A Year of Shakespeare

Julius Caesar, Act V: Scenes 1-5

The finale was not so much a question of what but how.  How would Brutus meet his end?  And would Cassius die along with him?  How might revenge be exacted?  Would Caesar’s ghost play a part?

As we left the story in Act IV, Cassius and Brutus were riding out to meet Antony and Octavius on the field of battle.  Caesar’s ghost had appeared before Brutus — surely not a good sign for him.

In the first scene of Act V, Antony seems surprised that his opponents are willing to face him out in the open.  He and Octavius have an odd quarrel about how to proceed in light of this news; a small detail, perhaps, but telling.

Once Caesar’s central authority is gone, neither side has the benefit of undivided leadership.  Octavius may be much younger than Antony, but he does not back down from stating his opinion or asserting what little authority he has.  This might be seen as foreshadowing the treacherous road ahead for Rome.

Brutus and Cassius meet up with Antony and Octavius at the 50-yard line for the opening coin toss.  It’s clear that whatever issues Antony and Octavius have pale in comparison to the dissension brewing between the conspirators.  When Antony calls them flatterers, Cassius mocks Brutus by saying they wouldn’t be thought of this way had he ruled instead.  It seems all but a foregone conclusion that the wheels are about to come off the cart.

Cassius then reveals to an aid that today is his birthday, and that he’s not enthusiastic about his side’s decision to put all their eggs into one basket.  He confirms his defeatism in a discussion with Brutus in which he says, “If we do lose this battle, then is this the very last time we shall speak together.”  Not exactly leading with confidence.

I ought to be prepared, then, when Cassius commits suicide — not by his own hand, mind, but by asking Pindarus to do the deed for him by stabbing him with a sword that was used to slay Caesar.  This indirect and ignoble death is fitting, as is the norm in most of Shakespeare.  Especially so, in light of how Cassius bases his decision on misinformation from Pindarus, a false report of Titinius’ capture.

It turns out that, in fact, while Cassius’s men had been surrounded and lost the first engagement with Antony, Brutus likewise triumphed over Octavius and the battle brought back to even.  Or it might have been, had Cassius not lost his nerve.

With Cassius gone, it isn’t long before Brutus fails in an attempt to rally the troops, likewise ending his own life by committing suicide by sword.  It’s all rather gruesome and much less than heroic, but just as you might expect based on the morality of the preceding actions.  For while the conspirators considered themselves heroes, they died as cowards… leaving Rome in shambles while doing so.

I find the final discourse between Antony and Octavius disturbing, however.  It could be because I’ve misread (and not deliberately) the whole play leading up to this.  But when Antony says, “This was the noblest Roman of them all,” I find myself utterly confused.  Brutus might have thought himself thus.  But where is the evidence that Antony held him in such high regard after the murder?

Antony follows: “All the conspirators save only he did that they did in envy of great Caesar.  He only in a general honest thought and common good to all made one of them.  His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed up in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world ‘This was a man.'”

To which Octavius replies: “According to his virtue let us use him, with all respect and rites of burial.”

This being Shakespeare, I don’t know how literally to take these lines; do I have a perspective that Antony and Octavius lack?  Am I supposed to understand that they don’t see Brutus for what he was — or have I got it wrong, and Brutus really was just a dupe who got pulled into treachery that was way over his head?

I know that greater minds have answered these questions, and that answers are out there in secondary sources.  But I’d rather dive into the sequel based on my own limited understanding and see where it goes.  I suspect that Antony will turn out to be far less the leader that Antony was… and that the clues for this have been planted in the way he wanted to alter the will, how he could not command submission from Octavius, and how both of them failed to comprehend the extent of the frustrations among certain factions leading up to Caesar’s assassination.

I don’t think they really “got” Brutus.  And that this is a point that Shakespeare wants to underscore.  Based in no small part on this insinuation (and making it that much worse for me if I interpret it incorrectly), I suspect that things are about to get a lot worse for Rome before they get better — if indeed, it’s not already all downhill from here.

Julius Caesar, Act IV: Scenes 1-2

I didn’t see this coming.

And to be honest, I’m not buying the plot twist.  It feels too glommed-on, too out of left field, too Deus ex machina — too unlike Shakespeare to throw in an appearance by Caesar’s departed spirit at the end of Act IV to make me take it seriously…yet.

What it does is make a great made-for-TV cliffhanger, a prelude to a string of Bounty paper towel and purple pill commercials that you’ll be wanting to Tivo through if you have the power.  But I’ll have to backtrack a bit if this is to make any sense.

Act IV is on the short side, comprising only two scenes in the steady march for payback after the conspirators murdered Caesar on the Senate floor in Act III.  I think Shakespeare intuitively recognized that he had a problem on his hands once his leading character left the stage… for Brutus and his colleagues are not compelling enough to hold our interest once their nefarious deed is done.

The issue of Antony as successor — or rather the shaky triumvirate of Antony, Octavius and Lepidus, who clearly plays the third wheel in the trio –will be taken up in the sequel.  While Antony certainly proved himself more than riveting in the way he turned the rabble back on the conspirators in the previous act, the jury’s still out once the dust has settled.

In fact, therein lies the story problem for Shakespeare, and perhaps the ultimate reason why he resorted to the ghost fallback maneuver to spice things up a bit.

Not that the story really needs it, honestly.  For the two scenes in this act are broken up (roughly) as follows:

SCENE ONE: Knowing he has Brutus and Cassius on the run, Antony attempts to consolidate the counter-rebellion by formally joining forces with the younger Octavius.  Together they will surely kick some ass [not to be confused with Kick-Ass], exact what revenge still needs exacting, and restore what order can be glued back again.

I am struck, however — I must have read the lines about twenty times, disbelieving the words that come out of Antony’s mouth — when Antony tells Lepidus to go to Caesar’s house to fetch the will so they can amend it for their personal gain.  Am I reading this right?  Is that really what he’s saying? Does this mean that Antony opposes the generosity Caesar showed the plebes in his dying wishes?  Or is it personal greed he’s showing here — what am I missing????

I was sorely tempted to turn to outside sources to make sense of this but refrained.  I’d like to think that this is just the sort of character spicing that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare.  Antony is not some cowboy riding in on his white horse.

SCENE TWO: This turns out to be one of the more intriguing scenes of the entire play.  In it, Brutus and Cassius are at odds with one another, their rebellion fraying into chaos and confusion.  It’s just the sort of situation you would expect after a strong, consolidating leader like Caesar has been rubbed out.

Throughout their dialogue, Brutus and Cassius dance a fine line between pissing contest and appeasement for the good of whatever it is they were trying to usher in with the assassination.  But as I believe I mentioned earlier, the impression they give me is that they didn’t think this thing through properly — not quite.

Here we find Brutus feebly attempting to rule in Caesar’s glaringabsence with a naive moral authority he can’t vindicate based on his own waffling actions.  So when he tries to nail Cassius for corruption — taking bribes, in fact — Cassius seems to have every right in calling him on the bluff.

Just what the hell does Brutus think he’s doing?  If Brutus’s actions seem strange, the stress he is working under goes a long way toward explaining his behavior.  He confesses as much to Cassius, relaying the news that his wife Portia is dead.  It all seems deeply metaphysical to me… karma being the bitch that it is.

Cassius carries himself like a man with an albatross around his own neck.  Of all the conspirators, he has seemed from the beginning to be the most clearheaded (if not outright nefarious) character to me.  And now he’s got Brutus riding his ass on some weird moral high high ground when their attentions really need to be directed at Antony and Octavius if they are to have any chance at staying alive.  Which they don’t.  At least not much.  And then, on top of all this, the ghost of Caesar comes strolling in…

I don’t know what ultimate purpose the ghost’s appearance serves, what it adds that we don’t have going already.  Time has become muddled.  Why the frenzied mob didn’t take Brutus and Cassius out in the act prior is a mystery.

But then I suppose that wouldn’t be the tale that Shakespeare wanted to tell.  While it was fine to lynch a few of the buddy characters, he wanted something else for the core bad guys.  I guess I won’t really know how (or if)  this will pay off till the climax.

As noted above, he trouble with these sorts of stories is that a lot of the air goes out when your compelling protagonist leaves the stage early.  Even Shakespeare has to dig deep to keep the audience from making a 7th-inning getaway to beat the rush on the 405.

Maybe — just maybe —  that’s the real reason why he found it necessary to bring Caesar back… even (especially?) in the form of a ghost.

I recently watched the visual splendor that is The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.  Visual, yes, but a storytelling trainwreck for a garden variety of reasons, the most notable of which in my mind is that Terry Gilliam refuses to establish a set of rules and abide by them.  If a chess player may move any piece like the queen whenever he chooses to, the game of chess becomes impossible.

The brilliance of Antony’s speech is that he has bound himself to a set of strict rules he adheres to while still accomplishing his aims.  He promises Brutus that he will only speak well of Caesar and say nothing against the conspirators.  And yet, Antony somehow manages to turn the crowd to exact revenge while keeping within the constraints of his promise.

Only a mind as brilliant as Shakespeare could pull that off. Don’t believe me?  Here, watch and be amazed for yourself:

Julius Caesar, Act III: Scenes 1-3

One of these days, I want to get around to analyzing Shakespeare’s consistent use of five acts rather than the usual three as advocated by no less than Aristotle.

Beginning-Middle-End… that’s how we’re taught to think, those of us who dwell in story on stage or screen.  The idea applies to all stories, though, or any discreet action in space and time.  As Aristotle so succinctly puts it:

• The beginning is a point that does not necessarily follow from anything else, which naturally has consequences following from it.

• The end is a point that naturally follows from preceding events but does not have any necessary consequences following it.

• The middle is a point that is naturally connected both to events before and after it.

And yet Shakespeare chose to divide his plays into five acts instead of three.  I want to know why, other than maybe convention, this became his regular practice and how it affects the Aristotelian parsing.

I hope that doesn’t seem too arcane for anybody stumbling upon this blog.  For most readers of Shakespeare, it might appear overly dry or technical or beside the point to study the architecture undergirding the story; but for those interested as much in the how as the what and the why, perhaps it will prove worthwhile.

This is an odd way of introducing one of the most surprising and powerful acts in all of Shakespeare.  But then — I’ve been out of practice for various reasons that nobody wants to hear.  It will take me awhile to get up to speed again.  Maybe my subconscious mind held off on an amazing launch point the way Hemingway put down his work when it got hottest; that way, he said, he would always be sure he could start back up again.

The third act of Julius Caesar is wicked and shocking, both because of one particular speech by Mark Antony and his reason for doing so.  For it is within this act that Caesar is murdered by the conspirators!  Unlike many of his other plays, Shakespeare does not withhold what would normally be the climax till the end (as in Hamlet, for example).  Instead it happens now, at the midpoint, telling me that what he really wants to drive home is the aftermath (obviously) — but also how shallow and subject to manipulation the masses seem to be.

I thought for sure this assassination would be strung out, that the Ides of March would last until just before the final curtain.  But like the movie Psycho, in which Hitchcock pulls the rug out from the audience conditioned to expect the genre norm, Julius Caesar takes our breath away by Shakespeare’s masterful control of his medium.  I felt my heart catch in my throat as the conspirators prostrate themselves at Caesar’s feet only to storm him and flay him in the Senate.  Shakespeare takes pains to point out that Brutus was the last to strike — the man upon whom history has bestowed the bulk of the blame.

What strikes me particularly hard are Antony’s actions immediately following.  There’s a lull here, a pause, an ellipse filled with tension: will anarchy break loose?  Revenge?  Will the conspirators be treated as liberators or villains?  Will civil war be launched?  Or will the treachery continue?  Or might peace and prosperity be the unlikely result after all?

But it is here, in Act III that Mark Antony becomes an utterly riveting character in Shakespeare’s pantheon.  His actions are deceptive and clever as he has to dance a thin wire to ensure his own survival and see that justice is served.  Therefore he placates Brutus even as he riles the plebeians, so fickle that they shift like a field of wheat in the wind.  One minute, Brutus is their hero and liberator…and the next, it’s off with the conspirators’ heads!

Cassius knows better than to allow Antony the chance to speak at Caesar’s funeral.  But Brutus is too cocksure of himself after being pumped up by all the earlier flattery.  He deigns to a tolerance and good-heartedness that he thinks he’s earned by doing the people a favor they should all be thankful for.  But clearly he hasn’t thought any of this through.  None of the conspirators has, actually.  Without getting too political, the easy metaphor strikes me that many of the conspirators thought they would be greeted as “liberators.”

And that’s what is so funny/striking/profound/notable about this read so far.  When I was in college wrapping up some unfinished undergraduate work at UCLA, I mistakenly took a class that included Shakespeare, only to discover that he is apparently reviled by many contemporary, revisionist scholars.  I listened in shock as the greatest playwright who ever lived got branded as a misogynist and many other horrific things I’d rather not repeat here.

There is an odd combination of elitism and democracy in Shakespeare.  One minute, he’s making Comedy Central crotch jokes and the next, he’s flaying the talk-radio herd for being so absurdly malleable.  It makes me wonder if that’s all just part of the universe that is Shakespeare, or is that part of the authorial mystery we’ll never really know for sure?

Yes, I told you already, I’m well aware what a hash I’ve made of this entry.  But you have to make a start (again) somehow.

Break eggs, I say, and write on.  I’m baaaaaa-aaaaaack.

…Julius Caesar is next!