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Julius Caesar, Act 3, November 13
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Candy
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Oct 30, 2017 01:56PM
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3.1.99(roughly):Brutus:
Fates, we will know your pleasures:
That we shall die we know, tis but the time
And drawing days out, that men stand upon.
Casca:
Why he that cuts off twenty years of life,
Cuts off so many years of fearing death.
So says a couple of the bookish conspirators, the one who struck first and Brutus, who dominates the play. This act III with 3 scenes shows conspirators closing in for the kill of Caesar and Anthony Mourning; great contrasting speeches that stir up the commons/plebeians either way, but the"closing arguments" carry the the day; and what happens when the plebes get stirred up by a demagogue-like hate speech, killing a poet just for having the same name as one of the conspirators.
Lots of great topics of discussion open in these three scenes!
Shakespear hated when the commons took the law into their own hands, and shows over and over again in his plays how mobs = terrorism.
Look at the two speeches from Brutus and Mark Anthony. Brutus' is so ice cold, in prose, giving nothing of hope to the people, only the negation of the concept, Tyranny. Anthony in dramatic and scheming verse works Crowd so expertly, in contrast.
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I'll read this in a bit...I haven't made it to Act 3 yet. So I am not lurking...and I will respond in time.
:)
Hi, Paul. You say 'Shakespear hated when the commons took the law into their own hands, and shows over and over again in his plays how mobs = terrorism.' A very common view, and endlessly repeated by nobles in the plays, but not justified. It's when the mob is stirred up by the aristocrats (as here) that they = terrorism. Same with the Jack Cade episode in Henry VI - Cade is set up by the Duke of York. It would have been difficult for S to portray virtuous rebellion without being censored, or worse, but he does in the late play Coriolanus. There the rebellious lower orders are rational, deliberate together - and win. As for the nobles themselves, they are constantly making wars, even against their own populations (like Coriolanus) but somehow that's not 'terrorism'...
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ANTONY.
O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well.--
I know not, gentlemen, what you intend,
Who else must be let blood, who else is rank:
If I myself, there is no hour so fit
As Caesar's death-hour, nor no instrument
Of half that worth as those your swords, made rich
With the most noble blood of all this world.
I do beseech ye, if you bear me hard,
Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and smoke,
Fulfill your pleasure. Live a thousand years,
I shall not find myself so apt to die:
No place will please me so, no means of death,
As here by Caesar, and by you cut off,
The choice and master spirits of this age.
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Here are the two instances when enfranchisement is used in Act 3....by Cassius. Add this word to the contemporary feel of suburban and self-injury. Shakespeare continues to be so relevant and timeless.
Pardon, Caesar; Caesar, pardon:
As low as to thy foot doth Cassius fall,
To beg enfranchisement for Publius Cimber.
Cassius
Some to the common pulpits, and cry out
'Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!'
Antony has to be alive for Caesar's funeral oration. "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!"
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Is the one affair and Cleopatra happening before this time frame? Like part way through?
I think the time frame goes like this: Antony defeats Brutus and the conspirators on the basis that Caesar will be replaced by a triumvirate - himself, Octavius Caesar and Lepidus - see scene IV.i Here the incipient triumvirate counterplot against the plotters, nastily deciding who will be executed in order to consolidate their power, irrespective of whether or not they were complicit in Caesar's murder. Then Lepidus goes out, and immediately Antony downgrades him: 'This is a slight unmeritable man / fit to be sent on errands' etc. Antony and Octavius Caesar then defeat Brutus and Cassius and so end up as rulers of Rome, with Antony seeming to be the more powerful. (Lepidus fades out of the picture). That's the situation in which Antony and Cleopatra begins. But now Antony has fallen for Cleo, largely leaving Rome in the hands of Octavius Caesar (now referred to simply as Caesar - but of course this is not Julius Caesar). The result is that after various to-ing and fro-ing between Egypt and Rome, Octavius Caesar defeats Antony and becomes sole dictator of Rome - exactly the result that Brutus and the original conspirators were trying to prevent. So politically the two plays join up as a story of the defeat of Roman democracy in two stages. But in terms of character the Antony of Antony and Cleopatra, who is open hearted, generous and forgiving, as well as totally besotted, is hard to reconcile with the Antony of Julius Ceasar, who is devious and vindictive. So Shakespeare may have lost interest in the continuity during the 7 years between writing JC and A&C and just felt like writing a different sort of play,
I should have added Octavius Caesar was Julius Caesar's great nephew, whom he adopted as his son and heir as he had no son of his own. Just to confuse matters, when Octavius succeeded his great uncle he took the name Julius Caesar Octavianus. But it wasn't a foregone conclusion that he alone would rule Rome. He had to defeat Antony first. By so doing he became the first Roman emperor.
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I also wonder...if the vindictive and devious Antony....changed because of love. That might not be so hard to believe? Ad how about for those people who see Antony in JC...and then 7 years later...are like "What happened to this jerk?" LOL
That's an interesting idea, Candy, about Antony changing because of love. If we get to read A&C some time we ought to look for any clues that Shakespeare may have put in about such a change. I'm not sure how long the gap is supposed to be in historical time. It also makes me wonder what may have happened to Shakespeare in those seven years. it was 1599-1606. In 1601 the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's original patron, was second in command of the doomed Essex rebellion against Queen Elizabeth and ended up in the Tower of London. In 1603 the Queen died and King James took over. Can't see any direct connections, but these were very turbulent times.
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I don't know how relevant to Shakespeare this is, but it might be interesting to remember that Julius Caesar also had an affair with Cleopatra just a few years before the events of this play. I don't think Shakespeare mentions the affair at all, but it was dramatized by George Bernard Shaw in Caesar and Cleopatra.There is a lot of repetition in the names of these Romans — I was at first confusing Decius Brutus with Marcus Brutus.
I think there is some significance in that fact that Brutus's full name is Marcus Junius Brutus, and he was a direct descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus, who rebelled against the Tarquinius, the last king of Rome, and founded the Roman Republic. His descendant and namesake coincidentally rebelled against another potential king at the end of the era of the Republic. The story of Tarquinius and Lucretia is told in Shakespeare's poem "The Rape of Lucrece," and he also refers to the story frequently in his plays.
The relations of these Romans also sometimes seems as complex as those of characters in a soap opera. Not only did Cleopatra have affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony (and have a child by Caesar), Brutus's mother had an affair with Julius Caesar and there was a rumor that Brutus might even be Caesar's illegitimate son. (In some versions of the assassination his last words are "You too, my son?") Brutus's mother was also the half-sister of Cato, who was the father of Portia, Brutus's second wife. Brutus and his wife were therefore first cousins.
P.S.: Speaking of confusing names, I'm sure Cinna the Poet was wishing his parents had gone for something more original when they named him!
