Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
Let me tell you two secrets about Julius Caesar:
1. Caesar doesn’t die. I mean, of course he does. He’s stabbed 23 times (33 if you believe Shakespeare’s version). He’s definitely, conclusively dead. Until his ghost appears.
Shakespeare pulls out the ghost trope in four of his tragedies: Macbeth, Richard III, Hamlet, and Julius Caesar. The appearance of each ghost is deftly timed. The ghost clearly signals the unraveling mental state of the main character: Macbeth is on a despicable murderous rampage, Richard III is so guilt ridden that his internal conflict seems to split his soul in two, and Hamlet is the poster child for mental illness. Each of these three bad boys see ghastly apparitions that forewarn of impending doom; however, each of these characters is already devolving into an unalterable hellish miasma.
The appearance of Julius Caesar’s ghost to our honorable man Brutus, however, is different. Brutus has his wits about him. He believes steadfastly that he has acted for the good and glory of Rome: there’s no internal conflict, there’s no mental dissolution. Ergo, when Brutus sees Caesar’s ghost, it’s not a manifestation of a guilty conscience; it’s a real live ghost.
See? Caesar doesn’t fully die. (I mean, he does; he just comes back in verifiable ghost form of his own volition.)
2. The play may seem like a tragedy, but it’s actually a love story. I often challenge my students to identify motifs simply by tallying word frequency. As you can imagine, predictable motifs abound in Julius Caesar. Such words as fault, wrong, constancy, flattery, sickness, blood, death, Roman, honor, nobility are easy targets. But can you guess which word appears more often than any other?
LOVE. Yup, that’s right. The word LOVE surfaces significantly in almost every pivotal scene, far more times than any other words I just listed. In fact, it appears 57 times, conveying love for country, love for friendship, love for honor, love for leader, love for one another.
· “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.”
· “It is not meet you know how Caesar loved you.”
· “You all did love him once, not without cause.”
· “I love the name of honor more than I fear death.”
· “For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel: / Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!”
· “When thou didst hate him worst, thou lovedst him better / Than ever thou lovedst Cassius.”
Take-Away: On the surface, Julius Caesar seems to be a dry political drama with an inevitably predictable ending. JC dies. Got it. However, moral ambiguity is a moveable character in Shakespeare’s version, as is rhetorical manipulation. So, if you’re up for a cerebral understanding of one of the most important historical turning points of Western civilization, then this might be the read for you. It’s deadly.
