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Tragic Error in Julius CaesarAuthor(s): D. J. PalmerReviewed work(s):Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Autumn, 1970), pp. 399-409Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2868424 .Accessed: 10/04/2012 10:39

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Tragic Error in Julius Caesar D. J. PALMER

LTHOUGH Julius Caesar has been described as a political play,' Shakespeare differs from other sixteenth-century dram- atists treating the story, by displaying less interest in the

Ell struggle for power between republicanism and tyranny than in the personal qualities and motives of his characters: such is the difference between the tutelary genius of Seneca and

that of Plutarch. Professor Virgil Whitaker, in a distinguished essay to which I shall often refer in the following pages, has observed that in his fidelity to his main source Shakespeare reflects Plutarch's primary interest in ethical anal- ysis, and thus explores with a new profundity the dramatic territory that was to become familiar in the great tragedies written soon afterwards:

In comparison with the chronicle plays just preceding it and even with the comedies contemporary with it, Julius Caesar is remarkable as being the first Shakespearean play in which the motivation is really adequate and in which we become acquainted with the characters through their mental processes as well as through their actions.2

Professor Whitaker regards the play as a tragedy of moral choice, with Brutus as the protagonist. A similar view has been put forward more recently by Dr. Ernest Schanzer, who has argued that the main issue in the play, fought out in Brutus, is a moral one, "consisting in the conflicting claims of the realm of per- sonal relations and that of politics".3 Both critics, however, isolate the tragedy of Brutus from the rest of the play, instead of relating it to the pattern of er- ror and misjudgment which is basic to the dramatic structure, involving all the major characters; and consequently both critics also assume that Shakespeare's treatment of the moral conflict upholds the claims of one set of principles at the expense of the other. Professor Whitaker's assertion that Brutus is a regicide (which obscures the fact that Caesar is not crowned),4 and Dr. Schanzer's sug- gestion (p. 68) that Brutus betrays personal values to political ideals, imply in each case that the play is constructed to deliver a verdict on the legality of the assassination.

But when Brutus' moral choice is considered in the context of the pattern of misjudgment throughout the play, it is seen to be an error, not because it

1 E.g. H. B. Charlton, Shakespeare, Politics and Politicians, English Association Pamphlet No. 72 (London, 1929), p. i9; J. Dover Wilson, Introduction to Julius Caesar (New Cambridge Shakespeare, I1949), p. xx.

2 Virgil K. Whitaker, "Julius Caesar and Tragedy of Moral Choice", Shakespeare's Use of Learning (San Marino, 1953), p. 246.

3 Finest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespere (London, I963), p. 68. 4 P. 234. Professor Whitaker's statement that "Shakespeare's Tudor absolutism was therefore

at complete odds with Plutarch's idealization of Brutus" (p. 240) is not conclusively borne out by the play itself. Dr. Schanzer has shown (pp. 23-24) that Shakespeare's conception of Caesar in the play is radically different from the attitudes expressed in his earlier work.

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would necessarily be wrong to kill Caesar, but because Brutus' faculties of judgment have been subverted, like those of his fellow Romans, whatever their motives or allegiances. His misjudgment is revealed by the way he arrives at his decision, rather than by the decision itself. The characterization in Julius Caesar is distinguished from that in Shakespeare's earlier portrayals of con- spiracy, rebellion, and deposition, by the focus of attention upon the conditions under which decisive judgments are made, and only to a lesser degree by the issues at stake. The central event in the play, Caesar's assassination, is pre- sented as the disastrous consequence of a series of misjudgments and misin- terpretations; and in minor episodes as well as in moments of crisis men are betrayed by their own errors or by the misunderstandings of others. Cicero's comment in the storm scene,

Men may construe things after their fashion Clean from the purpose of the things themselves (I. iii. 34-35)5

is a reflection which reaches far beyond its immediate context. Professor Whitaker sees Casca as Shakespeare's "mouthpiece" in this scene (p. 229), as he interprets the omens and prodigies seen in Rome; yet Casca's reaction to the portents is only one of several shown in the play, while Cicero's words express a truth to which the whole tragedy bears witness. Casca is hardly an appro- priate or sympathetic choice for a "mouthpiece", whereas in giving these lines to Cicero Shakespeare pays tribute to the wisdom of a figure so greatly re- vered by the Elizabethans, and one whose part in the play is otherwise sur- prisingly brief.

Elizabethan interests in psychology and in moral philosophy were so closely linked that it is fruitless to divorce Shakespeare's analysis of character motiva- tion from his treatment of moral issues. Nevertheless Julius Caesar follows the assumptions of its day in attributing violence and disaster to the overthrow of reason and judgment by the passions. The primary concern of the play is therefore with the causes of error in men's minds, as they lead to morally de- fective decisions. It is the detail and precision with which Shakespeare reveals men's judgments in different dramatic situations that indicate his use of con- temporary beliefs about the coordination of reason, the passions, and the senses. For he employs the psychological conceptions of his time in Julius Caesar more thoroughly and consistently than in any of his earlier plays, to articulate char- acter and action, and to weave into a tragic pattern the episodic and anecdotal insights of Plutarch.

Since Edward Dowden's pioneer essay on "Elizabethan Psychology"6 in i9io, there have been innumerable studies of Elizabethan drama in terms of contemporary ideas about the composition of mind and body. In his essay on "Shakespeare and Elizabethan Psychology", Professor Murray W. Bundy fore- saw in I924 that here was a rich soil to be tilled:

Suppose now that we were to find that Shakespeare causes his characters to talk about intellect and will, and about appetite, passion, and imagination; and suppose also that we were to find in him instead of the ideal of self-

5 Quotations of Julius Caesar are from The Complete Works, ed. P. Alexander (London and Glasgow, I'95'I).

*Essays Modern and Elizabethan (London, 1910), pp. 308-333.

TRAGIC ERROR IN JULIUS CAESAR 40I

realization the notion of self-knowledge; perhaps there would be material here for a Shakespearean philosophy far reaching in its implications for the study of the delineation of character.7

The once fertile field has no doubt suffered from over-cultivation, and at least one voice has been raised in protest, driven by a surfeit of such studies to de- clare a disbelief in the very existence of an Elizabethan psychology.8 Yet while the body of Elizabethan writing on psychology and moral philosophy has sometimes been used rather indiscriminately by modern critics searching for "'sources" or keys to interpretation, and while it is true that there are diver- gences of opinion between one Elizabethan authority and another, F. R. Johnson9 undoubtedly speaks with the voice of common sense when he says that we must distinguish between popular and learned treatments of the sub- ject, there being a considerable area of common ground in Elizabethan as- sumptions about the relationship between the reason, the affections, and the senses.

The number of well known modern accounts of this subject as it bears upon Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists10 relieves me of the need to offer more than a reminder of the principles underlying Elizabethan psychology; furthermore, all we know of Shakespeare suggests that for matters of central dramatic interest he would use ideas that were comparatively familiar and com- monplace in preference to highly specialized or elaborate versions of current doctrine. To summarize the more important conceptions as they impinge upon the interpretation of Julius Caesar, then, I shall borrow Brutus' own use of the commonplace analogy between the "state of man" and the body politic. The reason, whose seat was in the soul, governed the will, appetities, affections, and the senses. As servants of reason, the corporal senses transmitted knowl- edge of the outer world to the imagination, or fantasy, the inner sense which coordinated this information and presented it to the reason for judgment. The supremacy of the reason in maintaining this state was emphasized, but reason might be deposed, if the passions, working upon the fantasy, betrayed rea- son and the senses with false information. Delusion, bad judgment and im- moral or irrational behavior were seen as the result of passion supplanting reason.

While, as this essay will show, Shakespeare bases the structure of his tragic action on these ideas, there is only one passage in Plutarch which suggests a similar understanding of the nature of misjudgment. It occurs when Cassius interprets Brutus' vision of his evil spirit, a commentary which Shakespeare omits from the corresponding point in his play, but which is clearly of great importance for the tragedy as a whole, although so far as I can discover it has not previously received any attention from critics of the play:

Cassius beeing in opinion an Epicurian, and reasoning thereon with Brutus, spake to him touching the vision thus. In our secte, Brutus, we have an

7 JEGP, XXIII (1924), 517. 8 Louise C. Turner Forest, "A Caveat for Critics Against Invoking Elizabethan Psychology",

PMLA, LXI (1946), 65i-672. 9 "Elizabethan Drama and the Elizabethan Science of Psychology", English Studies Today, ed.

C. L. Wrenn and G. Bullough (London, i95i), pp. iii-ii9. 10 E.g. Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (Cambridge, I930); John W. Draper,

The Humors & Shakespeare's Characters (Durham, North Carolma, I945).

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opinion, that we doe not alwayes feele, or see, that which we suppose we doe both see and feele: but that our senses beeing credulous, and therefore easily abused (when they are idle and unoccupied in their owne objects) are induced to imagine they see and conjecture that, which they in truth doe not. For, our minde is quicke and cunning to worke (without eyther cause or matter) any thinge in the imagination whatsoever. And therefore the imagination is resembled to claye, and the minde to the potter: who with- out any other cause than his fancie and pleasure, chaungeth it into what facion and forme he will. And this doth the diversities of our dreames shewe unto us. For our imagination doth uppon a small fancie growe from con- ceit to conceit, altering both in passions and formes of things imagined. For the minde of man is ever occupied, and that continuall moving is nothing but an imagination. But yet there is a further cause of this in you. For you being by nature given to melancholick discoursing, and of late continually occupied: your wittes and sences having bene overlabored, doe easilier yeelde to such imaginations. (P. ii6)11

So far as Brutus is concerned, Professor Whitaker recognizes (p. 246) in principle that "what was new [in Julius Caesar] was the attempt to make the act of choice an important part of the play and to work it out in detail accord- ing to the accepted psychological theory". His comment on Shakespeare's pre- sentation of Brutus's moral crisis in the soliloquies of the orchard scene is that "passion has overturned reason". Professor Bundy similarly observed (p,. 534), in the article cited above, that Brutus' tribute to Caesar is ironic:

And to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections sway'd More than his reason, (II. i. 19-21)

since "Brutus, quite unlike Caesar, is a man whose affections sway more than his reason, in whom there is this tragic confederacy of passion and imagination against reason". But neither critic appears to have grasped the full significance of the soliloquies in the orchard in terms of "the accepted psychological theory".

When we see Brutus at the opening of this crucial scene (II.i), we already know that his mind is troubled, since early in the second scene of the play he told Cassius

Vexed I am Of late with passions of some difference. (I. ii. 39-40)

In that scene Cassius, and Casca who reported Caesar's behavior in the Forum, gave Brutus further cause for vexation and anxiety, and now he stands before use at night-time, sleepless and careworn. His first words, summoning Lucius, refer to the sleeplessness which was a sure sign of unnatural disturbance. The first soliloquy, "It must be by his death", has itself been the cause of no small vexation and anxiety to critics, chiefly because it has been regarded as in some sort a logical argument, progressing step by step. Critics are divided between those who think with Dover Wilson that it is successful logically, and those who share Professor Whitaker's view that it contains fallacies of reasoning. If we are to interpret it in terms of familiar Elizabethan psychol-

11 Quotations of Plutarch are from Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. G. Bul- lough (London and New York, i964), Vol. V.

TRAGIC ERROR IN JULIUS CAESAR 403

ogy, however, we should be prepared to see the speech as the utterance of a divided mind, expressing a conflict between the reason and the fantasy. Re- garded in this way, the speech does not advance as a sequence of connected thought, but alternates between rational judgments of things as they are, and the apprehensions of fantasy, operating under the sway of passion, of things as they may become. It is a debate between the two sides of Brutus' mind, in which the reason speaks in lucid unmetaphorical terms, and the fantasy re- plies in vivid configurations that are rhetorically persuasive:

He would be crown'd. 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. Crown him? That- And then, I grant, we put a sting in him... (11. i2-i6)

Thus the "question" is answered: Brutus himself changes Caesar's nature by conceiving him as an adder. Again, reason reasserts in plain terms that the Caesar known to Brutus is a man whose judgment never yielded to his pas- sions, and the admission is countered by a metaphorical picture:

But 'tis a common proof That lowliness is young ambition's ladder . (11. 21-22)

At the end of the soliloquy, Brutus explicitly refers to the part played by metaphor in persuading his judgment, when he speaks of the quarrel bearing ."colour", of his "fashioning" the matter by thinking Caesar "as a serpent's egg". The fantasy, or imagination, was commonly thought to apprehend ideas clothed in sensible impressions, whereas the reason judged matters freed from particulars, in general and more abstract forms.'2 Consequently it is the style and structure of the speech which reveals Brutus' self-deception, and Cassius' observation, in the passage from Plutarch cited above, serves as a commentary on the soliloquy: "For our imagination doth uppon a small fancie growe from conceit to conceit, altering both in passions and formes and thinges imagined". Brutus' melancholy, his "wittes and sences having bene overlabored", makes his reason an easier prey to these imaginings. These are what Brutus himself later in the scene describes as the "figures" and the "fantasies" "which busy care draws in the brains of men".

Professor Whitaker's summary of the soliloquy (p. 245) is slightly mislead- ing, because he neglects the part played by imagination in furnishing Brutus with arguments, and attempts to regard the speech as a progression in thought rather than a conflict:

Shakespeare has done his best to make the fallacies in the reasoning ob- vious. Brutus says explicitly that he has no evidence to support the con- clusion that Caesar will become immoral and that he must kill on an as- sumption without basis; he ends by remarking that one destroys a serpent's egg because it is the "kind" (nature) of a serpent to be poisonous, but he has opened by observing that Caesar will be a tyrant only if crowning him changes his nature.

12 Cf. Lily B. Campbell, p. 67.

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The point is that Brutus is led to believe, by "a common proof", that Caesar's nature will change; there is some basis for his assumption, but the terms in which it is expressed show it to be not strictly rational. Shakespeare is evi- dently directing our attention more to the nature of Brutus's judgment, than to the issues themselves. Whether Professor Whitaker is right in supposing that Caesar would not have been a tyrant, or whether Dover Wilson is right in be- lieving (p. xxxi) that "Shakespeare does all he can [in the rest of the play] to show us that the reading of Caesar's character in the soliloquy is correct", are really questions of little relevance to the situation, which is focused upon the overthrow of reason by fantasy and passion. Dr. Schanzer's comment on the speech (p. 55), that "Brutus deludes himself by vastly exaggerating the gap that separates the present from the future Caesar, the dictator from the king. Once this position is taken up, Brutus has no difficulty in advancing a logical argu- ment for the assassination, and in this he is aided by his metaphor", also falls a long way short of appreciating the analysis of psychological conflict in Brutus. The central irony is that as a Stoic Brutus holds the passions as in- herently evil.

In his second soliloquy, "the exhalations, whizzing in the air", fraught with significance for Casca and Cassius, are no more to Brutus than light by which to read the letter found in his window. But they assist his eyes, just as his passions colored his senses in the preceding speech, and also just as the letter will work on Brutus' "honourable metal" to forge the instrument that transforms the conspiracy "to virtue and to worthiness". In Plutarch's Life of Brutus, letters are sent by various citizens; here in the play they are cunning devices of Cassius to secure his alliance with the conspiracy. The letter Brutus reads is cryptic, and he must "piece it out" in the light, not only of the exhala- tions, but of his love of honor, which as Cassius foresaw will betray him. An awareness of the different functions of the senses, the passions, fantasy and judgment, greatly enriches the significance of this episode. The exhalations are like emblems or mirrors of the inner "phantasmal the unnatural distur- bances within himself which Brutus acknowledges in his third soliloquy; and in this light his integrity and sense of duty to Rome are made the dupes of his passions in piecing out the fragmentary evidence of his eyes.

The third soliloquy, spoken as Lucius is admitting the conspirators, spells out the implications of what we have witnessed, drawing for its imagery of the mind upon the common stock of Elizabethan psychology. Brutus describes the conditions under which he has made his crucial judgment, and the references to a "council" of the faculties, the "state of man" suffering "the nature of an insurrection", also set the scene for the council which follows, when Brutus overcomes Cassius' better judgment and commits the conspiracy to some dis- astrous decisions. The sequence of these three soliloquies allows Brutus' state of mind to be revealed only after he has resolved on Caesar's death, as he does in the opening line of the first soliloquy; otherwise it would appear as though Brutus' self-knowledge should have prevented his acting upon a disordered judgment. This sequence is a dramatic scheme, and does not represent a pro- gression in Brutus' thought.

The crisis of Brutus' tragedy is contained within this scene, and the meas-

TRAGIC ERROR IN JULIUS CAESAR 405

ure of his fall may be taken by reflecting on Plutarch's description of his char- acter, as Shakespeare read it in the Life of Brutus:

For as Brutus gravitie and constant minde woulde not graunt all men their requests that sued unto him, but being moved with reason and dis- cretion, did alwayes encline to that which was good and honest: even so when it was moved to followe any matter, he used a kind of forcible and vehement perswasion that calmed not, till he had obteyned his desire. For by flattering of him, a man could never obteyne any thing at his handes, nor make him to doe that which was unjust. (P. 93)

It is a passage which receives so many ironic echoes in the orchard scene and in the meeting of the conspirators that we should regard it as an integral part of the material used by Shakespeare, every bit as important as the more factual account of events leading to Caesar's assassination.

But Brutus' tragic error does not stand alone in the play, and the popular interpretation of Brutus as an idealist with no head for practical affairs needs to be reconsidered by relating his personal tragedy to the pattern of miscon- ceptions and misjudgments which runs throughout the action. Although Shakespeare adds very little to the events so vividly recorded by Plutarch, his interpretation of this material, and the tragic design into which it is woven, provide a unity not to be found in the source. Plutarch's sense of significant detail and revealing incident is reflected in the intimate and familiar atmos- phere of personal relationships in Shakespeare's Rome, a feature that has been noted as characteristic of the play.1" It is in the spirit of Plutarch that Shake- speare attributes to his characters penetrating informal judgments on each other's motives and conduct, judgments which they make not as strangers but as men who have known each other all their lives. And yet in transferring to the stage Plutarch's interest in personality and motivation, Shakespeare does significantly shift the emphasis; for the comments which the biographer makes in propria persona become, on the lips of dramatic characters, revelations of the speakers themselves.14 Their judgments of each other are colored by their own preconceptions and motives.

This pattern is established in the second scene of the play, where, although it is principally Caesar who is anatomized, by Cassius, Brutus, and Casca, we also hear Caesar's suspicions concerning Cassius (this is taken straight from Plutarch), Brutus' comments on Casca, and finally Cassius' assessment of Brutus. Here and throughout the play the numerous references to eyes, ears, hands, facial expressions, and gestures, are directly related to the play's concern with the interpretations placed on the evidence of the senses. Each point of view is relative to the speaker's interests and passions; thus, although Caesar interprets Cassius' character shrewdly, he goes on to reveal that, as with his rejection of the soothsayer, his pride and loftiness of spirit prevent his will from acting on the evidence:

I rather tell thee what is to be fear'd Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar. (I. ii. 2ii-2i2)

But Cassius is only dangerous to those greater than himself: Antony knows no cause to fear him. Shakespeare's intentions in these exchanges are made

13 G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme (London, I93I; 3rd. edn. I951), p. 63. 14 Cf. J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (London, I949), pp. 55-56.

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plain by the oblique device used to allow Casca to report on Caesar's off-stage behavior: the ceremony in the Forum is not dramatized directly, thus draw- ing attention to the interpretation rather than to the events themselves.

Later in the play we encounter the views of the conspirators on Cicero, Caesar, and Antony (II. i); the contrasting formal judgments on Caesar pro- nounced by Brutus and Antony at the funeral (III. ii); Antony's argument with Octavius on the merits of Lepidus (IV. i); and finally Antony's tribute to Brutus at the end of the play. In each case, as in the climactic scenes of the play, Julius Caesar anticipates a thought expressed by Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra:

I see men's judgments are A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward Do draw the inward quality after them, To suffer all alike. (III. xiii. 3-34)

Spectacle and event, as well as character and motive, are subject to men's judgments throughout the play. The episode in which, immediately before Caesar is struck down, Popilius Lena mysteriously wishes the conspiracy well and then whispers to Caesar, leading Cassius to believe that they are be- trayed, is taken ready-made from Plutarch; though it fits perfectly into Shake- speare's design, showing how Cassius' excitement first leads him to put a false construction on what he sees, and then itself almost betrays the plot. The murder of Cinna the poet is also presented according to Plutarch, but again this brutally reinforces the Shakespearian pattern of errors brought about by ungoverned passion. When Antony reproaches the mob for their fickleness towards Caesar,

0 judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason! (III. i 104-I05)

he is even then inciting them to their frenzied bloodlust. Augury plays an important part in the tragedy, for characters are prone

to interpret omens according to their hopes and fears; they unwittingly see re- flected in the portents the images of their own passions, and thus both senses and reason are abused. The prodigies appearing on the eve of Caesar's death are understood differently by Casca, Cassius, and Calphurnia, each in their turn, and similarly Calphurnia's dream is apparently capable of two meanings. In order to emphasize the importance of augury, Shakespeare elaborates Plu- tarch's account of the monstrous events before the assassination, borrowing ad- ditional details from Ovid and from Marlowe's version of the first Book of Lucan's Pharsalia; he also changes the substance of Calphurnia's dream, and Decius' alternative interpretation has no parallel in the source:

This dream is all amiss interpreted; It was a vision fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes, In which so many smiling Romans bath'd, Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck Reviving blood, and that great men shall press For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance. This by Calphurnia's dream is signified. (II. ii. 83-90)

TRAGIC ERROR IN JULIUS CAESAR 407

Decius of course is appealing to Caesar's pride, which he succeeds in using to sway Caesar's judgment. Thus it passes unnoticed that Decius' version of the dream does not really contradict Calphurnia's; from his point of view the death of Caesar will give Rome "reviving blood", and indeed his imagery an- ticipates the ritual after the assassination, when the conspirators anoint them- selves with their victim's blood. Naturally Decius does not specify to whom the vision is "fair and fortunate".

Cassius meets his death in circumstances which once more show the senses to be confused and the judgment undermined by a disordered fantasy. The misconception which leads to his suicide, when Titinius is dispatched to "yonder troops" (V. iii) and wrongly thought to have been captured, is taken from Plutarch; but Cassius' dependence on the eyes of Pindarus for report of Titin- ius' success ("My sight was ever thick") is Shakespeare's addition to the source. In Plutarch Cassius follows Titinius with his own eyes: Shakespeare alters the situation by transferring to Cassius' part in the story an incident described by Plutarch a few sentences before, where Brutus is informed about the state of affairs in Cassius' camp by "they that were about Brutus, whose sight served them better" (p. I22). This alteration, by placing Cassius' "eyes" at one remove as it were, serves to distinguish the agency of the senses from the judgment.

For although Pindarus sees the false for true, Cassius is not betrayed solely by false report. He is predisposed to credit bad news by the melancholy which has overtaken him since he yielded, once more against his better judgment, to Brutus' plans for a decisive battle at Philippi. His drooping spirits, rather than his reason, have induced him to abandon Epicurean scepticism for a super- stitious dread of omens in the "ravens, crows and kites" which hover above his army (V. i. 84). His melancholy now feeds on all he hears and sees, and just before sending Titinius on his mission, Cassius has received another report which deepens his foreboding:

0 Cassius, Brutus gave the word too early, Who, having some advantage on Octavius, Took it too eagerly. (V. iii. 5-7)

Thus when Messala returns with Titinius and finds Cassius' body, although he cannot know the immediate circumstances of his general's death, he comes close to the truth in mourning the catastrophe:

Mistrust of good success hath done this deed. 0 hateful error, melancholy's child, Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men The things that are not? (V. iii. 66-69)

It is a generalized reflection, inviting us to regard Cassius' end in the wider perspective presented by the play of the disasters caused by misunderstanding and misjudgment.

While Shakespeare uses contemporary psychology chiefly to dramatize the errors of judgment in the play, his treatment of Caesar shows the same body of ideas put to a rather different purpose. For although Plutarch refers several times to Caesar's "falling sickness", he scarcely anticipates the sharp contrast in Shakespeare's characterization between Caesar's physical weakness and his

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mighty spirit. Unlike other characters, Caesar's soul is of less interest as the seat of reason than as the immortal spirit which transcends an ailing and eventu- ally mutilated body. It was an Elizabethan commonplace that the supremacy of reason over the senses and affections was derived from its spiritual ascend- ancy, as the intellectual operation of the soul. In Caesar Shakespeare por- trays the sovereignty of the soul over the body, its freedom from corporal de- bility and death. Brutus and Cassius are both misled in their understanding of Caesar, not only by their own predispositions and clouded judgments, but by their failure to appreciate the true nature of the spirit's sovereignty and in- dependence of bodily infirmity.

Cassius observes only Caesar's physical deficiencies, and is outraged that a man of such "feeble temper" (the phrase is more ambiguous than Cassius realizes) should grow so prodigious. Plutarch gives no warrant for Cassius' contempt of Caesar's sickness, but possibly Shakespeare is exploiting Cassius' Epicurism in this respect, since Epicurean materialism denied the spiritual na- ture and immortality of the soul. Brutus, on the other hand, sees only Caesar's spirit, and regrets that this cannot be destroyed except by putting the body to death:

We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar, And in the spirit of men there is no blood. 0 that we then could come by Caesar's spirit, And not dismember Caesar! But, alas, Caesar must bleed for it! (II. i. i67-M71)

But the spirit is immortal, and Brutus' mistake is proved upon him when Caesar's ghost appears to him before Philippi.

The tragedy is thus closely worked out in terms of the associated moral and psychological ideas of its day. Julius Caesar is remarkable for the enhanced subtlety and detail with which motivation is scrutinized, as Professor Whitaker has suggested, and equally for the consistency of the pattern of tragic error which extends to every aspect of the action. As the hero, Brutus is therefore to be distinguished from the other characters by his nobility alone, and not by his capacity for delusion, since in this he shows his common humanity. His tragedy sets him above the other conspirators, for he is "the noblest Roman of them all", and yet it also unites him with the humblest plebeian, in a world where "men have lost their reason".

The commonplace nature of the moral psychology used in Julius Caesar, despite its specific and precise distinctions between the several elements of reason, fantasy, senses, and passions, makes it unnecessary to suppose that any single source lies behind Shakespeare's analysis of men's minds in the play. He employs the common property of the age; and yet the importance of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's development is that never before had he turned these concepts to such full dramatic advantage. I suggest as no more than an in- teresting possibility that Shakespeare's reading of Sir John Davies' poem on the nature of the soul, Nosce Teipsum (published in i599), may have prompted him to treat Plutarch's material in the way this essay has discussed. Nosce Teipsum is well known to students of Elizabethan psychology and has fre- quently been cited to illustrate the characterization of the major tragedies

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following Julius Caesar. It is, as Davies himself writes, a composition of "receiu'd opinions"'5 of the familiar, unspecialized kind that Shakespeare draws upon in this play. But it is intriguing to recall that the poem has been directly associated with the play for reasons that have nothing to do with its psychological doctrine, since Malone in I790 first drew attention to a verbal echo of Nosce Teipsum in the second scene of the play.16 On this ground, two recent editors of Julius Caesar, who disagree at many other points, concur in their view that "Shakespeare may have been reading Nosce Teipsum while he was writing his play"'7

University of Hull

15 The Complete Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London, i876), 2 vols., 1, 99. L. Bredvold, "The Sources used by Davies in Nosce Teipsum", PMLA, XXXVIII (I923), 745-769, shows the main source to have been The French Academie (1594), itself a popularized version of contemporary moral philosophy.

16 Julius Caesar I. ii. 5I-58 and Davies, p. 25. Dover Wilson notes other resemblances between the lines from the play and stanzas on p. 20.

17 T. S. Dorsch, Introduction to New Arden edition (London, i955), p. xi; J. Dover Wilson, Introduction to New Cambridge edition (Cambridge, I949), p. X.