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enacts a piece of stagey heroism; he suffers from the falling sickness; he is deaf; his body does not retain its early vigour. He is subject to the vain hopes and vain alarms of superstition. His manner of speech is pompous and arrogant; he accepts flattery as a right; he vacillates, while professing unalterable constancy; he has lost in part his gift of perceiving facts, and of dealing efficiently with men, and with events. Why is this? And why is the play, notwithstanding, "Julius Cæsar?" Why did Shakspere decide to represent in such a light the chief man of the Roman world? Passages in other plays prove that Shakspere had not really misconceived “the mightiest Julius," "broad-fronted Cæsar," the conqueror over whom "Death makes no conquest." "The poet," writes Gervinus, "if he intended to make the attempt of the republicans his main theme, could not have ventured to create too great an interest in Cæsar; it was necessary to keep him in the background, and to present that view of him which gave a reuson for the conspiracy. According even to Plutarch, Cæsar's character altered much for the worse shortly before his death, and Shakspeare has represented him according to this suggestion." + Mr Hudson offers a somewhat similar explanation. "I have sometimes thought that the policy of the drama may have been to represent Cæsar not as he was indeed, but as he must have appeared to the conspirators; to make us see him as they saw him, in order that they, too, might have fair and equal

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* Hamlet, Act i., Scene 1; Antony and Cleopatra, Act i., Scene 5; K. Richard III., Act iii., Scene 1.

+ Gervinus. Shakespeare Commentaries, 1863, vol. 2., p. 350.

judgment at our hands. For Cæsar was literally too great to be seen by them, save as children often see bugbears by moonlight, when their inexperienced eyes are mocked with air." And Mr Hudson believes that he can detect a "refined and subtile irony" diffusing itself through the texture of the play; that Brutus, a shallow idealist, should outshine the greatest practical genius the world ever saw can have no other than an ironical significance.

Neither Gervinus nor Mr Hudson has solved the difficulty. Julius Cæsar is indeed protagonist of the tragedy: but it is not the Cæsar whose bodily presence is weak, whose mind is declining in strength and sure-footed energy, the Cæsar who stands exposed to all the accidents of fortune. This bodily presence of Cæsar is but of secondary importance, and may be supplied when it actually passes away, by Octavius as its substitute. It is the spirit of Cæsar which is the dominant power of the tragedy; against this-the spirit of Cæsar-Brutus fought; but Brutus, who for ever errs in practical politics, succeeded only in striking down Cæsar's body; he who had been weak now rises as pure spirit, strong and terrible, and avenges himself upon the conspirators. The contrast between the weakness of Cæsar's bodily presence in the first half of the play, and the might of his spiritual presence in the latter half of the play is emphasized and perhaps over-emphasized by Shakspere. It was the error of Brutus that he failed to perceive wherein lay the true Cæsarean power, and acted with short-sighted eagerness and violence. Mark Antony, over the dead body of his lord, announces what is to follow:

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;

And Cæsar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice

Cry "Havoc," and let slip the dogs of war.

The ghost of Cæsar (designated by Plutarch only the "evill spirit" of Brutus), which appears on the night before the battle of Philippi, serves as a kind of visible symbol of the vast posthumous power of the dictator. Cassius dies with the words:

Cæsar thou art revenged

Even with the sword that killed thee.

Brutus, when he looks upon the dead face of his brother, exclaims :

O Julius Cæsar thou art mighty yet!

Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.

Finally, the little effort of the aristocrat republicans sinks to the ground foiled and crushed by the force which they had hoped to abolish with one violent blow. Brutus dies:

Cæsar, now be still:

I kill'd not thee with half so good a will. Brutus dies; and Octavius lives to reap the fruit whose seed had been sown by his great predecessor. With strict propriety, therefore, the play bears the name of Julius Cæsar.*

*I am in great part indebted for this explanation of the difficulty to the article Die Dramatische Einheit im Julius Cäsar, by Dr Albert Lindner, in the Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, Vol. ii.

Brutus has seen Antony going to the course where he is to run with others. The feast of Lupercal in honour of the god Pan is being celebrated, and Antony is present as chief of one of the companies of priests. The Stoic Brutus looks upon all this as an offence. despises Antony, because Antony is "gamesome," and he loves the dignified gravity of his own character :

Cas. Will you go see the order of the course?

Bru. Not I.

Cas. I pray you, do.

Bru. I am not gamesome; I do lack some part
Of that quick spirit that is in Antony.

Let me not hinder, Cassius, your desires;
I'll leave you.

He

Antony is a man of genius without moral fibre; a nature of a rich, sensitive, pleasure-loving kind; the prey of good impulses and of bad; looking on life as a game, in which he has a distinguished part to play, and playing that part with magnificent grace and skill. He is capable of personal devotion (though not of devotion to an idea), and has indeed a gift for subordination,—subordination to a Julius Cæsar, to a Cleopatra. And as he has enthusiasm about great personalities, so he has a contempt for inefficiency and ineptitude. Lepidus is to him "a slight, unmeritable man meet to be sent on errands," one that is to be talked of not as a person, but as a property. Antony possesses no constancy of selfesteem; he can drop quickly out of favour with himself; and being without reverence for his own type of

pp. 90-95. Dr Lindner fails however to bring out the relation of Shakspere's conception of Cæsar in this play to the character and act of Brutus.

T

But

character, and being endowed with a fine versatility of perception and feeling, he can admire qualities the most remote from his own. It is Antony who utters the éloge over the body of Brutus at Philippi. Antony is not without an æsthetic sense and imagination, though of a somewhat unspiritual kind: he does not judge men by a severe moral code, but he feels in an aesthetic way the grace, the splendour, the piteous interest of the actors in the exciting drama of life, or their impertinence, ineptitude and comicality; and he feels that the play is poorer by the loss of so noble a figure as that of a Brutus. Brutus, over whom his ideals dominate, and who is blind to facts which are not in harmony with his theory of the universe, is quite unable to perceive the power for good or for evil that is lodged in Antony, and there is in the great figure of Antony nothing which can engage or interest his imagination; for Brutus's view of life is not imaginative, or pictorial, or dramatic; but wholly ethical. The fact that Antony abandons himself to pleasure, is "gamesome," reduces him in the eyes of Brutus to a very ordinary person,-one who is silly or stupid enough not to recognise the first principle of human conduct, the need of self-mastery; one against whom the laws of the world must fight, and who is therefore of no importance. And Brutus was right with respect to the ultimate issues for Antony. Sooner or later Antony must fall to ruin. But before the moral defect in Antony's nature destroyed his fortune much was to happen. Before Actium might come Philippi.

The procession passes on; Cæsar and Antony are out of sight; Brutus and Cassius are left alone. Cassius

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