'Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.'
Brutus in Act II, scene i:63-65, from Julius Caesar
We hear Brutus as he privately contemplates the impending murder of Caesar, in what is recognisable as a pre-emptive strike against a would-be tyrant. Caesar is a de facto king in all but name, yet we are told “three times he did refuse the crown.” For Brutus the action against Caesar is not a case of someone needing to rationalise to themselves the doing of a thing, as he is clearly convinced of his ideological, as well as moral, high-ground. Unlike Hamlet, who equivocates as the task before him pushes the limits of what he can endure, Brutus has no such dilemma, but rather an inveterate pride cloaked within the public persona of being the defender of the Roman Republic. These are exalted and high-minded ideals, such that others are to die for. He is a would-be stoic and every bit the modern man of the political class, and so it is not at all surprising that Robespierre, France’s famous first citizen, should have been so enamoured by this celebrated character.
Mark Anthony was Caesar’s friend and stands in opposition, while asking permission of Brutus to speak. In the most powerful and efficacious political speech on record, he turns the tide of support for the ‘liberators’ against them. Anthony is accused of being an ambitious Machiavellian who uses the funeral eulogy of Caesar to “unleash the dogs of war” (Act III, scene i) as he beats the drum of the explosive leitmotif: “And Brutus is an honourable man” (Act III, scene ii), until the populace are drawn into a rage against Brutus and his co-conspirators whom only moments earlier they were cheering.
With Robespierre we have the pivotal figure of the French Revolution who casts himself in the leading role of the famous Roman patrician. Was not Robespierre also a chaste and honourable man; principled and virtuous? And did he not embrace the unassailable principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity upon which the French Republic stands, and with such passionate reverence that thousands upon thousands of Frenchmen should die for what he believed?
Brutus, like Richard II, was a mirror-gazer. Richard did not like what he saw, for in the famous usurpation scene, when he called for a mirror to be brought, he still looked a king, “O, flattering glass!” (Act IV, scene i), which he then saw to be totally false, and smashed it. He had been un-kinged, first by Bolingbroke, then by his own volition as he violently separated ‘the two bodies of the king’ by dashing his public persona of monarch into a thousand shards of glass.
Brutus, on the other hand, liked what he saw. Therefore, when Cassius says: “Tell me good Brutus, can you see your face” (Act I, scene ii), Brutus answers his question in optics by stating that only by reflection can someone see themselves. Cassius has him, for while the other conspirators were simply suborned with the promise of secured trading concessions and retaining political favours, Brutus is roped in by his deep-rooted rectitude upheld by the high-minded democratic principles of the Republic. When Brutus looks into the metaphorical mirror held up to him by Cassius:
“I, your glass
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of,”
he (unlike Richard) likes what he sees. One can sense that Brutus has gazed upon himself in private to view his impeccable public image.
Marat, the popular political philosopher and journalist, exhibited the pragmatic modalities of the Revolution. Marat’s thinly veiled enmity for the enshrined citizen, whom he gloriously championed in his writings, made clear that people were simply not capable of being in charge of something as important as their liberty. The freedom of ‘The People’ must be protected at all costs. This became a matter of National Security. Marat assured the citizens that the threat was everywhere, a virtual ‘code red’ and that counter-revolutionaries were entrenched in every dark corner, lurking in the shadows of society and, moreover, that the only way to assure the protection of Freedom was to purge the State of its enemies. If the body-politic was infected then the treatment was to bleed it. These enemies were not citizens protected by law but non-citizens, dehumanised, secret enemy combatants whose very existence threatened the safety and security of the Nation. Everyone must be vigilant. Complacency is tantamount to treason. Suspicion casts its hard cold stare as everyone comes under surveillance. They were outlaws, outside the Law, and therefore, the manner of dealing with them operates by the rule of exception outside the juridical process, so that the otherwise inalienable rights, civil liberties, did not apply. This does not break the law, but rather works outside of it by the establishment of a state of emergency. The Terror of the French Revolution drove the machinery of the modern democratic State that ratified the torture and execution of so many thousands of Frenchmen in the name of Liberty.
While we do know that Robespierre admired Brutus, we have no such proof that Marat, the relentless broadsheet propagandist (the mass media of the eighteenth century) was ever so enamoured by the bony Cassius.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar remains an important play, very much relevant to our modern age. Caesar posed a potential threat to the very foundations of the Roman Republic. If he were to become king it would “put the sting in him”, against which no free Roman citizen would be safe. “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more” (Act III, scene ii) is the basis of Brutus’ argument when he painstakingly explains to the crowd why it was for their own good that Caesar had to be killed, or “sacrificed” as he said, for the greater good. “Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to all live as free men?” Earlier in the play (Act II, scene i) we hear Brutus, after having been found more malleable than Cassius had originally thought possible, contemplating his impending action.
“It must be by his death; and for my part
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown’d:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.”
At the end of the same reflection, Brutus concludes:
“And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg,
Which, hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.”
Cassius, defeated by Anthony’s accomplished army, orders his own servant to stab him as he cries out, “Caesar, thou art revenged, / Even with the sword that killed thee.” Brutus, on the other hand, has repelled the forces of Octavius, Julius Caesar’s great-nephew and heir, who upon hearing of his uncle’s murder returns to Rome. But when Brutus finds Cassius dead and his army lost, he too looses heart and runs on the sword of his servant Volumnius. When Anthony finds the body of Brutus he comments:
“This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators save one only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar…” (Act V, scene v).
Young Octavius (he was still in his teens) orders the body of Brutus to be buried “With all respect and rites”, and declares an end to the battle.
Only the most educated of Shakespeare’s audience would have been moderately familiar with the (44 BC Roman) Republican form of government, or its much earlier Greek antecedent. For them Caesar’s murder was regicide. No modern audience (dating from the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century) has ever cast Brutus in less than a heroic light, with Caesar as the dangerous dictator. What is remarkable is that Shakespeare prefigured an age that had not yet arrived.
The key to the richness of Shakespeare’s plays is the language itself, as it unlocks all the myriad meanings. His remarkable genius is in how he wonderfully sets the stage and then refrains from imposing a demagogic or ideological hold on the action. Consequently, fresh thematic insights and character interpretations continue to emerge in each successive age. This is true now, as we approach the end of the Age of the Republic.
