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

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