Julius Caesar • 2013 - Chicago Shakespeare Theater

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SCHOLARS’ PERSPECTIVES
LOVE, PARTICULAR AND GENERAL
MARTHA NUSSBAUM is the Ernst Freund Distinguished
Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago,
appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School,
and Divinity School. She writes on Greek and Roman philosophy,
on political justice, and on the emotions. Her current
book in progress, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for
Justice, will be published by Harvard in 2013.
Julius Caesar shows us two
different kinds of love, in
tragic opposition. Although
it would be easy to see Brutus as
a cold man who acts on principle,
Shakespeare repeatedly emphasizes
his intense compassion for
Rome and all Romans, threatened
with bondage by a charismatic and
unprincipled populist tyrant. Brutus
tells us that one strong emotion has driven out another
emotion (personal love of Caesar), as fire drives out fire.
He appeals to the emotions all Romans have, he thinks,
for their threatened republican form of government. He addresses
them as “countrymen and lovers,” summoning them
to love of country and hatred of oppression. Reason and
love are not at odds for him,
because he intensely loves
the causes that he also thinks
rational argument can justify.
He expects all Romans to
be like him: deliberative citizens,
who value liberty with
both their judgment and their
hearts. (Were Antony Caesar’s
own son, Brutus says earlier, the conspirators’ compelling
moral arguments should satisfy him.) Shakespeare
gives him prose not poetry at this crucial moment, but a
passionate rhythmic prose, the language of general compassion.
Shakespeare’s sources, the ancient authors Plutarch and
Suetonius, support this picture of Brutus as a man of philosophical
principle, whose motives in leading the plot against
Caesar were untainted by personal grievance or envy. The
author of well-known books on virtue and duty, he really
was the moral philosopher putting his ideas into practice.
Brutus was not a Stoic, as he is often said to be, but a Platonist;
he auditioned possible conspirators by asking them
whether civil war was preferable to “lawless monarchy"—
Julius Caesar • 2013
Plato’s technical designation of the worst possible regime.
Shakespeare suppressed the one bit of personal gossip the
sources do mention, the possibility that Brutus may have
been Caesar’s natural son. According to Suetonius, Caesar’s
last words were, in Greek, “You too, my child” (kai
su, teknon)—in place of which Shakespeare gives us “Et tu
Brute, “You too, Brutus,” a reminder of personal friendship
rather than of kinship.
Brutus’s antitype is Antony, the dissolute and unprincipled,
who can understand no kind of love other than the personal,
who cannot refrain from calling the dead man “Julius” even
in the presence of the conspirators, and whose “O pardon
me, thou bleeding piece of earth” spills out over this world
of philosophically moralized emotion like a red stain. For
him, the Servant gives proof of a “big heart” only by being
dumbstruck at the sight of Caesar’s corpse. Antony can
understand that Brutus is honorable and fine; Brutus’s type
of passionate love he cannot grasp. In one sense Antony’s
heart is large; in another, it is pinched and small.
Julius Caesar is the play’s dramatic center because he is
the focal point of this collision of loves—the charismatic object
of Antony’s and the people’s devotion, the merely personal
love against which Brutus must fortify himself in pursuit
of his passion for justice. As in the sources, Caesar is
a populist tyrant, who loved the people and took bold steps
to improve their economic
circumstances, but at
the price of political liberty.
Daring commander,
epileptic, erudite author,
statesman who more
than anyone might have
saved the Roman Republic
had he not loved
glory more—these contradictory aspects of the man are indelibly
etched in Shakespeare’s spare portrait.
The citizens of Rome resemble
Antony, not Brutus, in their loves.
That is Brutus’s tragedy,
and theirs, and Rome’s.
The citizens of Rome resemble Antony, not Brutus, in their
loves. That is Brutus’s tragedy, and theirs, and Rome’s. The
play poses one of the darkest questions of political life: can
Brutus’s type of love ever motivate masses of people or determine
the course of events? And, if it cannot, what lies in
store for human freedom? ✪