William Shakespeare – Julius Caesar (1599)
Play – read as app from the splendid site playshakespeare.com
- 4 nods out of 5 -
He came, he saw and he conquered… then was promptly stabbed to death. This was the life of Julius Caesar, the man who led the Roman Republic to its end, falling before its rebirth as a large, behemoth empire. The largely unknown playwright Bill Shakespeare (okay, poor joke), made a name of dabbling in the biographies of the past, largely upon English kings; but in Roman antiquity he made these personalities and a vital period in time famous once again to audiences in the modern world.
It is 44 BC and Caesar is the master of Rome. Gone are his enemies, Pompey & Co, and a long period of dictatorship is set to follow his return to the capital. But lying beneath his official rule – where the likes of Mark Antony delight in acclaiming the glorious Caesar – is a growing band of conspirators. The duplicitous Cassius, knowing such a revolt would need solid backing, enlists the help of Brutus, the most honest of all Romans. And it is with a heavy heart that Brutus conspires against his father-figure.
Ignoring a soothsayer’s warning to beware the Ides of March, as well as Artemidorus’ letter (‘If thou read this, O Caesar, thou mayest live; if not, the Fates with traitors do contrive’), Caesar walks to the fate of a brutal stabbing. He falls to face the last man, Brutus himself, to ask in his last breath: ‘Et tu, Brute? – Then fall Caesar’. These words commonly applied as: ‘And you, too, Brutus?’ Caesar’s body fails in union with his dejected heart. It is left for the faithful Mark Antony to lament: ‘O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?’
Combined with Caesar’s assassination, the other outstanding scene in the play is the delivery of Brutus’ and Anthony’s speeches to the people of Rome. Brutus begins, asking his fellow Romans to ‘be patient till the last’, advising them the reason he killed the father figure of Caesar: ‘Not that I lov’d Caesar less, but that I lov’d Rome more….As Caesar lov’d me, I weep for him…but he was ambitious, I slew him’. It is a humble and steadfast speech; yet a speech that is immediately blown out of the water by Anthony’s words to the people, in which the deeds of Caesar are blown beyond the imagination, therefore inflicting acrimonious damage towards Brutus and the conspirators. Rome revolts and Brutus and Cassius flee, only to find meet their deaths at the end of the play during battle against the combined forces of Mark Anthony and Octavius, Caesar’s proclaimed heir.
The combined death toll fits the bill for perfect Shakespearian tragedy; yet there is a bigger victim in the play: Rome and western civilisation itself. Although Julius Caesar has no such definitive character – even the title’s character plays a minor role and is killed half way during proceedings – to match the likes of a Macbeth or a Hamlet, the plot itself shows a greater idea, being the fall of democracy and the rise of dictatorial empire. Such a scenario is all the more relevant in the context of the twentieth century, and a warning that heroic and honest Brutus-like deeds may yet lead to ruin.
