Julius Caesar • 2013 - Chicago Shakespeare Theater

deeply trusted. Caesar’s relative few lines, uncharacteristic of
a man respected as a skilled orator and writer by his contemporaries,
does not give us a clear depiction of his moral character,
which one might expect Shakespeare to have given
to his titular character. Rather, Shakespeare leaves the bulk
of plot development to Brutus, and later, to Antony. Indeed,
Caesar is dead before the close of Act 3. Why would the
dramatist still choose to name this play after him?
One possible answer may be that Shakespeare was dramatizing
the debate itself. Who is the hero of this play? Who
was the hero of history? Who was right, if anyone? No easy
answers are offered up. It is the relatively even weight each
side holds with respect to innocence and guilt that makes
this play a true tragedy. Although Shakespeare portrays Brutus
sympathetically, we never see any real proof that Brutus
is right in his doubts about
Caesar. In fact, we know a
mutual love exists between
the two men. Brutus says
at Caesar’s funeral, “With
this, I depart: that, as I
slew my best lover for the
good of Rome, I have the
same dagger for myself
when it shall please my country to need my death.” (Act 3,
sc. 2) Shakespeare makes sure we know that Brutus has despaired
in provoking the death of his friend and the supposed
freedom of his state. However we have only Brutus’s word
on his motives. We have no reason to doubt him, but while
the characters may describe events as they see them, their
views are as subjective as each of our own must be. Brutus is
certainly no perfect, nobly wooden hero. The “heroes” of this
play are distinctly, humanly flawed. To fully understand the
debate, simplified by the author in his drama, it is necessary
to examine the world in which these men lived and worked.
Brutus the Idealist
The Roman Republic was nearly five hundred years old
when Julius Caesar died on the cold marble of the Senate
House floor. The monarchy preceding it had been
overthrown in 510 BC–by a man some believed to be an ancestor
of Shakespeare’s Marcus Brutus. For generations, a citizen’s
dignity and success had been defined in terms of service rendered
to the State. Many of Brutus’s contemporaries believed
that this and other morals of Rome were being corrupted by
the addition of new territories and their accompanying wealth. In
the rush to add to their personal prestige, many statesmen had
begun to place their own gain before the Republic’s good. It is
easy to see why Brutus and the conspirators would find Caesar
the ultimate threat to the Republic; it could not survive if its citizens
believed their personal achievements placed them beyond
the reach of the law.
The urban poor, known as the
plebians, who figure so prominently
in , had relatively
little say in government.
JULIUS CAESAR
Although Brutus believed that in killing Caesar, he was defending
the freedom of all Romans, this was not necessarily
true. For the Roman Republic was not a democracy, but an
oligarchy. Webster’s defines an oligarchy as “government by
a few, especially by a small group or class.” In Rome, the governing
body, the Senate, was composed of men of the upper
classes who had reached a certain age. Women, slaves
and foreigners had no voting rights. Prisoners of war often
became the slaves of their captors, and could not vote or become
citizens until freed or until their master’s death, a hotly
debated topic in Republican Rome.
For the majority of the people living in Rome–whether citizens,
women, slaves or foreigners–the difference between the Republican
government and Caesar’s dictatorship was not that
great, although the Republic did provide them greater legal defenses.
On the other hand,
Caesar’s triumph had the
benefit of calming the instability
of Civil War years. The
strictly hierarchal structure
of Roman society leads us
to believe that Brutus was
not only fatally unaware of
the inequities of the system
he defended, but also that he had no idea what would actually
appeal to the citizens of Rome. To Brutus and his compatriots
the hierarchy of society and government had become both a
social and a moral imperative. Determining who held the reins
of power had become so entrenched that change implied not
only a corruption of the system but also the corruption of society.
Brutus’s Republic
Roman society was set up hierarchically. Citizens
were grouped into classes and voted based on the
amount of property they owned. If one could work
to own more property, he could theoretically work his way “up
the ladder” of society. By projecting this ideal, the Roman government
gave those whose votes were not equally weighted
(mainly its lower class and its occupied lands) some sense of
participation, and thereby resentment was meant to be kept to
a minimum.
However the strategic organization of public voting ensured
that some men’s votes had more weight than others, and
therefore power remained in the upper class. The consensus
of each “century” was held as a single vote for or against a
potential magistrate, or person of political power. Of the 193
so-called centuries, a candidate needed only half to obtain his
governmental position. But the voting process ensured that
the top two classes, privileged to vote first, made up just over
half the votes of the citizens. In theory, if all the centuries in
these classes voted the same, they could control the outcome
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