The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0367 Thursday, 9 July 2009
[1] From: Lynn Brenner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 3 Jul 2009 13:32:46 EDT
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0348 Julius Caesar, 4.3
[2] From: Joseph Egert <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 9 Jul 2009 11:42:45 -0700 (PDT)
Subj: Re: SHK 20.0348 Julius Caesar, 4.3
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Lynn Brenner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Friday, 3 Jul 2009 13:32:46 EDT
Subject: 20.0348 Julius Caesar, 4.3
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0348 Julius Caesar, 4.3
Louis Swilley writes that he has never seen a production of 'Julius
Caesar' in which actor and director emphasize Brutus 'realizing his
terrible mistake' in Act 4, Scene 3.
("In this scene, Brutus is made to realize that although Cassius has
certainly worked against the interests of the country Brutus loves, he
is spared the fate Brutus provided Caesar.")
I'm not surprised. I can't imagine how the scene could be staged or
played to convey this interpretation, which I've never heard before.
In a brilliant analysis, 'Political Characters of Shakespeare'
(originally published in 1945) John Palmer writes that this scene "has
been almost universally admired . . . Shakespeare's contemporary
audience received it with so much applause that it is specially
mentioned in the commendatory verses by Digges printed in the first
folio and with a modern audience it has never been known to miss its mark.."
Palmer then quotes Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, and Bradley, who praise the
scene for the moving power of its humanity, and continues,
"Why is it that audiences, from generation to generation, have left the
theatre with this particular passage so vivid in their minds? Why does
this episode of the two men quarrelling like children in the tent of
Brutus stand out so brightly? [...] The essential business of
Shakespeare's political plays is to show how the private person comes to
terms with his political duties, offices or ambitions, and the dramatic
climax is always to be found when the protagonists come before us
stripped of their public pretentions. So far we have had to do with
Brutus and Cassius as noble Romans committed to a political enterprise.
In this [intimate] scene, the two leaders put off their public characters...
"Brutus, the stoic moralist and man of preconceived ideas, is to unmask.
We are to see him deeply moved by the simplest of human feelings. He is
to quarrel with his friend and make it up under the stress of an emotion
which compels him in the end even to overlook the cause of his
displeasure and bury all unkindness is a cup of wine. Cassius, the
political leader who drove Brutus to the killing of Caesar and would
have killed Antony as well, is to be revealed in a mood which levels him
to the least sophisticated of men, to appear simply as one who loves his
friend, acknowledges his rash humour and cannot drink too much of
Brutus' love.
"The effect of this abrupt descent from the political to the human plane
of experience is poignant in the extreme. . . . It secures for Brutus
and Casius, despite the pitiful ruin of their enterprise and the yet
more pitiful collapse of their integrity of mind and purpose, a sympathy
which illumines all the concluding scenes of the tragedy."
In this scene, writes Palmer: "Brutus reveals himself as a moralist who
shrinks from the sordid expedients of political life but who is
nevertheless driven to claim the advantages derived from them . . . He
lectures Cassius for raising money and delivers a speech expressing high
distaste for the methods by which such money is obtained. He then hotly
complains that Cassius has refused to send him part of the proceeds,
coupling this complaint with a statement that he could never descend so
low as to collect it for himself:
`I did send to you
For certain sums of gold, which you denied me;
For I can raise no money by vile means:
By heaven, I had rather coin my heart,
And drop my blood for drachmas, than to wring
From the hard hands of peasants their vile trash
By any indirection.'
"Brutus is still the political moralist who recoils from the realities
of political leadership. He is likewise, here as always, the gentle
Brutus. He maintains his attitude of conscious rectitude to the last;
but, once tempers are cooled, his natural generosity of mind and his
genuine personal affection for Cassius disarms him completely... The
quarrel ends on both sides in a reconciliation of two friends, the
dearer for having fallen out."
Lynn Brenner
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Joseph Egert <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Thursday, 9 Jul 2009 11:42:45 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: 20.0348 Julius Caesar, 4.3
Comment: Re: SHK 20.0348 Julius Caesar, 4.3
On the Brutus-Cassius spat in JULIUS CAESAR (IV:2), Louis Swilley asks:
"Does Brutus realize his terrible mistake at this point? If it is
interpreted that he does not, doesn't that make him look a bit too
stupid for the dignity of the character?"
Elsewhere, Felix DeVilliers writes:
"When Ophelia is described as the Virgin Mary, she loses her
fascination, she loses herself."
Not only does Ophelia not lose her fascination, she becomes infinitely
more fascinating. It is the density and intricacy of figure and
metaphor, extending to allegory, which makes Shakespeare endlessly
intriguing to scholars and critics alike. In Shakespeare, a cigar is
never just a cigar. Never!
Nor is a knife merely a blade.
To illustrate from JULIUS CAESAR, itself a type of John's APOCALYPSE,
Casca voices disgust at the tearful indulgence shown Caesar after his
falling fit:
"If Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less."
(I:2)
A creative film director would have his Brutus in close-up wince at
these words. Shakespeare alerts us through Antony's conju-ring funeral
speech of the "private griefs" (III.2) behind the conspirators'
professed idealism. In repayment for lusty Caesar's 'stabbing' their
wives and mothers (Servilia?) with his fleshy awl, their metal awls have
pierced new bleeding wombs in Caesar's flesh. The assassins believe they
are made whole by pricking these new holes. He who has bewhored their
womenfolk is himself now turned into the Great Whore of Babylon,
gang-raped unto death. The absorbing question that remains is whether
and to what extent Shakespeare's Brutus is himself conscious of his own
parricidal impulse and Caesarist ambition (that 'evil spirit')?
For more, see:
http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2005/1702.html
Joe Egert
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