[8. Cassius] Mr Facing-both-ways, such a 'dish of skimmed milk' as Hotspur would have called him, but to vanish by an ignominious death in the proscriptions? 8. Cassius] PLUTARCH (Life of Brutus, § 22): Cassius would have done Brutus much honour, as Brutus did unto him, but Brutus most commonly prevented him, and went first unto him, both because he was the elder man as also for that he was sickly of body. And men reputed him commonly to be very skilful in wars, but otherwise marvellous choleric and cruel, who sought to rule men by fear rather than with lenity: and on the other side, he was too familiar with his friends, and would jest too broadly with them.—GERVINUS (ii, 339): Shakespeare has scarcely created anything more splendid than the relation in which he has placed Cassius to Brutus. Closely as he has followed Plutarch, the poet has, by slight alterations, skilfully placed this character, even more than the historian has done, in the sharpest contrast to Brutus,-the clever, politic revolutionist, opposed to the man of noble soul and moral nature. Roman state-policy and a mode of reasoning peculiar to antiquity are displayed in every feature of this contrast of Cassius to Brutus, as well as in the delineation of the character itself; the nature and spirit of antiquity operated with exquisite freshness and readiness upon the unburdened brain of the poet, unfettered by the schools. . . . According to Plutarch, public opinion distinguished between Brutus and Cassius thus: that it was said that Brutus hated tyranny, Cassius, tyrants; yet, adds the historian, the latter was inspired with a universal hatred of tyranny also. Thus has Shakespeare represented him. His Cassius is imbued with a thorough love of freedom and equality; he groans under the prospect of a monarchical time more than the others; he does not bear this burden with thoughtful patience like Brutus, but his ingenious mind strives with natural opposition to throw it off; he seeks for men of the old time; the new, who are like timid sheep before the wolf, are in abhorrence to him. His principles of freedom are not crossed by moral maxims which might lead him astray in his political attempts; altogether a pure political character, he esteems nothing so highly as his country and its freedom and honour. These principles, if they were not rooted in the temperament, spirit, and character of Cassius, would at all events have been more powerfully supported by them than the same principles would have been by Brutus' more humane, more feeling nature. . . . Throughout with eagle-eye he sees the right means for attaining his ends, and would seize them undeterred by scruples of morality; less irreproachable as a man than Brutus, he is as a statesman far more excellent. Full of circumspection, he is full of suspicion of his adversary; he is very far from that too great confidence in a good cause which is the ruin of Brutus. He possesses the necessary acuteness of judgment and action available only in times of revolution; he knows that it is useless mixing in politics, far less in revolution, unless one is prepared to exchange the tender morality of domestic life for a ruder kind; he would treat tyranny according to its own baseness; he would carry on matters according to the utmost requirements of his own cause, but not with the utmost forbearance towards the enemy; he would not use unnecessary harshness, but he would omit none that was necessary; he would think just as ill of the tyrant as the tyrant would of his adversary; he would, as far as in him lay, turn against him his cunning, his cruelty, and his power; he would go with the flood at the right time, and not, like Brutus, when it was too late. The difference, therefore, between his nature and the character of Brutus comes out on every ... [9, Casca] occasion: Brutus appears throughout just as humanely noble as Cassius is politically superior: each lacks what is best in the other, and the possession of which would make each perfect.—GOLL (p. 43): Cassius, with his mixture of political hatred, with his power to let the one strengthen and excite the other, is the type of one of the groups of which the adherents of revolution consists, the great haters, those who, as Auguste Comte says about the followers of the great French Revolution, are perpetually in a condition of 'chronic rage,' which enables them, whenever they consider the right moment has come, to perform the most horrible actionsthe men of whom the anarchists of the present time are the lineal descendants. 9. Casca] STAPFER (p. 365): If it were not a somewhat hazardous conjecture when applied to the most impartial of dramatic poets, one would be inclined to suspect that the type of character to which Casca belongs was a peculiar favourite of Shakespeare's. In the first place, he is a humourist, he has a strong sense of the comedy of human life, and of the nothingness of this world. It is he that relates in a tone of transcendent mockery to Brutus and Cassius, who are not at all in a mood to laugh with him, the great event of the feast of Lupercal, and describes how Antony offered the crown to Cæsar. Brutus is shocked at his levity of tone, and when Casca leaves them he expresses his disapprobation with all the weighty injustice of a stern moralist, who takes everything seriously, and who, as a matter of course, is invariably wrong in his judgments of men. Cassius, who has no obtuseness of this sort, answers that what shocks Brutus in him is only put on, and that he may be safely counted on for any bold or noble enterprise. Casca, when enrolled amongst the conspirators, soon justifies this opinion of him, and is the one to strike the first blow. This mingled good-humour and practical energy, this strength and solidity of character underlying all his merry jests and laughter, cannot but represent not only one of Shakespeare's favourite types, but the special type of his predelection, if we admit, with his most learned commentators, that Henry V., in whom these characteristics are most strongly marked, was his ideal. Casca is, moreover, an aristocrat in true disdainful English fashion. He expresses the most elegant contempt, which is all the more cutting because he speaks without any bitterness and with a smile on his lips, for the folly of the crowd, and for their dirty hands and sweaty night-caps and stinking breath. . . . One last thing to be noticed concerning Casca is the wonderful effect that the prodigies foretelling the death of Cæsar have upon him; they work a complete revolution in his nature, and give a suddenly meditative turn to his usual airiness of tone; his irony is, in reality, only a thin and superficial covering, which falls at the first serious occasion and lets the true nature of the man be seen.-OECHELHAÜSER (Einführungen, p. 222): The actor is to take account of a well-calculated hypocrisy in Casca. His loyalty to Cæsar is only assumed; to Brutus also, whose attitude towards Cæsar he does not wholly understand, he expresses himself guardedly, masking his true opinion of the important occurrence he describes under an affected indifference, concealing it by a rough, coarse humor. In such a fashion is the story of Cæsar's refusal of the offered crown to be delivered. His true character is revealed for the first time when he finds himself alone with Cassius during the dreadful night of storm and rain. His mode of expression suddenly changes to the normal tone of a serious man. Cassius happily makes use of this mood in order to enrol him among the conspirators. He is to become its most zealous member, and his hand the first to strike a mortal blow at Cæsar. With that his part is finished. Casca should be represented as somewhat younger than Brutus, whose schoolfriend he formerly was. A very expressive power of mimicry should be at his command, and this should be well taken into account in casting the part.-MACCALLUM (p. 286): Plutarch has only two particulars about Casca, the one that he was the first to strike Cæsar and struck him from behind; the other that when Cæsar cried out and gripped his hand, he shouted to his brother in Greek. Shakespeare, as we have seen, summarily rejects his acquaintance with Greek, but the stab in the back sets his fancy to work, and he constructs for him a character and life-history to match. Casca is a man who shares with Cassius the jealousy of greatness-the envious Casca,' Antony described him-but is vastly inferior to Cassius in consistency and manhood. He seems to be one of those alert, precocious natures, clever at the uptake in their youth, and full of a promise that is not always fulfilled: Brutus recalls that 'he was quick mettle when we went to school' (I, ii, 318). Such sprightly youngsters when they fail often do so from a certain lack of moral fibre. And so with Casca. He appears before us at first as the most obsequious henchman of Cæsar. When Cæsar calls for Calpurnia, Casca is at his elbow: 'Peace, ho! Cæsar speaks.' When Cæsar, hearing the soothsayer's shout, cries, 'Ha! who calls?' Casca is again ready: ‘Bid every noise be still: peace yet again!' Cassius would never have condescended to that. For Casca resents the supremacy of Cæsar as much as the proudest aristocrat of them all: he is only waiting an opportunity to throw off the mask. But meanwhile in his angry bitterness with himself and others he affects a cross-grained bluntness of speech, 'puts on a tardy form,' as Cassius says, plays the satirist and misanthrope, as many others conscious of double dealing have done, and treats friend and foe with caustic brutality. But it is characteristic that he is panic stricken with the terrors of the tempestuous night, which he ekes out with superstitious fancies. It illustrates his want both of inward robustness and of enlightened culture. We remember that Cicero's remark in Greek was Greek to him, and that Greek was as much the language of rationalists then as was French of the eighteenth century Philosophes. Nor is it less characteristic that even at the assassination he apparently does not dare to face his victim. Antony describes his procedure: 'Damned Casca, like a cur, behind Struck Cæsar on the neck.' Yet even Casca is not without redeeming qualities. His humour, in the account he gives of the coronation fiasco, has an undeniable flavour: its very tartness, as Cassius says, is a 'sauce to his good wit.' And there is a touch of nobility in his avowal: 'You speak to Casca, and to such a man, That is no fleering tell-tale. Hold, my hand: 19. Messala] APPIAN (Bk IV, ch. vi, § 38) says of Messala: 'A young man of distinction [who] fled to Brutus. The triumvirs, fearing his high spirit, published the following edict: "Since the relatives of Messala have made it clear to us that he was not in the city when Gaius Cæsar was slain, let his name be removed from the list of the proscribed." He would not accept pardon, but, after Brutus and Cassius had fallen in Thrace, although there was a considerable army left, as well as ships and money, and strong hopes of success still existed, Messala would not accept the command when it was offered to him, but persuaded his associates to yield to overpowering fate and join forces with Antony. He became intimate with Antony and adhered to him until the latter became the slave of Cleopatra. Then he heaped reproaches upon him and joined himself to Octavius, who made him consul in place of Antony himself, when the latter was deposed and again voted a public enemy. After the battle of Actium, where he held a naval command against Antony, Octavius sent him as a general against the revolted Celts and awarded him a triumph for his victory over them.'-(Trans. WHITE, vol. ii, 318.) 21. Artemidorus] THEOBALD (Nichol's Lit. Illust., ii, 491): Who told our editors that Artemidorus was a soothsayer? They were thinking, I suppose, of his namesake, whose critique on Dreams we still have, but did not think that he did not live till the time of Antoninus. Our Poet's Artemidorus, who had been Cæsar's host in Cnidos, did not pretend to know anything of the conspiracy against Cæsar by prescience or prognastication: but he was the Cnidian sophist, who taught that science in Greek at Rome: by which means, being intimate with Brutus and those about him, he got so far into the secret as to be able to warn Cæsar of his danger. . 39. Calphurnia] F. HORN (i, 129): We encounter in this tragedy two women, both alike in the absorbing love for their husbands, on which their characters are founded; and yet what a difference do we notice in them! Calphurnia lives in Cæsar's life alone, and by night and day it is her joy; but her solicitude for him is, perhaps, at times obtrusive; she wishes to be his sole possessor, and, since he has already done too much, that he undertake nothing further; he must, in short, take care and reserve himself for her alone. She loves him not only as her husband, but almost as a mother loves her child, or as a tenderly domestic wife guards and nurses her helpmate, who, although intellectually greater than she, is still weak and sickly. By a number of portents she is deeply moved to solicitude for Cæsar's safety, and herein we wish to be more lenient than many English critics, who blame, almost harshly, the superstition of this well-meaning woman without remembering that she, poor creature, had not the advantages of their education.— ROLFE (Poet Lore, vi, 12): No critic or commentator, I believe, has thought Calpurnia worthy of notice, but the reader may be reminded to compare carefully the scene between her and Cæsar with that between Portia and Brutus. . . . The difference in the two women is not more remarkable than that in their husbands' bearing and tone towards them. Portia, with mingled pride and affection, takes her stand upon her rights as a wife-'a woman that Lord Brutus took to wife'-and he feels the force of the appeal as a man of his noble and tender nature must. Calpurnia is a poor creature in comparison with this true daughter of Cato, as her first words to Cæsar sufficiently prove: 'Think you to walk forth? You shall not stir out of your house today.' When a wife takes that tone, we know what the reply will be: 'Cæsar shall forth!' Later, of course, she comes down to entreaty. Cæsar, with contemptuous acquiescence in the suggestion, yields for the moment to her weak importunities. When Decius comes in and urges Cæsar to go, the story of her dream and its forebodings is told him with a sneer (could we imagine Brutus speaking of Portia in that manner?), and her husband, falling a victim to the shrewd flattery of Decius, departs to his death with a parting fling at her foolish fears, by which he is ashamed of having been moved. ... 40. Portia] Mrs JAMESON (p. 330): Portia, as Shakespeare has truly felt and represented the character, is but a softened reflection of that of her husband Brutus; in him we see an excess of natural sensibility, an almost womanish tenderness of heart, repressed by the tenets of his austere philosophy: a stoic by profession and in reality the reverse-acting deeds against his nature by the strong force |