ACT I
SCENE i
“Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home! / Is this a holiday?” (I.i.1-2). The play begins on the theme of not knowing one’s proper place. Two Roman tribunes, Flavius and Murellus, representative of the Roman nobility, are eager to retain the status quo of the Republic under Senate rule. They encounter workmen — or “mechanical[s]” (I.i.3) — and are offended by the menials’ disregard for sumptuary laws: going about “without the sign / Of your profession” (I.i.4-5) or, in other words, not wearing the clothes that would designate their professions clearly. The classes are forgetting their station and getting uppity! The caste system is jeopardized! “Reading” itself is in danger!
The tribunes try to dissuade the forming crowds from cheering Caesar’s victory over Pompey’s sons. Whither their reverence for Pompey the Great? One commoner, a cobbler, uses verbal wit as a cheeky tool against the insulting tribunes. First, when asked his trade, he responds, “Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman, I am but, as you would say, a cobbler” (I.i.10-11). Why the delicacy of phrase “as you would say”? Everyone calls a cobbler a cobbler. Does he mean to emphasize the “but” — the tribunes’ classist dismissal?
The cobbler puns on words such as “sole” and “awl,” and his verbal dexterity allows him to imply that he is a priest and a doctor, of sorts. (Is Shakespeare’s recurring cobbler theme — Google Saint Crispin, for example — due to his honoring Chaucer/Chaussiere/shoemaker?) The cobbler’s slipperiness with language may demonstrate even more worrisome havoc to the conservative tribunes; but ultimately the populace seems easily manipulable. The two tribunes plan to remove ceremonial decorations from statues too on this feast of Lupercal (a Roman fertility celebration of mid-February), lest Caesar achieve such stature that he become a tyrant “And keep us all in servile fearfulness” (I.i.75), instead of just the mechanicals kept in servile fearfulness in accord with the current system.
Shakespeare displays through the tribunes the aristocratic view towards the masses who here — as in the Henry VI plays, Richard III, and elsewhere — seem to be fickle, irresponsible, easily manipulated goobers.
The battle in Caesar’s time did not really involve liberty in our modern sense. On the one hand was a time-honored but distorted and corrupt senatorial government, inefficient and dying. On the other was the one-man dictatorship of Julius Caesar, intent on fundamental reform and a centralized government…. We need not be deluded, however. The senatorial notion of ‘liberty’ was the liberty of a small group of venal aristocrats to plunder the state unchecked. (Asimov 260)
SCENE ii
The celebrated Caesar enters, already being treated like a monarch, even by Casca who will be among the conspirators: “Peace ho, Caesar speaks!” (I.ii.1). Caesar tells his wife Calpurnia to position herself so that when Mark Antony runs the Lupercal footrace he can touch her on the way by. This is an ostensible cure for sterility, so possibly Caesar has dynastic aspirations, but mingled with sad desperation if he is this superstitious. “When Caesar says, ‘Do this,’ it is perform’d” (I.ii.10). This scene is not in the Plutarch source, and it points out that, “Like Elizabeth, Caesar was a ruler without an heir of his own body” (Garber 410). A soothsayer calls out to Caesar, “Beware the ides of March” (I.ii.18). Brutus has his first line, which is tellingly a mere repetition of another’s words: the soothsayer’s (I.ii.18-19). But Caesar, who will occasionally speak of himself in the third person (I.ii.17), dismisses this warning: “He is a dreamer” (I.ii.24). So Caesar is or isn’t superstitious? Consensus holds that he is vain and so thinks of himself as unassailable; yet he suffers from various physical infirmities. “Shakespeare decided that his play required exactly a waning Caesar, a highly plausible mixture of grandeurs and weaknesses” (Bloom 105).
Cassius feels out a brooding Brutus, an “introspective Stoic who is fond of literature and music, considerate to people from all stations of Roman life” (Carey 88), over the Caesar question: whether he’ll turn into a dictator, a tyrant. Brutus, born in 85 bce and so just past the age of 40 at this time (Asimov 263), is troubled already and declares himself “not gamesome; I do lack some part / Of that quick spirit that is in Antony” (I.ii.28-29). Cassius asks if he can see his own, presumably careworn, face. “No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things” (I.ii.52-53), replies Brutus, pinpointing the theme of the elusiveness of trying to know oneself. The real dangers are in fact internal ones (I.ii.63-65). Cassius flatters Brutus, praising his “worthiness” (I.ii.57), and he claims to be hyper-selective in his friendships (I.ii.72ff). Brutus acknowledges, “I love / The name of honor more than I fear death” (I.ii.88-89). Cassius refers to Caesar’s weakest moments in contrast to his apparently superior demeanor now. Cassius sneers at Caesar having needed help during a swimming contest (reminiscent of a recounted Beowulf incident) and in the grip of a fever acting “As a sick girl” (I.ii.128). Cassius “doesn’t once accuse Caesar of tyrannical behavior or of cruelty; he doesn’t say his reforms are wicked or evil. He concentrates entirely on Caesar’s physical weakness and poor health” (Asimov 267).
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
(I.ii.139-141)
Cassius also refers to Brutus’ honorable ancestors and that the Roman populace therefore looks to him. “Age, thou art sham’d! / Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods! (I.ii.150-151). But Brutus seems uncertain how to act.
Especially relevant to Oxford’s situation in the late 1570s, Cassius’ appeal to Brutus’ ancestral pride (I.ii.158f) is probably one element in an autobiographical echo of an experience. The scene works as an anatomy of a political seduction, certainly of the type conducted by Henry Howard on the Earl of Oxford. Howard and others were serious and potentially deadly political conspirators aligned with the Catholic notion that Queen Elizabeth should be assassinated. Oxford informed the queen of their treachery when it became clear to him. But this scene details the wily ways the treacherous try to enlist others.
Caesar returns from the games with his groupies, including Mark Antony, who, born in 83 bce, would have been 38 years old at this time (Asimov 261). “And though he [Caesar] can be very blind, his estimate of Cassius shows him to be the best analyst of another human being in all of Shakespeare” (Bloom 106). Caesar demonstrates his good instincts when he tells Antony that “Cassius has a lean and hungry look, / He thinks too much; such men are dangerous” (I.ii.194-195). Cassius also, reportedly, doesn’t enjoy plays or music (I.ii.203-204)! Resentful puritanical prude! The elder Ogburns think Cassius represents Lord Burghley (Oxford’s father-in-law and Elizabeth’s chief advisor) in all this (Ogburn and Ogburn 473). Caesar proceeds onwards. Another weakness, the touch of deafness, is Shakespeare’s invention.
Cassius and Brutus solicit conversation with Casca, who tells them that Mark Antony thrice offered a makeshift crown to Caesar on behalf of the crowd. It was not a crown so much as a coronet — the headgear not for a monarch but for a count, or English earl, as Clark points out; similarly, the Prince of Orange was “offered the old title of Count of Holland,” lower than sovereignty (Clark 533; cf. Ogburn and Ogburn 470).
This second-hand report is usually taken by critics as Cassius, and Casca (once he sees how to grip his audience), would like it to be. But a real coronation by the masses at a holiday racetrack is quite illogical, Captain. Surely we can suspect it was more in the nature of a satiric game, a spectacle of dramatic gesture and good humor which Casca initially calls indeed “mere foolery” (I.ii.236) with Caesar showing what a tongue-in-cheek good sport he can be about a current goofy “issue.” A “coronet” suggests a dorky prop, like a Burger King crown — so this may all have been playful until the onset of Caesar’s epileptic fit. In any case, Caesar rejected this crown and afterwards fell into an epilepsy. (Some say Caesar grew wrathful when the people failed to press the point about the crown and cheered his refusals; but we don’t get this obviously dramatic scene directly, so we’re at the mercy of Shakespearean ambiguity and suspect that what may have been truly public fun and “foolery” is made to seem dire by paranoid and warped minds. Here again, the people get no credit for understanding wit and satire.) Cicero also said something, but “it was Greek” to Casca, literally — now the “proverbial protestation of failed understanding” (Garber 431). The “sour” Casca also reports that Flavius and Murellus “are put to silence” (I.ii.286). Casca slyly hints he could tell more but ekes a dinner invitation out of it (I.ii.286ff).
Afterwards, Cassius reveals in a soliloquy his plot to rope Brutus into a conspiracy against Caesar. The conspiracy needs Brutus’ moral prestige. Cassius will manufacture a mandate from the people in the form of fake notes thrown in Brutus’ window. The historical Cassius married Brutus’ sister and was therefore his brother-in-law (Asimov 264).
SCENE iii
A month later, at night in the streets, Casca, who declares himself “no fleering tell-tale” (I.iii.117) even though that is all he’s been so far, reports omens to Cicero: a storm, a slave’s burning hand, a wandering lion, an owl hanging out at the marketplace at noon, unrest of the living dead, etc. Casca didn’t seem so easily spooked in the previous scene.
Cicero agrees that “it is a strange-disposed time” (I.iii.33) but also notes that omens are often force-fit to betoken events they have no connection to (and, again, a major theme of the play involves the ability to “read” ambiguities). Cicero leaves, whereupon Cassius enters, obsessively interpreting the signs as warnings that Caesar is a threat to the Republic and foreseeing Caesar’s accession as a form of “bondage.” Cinna enters and joins what is becoming a group of conspirators, and Cassius sets in motion more hoaxes that will win Brutus over to the cause. A meeting is planned with other conspirators at Pompey’s Porch (a theater portico built by Pompey in 55 bce, but this is not the location we get in the play for such a meeting, which suggests revision). Cassius’ assertions contradict earlier ones: now the omens are “like the work we have in hand, / Most bloody, fiery, and most terrible” (I.iii.129-130). But he thinks they’ll win over Brutus: “Three parts of him / Is ours already, and the man entire / Upon the next encounter yields him ours” (I.iii.154-156).
Julius Caesar, Act by Act
Julius Caesar Act I