years ago [ie. in 1599] made fit for print.' The style and metre of Julius Cæsar are compatible enough with the date of Henry V. But its close and numerous links between our play and Hamlet speak for the date 1600-1; and the lost play of Cæsar's Fall on which, in 1602, Webster, Middleton, Munday, Drayton, were at work for the rival company would have been a somewhat tardy counterblast to an old piece of 1599. Other signs of the deep impression it made point to the later date. Julius Cæsar was certainly not unconcerned in the revival of the fashion for tragedies of revenge with a ghost in them, which suddenly set in with Marston's Antonio and Mellida and Chettle's Hoffman in 1601. Jonson made his own fashions. But the sudden appearance of the man of little Latin in the arena of Roman tragedy put him on his mettle, and there can be little doubt that his massive Sejanus (1603) conveyed an unavowed challenge.2 If Julius Cæsar, however, greatly stimulated tragedy at large, it struck a blight upon the dramas of Cæsar's death, hitherto a very flourishing growth. After the abortive effort of Henslowe's men, and Alexander's probably quite independent tragedy, printed in Scotland in 1604,3 no English poet again attempted to vie with Shakespeare. In rude German prose Julius Caesar was repeatedly acted by the comedians abroad. A puppet-play, doubtless founded on the 1 With which it is in fact classed, on purely metrical grounds, by the latest investigator of Shakespeare's metre, Goswin König (Der Vers in Sh.'s Dramen, p. 137). 2 It will suffice to mention here Mr. Fleay's belief that Jonson abridged and corrected Julius Cæsar into its present drama, is mentioned in form in 1607 (still affirmed in his Life of Shakespeare, p. 214). 3 Julius Cæsar, by William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling. It was republished in London, 1607. It is a learned work. 1626 4 First at Dresden, (Creizenach, Schauspiele d.engl. Com. p. xlii). 1605. A century later the Duke of Buckingham divided the play into two tragedies, Cæsar and Brutus, neither of which was ever performed.1 And in Voltaire's Brutus and La Mort de César Shakespeare achieved his first (as yet very qualified) triumphs over the dramatic traditions of the Continent. The suggestion that Julius Cæsar was prompted by the conspiracy of Essex in January to February 1601 (Furnivall, Acad., September 18, 1875, and Preface to Leopold Shakspere) is interesting, but the links are far too slender to support any inference as to the date. Plot. As has just been stated, the Fall of Cæsar was Source of the familiar on English stages before Shakespeare wrote, as well as the kindred subject of Cæsar and Pompey, -a kind of First Part to the History. The very early (and perhaps mythical) Julius Cæsar recorded. to have been performed at Whitehall in 1562 possibly included both. A lost play, Cæsar Interfectus, by Dr. Eedes, was acted at Oxford in 1582. Gosson mentions a Cæsar and Pompey in his School of Abuse (1579), and Henslowe another in his Diary (1594). None of these survives, but Shakespeare seems to be cognisant of their existence. His opening scene is addressed to a public familiar with the history of Pompey and Pompey's sons; 2 Polonius' description of his performance of the murdered Cæsar at the University, indicates that that subject was in vogue there; and some apparently purposeless deviations from Plutarch are probably concessions to an established dramatic or literary tradition. Thus the famous Et tu Brute' had occurred in the True 27 f. 1 The Tragedy of Cæsar and The Tragedy of Brutus, both printed 1722. Their relation to the original has been elaborately handled by O. Mielck, J. B. xxiv. 2 Similarly v. I. 102 implies familiarity with the suicide of Cato. Tragedy (1595); and Chaucer already placed the murder in the Capitol instead of in Pompey's Curia, though Shakespeare still makes Cæsar's bleeding body lie along the base of Pompey's statue. But Shakespeare undoubtedly drew his materials substantially from Plutarch's lives of Cæsar, Brutus, and Antony, as translated by Sir Thomas North.1 The translations had probably become as early familiar to him, and interested him as keenly, as the nearly contemporary folio of Holinshed.2 In now closing his Holinshed and opening his Plutarch Shakespeare turned from a homely though picturesque annalist to a philosophic and sentimental biographer, from a naïve chronicler of events to a literary and self-conscious exponent of men. For Plutarch personality was, if not the supreme, certainly the most attractive and intelligible factor in history; public events interested him by their bearing upon character, and his peculiar art and charm lay in following his heroes among the intimacies of their private life, and allowing them to reveal themselves in their familiar converse, their table-talk, their memorable epigrams and repartees. He had, moreover, the moralist's eye for ethical problems, for conflicts of motive and passion and conscience. And neither of these traits can have been 1 The Lives of the Noble Grecians, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer PLUTARKE OF CHAERONIA. As the titlepage candidly states, North had translated the French translation of Amyot, to which his own owes something of its relative accomplishment, as prose, and a few errors (e.g. Decius for Decimus Brutus). North is reprinted in the Tudor Transla tions, and the Lives in question in Hazlitt's Shakspeare's Library. There is an exhaustive study of Shakespeare's use of Plutarch by Delius in J.B. xvii. 67. 2 Bassanio's comparison of Portia to her namesake Cato's daughter, Brutus' Portia' (Mer. of Ven. i. I. 166); Portia's own name; and the deep admiration for Cæsar betrayed by a host of earlier allusions all indicate this. without relish for an intellect ripening towards the profounder psychology and the graver questionings of Measure for Measure, Hamlet, and Cæsar. Hence, The while Holinshed had furnished little more than the outline of the action to Richard III. or Richard II., the far subtler tragic conflict of Brutus, with almost every detail of the action, and a hundred vivid traits of character, are already clearly foreshadowed in Plutarch. But it is in the drama that the implicit eloquence of the subject is first revealed. means by which this is effected are, however, wonderfully simple. The language, though charged with poetry, is of a pellucid simplicity which Shakespeare had rarely approached; and through large tracts of it Plutarch's pedestrian narrative survives, only lifted. to a higher potency and purged of the last suggestion of banality and rhetoric. But at a few decisive points Shakespeare intervenes. Brutus' monologue in ii. 1. is wholly original. Of his oration after Cæsar's death, Plutarch records merely that it was designed to win the favour of the people and to justify that they had done.'1 Shakespeare gives him a speech strikingly unlike any of his other speeches in style, though full of his character; 2 a speech 1 Even these words strictly describe a previous harangue on the Capitol. 2 The style of Brutus' speech was evidently adopted on Plutarch's hint that in writing Greek he affected the brief compendious manner of speech of the Lacedæmonians'; writing e.g. to the Pergamenians: 'I understand you have given Dolabella money; if you have done it willingly, you confess you have offended me; if against your wills, show it then by giving me willingly.' The model of such a speech, in a parallel situation, Shakespeare had at hand, as Mr. Gollancz has plausibly suggested, in the harangue of Belleforest's Hamlet to the people after killing the king (cf. also Kuno Fischer, Hamlet, p. 104). One more of the inexhaustible points of contact between the two plays, and one more indication that Belleforest was known to Shakespeare, though the first attested English edition is of 1608. moreover in prose,1 which he nowhere else uses. Antony's oration is represented by the following: 'When Cæsar's body was brought into the marketplace, Antonius making his funeral Oration in praise of the dead according to the ancient custom of Rome, and perceiving that his words moved the common people to compassion: he framed his eloquence to make their hearts yearn the more, and taking Cæsar's gown all bloudy in his hand, he layed it open to the sight of them all, shewing what a number of cuts and holes it had in it. Therewith all the people fell presently into such a rage and mutinie that there was no more order kept among the common people.' 2 Plutarch assures us that Antony was eloquent : but he left it to Shakespeare to convert his blunt Casca-like report into the superb You all do know this mantle: I remember The action of the play is strikingly clear and simple. In this point of dramatic technique, as in others, it differs widely from the other Roman plays. The bewildering complexity of the history of Antony and Cleopatra has its counterpart in that play. A like chaos on a smaller scale filled the period intervening between Cæsar's death and Philippi, and 1 Why did Shakespeare make Brutus here use prose? The question is excellently answered by Janssen (Die Prosa in Sh.'s Dramen, p. 41). Brutus is an idealist. He loves the people' in idea, but is constrained when addressing them face to face. He has eloquence and passion for Antony; but, unlike Antony, only the dry language of under standing for the mob. 'The 2 Life of J. Cæsar (Hazlitt: Shakspeare Library, vol. iii. p. 186). A similar but less detailed passage occurs in his Life of M. Antony, ib. p. 331. |