Julius Caesar is, like Romeo and Juliet, one of those plays that are often used as an introduction to Shakespeare. That’s for a good reason as it is a fairly easy read as Shakespeare goes, and it doesn’t have any major plot problems to it like how Friar Lawrence’s message is trapped inside fair Verona due to a plague quarantine but Romeo’s friend gets in and out without a problem to tell Romeo Juliet is “dead”.
Still, we’re not quite in “great” Shakespeare territory yet, but it is one that everyone knows for a few famous lines and speeches if nothing else.
Notable cast members: No really big names stand out in this one. It does feature returns from Charles Gray as Caesar and Richard Pasco as Brutus. There is the addition of Garrick Hagon as Octavius, he being best known as Luke Skywalker’s doomed pal Biggs. Plus, there’s some guy with the same name as me playing a character named Claudius, but I don’t recall who that character is, so let’s move on.
Trivia: Director Herbert Wise wanted to set this one in Elizabethan times rather than the faux Roman times most productions put the play in, but the BBC turned that idea down. That actually would be more historically accurate. Obviously, not for Caesar, but for Shakespeare. Actors in Shakespeare’s day wore the equivalent of modern dress on stage no matter what the play’s time and setting was. So, rather than Shakespeare’s cast wearing togas and the like, they would have worn more or less the same costumes they wore in any other play they might have been performing.
The play: One of the things I like about Julius Caesar is that it is a very political play. I don’t mean that to say Shakespeare uses it to comment on the controversial issues of his day, but that he uses it to show the art of politics. Shakespeare was a rather apolitical writer. Many of his contemporaries (Ben Johnson comes to mind) weren’t shy about weighing in on various issues. About all that we can tell for certain with Shakespeare is he had an intense distrust of mobs. A mob in a Shakespeare play is always up to no good. Sometimes they can be pacified, but sometimes they do other things as seen in this play with the unfortunately named poet Cinna.
No, instead Shakespeare uses this play to show how politics actually works. For all that Brutus, not Caesar, is the main character of the play, he isn’t much of a politician. He’s the only character in the play with pure motives, namely a desire to keep Rome a free Republic and not the Empire it soon would be. His co-conspirators want Caesar dead for selfish reasons that Brutus fails to recognize, and Cassius convinces Brutus to join the assassination plan by appealing to the man’s patriotism and idealism. Naturally, the conspirators want Brutus to explain to the crowd outside the Senate what they did and why, and initially, that works.
Then noble Brutus lets Marc Antony have his own say, and Antony doesn’t need to believe what he’s saying. Indeed, he says as much to Octavius, that he’s doing what he’s doing to advance himself more than avenge Caesar’s murder. He’s just better at public speaking and rousing the crowd to his own ends. That’s a political move, where the image of a public figure is more important than the figure’s actual beliefs. Brutus is sincere. He’s the only really sincere man in the play. And yet, he ends the play dead, his ideals unable to get what he wants because other people are just better at getting what they want than he is. He truly is the noblest Roman of them all, a man who takes over the conspiracy’s planning just by being there and someone even his enemies will mourn when they find him dead.
Now, Caesar is the character the play is named for, and indeed, his murder is the play’s emotional climax, the point where the play’s ending is determined beyond a doubt. Killing a monarch, even one who refuses a crown, is a sure sign a character is going to screw up the country and die. But what kind of man is Caesar? It occurs to me he isn’t a man so much as an idea. He refers to himself in the third person, and when he talks about how many times cowards die versus brave men, he’s talking about an ideal, an image of himself he needs to maintain for himself and the rest of Rome. Oddly enough, this secret conspiracy is one that many people seem to know about and even attempt to warn Caesar of. The only one Caesar actually hears is a soothsayer, and he can be dismissed as a fake despite the fact everyone in the audience should know the man speaks truth. Who is the real Caesar? I don’t know. His political stand-in sees himself as an unstoppable icon. But, he isn’t. He’ll still bleed out and die.
It doesn’t matter who you are. You’re only human. You’re very vulnerable. And political violence only leads to more. That may be the lesson of Julius Caesar more than anything else.
Grade: Again, this one is good, not great. This particular production decided to superimpose a giant Caesar head over the background of one scene to give us Great Caesar’s Ghost, but overall, it’s fairly solid. Let’s say B+ for this one.
Next: Some of Shakespeare’s works are referred to as “problem plays”. We have one of those up next with Measure for Measure.
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