Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

As always, Shakespeare's “history” plays are concerned as much with current history as with the historical past,

Civil wars, whether of language or of action, must and do give way to the energies of an external war, a war that is thought of, once again, as a kind of holy war.

Fluellen's chief opponent and polar opposite is Ancient Pistol, with whom he becomes embroiled in a comic controversy in act 5. It is noteworthy that Henry V, a play that centers on

war and soldiery, concludes with two extended comic scenes. In 1 Henry IV comedy turned to history; here history turns to comedy, and indeed to the promise of a marriage between the King of England and the Princess of France.

Valor, and not elaborate language or high birth, is now the mark of a gentleman—and of an English soldier.

The Pistols of this world cannot be killed in battle because they never go to battle. They represent the irreducible mischief in humankind,

This may be one of the reasons for the presence of the rather comic wooing scene between the French Princess and the English King. Charming in itself, it also completes and concludes the theme of language and languages that has been present throughout all these history plays.

King Harry's speeches in the wooing scene are prose, a form he has used, for three plays, on the battlefield or

in the tavern but never, until now, at court. His declaration of love is couched, deliberately and significantly, in plain language. He is a “plain king,” a “fellow of plain and uncoined constancy,” who speaks to her “plain soldier” (5.2.124, 149, 146).

And yet that hope is deliberately undercut by the play's Epilogue, which immediately follows the betrothal scene. The Epilogue reminds the audience with brutal directness that after

Henry V came his son Henry VI, and that the child king Henry VI had so many conflicting advisers that everything gained by his father's war and marriage was swiftly lost.

The play the audience has been watching is, as the prologues have insisted, only an illusion, forged in the working-house of thought. The conventional request for applause (“let this acceptance take”) returns the power to the audience, where it has always been.

a concept of kingship, that is finally only an idea, precariously achieved and too easily lost.

Julius ...

Play 20

OR MANY YEARS Julius Caesar was regularly taught in American high schools, often as the first play of Shakespeare assigned. One reason for this may have been the concurrent study of Latin.

Another plausible reason for its favor among educators was that Julius Caesar is one of the few Shakespeare plays that contains no sex, not a single bawdy quibble. An equal and opposite relation to adolescent sexuality leads high school teachers today to assign Romeo and Juliet instead.

a play concerned, as Caesar is, with political rivalry, martial competition, and the disillusionment of ideals.

the nature of kingship, the relationship of the public to the private self, the limits of reason, and the necessity of coming to terms with the irrational—the

To Shakespeare's original audiences, a play about ancient Rome or ancient Troy was not an escapist document about a faraway world,

but something very like the opposite: a powerful lesson in modern—that is to say, current, sixteenth century—ethics and statecraft.

Plutarch's Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, in the 1579 translation of Sir Thomas North, had an enormous influence on Shakespeare's plays and on the ways Elizabethans looked at their own history as it unfolded.

the comparative method also implied the possibility of adding a third figure, one from the present day. Caesar, like Queen Elizabeth and her father, Henry VIII, was a monumental monarch, both loved and feared.

“Brutus, with himself at war” (1.2.48). Brutus is torn by his own conflicting feelings, between his private friendship with Caesar and

his public dislike of kingship and dictatorship—of any absolute rule that approaches the condition of godhead.

The presence of a modern clock in Caesar's Rome abruptly reminds the audience of the double time period in which the play is set. Not only

a history of the classical past, it is also a story of the present day. The supposed anachronism of the striking clock abruptly jars the audience from any complacency it may be feeling about the difference between “then” and “now.”

Brutus's inner struggle occupies the moral center of the drama, and it is Brutus who names himself “poor Brutus, with himself at war.”

Brutus suffers from the Shakespearean malady of sleeplessness, an index of moral turmoil and guilt. Like Macbeth, and indeed like Hamlet, he hesitates on the brink of a cataclysmic action:

Once again, psychomachia, the struggle for control of a soul, is figured here in an image of civil war.

Brutus is consistently, indeed insistently, revealed as a man whose reason, whose trust in the power of order and discourse in the state, was his downfall.

His sense of honor—the word that above all typifies him to the time of his death, and beyond—is unrealistic, in that it is not an accurate gauge of the real world.

But it is easier in this play's world to die by honor than to live by it, despite Mark Antony's mocking refrain in his funeral oration for Caesar, “Brutus is an honourable man.”

Julius Caesar is more than this play's murdered king. Julius Caesar is also the topic, and the conundrum, of this play—who or what is “Julius Caesar”? This is the question, and the problem, that much of the play and many of its characters seek to answer.

(We might notice, here again, the iteration of “honourable”/”dishonourable,” so key a theme for this play.)

“Always I am Caesar;” “this ear is deaf.” The difference between bodily infirmity and mythic fame is also a difference in time and timelessness—always I am Caesar. And this is a difference that Brutus will signally fail to take into account when he joins the conspiracy.

This rejection of the personal, this refusal to acknowledge a private, flesh-and-blood self with private needs, is Caesar's downfall.

The play is full of dreams, omens, portents, superstitions, and prophecies, all elements of the powerful irrational.

In Julius Caesar such signs are either dangerously disregarded, as Caesar disregards the Soothsayer's warning, or else they are misconstrued, misinterpreted.

Indeed, it is a strange-disposèd time; But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.

Julius Caesar 1.3.33–35

“Alas, thou hast misconstrued everything” is in a way a fitting epigraph for this entire play.

Signs in Shakespeare's plays are morally neutral. They exist to be interpreted.

Caesar could heed Calpurnia's dream, and save himself. But this would be to show the very self-knowledge, the very awareness of his own human frailty, that he so conspicuously lacks.

That “men may construe things after their fashion” is a statement closely allied to Cassius's often quoted but frequently misunderstood observation, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings” (1.2.141–142).

The fault in Brutus is that he convinces himself that his own sense of honor and reason, his private code, can be used to gov...

Brutus is trying to divide the indivisible, to make murder into something holy. Ceremony in this case is a way of avoiding reality, of sanctifying disorder. When after the murder Antony asks for “reasons” why Caesar had to be killed, Brutus assures him that there are plenty, “[o]r else were this a savage spectacle” (3.1.225)—as if his good reasons made the death of Caesar less savage.

ceremony is the shield behind which Brutus hides from

himself the unsupportable truth, that what he is doing is murdering his friend.

In fact, as Cassius and Brutus are soon to learn, they have killed the wrong Caesar. They have killed the private man, the one of flesh and blood. But the public man, the myth, lives on, after his death, and after theirs, and long after Shakespeare's.

this removal of strong rule, the assassination of the rightful ruler, inevitably leads to chaos. We have seen this in Shakespeare's English history plays, where a fear of usurpation and regicide and a distrust of the common people usher in years, even decades, of instability.