23
Greeks and Romans 2: Julius Caesar (1599); Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7); Coriolanus (1608)
These three plays on Roman themes provide a further variant or dimension of ‘tragic history’ from the ones we have discussed earlier in our consideration of the English history plays or the four great tragedies. These are histories taken from a variety of sources but principally Plutarch’s Lives, published as Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans in a translation by Thomas North in 1595. In being dependent on a particular source, the structure of each play follows the historical narrative.
The structure of the plays
These three Roman plays exploit a dimension of tragedy by foregrounding a dialogue between the private and the public sphere and the effect each has on the other. To do so, Shakespeare follows his source and creates his own discipline for their structure, which often challenges expectations.
In Julius Caesar, Brutus justifies the murder of his friend Caesar to himself thus:
It must be by his death: and for my part
I know no personal cause to spurn him
But for the general. He would be crowned:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking.
(2.1.10–15)
In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony’s friend Enobarbus justifies his betrayal of Antony because of what he terms ‘A diminution in our captain’s brain’, which has made Antony ‘outstare the lightning’, concluding:
When valour preys on reason,
It eats the sword it fights with. I will seek
Some way to leave him.
(3.13.204–6)
In Coriolanus, the protagonist’s mother Volumnia does not desert him in the same way but, in persuading the banished warrior not to wreak his revenge on Rome by sacking the city, she condemns him to his death at the hands of the Volscian general Aufidius. At the conclusion of Volumnia’s great appeal for her son’s mercy on the city (5.3.94–124, 133–84), Coriolanus replies:
O mother, mother!
What have you done?
…
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But for your son, believe it, O, believe it,
Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,
If not most mortal to him.
(5.3.185–6, 189–92)
Antony and Cleopatra moves across the years and across the ancient world with astonishing rapidity because the dramatist seeks to represent a history in which the characters did move from Rome to another part of the Roman Empire, but he has to represent these movements within the timespan of a performance. Shakespeare is pragmatic. He tells a vast story within the restricted limits of a theatrical production on a particular stage. He does not focus on a single aspect but opens up the narrative to produce an episodic structure which not only allows him to violate the unities of time, place and action but also to provide an opening or debate among the play’s political adversaries. These necessarily involve plebeians and common soldiers, faced with the attitudes and decisions made by their generals. So, for example, in Act 3, Scene 7 of Antony and Cleopatra, he introduces a character that Antony respectfully terms a ‘worthy soldier’. The soldier then pleads with Antony not to fight at sea (as Cleopatra plans to do) but on land:
O noble Emperor, do not fight by sea.
Trust not to rotten planks. Do you misdoubt
This sword and these my wounds? Let th’Egyptians
And the Phoenicians go a-ducking; we
Have used to conquer standing on the earth
And fighting foot to foot.
(3.7.60–66)
Antony ignores his advice but, in creating the scene, Shakespeare introduces a number of issues: the scepticism and unhappiness of the common soldier with regard to the general that he has followed for years, and the determination of Antony not to listen to any advice but that of Cleopatra, however incorrect others deem it to be.
Similarly, in Julius Caesar the people have to make up their minds about why Caesar has been assassinated, and Coriolanus opens with the people nearing revolt because of famine and identifying Caius Martius (Coriolanus) as their chief enemy. It is no surprise, perhaps, that Bertolt Brecht, the twentieth-century advocate of Epic Theatre and political drama, was stimulated to make a translation and adaptation of Coriolanus, commenting on the plebeians in the first scene, ‘Think how reluctantly men decide to revolt! It’s an adventure for them: new paths have to be marked out and followed; moreover the rule of the rulers is always accompanied by that of their ideas’ (Willett, J. [1964: 252], Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. by John Willett. London: Eyre Methuen).
Exploring social conduct through the drama
By the time of writing Coriolanus, Shakespeare appears to have moved on from the dialogue that we saw in Henry V – written at approximately the same time as Julius Caesar – between the soldier Michael Williams and the King on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt (see Chapters 13 and 15). In this Roman play he provides a greater exploration of the significant social tensions, not just among ruling hierarchies and with soldiers but among the people themselves.
Each of these three Roman plays is termed a ‘tragedy’ but none of them lends itself to being regarded as ‘cathartic’ in quite the same way that critics have traditionally considered the four ‘great tragedies’. Some critics, of course, will argue about whether they are ‘tragedies’ or ‘histories’ and try to pigeonhole them, while others might politicize them in a different way, as does Brecht. But on our journey through these Shakespearean plays we are considering how plays open up debates, asking questions by illuminating social conduct as reflected through dramatic narrative.
What we find with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus in particular is a merging between stage and audience, insofar as an affinity is established between the people within the audience and the plebeians being depicted. Even so, there is a different emphasis with regard to the depiction of the Roman populace between Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, where in the latter the people are treated more sympathetically.
‘Coriolanus exploits the conditions within the playhouse which produces such close contact between audience members; the play contains many scenes involving Roman citizenry, which, when we consider the atmosphere within a crowded playhouse, draws in the spectators, transforming them momentarily into the very people whom Coriolanus, reluctantly, has had to work so hard to win over. The protagonist needs the people’s voices as much as the actor playing him needs the approval of the audience. Thus it is hard to miss the irony when Coriolanus remarks that he doesn’t like to speak to the people – “It is a part/That I shall blush in acting, and might well/Be taken from the people” (2.2.144–6).’
Karim-Cooper, F. and Stern, L. (eds) (2014: 221), ‘Touch and Taste in Shakespeare’s Theatres’, in Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance. London: Bloomsbury (Arden Shakespeare Library)
But this understanding comes from the fact that the plays themselves are telling a good story, which other, later, writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Günter Grass (1927–2015) readily recognized.
‘Even with popular ballads or the peepshows at fairs the simple people (who are so far from simple) love stories of the rise and fall of great men, of eternal change, of the ingenuity of the oppressed, of the potentialities of mankind. And they hunt for the truth that is “behind it all”.’
Willett, J. (ed. and trans.) (1964: 265), Brecht, B., 1957, Brecht on Theatre. London: Eyre Methuen
Merging stage and audience
Julius Caesar may have been the first play to be staged at Shakespeare’s new theatre, the Globe, in 1599. As we have seen, this theatre was constructed in ‘the stews’ of London. The play opens with the rabble, with people out on the streets. The Tribune Flavius commands them:
Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home!
Is this a holiday? What, know
you not,
(Being mechanical) you ought not walk
Upon a labouring day, without the sign
Of your profession? Speak, what trade art thou?
(1.1.1–5)
A new theatre, a new play, the early afternoon, and who are the audience? Shouldn’t some of them at least be at work? Shakespeare, with these opening words, draws attention to the very notion of the play as a representation, not just of the fictional history, but as entertainment itself involving the audience in a relationship with the characters on stage, the first of whom answers Flavius’ question with, ‘Why, sir, a carpenter.’ It’s not impossible that someone watching that afternoon – perhaps more than one – was a carpenter, since this, after all, was possibly the first production in the wooden theatre – the wooden O – that had been recreated from the timbers of the old playhouse in Shoreditch, ‘The Theatre’.
As with the later Coriolanus, in Julius Caesar a connection is being made from the start between the governed and those who govern, the audience and the action on stage, whether they are playing nobility or commoners. We have from this dramatic opening a communal event being enacted, suggesting a shared understanding which involves everyone in the theatre. The ‘well-heeled’ audience in the sixpenny seats might even have wondered why those standing around the stage were not at work. But that is, of course, speculation. What is of further interest is the emphasis, within the representation of the Roman context, of the interaction of the plebeian with the governing classes, and the fact that the celebration is stimulated by a series of political events.
Spotlight
Rome, the greatest empire of which Shakespeare’s time had knowledge, is used by the dramatist to develop dramatic entertainments around the lives and fates of noble men depicted as individuals, within the context of a society that was in some ways not unlike the one engaged in the dramatic experience of the performance itself.
In an ingeniously meta-dramatic moment in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare makes the defeated Queen of Egypt refer to the very action of the drama itself. She recoils from the fact that she could be ‘staged’:
…Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o’ tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth; and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I’th’ posture of a whore.
(5.2.213–20)
Remember that this is the boy actor, the subject of Cleopatra’s prophecy or denial, who is speaking these lines. Antony and Cleopatra was written nine years after Julius Caesar and the meta-theatrical reference had become within that time ever more assured than at the opening of Julius Caesar. But even that play, like Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, defies categorization. Once termed a ‘tragedy’, however, debates occur as to whose tragedy it is, or who is the tragic protagonist. Is it Julius Caesar, who dies in Act 3, Scene 1 (the apex of Freytag’s pyramid) or is it Brutus, whose death comes at the conclusion of the play? We began our journey through Shakespeare’s plays by defining structures and their underpinning of the dramatic plot and action, but we’ve now arrived at a point in our discussion where we can see that Shakespeare is so much in command of his material that he can open the structure expansively without it collapsing.
Elizabethan contemporary issues
Although eighteenth-century critics complained about the lack of structural decorum, Julius Caesar, like Henry V, involves itself in contemporary issues such as the reign of the ageing Queen, the famines that afflicted the rural communities of early Jacobean England, and the continued outbreaks of plague in London. The nature and make-up of the original audience in the new London theatre had knowledge of contemporary events of the day, and they were mirrored in the stories of the past that Shakespeare exploited.
Even in our contemporary theatre, the great orations to the people by Brutus and Antony following Caesar’s assassination are sometimes made directly to the audience. But to the Elizabethans watching the spectacle, the bloody nature of Caesar’s body which Antony displays, the tears in Caesar’s robes, the wounds still oozing blood, all emphasized by Antony’s rhetoric and also, to an extent, indicative in ‘theatrical terms’ of the actual executions that they could watch across London at Tyburn, were immediate experiences for which there were plenty of extra-theatrical analogues. There is in Shakespeare’s theatre a realization of the theatrical potential of earlier morality plays. In the old medieval The Play of the Sacrament, the defiled consecrated host of the Catholic Mass bleeds in the hands of those desecrating it, just as Caesar bleeds again on stage or the traitors bleed at their execution. Within that context, the plays refer not only to the larger context of Elizabethan/Jacobean society itself but also to the public discourses that sustain them.
‘In particular, this première Globe play reflects candidly on the process whereby hegemony is obtained through the control of discourse, a process in which the inauguration of the playhouse was itself a major intervention. Victory in Julius Caesar goes to those who administer and distribute the access to discourse, and the conspirators lose possession of the initiative in the action from the instant they concede Antony permission to “speak in the order of [the] funeral” (3.1.230–50). Inserting his demagogy into Brutus’s idealistic scenario, Antony disrupts the “true rites and lawful ceremonies” of the republic to expedite a counter-coup (3.1.241).’
Wilson, R. (ed.) (2002: 72), ‘Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival’, in Julius Caesar: Contemporary Critical Essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave, New Casebooks
Manipulation of perception
It is the language, the manipulation of perception, the stage management of the oratory, which works within the play, and as in a play, it sways an audience this way and that.
Spotlight
Antony and Cleopatra opens with a statement that the great general has been compromised, with his own soldiers complaining:
Nay, but this dotage of our general’s
O’erflows the measure. Those his goodly eyes,
That o’er the files and musters of the war
Have glowed like plated Mars, now bend, now turn
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front.
(1.1.1–6)
He has been entrapped, as far as his soldiers are concerned, by the ‘tawny front’ that is Cleopatra. The image of Mars, the god of war, is introduced, which is to be counterbalanced in the play by that of Venus, the goddess of love. The images do not make characters into gods but put them in the service of various adversarial gods. In a telling scene before battle, soldiers hear music in the air and discuss what it should mean. One of them hopes that it might be a good omen but the other corrects him, saying, ‘’Tis the god Hercules whom Antony loved/Now leaves him’ (4.3.21).
The line functions not just as part of the story but also as a reflection on the audience’s wonder of stage representation. What is that strange music that the soldiers hear but also that the audience hears? It is a question not just for the fictional characters but also for the spectators, and one that is answered by the stage character who draws the audience into the action.
On the other hand, in Julius Caesar the audience does not witness the offer of the crown three times to Caesar – although some film directors cannot resist the temptation to visualize it. Shakespeare knew his business of writing in a disciplined way, omitting distractions, but also, as in the later Othello, forcing the audience to make up its mind from conflicting narratives. The audience hears the off-stage noise but the conspirators use the noise to persuade Brutus to join them. This is part of the continuing unfolding drama of the play, one episode leading to the next and that to the following, rendering the narrative complex and ambiguous until it is drawn to a conclusion. Indeed, although Caesar dies in Act 3 of the play, his presence prevails unti
l the end when Brutus ‘runs on his sword’.
The domestic and the public
You will recall that, except for the prostitutes, there are no female roles in Timon of Athens, which allows for the restrictive dominance of the masculine world of Athens. In the earlier Julius Caesar, however, aspects of the play work by the exposure of the feminine attempt to ward off the determination of the masculine. Calphurnia, Caesar’s wife, begs him not to go to the Capitol because of the dream she has had. She attempts to impose domestic discipline upon him:
What mean you, Caesar? Think you walk forth?
You shall not stir out of your house today.
(2.2.8–9)
Caesar is momentarily shown to be vulnerable and is tempted by her:
Mark Antony shall say I am not well,
And for thy humour I will stay at home.
(2.2.55–6).
The domestic, however, gives way to the public through Decius’ explanation of the dream as a means to exalt Caesar with the promise that ‘the Senate have concluded/To give this day a crown to mighty Caesar’ (2.2.93–4). Caesar’s domestic subservience is shown to give way to politics and pride and male hubris overcomes Calphurnia’s female intuition.
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 29
