Experiments in Criticism

The play’s final act begins and ends with Antony and Octavius, the counterparts to Brutus and Cassius respectively. Antony and Brutus are mirrors of each other: close friends of Caesar, one to the extent that he will get revenge for his death, the other to the extent that he was willing to kill his friend for the better cause. Octavius and Cassius are the pragmatic counterparts, the Machiavellians. The only difference is that while Octavius wants power, Cassius simply doesn’t want anyone to have power over him.

The conspiracy fails. Brutus and Cassius commit suicide and lay their end at Caesar’s feet. “Caesar, thou art revenged,” says Cassius as he commits suicide, “Even with the sword that killed thee.” Brutus’s final lines are “Caesar, now be still. / I killed not thee with half so good a will.” That last line is tortured. It’s Brutus’s way of admitting an ignoble end. He murdered Caesar for far better reasons, he claims, than why he’s currently committing suicide. Just because his assassination was relatively better doesn’t make it good, however.

The play ends with Antony and Octavius assessing the conspirators’ legacy. Antony calls Brutus “the noblest Roman of them all,” and he admits that Brutus had good intentions. Yet his final pronouncement–“This was a man”–stands in stark contrast with the god Caesar who Brutus struck down. The line “This was a man” is both a complement and an insult. He was truly a man and only a man. Octavius has no time for moral assessment. He thinks about how best to stage Brutus’s death: “According to his virtue let us use him.” This is the man who will eventually defeat Antony and take over the title of Caesar and anoint himself a son of God. He’s very pragmatic.

Where does this leave our assessment of the play? In his chapter on Julius Caesar in his book Shakespeare’s Politics, Allan Bloom notes that Shakespeare has not simply dressed up Englishmen in Roman clothes. In other words, this play is not an allegory for contemporary English concerns where Caesar equals Queen Elizabeth I and Brutus and Cassius are stand-ins for someone like the Earl of Essex. Shakespeare’s Romans are Romans. They are different than the people Shakespeare lived with.

While Bloom never states this overtly, the greatest contrast is not political but religious.

The play ends with the dissolution of pagan philosophy. Brutus’s Stoicism wilts in the face of political hardship. Cassius’s Epicureanism wilts in the face of military setbacks. The only alternative is to take the path offered by Caesar’s divinity: political power as a means of transcendence. Antony knows this road is a dead-end. Caesar, like Brutus, was a man. Octavius can only think of “the glories of this happy day” which taste bitter in anyone’s mouth who has just watched the play. There is no glory here.

But the reaction that people have had to the play–that Brutus’s end no less than Caesar’s–does constitute a major tragedy let us know that Shakespeare has not simply represented Rome ironically. The implication seems to be that if men as great these were still tragically wrong about politics as a route to transcendence–especially Octavius who will be Caesar when Christ is born–then how much more laughable is it that lesser men and women attempt to find immortality through political power.

Act 3 revealed the Roman plebeians as an unruly mob. They do not appear again. Instead, Act 4 shows us the men who will lead these plebeians: the imperial triumvirate in scene 1 and the republicans in scene 2. Both sides are divided.

Antony and Octavius dismiss Lepidus, the third man in their partnership. He’s useful as a soldier and in securing public opinion but worthy, according to Antony, of the same consideration as a really good horse. Antony’s speech in Act 3 labeled the Roman people “stones” for not properly grieving Caesar. The reality is that he thinks they’re beasts for men like him and Octavius to lead around by the nose. In fact, that’s what he thinks of Lepidus, and Lepidus is supposedly his equal!