My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V

Julius Caesar

If King John should have been called “Three Mothers and One Illegitimate Man,” then Julius Caesar should be called “Brutus”. Caesar is assassinated at the halfway mark, and except for his Ghost, we never see him again. Brutus is the center of the play, morally and emotionally. He is the least “clear” of the characters, the one most privately tormented by his actions, the one with an interior life. He has to be convinced to join the conspiracy, and Cassius plays him like a violin – “seduces” him, which Cassius does deliberately, using the word. Brutus is not easily flattered – he’s man of moral upstanding, not really given to outward displays of emotion (see his botched oratory at Caesar’s funeral), but Cassius’ arguments do flatter him. Cassius’ tactic is, at first, “You are so wonderful, I wish you could see yourself the way others see you.” This would be difficult for most people to resist. The first two acts of the play involve the seduction of Brutus.

Brutus lives by a code. He has specific ideas about how the world should work. People like this, unfortunately, are often more susceptible to whispering seduction than those who are independent loosey-goosey. People don’t join cults. They join groups who share their strong beliefs about how the world should work. Brutus believes in abstract concepts like honor. He turns himself inside out to justify the murder of Caesar, he says he cares more about Rome than he cares about Caesar. He totally identifies himself with Rome. We can see what happens when someone totally identifies themselves – their whole world and persona – with a political cause or political group.

We know things are going wrong when Brutus starts referring to himself in the third person, like Caesar did. Brutus has been all “I” “I” “I”, and confidently so, but after Caesar’s death the third person creeps in. In order for Brutus to be “in politics”, he needs to kill the part of himself who knows who he is. His wife Portia feels this too. He has shut her out. This is one of the few good marriages in Shakespeare’s plays. You feel the love they have for each other. Brutus’ tenderness towards Lucius – his child servant – is also truly touching.

Julius Caesar is relatively short, compared to Shakespeare’s other works, and the language is noticeably different than anything in any other of his plays. There are almost whole entire scenes where the language is monosyllabic. It’s striking! It sounds weird and “other”. Perhaps this was Shakespeare’s idea of how ancient Romans spoke, and maybe they did speak like that, who knows … but the overall effect is very strange in a way that serves the play. The language is appropriate for blunt feelings and actions, and also a language where interiority has no place – or, at least, the language is not built to express ambivalence. Brutus murmurs his interiority late at night to himself, and Antony the extrovert blasts out his feelings during HIS funeral oration, in marked contrast to Brutus’ abstract rhetorical speech. In Antony’s speech, something else – something informal, something primal – – is allowed to speak.

You could say that in Antony’s speech, he is consciously playing the crowd, manipulating them: he knows they are fickle and easily swayed (he’s right: no matter who’s screaming at the podium, they scream back in agreement). Antony is also furious at what has been done, and is already plotting his revenge. Antony goes out there, knowing what he wants to accomplish, but his words are not just crowd manipulation. Brutus and the conspirators don’t stand a chance against Antony’s powerful eloquence.

When you watch Marlon Brando do the speech in the 1953 film … you see the real feeling powering those manipulative brilliant words. By the end of the speech, Brando is drenched in sweat – real sweat, you watch it appear on his face in real time, and he’s clearly on the verge of losing his voice. Brando uses the repetition built in – all of those “Brutus is an honorable man” – each time he hits them, they’re different, the ditch of the speech gets larger and larger. He’s using the words to do what he wants them to do, while pouring in complexity and real feeling. The whole “Marlon Brando mumbled” thing is stupid. No, he didn’t. He didn’t mumble in Streetcar. He doesn’t mumble here, either. I also have to point out what Brando does with the penultimate line: “when comes such another?” His voices rises, and he elongates the vowels into a scream: “when comes such anOOOOTHEEER”. Goosebumps.

The speech is all cut up in pieces on YouTube – the whole thing has to be about 15 minutes long:

Surrounded by classically trained heavy-hitters like James Mason and John Gielgud – who are both excellent and so fun to watch – Brando strolls in with slicked-down hair, a toga and sandals, and he seems like … he actually LIVES there. He shocked everyone at the time, and the hoity-toits were like, “This is an OUTRAGE.” He worked hard. He listened to tapes of Shakespearean actors saying the speech, he paid close attention to Gielgud, whose prosody/pantameter was immaculate, who also had played Mark Antony onstage. He talked to Gielgud, he asked for advice. I found this absolutely charming little conversation between Dick Cavett and John Gielgud about Brando in Julius Caesar:

I am not an expert at ALL, but one of the things about Shakespeare which takes getting used to is that the thought is IN the line. I think Olivier said that? I can’t remember. George Bernard Shaw had a lengthy correspondence with celebrated actress Ellen Terry, and in a discussion about Shakespeare, Shaw wrote: “Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn’t time for it.” The thought is in the line, follow the punctuation, stay on beat, and there’s the thought. This isn’t the case with modern plays. With other scripts, you need your backstory and subtext. A well-placed pause can be very eloquent, but rarely in Shakespeare.

There is such a thing as talent. I won’t discount it. Brando just knew “how to work” – he had technique, he had been on Broadway, he knew. He was not precious with himself, he got Gielgud on tape saying the speech so he could hear how a legend would do it. Technique means you do what’s necessary to sneak your way in to a role or a theatrical context and you have lots of tools at your disposal, not just one or two tools.

Watching John Gielgud or Richard Burton or Lawrence Olivier “do” Shakespeare shows how you don’t really need to ADD much. What you need is there on the page. I am sorry I wasn’t alive to ever see Ralph Richardsom in action – his Falstaff was legendary – although his performances in The Heiress and Long Day’s Journey Into Night provide more than enough evidence of his uncanny vocal power. And with him, it might have been a trick, it might not have been, it really doesn’t matter: the voice went straight to his soul.

Manipulating the voice to bring out the text is a skill, especially since the language is amazingly fast! If you’re used to doing modern plays and suddenly you’re doing Shakespeare, you’re going to be tossed around in a whirlwind. You don’t have time to “set up” an emotional moment in between lines. You can’t keep up. “Listening and talking” takes on a whole different meaning in these plays. “Listening talking” is built into the language already. Don’t slow shit down. Like Shaw said, “There simply isn’t time for it.”

All of this is to say: in the “friends, Romans, countrymen” speech, Brando’s emotion is IN the line. One could never look at the performance and say “He’s singing the language”, but he is doing what the language demands, and he is doing it without complicating it. Emotion/thought is in the line. Also, what he’s doing is very CLEAN, and yet he sacrifices none of the emotion required.

Antony takes up less space in the narrative than Brutus and Cassius. They all take up more space than Caesar does. Antony exits the narrative mostly after his oration until he roars back at the end. Interesting what is missing here: there’s a lot of reference to how much Caesar loved Brutus. Brutus was Caesar’s “angel”. But except for a small moment in the opening, we barely them together. This seemingly central relationship does not exist in the text. We just have to take everyone’s word for it!

Cassius is not exactly Iago in his manipulations because there’s understandable motivation behind Cassius’ behavior, he knows he needs Brutus to “legitimize” the assassination. He must soften Brutus up. Still, there is a Iago-like sense of Cassius corrupting the pure. Brutus is too naive be in politics, probably. Politics are dirty. Brutus is Jimmy Carter. Brutus treats Antony with generosity, giving Antony permission to speak at Caesar’s funeral. Cassius balks, pulling him aside to say “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” And – as we have just discussed – it was NOT a good idea.

Hamlet is coming down the pike for Shakespeare, and Brutus – insomniac suicidal Brutus – does feel like an early version of Hamlet, but there are also elements of Macbeth/Lady Macbeth in there, the guilt, the sleeplessness – and the other spooky things Shakespeare is getting more comfortable exploring: ghosts, madness, visions. Julius Caesar is one of the most supernatural of Shakespeare’s plays thus far, and until we get to The Tempest. The Soothsayer’s warning is just the tip of the iceberg. Brutus’ wife Portia feels the dread to a prescient degree. She knows something isn’t right. Calpurnia has prophetic dreams, and begs Caesar not to go the Senate that day. (The women, of course, have intuition the men lack). Nature itself has gone berserk: Thunderstorms. Lightning. A lion is seen in the Capitol. An owl is seen during the day. Comets whizz through the sky. (Shakespeare uses “whizz”, which I assumed was a very modern word but … I guess it’s not!)

The play lays out such a stark conscious difference between day and night. There’s a clock striking one, two, three … never mind the anachronism. We are marching towards the Ides of March. When it’s night, you feel the darkness, the shadows, the comets whizzing by above. The first three acts take place in a 24-hour period, and with each scene darkness descends even further. The scene where the conspirators show up at Brutus’ house at 2 o’clock in the morning is one of the most chilling scenes in Shakespeare. They’re hiding their faces “even in darkness”, clustered at Brutus’ door.

In grad school, I took a “classics” class with Doug Moston, whom I paid tribute to in my first year of this here blog. GREAT class. Moston’s dad was Murray Moston (the guy who got his hand blown off in Taxi Driver, the subway token-taker in After Hours), and Moston didn’t even graduate high school, I don’t think, but he was a deeply learned guy and a GREAT teacher. He was the one who organized publication of Shakespeare’s first folio in facsimile (I still have my copy). He taught us how to read it, he made us play scenes FROM it, he handed out rolls of paper (“roles”) with only YOUR lines on it and had us play from that, because that’s how it used to be done. He taught us about how Shakespeare put everything in the language because there weren’t elaborate stage directions. The most elaborate he got was “Exeunt, pursued by a bear” – perhaps the greatest single stage direction in theatrical history.

So, to use an obvious example, if the scene takes place at night, then the characters will talk about how it’s night. This is where “O I am slain” comes from. It’s a clue to the actor about what is happening, and it’s all in the lines people say. One exercise I won’t forget: Doug handed out sides, randomly assigned us each a part, and had us read it out loud. Don’t worry about acting it, just read. The scene was Act II, scene i, of Julius Caesar, the conspiracy scene. He had us read this:

CASSIUS:
This is Trebonius.

BRUTUS:
He is welcome hither.

CASSIUS:
This, Decius Brutus.

BRUTUS:
He is welcome too.

CASSIUS:
This, Casca; this, Cinna;
And this, Metellus Cimber.

BRUTUS:
They are all welcome.
What watchful cares do interpose themselves
Betwixt your eyes and night?

Pretty straightforward. Introductions being made. But Doug had us listen carefully, to close our eyes. Because yes, there’s the thing happening in the scene, but he didn’t want us to get distracted by the acting. He wanted us to hear what Shakespeare was doing with the language.

Read it out loud and notice the frequency of the letter “s” – not just in the introductions – although that’s where it’s most obvious – but in the scene overall. Everyone’s name has an “s” in it. When you hear the language (it’s only perceivable when you hear it out loud), disregard the words they’re saying … all you really hear is “ssssssss”. The SOUND of the scene is whispered gossip. “Psst”. “Psst.” “Psst.” “Whissssper …” “Whisssper”. It also sounds like snakes hissing, and we’ve already heard Brutus mention an adder and Caesar compared to a serpent’s egg.

Theatrically, “S” is a sound that carries. If people whisper over the water cooler and don’t want to be overheard, they should stick to vowel sounds: “o” or “e” don’t carry across space, but an “S” will ricochet across a room as though there is a megaphone attached to it. In a theatre, this is even more true.

The ACTION of the scene – what the characters are DOING (conspiring to assassinate someone in a secret meeting) – is IN the language. Ssssssssss … the whisper of conspiracy.

This post is all over the place. I am not a scholar! But this is what comes up for me with Julius Caesar.

Quotes on the play

 

“If Caesar’s cold sobriety marks him as likely to prevail in the struggle for power; it also makes him as far less appealing than the riotous, great-spirited Antony. True nobility in Antony and Cleopatra — nobility not of blood alone but of character — has an affinity with excess.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World

“[Henry V] is a play produced on the heels of Henry IV, practically contemporary with As You Like It and Julius Caesar, and just preceding Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. Judged by these titles, Shakespeare was incapable of producing anything but masterpieces at this time. (Even Merry Wives is one in its inferior kind.)”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“It was natural in the thirties of this century for theatrical directors to make Caesar a Fascist dictator and the conspirators noble liberals. That’s a misreading, I think, but there are things to be said for it.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

Auden is probably talking about Orson Welles’ celebrated stage production in 1937, with an explicitly fascist aesthetic.

“…society incapable of coping with its situation, which is why the noble Brutus is even more at sea in the play than the unscrupulous and brutal Antony. The Roman-Hellenic world failed to evolve a religious pattern that was capable of grasping the world … The Platonic-Aristotelian politics of the good life proved ineffective … and Stoic-Epicurean thought proved incapable of saving the individual. The play presents three political responses to this failure. The crowd-master, the man of destiny, Caesar. The man who temporarily rides the storm, Antony. And Caesar’s real successor … Octavio. Brutus, who keeps himself independent, is the detached and philosophic individual.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“The speeches of Flavius and Marullus are in blank verse. Whatever regular metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, passion, or personal rank, Shakespeare seldom, if ever, neglects it. For even the prose has in the highest and lowest dramatic personage, a Cobbler or a Hamlet, a rhythm so felicitous and so severally appropriate, as to be a virtual metre.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecture on Julius Caesar

“I like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and I would be happier with myself if I did not. [I began] examining the probability that people who do not like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar do not like it because Julius Caesar doesn’t like them — doesn’t like its audience, doesn’t like any of us … the play is hateful, full of hate, or at least contempt — for its audience.””
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“Of this tragedy many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated; but I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting compared with some other of Shakespeare’s plays; his adherence to the real story, and to Roman manners, seems to have impeded the natural vigor of his genius.”
— Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Shakespeare

“…the efficient means by which the play attacks us is … the honey-like poison of perceiving ironies.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“Julius Caesar seems to me to be its author’s cynical experiment with the limits of his power to make puppets of theatre audiences Shakespeare — particularly early in his career — seems to have been fascinated and amazed by the capacity words have to make people forget what matters to them most. The reason I think Shakespeare is fascinated and persistently surprised by the phenomenon is first that he enacts it so often on the stage and second that some of his characters remark upon it.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“Consider the plebians who, only moments after they clamor for Antony to read Caesar’s will (3.2.138-55), have to be reminded of the will by Antony (238). The most striking example of the phenomenon of [people/audiences] being forced to forget what matters to them most is provided by the ‘Third Plebian’, when — after hearing Brutus’s moving assertion of the republican principles that led him to pressure Rome from the threat of monarchy — he endorses Brutus’s position by saying, ‘Let him be Caesar.’ [my italics]”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“1. The pleasure of irony is in noticing, 2. what is noticed is that someone else has not, and 3. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and we, its audience, give repeated attention to such failures — particularly to examples from the mob, the intellectually contemptible Roman mob.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“… we studied Julius Caesar and care to observe — and presumably please ourselves by observing — ironic discrepancies we know very well most people do not observe and that generally go unremarked by even the eagerest annotators. To clarify these last assertions and perhaps to justify them, I will start with a discrepancy that in fact has been often noticed by students of the play: the pointed echo Antony’s last speech in Julius Caesar — his speech over the corpse of Brutus — provides for Antony’s ironic assertions over the corpse of Caesar that ‘Brutus is an honorable man.'”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“The famous line that is not in Julius Caesar — ‘Caesar did never wrong but with just cause,’ the line Ben Jonson may have mocked out of the play, is, in its nearly inaudible illogic, typical of the play.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“I am out to demonstrate that Julius Caesar makes fools of its audiences and makes them exactly the sorts of fools they scorn the mob for being and Brutus for being, and so on. I have noticed that. And I am pleased to have noticed it. Who that is observant for a living wouldn’t be? As I said at the beginning, I like Julius Caesar. Like all members of all audiences to Julius Caesar, I am clever in its presence.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“I don’t think there is any cause-and-effect relationship between the unobserved follies the play leads us to enact as we respond to its passing elements and the perceptible ill will I feel oozing from the play. I do, however, strongly suspect … that … Shakespeare felt malicious pleasure in making us victims of a practical joke so mean that it denies its victims the ultimate dignity of knowing they have been victimized and thus knowing that their attacker considers them worth attacking.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“Whether Shakespeare did or did not set out to make a play that would make its audience make fools of themselves and compound their folly by blindness to it is, of course, a matter of pure and purely biographical speculation and therefore … irrelevant to the play as we perceive it. On the other hand, the unobserved follies we commit during Julius Caesar do occur, and their contribution to the experience of the play is not at all irrelevant to its audience.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“In Henry VI, Clifford and Cade both speak in the same way. In Julius Caesar, the speeches of Brutus and Antony are differentiated, so we can see not only that the crowd is fickle, but also that Brutus doesn’t understand how to move them … while Antony does … because he has to excite their feelings.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Richard III first refuses a crown. Caesar, Casca tells us, twice puts back the crown Antony offers him — reluctantly though, he wants it a bit. Henry V and Antony assume a bluntness of manner … President Roosevelt used his smile and cigarette holder to show his disinterest, Churchill both uses gestures and keeps his hands in his pockets … A good leader understands that emotion precedes effective action.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“There are many instances in which Shakespeare successfully manipulates audiences into unlikely acquiescence. In Julius Caesar, he all but openly points up the likeness between his audience and the onstage audience to the funeral speeches of over Caesar’s corpse, particularly their likeness — our likeness — to Third Plebian, who applauds Brutus’s speech in support of republican government by cheerfully crying, ‘Let him be Caesar.'”
— Stephen Booth, “The Acquiescent Audience” (2012)

“To Shakespeare, melancholy is a symptom … He dissects the cases of two such men, Richard II and Antonio at length, two others, Jaques and Orsino, more briefly, and gives us a glimpse into the melancholy stage of still another, Brutus. Melancholy, he concludes, is a sign that a man is living or trying to live a miscast, partial, or obstructed life … Richard II was a poetic soul attempting to enact a royal role. Antonio was a man made for better things who dedicated his ife to trade … Jacques was a philosophic nature that had wasted itself insensuality, Orsino an artistically gifted person who led an idle life. Brutus stifled his melancholy in action.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“An audience for Julius Caesar … not only gets to feel superior to people in the play and to exercise those feelings extensively but consistently gets to feel contempt for people or thinking or behavior that it has nimbly observed to be inconsistent. Our experience of Julius Caesar is not one in which we merely luxuriate in our superiority as we do during comedies but one in which we feel active scorn for – contempt for – the characters int he play.”
— Stephen Booth, “Liking Julius Caesar, 1987

“[Antony’s] in politics for fun, he craves excitement. He’s not good at slow patient plotting. After he has successfully turned the plebians into a mob, he says indifferently,
Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt.
Octavius or Caesar would never make such a playboy remark.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Cassius is a choleric man — a General Patton. He is passionate, short-tempered, sentimental. He is also politically shrewd. Before the assassination, he sees that Antony will be dangerous to the conspiracy and argues that he should be killed … He is a follower of Epicurus … Epicurean thought was largely determinist and materialistic. His aim was to show that life was rational … Cassius is thus a comic character, because his emotional temperament is quite opposite to his Epicurean philosophy.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Brutus became the victim of insomnia. He stifled his conscience by action and saw no ghost until after the deed. Hamlet saw his before the deed — as Brutus would have if his soul had been stronger.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“Cassius is childishly envious — I swim better!”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Wherever art works appear in Shakespeare — Viola grieving like ‘Patience on a monument’; Octavia as ‘a statue rather than a breather,’ Hermonia as a statue brought to life — they are usually symptoms of some emotional lapse or deficiency, of the callous abandonment of good, usually by blameworthy males.”
— Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

“Brutus and Cassius are Shakespeare’s criticism of the ideal of detachment, an ideal that ends up in an ideal that is ultimately suicidal.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Brutus is related to Hamlet. Hamlet knows he is in despair, but Brutus and other characters in Julius Caesar don’t know.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“Caesar is … an Elizabethan personality; he is one of Shakespeare’s men. While he lasts he reveals himself in his irregularity, not in his symmetry, in picturesqueness rather than in pose.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“[Caesar] falls at the hands of men so completely unlike him that the difference alone might pass as motive for their hatred.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

I love that.

On Brutus’ Act II, scene 1 speech:

“This speech is singular; — at least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare’s motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus’ character to appear. For surely — (this, I mean, is what I say to myself, with my present quantum of insight, only modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults;) surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him — to him, the stern Roman republican, namely, — that he would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar but be a good monarch as he now seems disposed to be!”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecture on Comedy of Errors

“Shakespeare develops Hamlet from a number of earlier characters who are in differing ways proto-Hamlets. Richard II is a child, full of self-pity, who acts theatrically, but who is not, like Hamlet, conscious theatrically, but who is not, like Hamlet, conscious of acting. Falstaff is like Hamlet, an intellectual character and the work of an artist who is becoming aware of his full powers, but he is not conscious of himself in the way Hamlet is. When Falstaff does become conscious of himself, he dies, almost suicidally. Brutus anticipates Hamlet by being, in a sense, his opposite. Hamlet is destroyed by his imagination. Brutus is destroyed by repressing his imagination, like the Stoic he is. He tries to exclude possibility. The nearest to Hamlet is Jaques, who remains unexplained and can take no part in the action.”
— W.H. Auden, 1947 lecture

“They cannot cope with [Antony’s] irony; it is a thing to which solemn men feel superior, and so, since they are not only solemn, but innocent, it is a thrust they cannot parry. It is what destroys them…They never knew the force that is coiled behind [Antony’s] charm. Nor do we know it as we shall in Antony and Cleopatra. But it is here, if only briefly as in the case of the eccentric Caesar.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“When [Brutus] speaks to himself [in II.i.] he knows not what is there; he addresses a strange audience, and fumbles. The soliloquy of which these pitiful phrases are a part is riddled with rank fallacy. The fine man is a coarse thinker, the saint of self-denial has little self left today.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“[Brutus] is not mad, haunted, or inspired, or perplexed … He is simply confused, and the grounds of confusion in a man so negative are not to be known. Neither perhaps are they to be known in a man like Hamlet who uncovers something in himself with every word he utters. Yet we know the man — so well that his very attempts to evade us bring him closer. Hamlet may seldom mean what he says, and Shakespeare will never commit the error of exposing him in thought as he exposes Brutus; but we shall be instantly aware of what he means, at any rate to us, and we shall not fail to measure the disturbance in a too much changed mind.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Julius Caesar is a bridge. That it is a bridge between Shakespeare’s Histories and his Tragedies has often been pointed out … But held too rigidly, this view of it rests on the assumption that being ruled out because of the part that accident plays in its plot, and Julius Caesar because its protagonist is not its titular hero. If the story of Brutus is not tragedy, it is hard to know what it is.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“By way of [Julius Caesar, Shakespeare] shifts the center of his universe. Julius Caesar is his Copernican revolution. There are plenty of premonitions in his earlier works of the coming change: on the last act of Richard III, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream throughout Romeo & Juliet … But it is in Julius Caesar that the poet finally crosses the Rubicon.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“Shakespeare was growing more convinced that we neglect dreams and dreamers at our peril.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“The ghost of Julius Caesar … brief are his three utterances, just sixteen words, in all, he speaks with a new accent … It is the accent, we instantly know, of something that has happened in Shakespeare’s own soul, the secret of human life, it seems to say, lies beyond that life as well as within it. The ghost of Julius Caesar was as truly a part of Brutus or it was of Caesar … That is why a play whose protagonist is one of the two is appropriately named for the other.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“The young Henry V ‘killed’ his old friend when he rejected him … Brutus did precisely the same thing when he assassinated Caesar. The analogy is startling. Sir John and the mighty Julius make strange bedfellows, but their situations are so similar that it is easy to imagine Falstaff saying to himself at the moment he was rejected … ‘Et tu, Henry!” Indeed, that is just what his silence does say.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

On Act IV, scene 3:

“What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Caesar supported, and was supported by, such as these; — and even so Bonaparte in our days. I know no part of Shakespeare that more impresses on me the belilef of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecture on Comedy of Errors

“To say that Shakespeare in this play is asserting that assassination as a political instrument is always, everywhere, for any men, under any circumstance, morally unjustifiable would be asserting too much. Shakespeare is not given to defending or attacking universal propositions.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“If ever Shakespeare left anything beyond doubt it is that this particular man Brutus should never have had anything to do with this particular deed.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“[Portia and Calpurnia] through their dreams and intuitions draw from deeper springs of wisdom than any to which their husbands have access.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“The dawn that might save [Brutus] is as near as the next room, as near as the child, as near as himself, and when he cries ‘Awake!’ he is beseeching the child within to awaken before it is too late. The boy enters, and his master sends him to light a taper in another room, not realizing that the child himself is the best light. From end to end the role of Lucius is permeated with this symbolism.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

Conspiracy scene: on “Here lies the east”:

“If there is a passage in the play that lets us into the secret of what the author thought of this conspiracy, it is this … Shakespeare is forever using such apparent parenthesis for uttering his own convictions under the protection of a metaphor. These men think they are about to bring a new day in Rome when they cannot even agree as to where the geographical ‘east’ is.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

On “Our course will seem too bloody”…

“As in Richard II’s tribute to Peace, or Henry V’s argument with William about the king’s responsibility for the consciences of his soldiers, the imagination of the man tells the truth over his head. He thinks he is saying one thing when actually he is saying just the opposite.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“‘We shall be call’d purgers, not murderers.’ Purgers! the very word that in our day has been used so often to camouflage murder.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“There are few stage directions in his plays more pathetic than these two words: Exit Portia. It might have been: “Exit the Soul of Brutus.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“It was Caesar who stabbed Brutus.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“If the immediate fruits of the assassination as depicted in this play are insufficient, the reader may turn to Antony and Cleopatra to behold its remoter harvest.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

On Brutus’ funeral oration:

“Its symmetrical structure, its balanced sentences, its ordered procedure, its rhetorical questions, its painfully conscious and ornamental style, its hopelessly abstract subject matter, all stamp it as the utterance of a man whose heart is not in his words. It is a dishonest speech.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

On “Let him be Caesar”, said by Third Citizen:

“These four words have often been pointed out as one of the most crushing ironies in the play. They are. These people did not deserve liberty. They were ready for slavery.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

Ouch. But it resonates.

On Antony’s funeral oration:

“… for all its lies [it] is at bottom an honest speech, because Antony loved Caesar … he is as concrete as Brutus was abstract. A sincere harangue by a demagogue is better than the most ‘classic’ oration … It is like Henry IV and Falstaff.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“[Cinna the poet], whom the mob mistakes for Cinna the conspirator … What if they do have hold of the wrong men? They go ahead anyway — on sound lynching principles. It is the Jack Cade motif over again. Mythology is wrong. It is not love, it is passion that is blind.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“For I am arm’d so strong in honesty” — Brutus

“The arrogation of moral infallibility is but a step below the affectation of divinity. Brutus has become like Caesar…It is the special nemesis of the revolutionist. He comes to resemble what he once abhorred.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“As fact, Portia’s death by swallowing fire, is perhaps incredible…As [Shakespeare] uses it, it becomes the second of his three main comments on his own play (the first being the passage on the location of the East). He has made plain in the one scene where we see them together that Portia is Brutus’ other ‘half’. As the mirror of his soul, she is bound to reflect so tremendous an event as his spiritual death in accepting the code of violence. BAnd that is exactly what her death does. On entering the conspiracy, Brutus metaphorically swallowed fire.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“The child is dreaming, and out of some divine confusion in his mind between his instrument and the trouble he has read on his master’s brow, his unconsciousness frames this inspired answer. (It is Shakespeare’s third supreme comment on his own play.) Brutus’ slumbering innocence, awakening, gives him a last warning … ‘The strings, my lord, are false.’ Brutus is out of tune.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“If anything was needed after Henry V to make plain what Shakespeare thought of imperialism, this play symbolizes it.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare: Volume 1

“[Julius Caesar] is not equal, as a whole, to either of his other plays taken from the Roman history. It is inferior in interest to Coriolanus, and both in interest and power to Antony and Cleopatra. It, however, abounds in admirable and affecting passages, and is remarkable for the profound knowledge of character, in which Shakespeare could scarcely fail.”
— William Hazlitt, The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“[Julius Caesar] makes several vaporing and rather pedantic speeches, and does nothing. Indeed, he has nothing to do.”
— William Hazlitt, The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Those who mean well themselves think well of others, and fall a prey to their security, that humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustsice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavor to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard for anything but their own unprincipled ends … Cassius was better cut out for a conspirator.”
— William Hazlitt, The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

On “here lies the east”:

“In the midst of this scene we meet with one of those careless and natural digressions which occur so frequently and beautifully in Shakespeare’s work… We cannot help thinking this graceful familiarity is better than all the formality in the world.”
— William Hazlitt, The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Like Macbeth, and indeed like Hamlet, [Brutus] hesitates on the brink of a cataclysmic action.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The mention of Caesar’s deafness, a sign of his age, his weakness, and his unwillingness to listen to other people, is twice balanced by references to people who hear well.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The play is full of dreams, omens, portents, superstitions, and prophecies, elements of the powerful irrational … Shakespeare would return to this moment in Hamlet [I.i.106]. These omens and portents, signs of a world profoundly unnatural, may remind us of Owen Glendower, the superstitious Welshman of Henry IV, Part 1 and they prefigure, as well, the sign-filled world of Macbeth.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Signs in Shakespeare are morally neutral. They exist to be interpreted. Macbeth need not interpret the ‘weird sisters’ as inciting him to murder: they merely say he will be king. In his own subconscious, of which they are a theatrical counterpart, that drives him to kill Duncan and take the throne. So 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.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

Brutus telling conspirators to dip their hands in Caesar’s blood:

“This is an extraordinary notion, to dip your hands in the blood of the ruler you have murdered, and, waving them in the air, any ‘peace, freedom, and liberty!’ It is a stunning moment in Shakespeare, one that would be remembered by the principals of the French Revolution, and again by Karl Marx, writing of the French Revolution.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Each of these men [Romeo, Brutus, Hal) wanted to dedicate himself to life. Romeo wanted to love. Hal wanted to play. Brutus wanted to read philosophy. But in each case a commanding hand was placed on the man’s shoulder that disputed the claim of life in the name of death. Romeo defied that command for a few hours … Hal evaded it for a while … Brutus tried to face the issue, with the result of civil war within himself. But death won… Hamlet is the next step.
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1

“It is Octavius, not Antony, who speaks the play’s final lines commending the body of Brutus to ‘all respects and rites of burial.’ As Shakespeare moves into the period of his major tragedies, this ultimate act of homage will assume an increasingly conciliating tone, as an attempt to heal the breaches in governance caused by tragedy, war, misunderstanding, and loss…Octavius’ final words, in fact, point toward a real and important split in Shakespearean drama between dispassionate ruler and tragic hero, a split that never seems to be mended in the plays.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Julius Caesar, a play set in ancient Rome, centuries before the invention of type or print, is directly concerned with the question of writing and speaking, and with the intrinsic treachery of the written word. Much of the play’s action is transacted through the exchange of letters, and the reading aloud of documents, and these written artifacts seem to take on lives of their own.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“This now-proverbial protestation of failed understanding — ‘it was Greek to me’ — is another in the play’s catalog of oblique, deceptive, co-opted, or untranslatable utterances and messages. Cicero’s speech, the speech of a great and revered man, cannot be understood, and therefore has no effect.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“As a persistent figure of power and possibility, the Ghost still stalks the plains of Philippi, on the page, and the stage, haunting the audience; imagination as it haunted Brutus, and as it haunts Hamlet, and will haunt the French Revolution and its aftermath. The play, like its Ghost, speaks pertinently, and often impatiently, to the modern and postmodern condition, to modern history, and to modern politics, rhetoric, and oratory. This is, after all, a play rewritten by Brecht and appropriated by Marx. But its lessons are elusive.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“It is impossible for even the most judicially minded critic to look without a revulsion of indignant contempt at this travestying of a great man as a silly braggart, whilst the pitiful gang of mischief-makers who destroyed him are lauded as statesmen and patriots. There is not a single sentence uttered by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that is, I will not say worthy of him, but even worthy of an average Tammany boss.”
— George Bernard Shaw

Caesar’s observation on Cassius:

“Caesar is accurate, and Antony is not; Shakespeare scarcely could have found a better way to demonstrate the psychological acuity that made Caesar as great a politician as he was a soldier. Yet the same speech indicates one of several gathering infirmities, deafness, and the increasing tendency to regard himself in the third person.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Cassius, like many Roman Epicureans, is a Puritan, and embodies the spirit of resentment, unhappy as he is at contemplating a greatness beyond him. Brutus, a Stoic, has no envy of Caesar’s splendor yet fears the potential of unlimited power … The soliloquy [II.i.10-34] in which this fear is voiced is the best thing of its kind that Shakespeare had yet written, and is marvelously subtle.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Brutus’ patriotism is itself a kind of flaw, since he over-identifies himself with Rome, just as Caesar does. It is uncanny that Brutus, awaiting the night visit of Cassius and the other conspirators, suddenly becomes a prophecy of Macbeth, in a further soliloquy that seems to belong in the first act of Macbeth.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“State of man” – Brutus, II.i./Macbeth I.iii

“Macbeth has nothing like Brutus’ rational powers; Brutus has nothing like the Scottish regicide’s range of fantasy, yet they almost fuse together. The difference is that Brutus’ ‘state of man’ is more unaided and lonesome than Macbeth’s. Macbeth is the agent of supernal forces that transcend Hecate and the witches. Brutus, the Stoic intellectual, is affected not by preternatural forces, but by his ambivalence which he has managed to evade.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare is on the threshold of writing the high tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. The cool disengagement of the dramatist’s stance on Julius Caesar allows for an inner gathering of the forces, just as perhaps Caesar gathered himself for conquests.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Cowards die many times”… II.i.32

“The play’s authentic victims are Brutus and Cassius, not Caesar, just as its victors are not Mark Antony and Octavius, tuning up for their cosmological contest in Antony and Cleopatra. Caesar and Shakespeare are the winners; it is appropriate that this tragedy’s most famous lines show Caesar at its finest. [“Cowards die many times”] is not quite Hamlet’s ‘the readiness is all,’ for Hamlet means something more active, the willingness of the spirit, though the flesh be weak. Caesar, gambling on eternity, galls back upon a rhetoric unworthy of him, one that Hamlet would have satirized.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Brutus is such a puzzle that he is wonderfully interesting, to Shakespeare as to us. To call Brutus a sketch for Hamlet destroys poor Brutus: he hasn’t a trace of wit, insouciance, or charisma, though everyone within the play clearly regards him as the Roman charismatic, after Caesar. Mark Antony has considerably more zest, and Cassius rather more intensity; who and what is Brutus?”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Mark Antony’s masterpiece of an oration may be the most famous sequence in Shakespeare, yet it is a half step on the road to Iago.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare, always wary of a state power that had murdered Marlowe and tortured Kyd into an early grave, makes a fine joke of the raging mob’s dragging off the wretched Cinna the poet for having the wrong name.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Of this tragedy many particular passages deserve regard, and the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is universally celebrated; but I have never been strongly agitated in perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, comparing with some other of Shakespeare’s plays; his adherence to the real story, and to Roman manners, seems to have impeded the natural vigor of his genius.”
— Samuel Johnson

“It may be that Shakespeare subtly marks the limits of judgment and tyranny: who is to decide which monarch is or is not a tyrant? The people are a mob, and both sides in the civil war after Caesar’s death seem worse than Caesar.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Surely nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of this Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him, to him, the stern Roman republican, viz., that he would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar be as good a monarch as he is now disposed to be. How too could Brutus say he finds no personal cause, i.e. none in Caesar’s past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Entered Rome as a conqueror? Placed his Gauls in the Senate? Shakespeare (it ay be said) has not brought these things forward. True! and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character does Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“…one of the sources of the soliloquy is in Plutarch’s Comparison. Brutus is objecting to the crowning of Caesar; he is a man who attaches much importance to ceremony, even attempting to make a savage murder into a sort of ritual. But Caesar also thinks that crowning is a significant ceremony. The question is an alteration of Caesar’s status. For Plutarch, Caesar is already virtually a king, and Brutus’ an act of deposition; it is not so for Shakespeare, who, in the English tradition attached great importtance to coronation. What alarms Brutus is not the present loss of republican freedom, but the coronation, which will put Caesar beyond reprisal: it is as if Caesar were aspiring to the English throne, and as if Brutus were an Elizabethan supporter of the doctrine of non-resistance. Anachronistic assumptions below the historical surface.”
— Frank Kermode, Riverside Shakespeare

 

Quotes from the play

 

These growing feathers pluck’d from Caesar’s wing
Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,
Who else would soar above the view of men,
And keep us all in servile fearfulness.
— FLAVIUS, I.i.72-95

He is a dreamer, let us leave him. Pass.
— CAESAR, I.ii.24

If I have veil’d my look,
I turn the trouble of my countenance
Merely upon myself.
— BRUTUS, I.ii.37-39

… poor Brutus, with himself at war,
Forgets the shows of love to other men.
— BRUTUS, I.i.46-47

I am not gamesome; I do lack some part
Of that quick spirit that is in Antony.
— BRUTUS, II.i.28-19

CASSIUS:
Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
BRUTUS:
No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things.
CASSIUS:
‘Tis just,
And it is very much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
That you might see your shadow …
— I.ii.51-58

Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius,
That you would have me seek into myself
For that which is not in me?
— BRUTUS, I.ii.63-65

Listen to your gut, Brutus.

And since you know you cannot see yourself
So well as by reflection, I, your glass,
Will modestly discover to yourself
That of yourself which you yet know not of.
— CASSIUS, I.ii.67-70

For let the gods so speed me as I love
The name of honor more than I fear death.
— BRUTUS, I.ii.88-89

Ye gods, it doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world
And bear the palm alone.
— CASSIUS, I.ii.128-131

Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:230
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
— CASSIUS, I.ii.135-141

When could they say, till now, that talk’d of Rome,
That her wide walks encompass’d but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
— CASSIUS, I.ii.154-157

Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much, such men are dangerous.
— CAESAR, I.ii.192-195

Listen to your gut, Jules.

Three or four wenches, where I stood, cried ‘Alas, good soul!’ and forgave him with all their hearts. But there’s no heed to be taken of them; if Caesar had stabb’d their mothers, they would have done no less.
— CASCA, I.ii.271-275

CASSIUS:
Did Cicero say anything?
CASCA:
Ay.
CASSIUS:
To what effect?
CASCA:
Nay, and I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you in the face again. But those that understood him smil’d at one another and shook their heads, but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.
— I.ii.278-284

Till then, think of the world.
— CASSIUS. I.ii.307

No pressure, though.

For who so firm that cannot be seduc’d?
— CASSIUS, I.ii.312

Caesar doth bear me hard, but he loves Brutus.
If I were Brutus now and he were Cassius,
He should not humor me.
— CASSIUS, I.ii.313-315

When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say
“These are their reasons, they are natural.”
For I believe they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
— CASCA, I.iii.28-32

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time;
But men may construe things after their fashion,
Clear from the purpose of the things themselves.
— CICERO, I.iii.33-35

It is the part of men to fear and tremble
When the most mighty gods by tokens sound
Such dreadful heralds to astonish us.
— CASCA, I.iii.54-56

Why, you shall find
That heaven hath infus’d them with these spirits,
To make them instruments of fear and warning
Unto some monstrous state.
Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man
Most like this dreadful night,
That thundes, lightens, opens graves, and roars
As doth the lion in the Capitol —
A man no mightier than thyself, or me,
In personal action, yet prodigious grown,
And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.
— CASSIUS, I.iii.68-78

I know where I will wear this dagger then.
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius.
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong.
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.
But life, being weary of these worldly bars,
Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
— CASSIUS, I.iii.89-97

For now, this fateful night,
There is no stir or walking in the streets,
And the complexion of the element
In favor’s like the work we have in hand,
Most bloody, fiery, and most horrible.
— CASSIUS, I.iii.126-130

O, he sits high in all the people’s hearts,
And that which would appear offense in us
His countenance, like richest alchemy,
Will change to virtue and to worthiness.
— CASCA, I.iii.157-160

How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
— BRUTUS, soliloquy, II.i.13

Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power.
— BRUTUS, II.i.18-19

But ’tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But, when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may.
Then, lest he may, prevent.
— BRUTUS. II.i.21-28

Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities;
And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg
Which, hatch’d, would as his kind grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.
— BRUTUS, II.i.30-34

The exhalations whizzing in the air
Give so much light that I may read by them.
— BRUTUS, II.i.44-45

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar,
I have not slept.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.
–BRUTUS, II.i.61-69

BRUTUS:
Is he alone?
LUCIUS:
No, sir. There are more with him.
BRUTUS:
Do you know them?
LUCIUS:
No, sir. Their hats are plucked about their ears,
And half their faces buried in their cloaks,
That by no means I may discover them
By any mark of favor.
BRUTUS:
Let ’em come.
They are the faction. O conspiracy,
Sham’st thou to show thy dang’rous brow by night,
When evils are most free? O, then, by day
Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough
To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy.
Hide it in smiles and affability;
For if thou path, thy native semblance on,
Not Erebus itself were dim enough
To hide thee from prevention.
— II.i.71-85

Every one doth wish
You had but that opinion of yourself
Which every noble Roman bears of you.
— CASSIUS, II.i.91-93

CASSIUS:
This is Trebonius.
BRUTUS:
He is welcome hither.
CASSIUS:
This, Decius Brutus.
BRUTUS:
He is welcome too.
CASSIUS:
This, Casca; this, Cinna; and this, Metellus Cimber.
BRUTUS:
They are all welcome.
What watchful cares do interpose themselves
Betwixt your eyes and night?
CASSIUS:
Shall I entreat a word?
[They whisper]
— II.i.94-100

Read it out loud. Hit the “s”s hard and deliberate. It sounds like a serpent – “sssss” – it sounds like secrets.

Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius,
To cut the head off and then hack the limbs,
Like wrath in death and envy afterwards;
For Antony is but a limb of Caesar.
Let’s be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar,
And in the spirit of men there is no blood.
O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it. And, gentle friends,
Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully.
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds.
— BRUTUS, II.i.161-174

We shall be call’d purgers, not murderers.
— BRUTUS, II.i.180\

BRUTUS:
Peace, count the clock.
CASSIUS:
The clock hath stricken three.
TREBONIUS:
‘Tis time to part.
— II.i.192-193

Boy! Lucius! Fast asleep? It is no matter.
Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber.
Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies
Which busy care draws in the brains of men.
Therefore thou sleep’st so sound.
— BRUTUS, II.i.229-233

What, is Brutus sick,
And will he steal out of his wholesome bed
To dare the vile contagion of the night
And tempt the rheumy and unpurg’d air
To add unto his sickness? No, my Brutus,
You have some sick offense within your mind,
— PORTIA, II.i.263-268

And what men to-night
Have had resort to you; for here have been
Some six or seven, who did hide their faces
Even from darkness.
— PORTIA, II.i.275-278

Dwell I but in the suburbs
Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,
Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.
— PORTIA, II.i.285-287

“suburbs” = outskirts of city = “red light district”

A lioness hath whelp’d in the streets,
And graves have yawn’d and yielded up their dead.
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol.
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
— CALPURNIA, II.ii.17-24

When beggars die there are no comets seen.
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
— CALPURNIA, II.ii.30-31

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
— CAESAR, II.ii.32-33

Besides, it were a mock
Apt to be render’d, for someone to say
“Break up the Senate till another time,
When Caesar’s wife shall meet with better dreams.”
— DECIUS, II.II.96-99

I shall beseech him to befriend himself.
— SOOTHSAYER, II.iv.30

If I could pray to move, prayers would move me.
But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumb’red sparks;
They are all fire, and every one doth shine.
But there’s but one in all doth hold his place.
— CAESAR, III.i.59-65

CASCA:
Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life
Cuts off so many years of fearing death.
BRUTUS:
Grant that, and then is death a benefit.
So are we Caesar’s friends, that have abridg’d
His time of fearing death. Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows and besmear our swords.
Then walk we forth, even to the market-place,
And, waving our red weapons o’er our heads,
Let’s all cry “Peace, freedom, and liberty!”
— III.I.101-110

I do beseech, yes, if you bear me hard,
Now, whilst your purpled hands do reek and smoke,
Fulfill your pleasure.
— ANTONY, III.i.157-159

As fire drives out fire, so pity pity.
— BRUTUS, III.i.171

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy
(Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue)
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
All pity chok’d with custom of fell deeds.
— ANTONY, III.i.259-269

And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.
— ANTONY, III.i.270-273

If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.
— BRUTUS, III.i.20-22

ALL:
Live, Brutus, live, live!
1 PLEBEIAN:
Bring him with triumph home unto his house.
2 PLEBEIAN:
Give him a statue with his ancestors.
3 PLEBEIAN:
Let him be Caesar.
— III.ii.48-51

Antony’s oration is hard to excerpt. Its flow is exquisite and perfect, and – in its way – more affecting – and certainly more emotionally complex – than Henry’s “we happy few”. The oration is a master class in emotional manipulation, sarcasm masquerading as sincerity, and subtext-turned-text.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interr’d with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar.
— ANTONY, III.ii.73-77

Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me,
But Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.
— ANTONY, III.i.84-87

“Brutus is an honorable man … “

For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel.
Judge, O you gods, who dearly Caesar lov’d him!
— ANTONY, III.ii.181-182

I am no orator, as Brutus is.
— ANTONY, III.ii.217

This is not false modesty. He knows what he’s done. He knows he’s crushed it. Brutus made a huge mistake in letting Antony speak.

Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt!
— ANTONY, III.ii.259-266

CINNA:
Truly, my name is Cinna.
1 PLEBEIAN:
Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.
CINNA:
I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet!
4 PLEBEIAN:
Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!
CINNA:
I am not Cinna the conspirator.
4 PLEBEIAN:
It is no matter. His name’s Cinna.
— III.iii.27-33

Ah, mob rule.

Thou hast describ’d
A hot friend cooling. Ever note, Lucilius,
Whern love begins to sicken and decay
It useth an enforced ceremony.
There are no tricks in plain and simple faith,
But hollow men, like horses but at hand,
Make gallant show and promise of their mettle.
— BRUTUS, IV.ii.17-23

When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous
To look such rascal counters from his friends,
Be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts.
Dash him to pieces!
— BRUTUS, IV.iii.79-82

Now suddenly Brutus speaks in the third person.

CASSIUS:
A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities,
But Brutus makes mine greater than they are.
BRUTUS:
I do not, till you practice them on me.
CASSIUS:
You love me not.
BRUTUS:
I do not like your faults.
CASSIUS:
A friendly eye could never see such faults.
BRUTUS:
A flatterer’s would not, though they do appear
As huge as high Olympus.
— IV.iii.86-92

We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
— BRUTUS, IV.iii.217-224

O murd’rous slumber!
Layest thou thy leaden mace upon my boy …
— BRUTUS, IV.iii.267-268

The strings, my lord, are false.
— LUCIUS, talking in his sleep, IV.iii.291

This day I breathed first: time is come round,
And where I did begin, there shall I end;
My life is run his compass.
— CASSIUS, V.iii.23-25

The sun of Rome is set. Our day is gone.
Clouds, dews, and dangers come, our deeds are done.
— TITINIUS, V.iii.63-64

Alas, thou hast misconstrued every thing.
— TITINIUS to dead CASSIUS, V.iii.84

When you do find him, or alive or dead,
He will be found like Brutus, like himself.
— LUCILIUS, V.iv.25

Night hangs upon mine eyes, my bones would rest,
That have but labor’d to attain this hour.
— BRUTUS, V.v.41-42

This was the noblest Roman of them all.
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 mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, “This was a man.”
— ANTONY, V.v.68-75