ARTicles vol. 6 i.3a: The Power of Speech

Shakespeare chose Julius Caesar to be the opening production at his new theatre, the Globe. As its reconstruction in modern-day Southwark eerily reminds us, the Globe was a playhouse of remarkable properties; the acoustics were powerful, and no matter where the audience stood or sat they remained very close to the performance. From its small, bare stage the actors could control the entire theatre using little more than the power of their words.

It is no coincidence that the world of Julius Caesar is constructed almost entirely from language. The play contains little physical action: there are few shifts in location, in contrast to As You Like It, the play that preceded it, nor are there any special stage effects, apart from the appearance of Caesar’s ghost to Brutus. Except for Caesar’s assassination at the Capitol and the suicides in the final act, the play shows us very few events; almost everything that happens takes place off-stage and is then retold through rumor or report. This gives Julius Caesar an oddly subjective quality; so little is enacted directly in front of us that we must rely on other people’s characterization of events, and we’re never quite sure whom or what to believe. Words, not deeds, are the primary agents in the play, and they are endowed with extraordinary powers of creation, transformation, and destruction. Words can create a reality, or destroy a life.

The clearest example of the power of language is Mark Antony’s virtuosic funeral oration in which he turns the volatile crowd against Brutus and his fellow conspirators. But Antony is by no means the only propagandist in the play; indeed virtually every character has a well-stocked verbal toolkit at his or her command. Cassius, for example, is a master of persuasion. The case that he builds to incite Brutus against Caesar is constructed through a series of characterizations: Caesar is by turns “a sick girl,” “a god,” and “a Colossus.” Cassius paints a series of portraits of Caesar as a tyrant and a coward that may or may not be accurate, but by planting these images in Brutus’ imagination, he wins him to his side. Once these words are spoken, they take on a kind of truth; by naming Caesar a “wolf” to the Roman “sheep,” he makes him so. And then, in his argument’s coup de grace, Cassius reduces Caesar to nothing more than a word, which in itself has no value and can easily be swapped for another word:

Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that ‘Caesar’?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours? (I.2)

When we finally see Caesar in action, we may find ourselves wondering how much truth there was in Cassius’ assertions. Is this man really such a  tyrant, a colossus under whose legs the Romans “peep about / To find ourselves dishonorable graves”? But by then it is too late; Cassius’ words have had their deadly effect.

Caesar, too, constructs his own image through metaphor, indeed whatever strength he has as a ruler is fashioned almost exclusively from his self-characterizations. “I am constant as the northern star,” he declares moments before his murder, and he explains to Calpurnia his bravery in the most extravagant terms:

Danger knows full well
That Caesar is more dangerous than he:
We are two lions littered in one day,
And I the elder and more terrible. (II.2)

Even at his death Caesar remains in control of his language, invoking Latin to grant himself the most famous of all last words: “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!”

Though Brutus’ funeral oration lacks Mark Antony’s bravura rhetoric, he remains a considerable wordsmith. Alone in his orchard in the middle of the night, Brutus is plagued with anxiety about the legitimacy of Cassius’ plot to bring down Caesar. His soliloquy begins with an assertion: “It must be by his death,” but continues with a concession: “and for my part / I know no personal cause to spurn at him.” Brutus is searching for evidence that Caesar must die, and his serpentine argument is laden with conditional and hypothetical constructions. He plays Cassius’ game of characterization to create a deadly, inhuman enemy out of his friend Caesar: He is like an “adder,” and to give him the crown would “put a sting in him” and make him dangerous. And although Caesar is not dangerous yet, Brutus extends the simile further to seal his case and complete the circle of his argument:

And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg
(Which, hatched, would, as his kind, grow mischievous)
And kill him in the shell. (II.1)

In a world where language and persuasion are primary forces, the human experience is volatile and uncertain. Every off-stage event is subject to a host of subjective interpretations, often with disastrous consequences. When Calpurnia dreams of Caesar’s statue spouting blood, she takes it as a sign of her husband’s impending doom. She begs him to remain home, but Decius Brutus offers an alternative, more favorable reading of the dream, which Caesar accepts. He leaves for the Capitol – and is murdered. The storm that rages through the play’s second act is similarly interpreted in many ways. Casca considers it “a civil strife in heaven” provoked by man’s hubris; for Cassius it is an emblem of Caesar’s tyranny, enacted in the skies. Given the carnage that ensues after Caesar’s murder, and Cassius’ own grisly fate, we might just as well decipher the storm as a metaphor for the impending civil war. It is, like so many elements in the play, an open symbol, available to be interpreted, or misinterpreted, freely. As Cicero warns Casca:
Indeed it is a strange-disposed time.

But men may construe things after their fashion
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. (I.3)

This tendency for subjective interpretation weaves through all of Julius Caesar and appears in many guises, creating the impression of a shifting, senseless world with no fixed sense of reality. Cassius’ death, for example, is the result of a catastrophic misinterpretation. Pindarus misreads the state of the battle and believes that Cassius’ troops are losing; Cassius, in despair, commits suicide, leaving his follower Messala to lament the mistake:

Oh hateful error, melancholy’s child,
Why dost thou show to the apt thoughts of men
The things that are not? (V.3)

Even in the play’s final moments, as Antony and Octavius survey the carnage before them, they choose words that shape the reality of the situation. Antony, standing over Brutus’ corpse, characterizes him as “the noblest Roman of them all,” and Octavius sums up the battle, in which so many have fallen, as a “happy day.” Though they live in a world long before the advent of spin-doctors and sound bites, Octavius, Antony and the rest would surely make formidable politicians.
Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Acting Artistic Director.