BURGUNDY God save your majesty. My royal cousin, teach you our princess English?
KING HARRY I would have her learn, my fair cousin, how perfectly I love her, and that is good English.
BURGUNDY Is she not apt?
KING HARRY Our tongue is rough, coz, and my condition is not smooth, so that having neither the voice nor the heart of flattery about me I cannot so conjure up the spirit of love in her that he will appear in his true likeness.
BURGUNDY Pardon the frankness of my mirth, if I answer you for that. If you would conjure in her, you must make a circle; if conjure up love in her in his true likeness, he must appear naked and blind. Can you blame her then, being a maid yet rosed over with the virgin crimson of modesty, if she deny the appearance of a naked blind boy in her naked seeing self? It were, my lord, a hard condition for a maid to consign to.
KING HARRY Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and enforces.
BURGUNDY They are then excused, my lord, when they see not what they do.
KING HARRY Then, good my lord, teach your cousin to consent winking.
BURGUNDY I will wink on her to consent, my lord, if you will teach her to know my meaning. For maids, well summered and warm kept, are like flies at Bartholomew-tide: blind, though they have their eyes. And then they will endure handling, which before would not abide looking on.
KING HARRY This moral ties me over to time and a hot summer, and so I shall catch the fly, your cousin, in the latter end, and she must be blind too.
BURGUNDY As love is, my lord, before that it loves.
KING HARRY It is so. And you may, some of you, thank love for my blindness, who cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in my way.
KING CHARLES Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively, the cities turned into a maid—for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath never entered.
KING HARRY Shall Kate be my wife?
KING CHARLES So please you.
KING HARRY I am content, so the maiden cities you talk of may wait on her: so the maid that stood in the way for my wish shall show me the way to my will.
KING CHARLES We have consented to all terms of reason.
KING HARRY Is’t so, my lords of England?
⌈WARWICKI⌉
The King hath granted every article:
His daughter first, and so in sequel all,
According to their firm proposed natures.
EXETER
Only he hath not yet subscribed this:
where your majesty demands that the King of France,
having any occasion to write for matter of grant, shall
name your highness in this form and with this addition:
⌈reads⌉ in French, Notre très cher fils Henri, Roi
d’Angleterre, Heritier de France, and thus in Latin,
Praeclarissimus filius noster Henricus, Rex Angliae et
Haeres Franciae.
KING CHARLES
Nor this I have not, brother, so denied,
But your request shall make me let it pass.
KING HARRY
I pray you then, in love and dear alliance,
Let that one article rank with the rest,
And thereupon give me your daughter.
KING CHARLES
Take her, fair son, and from her blood raise up
Issue to me, that the contending kingdoms
Of France and England, whose very shores look pale
With envy of each other’s happiness,
May cease their hatred, and this dear conjunction
Plant neighbourhood and Christian-like accord
In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance
His bleeding sword ’twixt England and fair France.
⌈ALL⌉ Amen.
KING HARRY
Now welcome, Kate, and bear me witness all
That here I kiss her as my sovereign Queen.Flourish
QUEEN ISABEL
God, the best maker of all marriages,
Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one.
As man and wife, being two, are one in love,
So be there ‘twixt your kingdoms such a spousal
That never may ill office or fell jealousy,
Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage,
Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms
To make divorce of their incorporate league;
That English may as French, French Englishmen,
Receive each other, God speak this ‘Amen’.
ALL Amen.
KING HARRY
Prepare we for our marriage. On which day,
My lord of Burgundy, we’ll take your oath,
And all the peers‘, for surety of our leagues.
Then shall I swear to Kate, and you to me,
And may our oaths well kept and prosp’rous be.
Sennet. Exeunt
Epilogue Enter Chorus
CHORUS
Thus far with rough and all-unable pen
Our bending author hath pursued the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.
Small time, but in that small most greatly lived
This star of England. Fortune made his sword,
By which the world’s best garden he achieved, And of it left his son imperial lord.
Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king Of France and England, did this king succeed,
Whose state so many had the managing That they lost France and made his England bleed,
Which oft our stage hath shown—and, for their sake,
In your fair minds let this acceptance take. Exit
ADDITIONAL PASSAGES
The Dauphin/Bourbon variant, which usually involves only the alteration of speech-prefixes, has several consequences for the dialogue and structure of 4.5. There follow edited texts of the Folio and Quarto versions of this scene.
A. FOLIOEnter the Constable, Orleans, Bourbon, the Dauphin, and Rambures
CONSTABLE O diable!
ORLÉANS O Seigneur! Le jour est perdu, tout est perdu.
DAUPHIN
Mort de ma vie! All is confounded, all.
Reproach and everlasting shame
Sits mocking in our plumes.
A short alarum
O méchante fortune! Do not run away.
⌈Exit Rambures⌉
CONSTABLE Why, all our ranks are broke.
DAUPHIN
O perdurable shame! Let’s stab ourselves:
Be these the wretches that we played at dice for?
ORLÉANS
Is this the king we sent to for his ransom?
BOURBON
Shame, an eternall shame, nothing but shame!
Let us die in pride. In once more, back again!
And he that will not follow Bourbon now,
Let him go home, and with his cap in hand
Like a base leno hold the chamber door,
Whilst by a slave no gentler than my dog
His fairest daughter is contaminated.
CONSTABLE
Disorder that hath spoiled us, friend us now,
Let us on heaps go offer up our lives.
ORLÉANS
We are enough yet living in the field
To smother up the English in our throngs,
If any order might be thought upon.
BOURBON
The devil take order now. I’ll to the throng.
Let life be short, else shame will be too long.
Exeunt
B. QUARTOEnter the four French lords: the Constable, Orléans, Bourbon, and Gebon
GEBON O diabello!
CONSTABLE Mort de ma vie!
ORLÉANS O what a day is this!
BOURBON
O jour de honte, all is gone, all is lost.
CONSTABLE We are enough yet living in the field
To smother up the English,
&n
bsp; If any order might be thought upon.
BOURBON
A plague of order! Once more to the field!
And he that will not follow Bourbon now,
Let him go home, and with his cap in hand,
Like a base leno hold the chamber door,
Whilst by a slave no gentler than my dog
His fairest daughter is contaminated.
CONSTABLE
Disorder that hath spoiled us, right us now.
Come we in heaps, we’ll offer up our lives
Unto these English, or else die with fame.
⌈BOURBON⌉ Come, come along.
Let’s die with honour, our shame doth last too long.Exeunt
JULIUS CAESAR
ON 21 September 1599 a Swiss doctor, Thomas Platter, saw what can only have been Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar ‘very pleasingly performed’ in the newly built Globe Theatre—‘the straw-thatched house’—on the south side of the Thames. Francis Meres does not mention the play in Palladis Tamia of 1598, and minor resemblances with works printed in the early part of 1599 suggest that Shakespeare wrote it during that year. It was first printed in the 1623 Folio.
Julius Caesar shows Shakespeare turning from English to Roman history, which he had last used in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece. Caesar was regarded as perhaps the greatest ruler in the history of the world, and his murder by Brutus as one of the foulest crimes: but it was also recognized that Caesar had faults and Brutus virtues. Other plays, some now lost, had been written about Caesar and may have influenced Shakespeare; but there is no question that he made extensive use (for the first time in this play) of Sir Thomas North’s great translation (based on Jacques Amyot’s French version and published in 1579) of Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by the Greek historian Plutarch, who lived from about AD 50 to 130.
Shakespeare was interested in the aftermath of Caesar’s death as well as in the events leading up to it, and in the public and private motives of those responsible for it. So, although the Folio calls the play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Caesar is dead before the play is half over; Brutus, Cassius, and Antony have considerably longer roles, and Brutus is portrayed with a degree of introspection which links him more closely to Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes. Shakespeare draws mainly on the last quarter of Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, showing his fall; he also uses the Lives of Antony and Brutus for the play’s first sweep of action, showing the rise of the conspiracy against Caesar, its leaders’ efforts to persuade Brutus to join them, the assassination itself, and its immediate aftermath as Antony incites the citizens to revenge. The second part, showing the formation of the triumvirate of Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius Caesar, the uneasy alliance of Brutus and Cassius, and the battles in which Caesar’s spirit revenges itself, depends mainly on the Life of Brutus. Facts are often altered and rearranged in the interests of dramatic economy and effectiveness.
Although Shakespeare wrote the play at a point in his career at which he was tending to use a high proportion of prose, Julius Caesar is written mainly in verse; as if to suit the subject matter, the style is classical in its lucidity and eloquence, reaching a climax of rhetorical effectiveness in the speeches over Caesar’s body (3.2). The play’s stage-worthiness has been repeatedly demonstrated; it offers excellent opportunities in all its main roles, and the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius (4.2) has been admired ever since Leonard Digges, a contemporary of Shakespeare, praised it at the expense of Ben Jonson:So have I seen, when Caesar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius; O, how the audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence,
When some new day they would not brook a line
Of tedious though well-laboured Catiline.
THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
1.1 Enter Flavius, Murellus, and certain commoners over the stage
FLAVIUS
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?
CARPENTER Why, sir, a carpenter.
MURELLUS
Where is thy leather apron and thy rule?
What dost thou with thy best apparel on?—
You, sir, what trade are you?
COBBLER Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman I am but, as you would say, a cobbler.
MURELLUS But what trade art thou? Answer me directly.
COBBLER A trade, sir, that I hope I may use with a safe conscience, which is indeed, sir, a mender of bad soles.
FLAVIUS
What trade, thou knave? Thou naughty knave, what trade?
COBBLER Nay, I beseech you, sir, be not out with me. Yet if you be out, sir, I can mend you.
MURELLUS
What mean’st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow?
COBBLER Why, sir, cobble you.
FLAVIUS Thou art a cobbler, art thou?
COBBLER Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl. I meddle with no tradesman’s matters, nor women’s matters, but withal I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes: when they are in great danger I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat’s leather have gone upon my handiwork.
FLAVIUS
But wherefore art not in thy shop today?
Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?
COBBLER Truly, sir, to wear out their shoes to get myself into more work. But indeed, sir, we make holiday to see Caesar, and to rejoice in his triumph.
MURELLUS
Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless
things!
O, you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day with patient expectation
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?
Be gone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.
FLAVIUS
Go, go, good countrymen, and for this fault
Assemble all the poor men of your sort;
Draw them to Tiber banks, and weep your tears
Into the channel, till the lowest stream
Do kiss the most exalted shores of all.Exeunt all the commoners
See whe’er their basest mettle be not moved.
They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness.
Go you down that way towards the Capitol;
This way will I. Disrobe the images
If you do find them decked with ceremonies.
MURELLUS May we do so?
You know it is the Feast of Lupercal.
FLAVIUS
It is no matter. Let no images
Be hung with Caesar’s trophies. I’ll about,
And drive away the vulgar from the streets;
So do you too where you perceive them thick.
These growing feathers plucked from Caesar’s wing
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Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,
Who else would soar above the view of men
And keep us all in servile fearfulness.
Exeunt
1.2 ⌈Loud music.⌉ Enter Caesar, Antony stripped for the course, Calpurnia, Portia, Decius, Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Casca, a Soothsayer, ⌈a throng of citizens⌉; after them, Murellus and Flavius
CAESAR Calpurnia.
CASCA Peace, ho! Caesar speaks. ⌈Music ceases⌉
CAESAR Calpurnia.
CALPURMA Here, my lord.
CAESAR
Stand you directly in Antonio’s way
When he doth run his course.—Antonio.
ANTONY Caesar, my lord.
CAESAR
Forget not in your speed, Antonio,
To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say
The barren, touched in this holy chase,
Shake off their sterile curse.
ANTONY
I shall remember:
When Caesar says ‘Do this’, it is performed.
CAESAR
Set on, and leave no ceremony out.⌈music⌉
SOOTHSAYER Caesar!
CAESAR Ha! Who calls?
CASCA
Bid every noise be still. Peace yet again.⌈Music ceases⌉
CAESAR
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak. Caesar is turned to hear.
SOOTHSAYER
Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR What man is that?
BRUTUS
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
CAESAR
Set him before me; let me see his face.
CASSIUS
Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.
The Soothsayer comes forward
CAESAR
What sayst thou to me now? Speak once again.
SOOTHSAYER Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR
He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass!Sennet. Exeunt all but Brutus and Cassius
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works Page 206
