The most important quotation from Act 1 was Cassius’s comment regarding Caesar: “And this man / Is now become a god.” The first act gives us ample evidence that none of these characters are transcendent, Caesar included.
The most important quotation from Act 2 is a question from Caesar himself: “What can be avoided / Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?” The question is about human agency. Caesar’s implicit argument is that humans can’t change their fates. Artemidorus says later in the act, “[T]he Fates with traitors do contrive” if Caesar doesn’t get word about the conspiracy against him. Cassius offers another interpretation of human agency when he tells Brutus that the fault is not “in our stars / but in ourselves.” If these views seem muddled, that’s because they are.
These views of fate also reflect political and philosophical worldviews. The republican believes that human action matters. The emperor believes in a totalitarian decree from the gods that must be obeyed.
If my reading of the play is correct, we should expect Act 2 to add more demonstrations that the characters are finite. Act 1 showed the fallibility of the plebeians, emperor, and senators. Act 2 shows the private lives of the play’s male characters –Portia (Brutus’s wife) and Calpurnia (Caesar’s wife) are prominent. The general fallibility of these characters is concentrated into one specific weakness: they don’t know the future. All they can do is project, consciously or unconsciously.
Brutus calls his expectations a kind of nightmare.
Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream…
Everyone becomes a fiction writer when it comes to the future. You script what you think will happen, but it’s not real and begins to assume the status of a nightmare.
Calpurnia has had bad dreams too. She sees Caesar’s statue spouting blood and tries to get Caesar to stay at home. Decius Brutus reinterprets the dream not as a nightmare but as a sign of Caesar’s strength. Caesar is flattered and declares, “How foolish do your fears seem now, Calpurnia! / I am ashamed I did yield to them.” In changing his mind, Caesar shows his lack of malleability. He changes. He criticizes Calpurnia’s fears, but he’s not immune to terror. He is not, as he will assert in Act 3, fixed like the northern star.
Five more random notes from this act…
- Brutus intends Caesar to be a sacrifice, a sanctified offering. “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods.” Just who are those gods? I think it’s clear that these gods are reducible for Brutus to Rome itself.
- The husband/wife relationships we see in this play are republican. The husband is in charge, but neither Caesar nor Brutus treat his wife as an emperor.
- People point out that Brutus makes his first mistake here regarding Marc Antony. Cassius is right. If you’re going to take out Julius Caesar, you should take out Marc Antony too. All this pragmatic hand-wringing demonstrates that the ethical norms these characters are following is relative. Every assassin must “fashion it thus” without clear laws to follow.
- Brutus oddly says the men don’t need to make an oath to one another. His justification? They are all Romans. That’s their real sign of loyalty. There’s nothing higher they can swear by. Rome is their real god.
- Even as these characters are preoccupied with the future, they never paint a compelling version of what the future looks like. Brutus fears a serpent-like Caesar. Calpurnia fears Caesar’s death. What will the future look like positively for the republican conspirators? The best they can hope for is not being called butchers. What greatness awaits Caesar at the Capitol? Certainly no great battles. Bureaucratic details at best.
Experiments in Criticism 