English 101: English Literature

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In this lesson, we'll examine Shakespeare's take on the life of Julius Caesar, which spawned such famous quotes as 'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!' and 'Et tu, Brute!' We'll also take a look at Brutus and Cassius, the conspirators who plotted Caesar's demise, as well as Mark Antony and Octavius, who remained loyal.

Introduction

We're talking about Julius Caesar, the play by Shakespeare, but also about Julius Caesar the man, because that's kind of inescapable. He's one of the most famous ancient-day people, but maybe we don't know that much about him besides that he's a Roman and vaguely associated with the phrase 'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,' so we're going to delve a little more into that. That phrase is from this play; it's Shakespeare. Caesar didn't say it; Caesar doesn't say it in the play. It's one of those endlessly parodied Shakespearean lines:

Lend me your beers!

Lend me your rears!

Lend me your ... years!

It's one of those lines that's endlessly 'punable.'

It's good to keep in mind that Shakespeare's take on Roman history is not necessarily Roman history, but it can be easy to confuse the two. Like the 'Friends, Romans' statement - I definitely thought that was a real, historical thing when I first read it. It's not! It's fiction! Shakespeare does this all over history. He writes a bunch of things about Romans and Greeks - Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra (you know, Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen), Troilus and Cressida (they're not as famous, but they were in the Trojan War), Titus Andronicus (wasn't real at all) - and he writes about English kings. These are called 'history plays,' (or sometimes tragedies; it depends on how they classify them), which doesn't really make them true, necessarily, but they're based on historical figures. Usually, Shakespeare is reading ancient sources and figuring out what he wants to include in his play. So keep in mind that we're telling Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and not necessarily the real Julius Caesar. They can be easily conflated, because they're both super old. They both seem like history, but they're not.

Characters

So who's in this show? We've got Julius Caesar, obviously. He is a Roman leader and general, and he's steadily gaining power. People are kind of worried, because Rome is supposed to be a republic. They're worried that maybe he's got too much power. We've got Brutus, who is a friend of Caesar's and ultimately ends up being a conspirator against Caesar. Octavius is Caesar's nephew, who's also been named his heir to the throne. Mark Antony is the husband of Jennifer Lopez - ha, ha, no he's not. He's a general and politician. Cassius is a bad dude who's also a conspiracy guy. And there are all sorts of other assorted senators and councilmen and their wives (there aren't really a lot of ladies in this play except the wives of the senators).

Act I: Caesar's Victory

So what happens? In Act I, Caesar has won this big victory against his enemy, Pompey, so he's riding high on the horse. He's got this big parade; he's going through Rome, but some people are worried that he might be getting too powerful. While he's parading around, bathing in the admiration of the people, a soothsayer (who's really just a fortuneteller) pops out of the crowd and says, 'Beware the Ides of March!' ('Ides of March' is just a fancy way of saying March 15th).

Meanwhile, Brutus and Cassius are chatting about what it might mean if Caesar became king. They're kind of worried; they don't think it's totally fair that he would get to be king and they wouldn't, because they're kind of all the same. Then they hear a play-by-play of what went down at the square after the soothsayer showed up. What they hear is that Mark Antony offered Caesar the crown three times, and three times Caesar said no. So Caesar's saying that he doesn't want to be king, but clearly there's some popular sentiment toward his being king, and they think this would be a really bad idea.

Cassius - he's the sneakier of the two - decides he's going to forge some letters, claiming they are from people who are worried about Caesar, and leave them by Brutus' house in an effort to convince Brutus this is really a problem and they need to take care of it. It's an effort to turn Brutus against Caesar, basically.

Later that night, in keeping with the whole fortune theme of 'beware of stuff,' the weather is really strange, there are lions wandering around in the streets, and there's blood - lots of weird stuff going on in Rome that night. Cassius learns that the senators are planning on making Caesar king the next day, so all that refusing of the crown doesn't really stop them, I guess. Cassius is not happy about this, obviously, because he doesn't want Caesar to be king.

Act II: Conspiracy

Then we're in Act II. Brutus has read these fake letters and reluctantly decided that Caesar does indeed need to die. So all the conspirators turn up at his house and they start making this plan. Cassius wants to kill Mark Antony, too, because he's an ally of Caesar's. Brutus doesn't want them to look any more like murdering barbarians than they need to, so he calls for a 'staying of their bloody hands.'

The next morning at Caesar's Palace (did Caesar really live there?!), Caesar's wife is super worried about all the weird weather; she thinks it's a really bad sign. She also had a dream in which there's a statue of Caesar with blood all over it, so she's very worried and doesn't think Caesar should go into work that day. Also remember there's that guy who said, 'Beware the ides of March', which is today. And, even further evidence that Caesar should not go into work, his personal fortunetellers are trying to tell the future by looking at animal guts, which is something people did back then. They can't find a heart inside the animal they slaughtered to tell the future, which is a really, really bad sign, apparently.

Eventually, he does actually relent and says, 'Okay, I'll stay home today.' His wife's freaking out, so he'll just placate her and it'll be fine. Then one of the conspirators shows up and says, 'Time to go to the Senate!' and manages to convince him to come. They convince Caesar that he's going to look too whipped if he listens to his wife and stays home and doesn't go to work. So they play the manly card and get him to come in.

Act III: Caesar's Death and Funeral

Then we've got Act III, the big murder scene. Caesar is all on his high horse and making a speech about how no one's going to shake his will. Then, right on cue, all the conspirators go in, and they each stab him. Brutus stabs him last, but he does do it. That's when Caesar says the most famous thing ever: 'Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!' So it's sort of like he's saying: 'You, too, Brutus? All right then, I'll just die.' So he's dead now. We're about halfway through the play and the title character is dead, which is fairly unusual, even in Shakespearean plays.

Mark Antony runs away - from Jennifer Lopez, ha, no - from Caesar's body. Then he says he'll be loyal to Brutus as long as no one takes it out on him that he used to support Caesar. Brutus says okay, but Cassius, predictably, is a little more worried. He's particularly worried about Antony speaking at Caesar's funeral, which is what he wants to do. He doesn't want Antony stirring up any kind of popular resentment toward the conspirators who just killed their beloved leader.

Brutus thinks it will show a human side to the conspiracy if they let him talk, and they won't look so awful. You can see this is always the difference between Brutus and Cassius. Brutus really likes to think that he's doing the right thing, and he tries to be a decent guy. Cassius is much more transparent about just wanting power, so there's always a divide between those two.

They all leave, and Mark Antony is feeling conflicted and guilty there with Caesar's dead body full of stab wounds. He's feeling guilty about making peace with these guys, and he says:

'O, pardon me, thou bleeding peace of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever lived in the tide of times.

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!'

Then Octavius' servant turns up - remember Octavius, Caesar's nephew and heir to the throne - and Mark Antony warns him: 'Keep Octavius well away from this place. It's not a friendly place for him right now.' Because even Brutus might not be able to stop Cassius from murdering the guy Caesar appointed as his heir.

So now it's time for Caesar's funeral and a bunch of funeral speeches. This play is full of big speeches - they're fun for Shakespeare to write, and they're also characteristically Roman. This idea of addressing the crowd, oration, is a Roman tradition in a way. There's a big focus in the play in general on this idea of 'rhetoric,' which is just techniques for skillful speaking. Brutus' big funeral speech is justifying why he killed Caesar; that's his goal in speaking to the people. He says:

'If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of

Caesar's, to him I say, that Brutus' love to Caesar

was no less than his. If then that friend demand

why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:

- Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved

Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and

die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live

all free men?'

So basically, Brutus loved Caesar, he says, but he worried about the fate of Rome and the freedom of everyone who lived in Rome if Caesar were to gain too much power. The audience actually seems to be relatively receptive to this. They don't boo him off the stage; they seem to think this is reasonable, so it's going pretty well for Brutus. But then Mark Antony comes up, and he gives a speech, which famously begins, 'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,' so that's where it comes in. So he goes along and tries to basically disprove Brutus' thesis that Caesar was too ambitious. Brutus says 'I killed him, because he would have made us all slaves.' Mark Antony's trying to say 'No, that doesn't make sense.' So this is the strategy he tries with this speech, where he says:

'He was my friend, faithful and just to me:

But Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome,

Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.'

That phrase 'Brutus is an honorable man' comes back four times in that speech. This exchange between Brutus and Mark Antony really highlights this idea of rhetoric that I was talking about. That technique - to praise Brutus while also undermining what he's saying - proves extremely effective. He's like, 'Oh, yeah, Brutus is fine, but this doesn't make any sense!' So that's the technique that he's drawing on.

He shows off the wounds on Caesar's body and really whips the crowd up into a frenzy, after which they are upset at the conspirators. They want Caesar to not be dead; they are so sad. And then Mark Antony reads Caesar's will, in which Caesar said he's going to give them all money, all the citizens of Rome. So then they really freak out and go on a rampage, looting and killing people, and we find out that Octavius - who was Caesar's nephew and heir - has turned up in the city. So things are suddenly really not going well for the conspirators. It turns out Cassius was totally right, that Mark Antony should not be speaking at this thing, and that's the end of Act III.

Act IV and V: Power Struggles

In Act IV, Octavius and Mark Antony are trying to figure out what's the best way to deal with the conspirators and restore order. They hear that Brutus and Cassius are gathering an army, which indeed they are, and we see them with their army, arguing with each other. We could probably see that coming, right, because Brutus actually is kind of an honorable man and Cassius is just out for power.

Brutus is upset because people are taking bribes, and Cassius is like, 'Get over yourself, you're way too noble.' Brutus' point, which seems to be a fair one, is 'We killed Caesar because he was corrupt. What's wrong with us? We can't be corrupt too, then there's no point in having killed Caesar.' That makes sense. Brutus gets drunk and confesses that he's on edge because his wife killed herself (which is the first we know of this, this kind of offhand remark). So he and Cassius decide that they're going to march on Octavius and Antony's army tomorrow.

It's late at night, and they're all trying to go to sleep, and Brutus is visited by the ghost of Caesar. Because no good Shakespeare play is complete without a ghost! He says:

'How ill this taper burns! Ha! who comes here?

I think it is the weakness of mine eyes

That shapes this monstrous apparition.

It comes upon me. Art thou any thing?

Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,

That makest my blood cold and my hair to stare?

Speak to me what thou art.'

'Thy evil spirit, Brutus.'

So that's the end of Act IV. We've got the ghost of Caesar, and Brutus is feeling guilty and weird about everything. Act V is mostly fighting. The armies of Antony and Octavius and Brutus and Cassius meet at a place called Philippi, and they fight. Octavius and Antony are not getting along vis-a-vis strategy. Cassius is worried because he's seen some bad omens, so then Brutus is saying, 'I would rather die than be paraded around as a prisoner' if they indeed lose this battle. Then they really start fighting in earnest. And it doesn't really seem to be going Brutus and Cassius' way; they're getting pretty worried, Cassius in particular. He sees a battle go down that seems to have gone really negatively for them and decides to have his servant kill him, because he doesn't want to be paraded around as a prisoner either.

But he's actually wrong. Brutus' army defeated Octavius' army, even though Octavius was whomping on Cassius! So basically things are okay, but Cassius doesn't know it because he's on the losing end of things. He kind of kills himself for nothing, which is kind of sad, although he wasn't that sympathetic of a guy to begin with. Brutus discovers the body, and he's really upset about it.

Now he thinks Caesar's ghost has come to see him again on the battlefield, and he decides that it's probably time for him to die as well. He runs himself through with a sword, and then he dies. Mark Antony gives another one of his famous, awesome funeral speeches - this time about Brutus - saying that Brutus was actually a really good guy and they should bury him well. And that's the end of the play. It ends with Brutus' death and his being memorialized by Mark Antony.

Lesson Summary

So what do we take away from all this? I think that's a fair question about Julius Caesar. One thing to take away is that Shakespeare was definitely into classical history, Greek and Roman stuff. He got most of the history in this play from a Roman writer named Plutarch. He kind of read his book and thought, 'That sounds cool; I think I'll write a play about that.'

Another interesting thing to think about is why did he want to write about Romans? Why would you write a play about Romans when there are plenty of plays written by Romans that are about Romans? The idea is that this uncertainty in the political climate can be represented or analogized in this old, historical thing that Shakespeare writes a play about. There's a general sense of unrest. Critics have argued that some of the things that go on - the infighting, the debates about honor, the corruption - might be meant to highlight potential problems in the current administration. Also, if you think about it, all that speechifying - all those people make all those speeches, and rhetoric is super important in the play - wasn't made up; the Romans really were into that. But in the context of the whole commentary on politics thing that might be going on, it gets more interesting.

Shakespeare obviously makes a living off of being well spoken; that's why we read him today. So his advocacy of good speech and people who talk well in this play seems natural and a bit self-serving. If you can make a great speech about how Brutus is an honorable man but also wrong and get all the people on your side and end up driving out the conspirators all through the power of words, that's a really cool thing for Shakespeare to say, because he's all about the power of words.

So that's Julius Caesar, teasing apart the idea of what's historical and what's made up and why historical fiction is appealing to us and to the people in Shakespeare's day.