All he does is to offer Caesar the crown. Caesar’s concern with Calpurnia’s barrenness is Shakespeare’s idea; it provides a very discreet introduction to the theme of Caesar’s Heir - a theme which will recur in the last two acts, where the newcomer Octavian quietly establishes his claim.

A second feature to note is the bloodiness of the killing itself. On Brutus’ directions, quoted above, the conspirators ritually blood themselves, as after a hunt, ‘‘wash [ing]’’ in Caesar’s wounds. Immediately after this, Brutus and Cassius imagine the assassination scene taking place on the stages of the future:

Cassius

Brutus

How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown? How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport That now on Pompey’s basis lies along,

No worthier than the dust?

(m. i.111-16)

In fact, however, the scene is unusual. Few of the plays that cover the assassination actually show it: Caspar Brulow in German; Georges de Scudery in French; Roeland van Leuve in Dutch; and in English, just Shakespeare and the anonymous author of Caesars Revenge.

Including the scene made it necessary to decide on a historically debatable topic: whether Caesar had or had not spoken at the point of death. The classical authors were divided on this. Plutarch gives him no words; Appian has him cry out ‘‘like a wild beast’’ (B Civ. 2.117); in Suetonius, he expresses himself in Greek: ‘‘Kai su, teknon’’ - ‘‘You too, my child’’ (Div. Iul. 82.3). (Dio reports this story but comments that the best authorities say he was silent: 44.19.) Muret, Grevin, and Pescetti had followed Plutarch; playwrights after Shakespeare generally follow Suetonius, incorporating Caesar’s exclamation into the Messenger’s Speech that describes the killing. Shakespeare himself takes a third course. He had already used, or devised, a non-classical Latin tag for the occasion: in The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (1595; the first published version of 3 Henry VI), King Edward uses it to his brother Clarence, who has declared his support for the King’s opponents: ‘‘Et tu, Brute? Wilt thou stab Caesar too?’’ In Caesars Revenge, too, the dying Dictator says ‘‘Brutus’’ rather than ‘‘son’’: this play may have influenced Shakespeare, though uncertainty about the date complicates the question. It may be that both playwrights independently wished to avoid any suggestion of patricide. Plutarch mentions an old rumor that Brutus might have been Caesar’s son (Brutus 5.2), and Shakespeare alludes to it in another early play, 2 Henry VI(1594), where a character remembers how ‘‘Brutus’ bastard hand / Stabbed Julius Caesar.’’ But whatever his reasons for departing from Suetonius’ wording, Shakespeare followed him, as critics have often pointed out, in one curious and unique way: the bilingualism (see, for example, Garber 1987: 54). Suetonius’ Caesar speaks Greek, in the midst of a Latin text; Shakespeare’s speaks Latin, in the middle of the play’s English. The effect is to set the quotation off, to highlight it as a quotation. In The True Tragedy, it really was a quotation, in an obvious sense: the King was using it as such, quoting or pretending to quote Caesar. But Caesar, in Julius Caesar, can only be quoting himself. In no other play on the subject are the characters so self-conscious, so aware of their place not only in Roman history but in the history of drama.

Later versions

Shakespeare’s was to be the most influential play ever published on Caesar. For the next 150 years, however, plays on the assassination continued to be written - sometimes even performed - with no knowledge of it. First came The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1607), by William Alexander, a soporific neoclassical piece written in dreary cross-rhyming: the ‘‘Argument’’ suggests an anti-Caesarian position, but little sense of it comes through from the play itself (it ends with a long Chorus on the unknowability of destiny). Caspar Brtilow’s Caius Julius Caesar Tragoedia (1616), by contrast, sprawls from pre-assassination to the Battle of Actium - a longer span than any other play except Caesars Revenge and Shakespeare: it presents Caesar sympathetically, devoting a whole scene to Cicero’s praise of him (see, for a summary, Gundelfinger 1904: 52-6). La Mort de Cesar (1635) by Georges de Scudery is an unambiguously pro-Caesar play, featuring an unusually treacherous and unappealing Brutus. Marie Anne Barbier’s play of the same name (1710) is a romantic extravaganza, closer in content to a precieuse novel or an opera libretto than to any of the other plays; in it, Brutus, Portia, Antony, and Octavia (Caesar’s niece) dance out an elaborate combination of love intrigues, ending in the assassination of the kindly and benign Dictator. Two Dutch plays, by Johann Someren (1670) and Roeland van Leuve (1723) seem to divide their sympathy: Someren’s play is called ‘‘the revenge for conquered freedom,'' but ends with Caesar's ghost urging on a revenge of its own; van Leuve's Caesar dies on stage with a uniquely long and emotional speech, but the play ends with the mutual farewells of Brutus and Cassius, still exclaiming about liberty. Dutch interest in the subject also led to translations of both Scudery and Barbier: in the second case, the anonymous translator changed the play completely by rewriting the last scene, replacing a lamentation by the Caesarians with a celebration by the conspirators. The two endings together seem to restore the usual ambivalence the subject inspires.

Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, popular in more or less unaltered form - unlike many of Shakespeare’s plays - throughout the seventeenth century (Ripley 1980: 13-22), had begun to generate a new tradition of its own. John Sheffield, third Duke of Buckingham, produced two plays on the assassination, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Altered and The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus (both c. 1716), by rewriting Shakespeare’s play and dividing it in half at the point of Antony’s funeral oration. Shakespeare provides the basis of the first play (whole scenes are preserved almost unchanged), but the tone of the revision is more consistently stately. Gone are Caesar’s deafness, Brutus’ bathing in his blood. Expanding the scale, Buckingham has room to increase the roles of both his leading men: the Dictator gets to soliloquize (as we have seen) on the tyrannical burden of his own ambition; Brutus gets more time with Portia. Unlike Shakespeare’s Caesar, this one decides, honorably, to make Brutus praetor, though recognizing that he is (in a direct lift from Shakespeare) ‘‘very dangerous’’; Brutus responds with an additional fit of anguish. Buckingham also provides a Prologue, in which he explains his attitude to Caesar. The imagery (very disagreeable to a modern taste) is characteristic of the period:

At distance now of sev’nteen hundred Years,

Methinks a lovely Ravisher appears,

Whom, tho’ forbid by Virtue to excuse,

A Nymph might pardon, and could scarce refuse.

(fol. E2)9

If Caesar is a lovely rapist, Brutus’ morality is also left ambiguous - more explicitly so than in Shakespeare. ‘‘Here lies the Greatest Man that e’er was Good’’ comments his friend Lucilius, in the last scene of Marcus Brutus, but the Caesarian side has the last word: ‘‘He lov’d his Country, but he kill’d his Friend’’ (V. vi, p. 453). Everyone has gained in dignity; ambivalence remains.

Through Buckingham, Shakespeare began, though at a remove, to have an influence on the Continent. Antonio Conti, a Venetian aristocrat, read Buckingham’s work, and was inspired by it to write on the subject himself (Fletcher 1981: 442). Like Buckingham, he eventually wrote two plays, one named after Caesar and one after Brutus; unlike him, he wrote both of them on the same part of the story: the assassination. In the first play, Giulio Cesare (1718), Caesar receives the usual mixed treatment. In a long letter published with it, Conti explains that he has made the character great in mind and magnificent in action, but also cunning and ambitious; Brutus, with all his merits, deserves censure for his ingratitude and his unrealistic idealism. This even-handedness, apparently, Conti came to regret. He explains in the Preface to the second play, Marco Bruto (1744), that critics had complained that they did not know which side they were supposed to take; here he will make it clear that Brutus, and Brutus alone, is the hero. To do this, he plays up the character’s hesitation to the absolute maximum: Cassius and Portia spend most of the play pressuring him and complaining to each other. To direct audience sympathy still further, Conti also takes the extraordinary and probably unique step of removing Caesar himself altogether from a play about his own assassination. In so far as the subject allows, his Brutus performs a heroic act that has no victim - an indication of the difficulty of presenting the story unequivocally.

Conti’s Giulio Cesare and Buckingham’s two plays were all known to Voltaire. But he also experienced Shakespeare’s play at first hand on his visit to London in 1726; and, on his own account, he was overwhelmed - despite all the faults that he perceived in it. In his Discours sur la Tragedie (1730), addressed to Lord Boling-broke, he recalls his excitement:

Avec quel plaisir n’ai-je point vu a Londres votre tragedie de Jules-Cdsar, qui, depuis cent cinquante annees, fait les delices de votre nation! Je ne pretends pas assurement approu-ver les irregularites barbares dont elle est remplie. [... ] Mais, au milieu de tant de fautes grossieres, avec quel ravissement je voyais Brutus, tenant encore un poignard teint du sang de Cesar, assembler le peuple romain, et lui parler ainsi du haut de la tribune aux harangues [...]. (Voltaire 1964: 106-7)

(With what pleasure did I see in London that Julius Caesar tragedy which has been the delight of your nation for a hundred and fifty years! Certainly I do not pretend to approve of those barbarous irregularities of which it is full [...]. But, in the middle of so many gross faults, with what delight did I see Brutus, still holding a dagger stained with Caesar’s blood, summoning the Roman people and addressing them thus from the height of the rostra [...].

- and he proceeds to translate the whole of Brutus’ speech. It was the beginning of a long, tempestuous relationship with Shakespeare.

His choice of an episode for praise might seem surprising. Brutus with bloodstained hands is, as we have seen, a troubling image in the early eighteenth century: this might seem an obvious example of an ‘‘irregularite barbare.’’ But Voltaire responded to the energy of the scene - the merit, as he put it, of ‘‘action.’’ He set out to compose a play on the same subject himself, paying Shakespeare the complicated compliment of writing it in the ‘‘English taste’’ (by which he meant austere and without love interest). For his later Catiline play, as we saw, he claimed, unconvincingly, the influence of Ben Jonson; Shakespeare’s play, by contrast, he clearly knew very well. Still, however English he might have thought it, La Mort de Cesar (first performed in 1733) comes much closer to the older French plays on the subject than to Shakespeare, built up as it is of soliloquies and dialogue, with a tight time-line and a small cast list. It begins with a dialogue between Caesar and Antony: Grevin’s Cesar, the first French Caesar play, includes one in the first act; it ends with Antony’s oration, which is how Grevin’s also ends. Voltaire’s innovation was to take up Plutarch’s rumor and make Caesar not just Brutus’ friend, but his father - an idea which Shakespeare had chosen to ignore. It provides Voltaire with opportunities for extended agonizing for Brutus, plus a neat way of barring him from bloodshed without removing him from the conspiracy; he also - coincidentally? - provides a twist of his own on Shakespeare’s theme of Caesar’s Heir. As Brutus’ father, Caesar spends some time revealing his softer side; when off this topic, he expresses himself as a political cynic, turning the rhetoric Shakespeare’s Cassius had used of him (Caesar the Colossus) against Rome itself, to justify his seizure of power:

Nos moeurs changent, Brutus; il faut changer nos lois.

La liberte n’est plus que le droit de se nuire:

Rome, qui detruit tout, semble enfin se detruire.

Ce colosse effrayant, dont le monde est foule,

En pressant l’univers est lui-meme ebranle [...]

(III. iv.184-8)

(Our customs change, Brutus; we must change our laws. Liberty is now no more than the right to harm oneself; Rome, the destroyer of all, seems at last to be destroying itself. This alarming Colossus, which treads down the world, in pressing on the universe is shaken itself.)

Nevertheless, he recognizes his affinity with his son:

Si je n’etais Cesar, j’aurais ete Brutus

(I. i.120)

(If I were not Caesar, I would have been Brutus.)

Both take extreme positions: the inflexible power-seeker; who disowns his own son when he refuses to take his side; the rigid idealist, who will defend his ideals even against his own father. In the last scene, Antony makes public the secret of Brutus’ birth, and the paternal Caesar triumphs posthumously, the outraged people mourning him as Brutus’ father and their own.

Voltaire claimed the credit for introducing Shakespeare to France; there would also be a smaller reciprocal movement. In 1758, Voltaire’s Shakespearean play was translated into English, and altered in the process to Caesar’s advantage. Aaron Hill, man of letters and friend (sometimes) of Pope, published an article in his own periodical, The Prompter (1736), complaining that no one did Caesar justice:

While the lowest, and most virulent, ofWriters can expatiate on Those Arts of His, most liable to Censure, the very choicest, and most able Wits fall short, when they attempt his Virtues. [... ] Even our Great Shakespeare has shot wide: and after This Confession, Monsieur de Voltaire must look upon it as no Injury, that I cannot like the Picture, He has lately given us [...]. (quoted in Fletcher 1975: 75)

Rising to his own challenge, Hill adapted Voltaire’s La Mort to produce a Caesarian drama of his own. With Hill, Caesar finds a voice as rationalist thinker in the

Enlightenment mode - an ancient Roman version, in fact, of Lord Bolingbroke, to whom Hill dedicated his play:

Caesar [kneeling]

Hear me, thou! Self-producing, dark, first cause! All ruling! All-pervading! Aweful Power,

Whom, under various names, blind worship seeks! If, till compell’d, I draw the public sword, Sheath’d, in my bosom, let me guilty fall! [Rises]

(I. iii; p. 266)

And yet even Hill, as dramatist, felt the force of the other side. Antony ends the play - not, this time, with a rabble-rousing eulogy, but an unexpectedly low-key reflection on the nature of ambition:

All fruit of power is pain: and what is fame?

When ev’n a Caesar’s glory stains his name.

(V. vii; p. 327)

The story of Shakespeare, Caesar, and Voltaire ends with its own anticlimax. In the thirty years after La Mort, French interest in and enthusiasm for Shakespeare exploded, and the first translation appeared. Voltaire became increasingly restive; his protege was becoming a rival. In this darkened mood, he returned to Julius Caesar. This time, he set about producing a literal translation of the first three acts: the point, as he made clear in his Avertissement, was to show his fellow countrymen that they had no idea what Shakespeare was really like, and would be appalled if they had.10 The undignified nature of some parts of the play become, in Voltaire’s footnotes, the focus of sarcastic attack - in particular the representation of Caesar himself. Beneath Caesar’s boastful descriptions of himself as danger’s older brother, more constant than the northern star, Voltaire notes: ‘‘Traduit mot a mot,’’ ‘‘Traduit avec la plus grande exactitude’’ (‘‘translated word for word’’; ‘‘translated with the greatest exactitude,’’ pp. 170, 183). The last note concerns the action of the conspirators immediately after Caesar’s death. Voltaire translates literally the speech of Brutus that Pope had reassigned to Casca: ‘‘Baignons tous dans son sang nos mains jusques au coude’’ (‘‘Let us all bathe our hands to the elbow in his blood’’), and comments:

C’est ici qu’on voit principalement l’esprit different des nations. Cette horrible barbarie de Casca ne serait jamais tombde dans l’idee d’un auteur franijais. (p. 187)

(It is here that one principally sees the different spirit of the two nations. This horrible barbarity of Casca’s would never have entered the mind of a French author.)

Gone is the admiration of Brutus waving his bloody dagger; even from Casca, this bloodthirsty suggestion now fills Voltaire with contemptuous cultural superiority. Leaving the play at this point, though, makes an extra-intentional impact. In taking it on himself to put an end to the false reign of Shakespeare, he had cast himself, inevitably, in the role of Brutus. His righteous indignation was not enough to stop the tide: some 15 years later, the second French translation of Shakespeare appeared;

A very grand production, dedicated to the King. As Brutus himself found out, Caesar was a hard ghost to exorcise.11