Contents
Acknowledgements
ix
General Editors’ Preface
xi
Introduction: RICHARD WILSON
1
1.
The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar
29
WAYNE REBHORN
2.
‘Is this a holiday?’: Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival
55
RICHARD WILSON
3.
‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the Politics of
Theatrical Representation
77
JOHN DRAKAKIS
4.
The Roman Actor: Julius Caesar
92
JONATHAN GOLDBERG
5.
Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar
108
RENÉ GIRARD
6.
‘Thou bleeding piece of earth’: The Ritual Ground
of Julius Caesar
128
NAOMI CONN LIEBLER
7.
‘In the spirit of men there is no blood’: Blood as
Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar
GAIL KERN PASTER
vii
149
viii
CONTENTS
8.
Portia’s Wound, Calphurnia’s Dream: Reading
Character in Julius Caesar
170
CYNTHIA MARSHALL
9.
Bardicide
188
GARY TAYLOR
10. Vicissitudes of the Public Sphere: Julius Caesar
210
RICHARD HALPERN
Further Reading
229
Notes on Contributors
234
Index
236
Introduction
RICHARD WILSON
There is a special necessity for a New Casebook on Julius Caesar
because by the year 1999 this play of 1599 had become one of the
most quoted texts in debates about critical theory. And this prominence was intriguing because Shakespeare’s tragedy was no longer
a favourite of actors, as it had been for most of the twentieth
century. Less staged than studied, the Roman play had become an
ironic instance of its own theme of the gap between ideas and
action. But one reason why it had become so influential in theorising the relation of the word to the world was that its imaging of
the moment ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing’ / And the first
motion’ (II.i.63) appeared to anticipate so much of postmodernism.1 Here was a text that dreamed the past as a museum, the
present as a market, and the future as a kind of movie, in which
there would be no telling ‘How many ages hence’ its plot would be
‘acted over, / In states unborn and accents yet unknown’ (III.i.11).
From museum, to market, to movie: it was because Julius Caesar
seemed sure of the power of representations to pre-programme
reality that it invited such close attention from critics themselves
convinced that the present was the incomplete project of
Shakespeare’s era. Whether dramatising controversy about mass
culture in the Colosseum; conflict over public information in the
Senate; contest for audience ratings in the Forum; or war conducted by surveillance and misinformation, this drama spoke directly to poststructuralist anxiety that there was nothing outside
of texts and simulation. As Barbara Freedman wrote in her 1991
1
2
INTRODUCTION
book, Staging the Gaze, when Brutus admits that ‘The eye sees not
itself / But by reflection’ (I.ii.53) Julius Caesar comes very close to
our own videomania, and a play which consists of ‘the continual
posing and reposing of the interplay of regards … confirms the
power of theatre as theory’.2 Shakespeare’s tragedy emerged as
such a prime site for theorists, then, because it was itself so virtually theorised.
The aim of this collection is to bring together some of the most incisive of the theoretically informed interpretations that transformed the
estimation of Julius Caesar over the last decade of the twentieth
century. Criticism of the play had stagnated in the Cold War period,
when it was studied and acted as if it took place entirely in togas, and
when its feather hats and chiming clocks were treated as mere
anachronisms. This naïve historical realism was epitomised by the
1953 Mankiewicz film, in which the hairstyles prompted Roland
Barthes to smile that ‘no one can doubt he is in ancient Rome. And
this certainty is permanent: the actors speak, torment themselves,
debate “questions of universal import”, without losing historical plausibility. Their general representativeness can expand in complete
safety, cross the ocean and centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs
of Hollywood extras: no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in a
universe without duplicity, where Romans are Romans thanks to the
most legible of signs: hair on the forehead.’ The purpose of this
‘antique’ idiom, Barthes saw, was a transparency to confirm cinemagoers in prejudice about the naturalness of both Roman past and
American present; but his comments marked the dawning of an
awareness that what, in fact, made Julius Caesar fascinating was its
rejection of the illusion that we can ever access an unmediated
history.3 All the best criticism after Barthes seized on Cassius’s thesis
that it is only through mirrors ‘That you might see your own shadow
… since you know you cannot see yourself / So well as by reflection’
(55–67), to consider how the play poses the problem of self-knowledge, rather than celebrates fixed identity. And, as the essays in this
volume show, this meant attending, above all, to the ways in which
Julius Caesar processes the Roman past through the Elizabethan
present, with an eye always to future audiences.
When he was 19, in October 1583, Shakespeare’s family was fatally
entangled in a conspiracy to assassinate the Queen. The so-called
Throckmorton Plot was named after a Warwickshire aristocrat whose
house near Stratford was the base of operations, but the man selected
INTRODUCTION
3
to shoot Elizabeth was a 23-year-old neighbour called John
Somerville, married to a daughter of Edward Arden, the head of
Shakespeare’s mother’s clan. Intercepted on the London road, this
‘furious young man’ gave his name as Holland, and it seems he had
been inspired by recent Dutch assassins; but his actual orders, the
interrogators soon discovered, came from ‘certain traitorous persons,
his allies and kin’. The Arden and Throckmorton families were
rounded up, and revealed a Catholic resistance network which
stretched from Mary Queen of Scots to Shakespeare’s very home,
where his father had signed a Jesuit pledge of faith. Hastily, John
Shakespeare hid the incriminating document in the roof of the
Birthplace (where it would remain concealed until 1757), and when
the investigators called on November 5 they had to report that ‘it will
not be possible for us to find out more than is found already, for the
papists in this country greatly work upon the advantage of clearing
their houses of all show of suspicion’. Arden and Throckmorton were
duly hanged, but Somerville was found strangled in his cell the night
before his execution: murdered, according to informants, to smother a
scaffold confession that would have exposed the full extent of treason
in Shakespeare’s Warwickshire world.4
Though strangely ignored, Shakespeare’s closeness to this suicidal
conspiracy may explain how in his tragedy about assassination –
Julius Caesar – he came to write the most intense of all plays about
the necessity and danger of resistance to ‘high-sighted tyranny’
(II.i.118), and why the language in which he imaged this imperative
was the same as that used by his own relatives when they decided
their quarrel with a tyrant left them no option but to treat it ‘as a
serpent’s egg’, and kill it ‘in the shell’ (28–34). The fiasco of the
Warwickshire plot reminds us that for Shakespeare’s circle of
Catholic Englishmen the question of ‘To be or not to be’ was
indeed – as Hamlet says – whether to suffer an ‘outrageous
fortune’, or to take arms against oppression, and ‘by opposing end’
it.5 And it suggests that one reason why Julius Caesar has been
central to our culture is that it was written out of fraught involvement in this problem: the clash between claims of authority and
conscience. For as the philosopher Michel Foucault has argued, the
essential question posed in modern politics – of ‘how to be ruled, by
whom, and to what end’ – dates precisely from the contradiction in
which young Shakespeare was trapped, when two roads crossed,
and oaths of loyalty required by new nation states, such as Tudor
England, collided with religious movements, like that of the Jesuits,
4
INTRODUCTION
which dictated ‘how one must be led and ruled in order to achieve
eternal salvation’.6 It may be that the sheer violence of
Shakespearean tragedy was generated by this conflict, as from the
scene when his king begs Hamlet to ‘look like a friend’, to the point
when another demands, ‘Which of you shall we say doth love us
most?’7 these plays all revolve around the coercion of some oath of
allegiance. And it is because it stages this contest between self and
state so sharply that Julius Caesar has become for critics one of the
founding dramas of modernity.
The sense of self is not, as we imagine it, the same in all ages and
societies, but as Foucault countered, a function of the institutions of
some specific place and historical period.8 That, at least, was the
starting-point of the so-called New Historicist school of literary
critics who (inspired by Foucault’s lectures in California in the
1970s) revolutionised the reading of Shakespeare as the one writer
who, above all others, was responsible for inventing the idea of the
modern nation and individual. The inaugural work of this school
was Stephen Greenblatt’s study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which
concluded that, contrary to the myth of the era as a time when
‘aristocratic males began to feel that they had shaping power over
their lives’, the Shakespearean age was instead the epoch when ‘the
human subject began to seem remarkably unfree, an ideological
product of relations of power in a particular society’.9 This
Foucauldian insight lies behind the essay by Wayne Rebhorn which
in 1990 condensed all the implications of New Historicism in an
analysis of Julius Caesar (essay 1). Critics have long interpreted the
play as a drama simply about killing a king, and so obtusely accorded Caesar the status of a rightful sovereign, but Rebhorn
typifies the ‘historical turn’ in 1990s criticism by noting that since
Caesar does not actually wear the crown, but merely aspires to a
‘coronet’ (I.ii.234), the characters of the play have to define themselves against a power (like that of the Tudors in the eyes of their
Catholic subjects) which is without legitimacy. Shakespearean
Rome is a mirror, therefore, of Elizabethan England, where aristocrats cultivated an egomaniac will to dominate that was hostile to
the empowerment of any one and ultimately a form of collective
suicide. Starting, then, from the observation that ‘In this perspective
the assassination is not regicide, but an attempt to restore the status
quo’, Rebhorn highlights the way in which Julius Caesar is above
all a play about state-making and self-fashioning at a moment when
these are in violent contradiction.
INTRODUCTION
5
‘To be’, for the ‘imperial self’ that Julius Caesar depicts, meant to
take up arms, Rebhorn proposes, in a self-aggrandisement that
opposed all rivals only to destroy itself. The suicides of Brutus and
Cassius thereby come to stand for a catastrophe that overwhelmed
the nobility of England in the century of duels and dispossession
before the Civil War, as detailed by historian Lawrence Stone in his
classic study from which the essay is named, The Crisis of the
Aristocracy.10 But it is characteristic of New Historicism that this
long historical process is exemplified, in this account, by one decisive
turning-point, and that the play should be seen to represent events
preceding the last desperate rebellion against Elizabeth, and the bid
on which Shakespeare’s own patrons staked most, the Essex Revolt.11
In fact, the Earl’s abortive coup, which took place during the 1601
carnival, has become a favourite topic for New Historicism, because
of the fact that its rallying-point was a performance by Shakespeare’s
company at the Globe of its deposition epic, Richard II. In other
words, this episode substantiates a vital New Historicist theme,
which is that in Shakespearean culture there was no separation
between fact and fiction, because, far from being a mere passive
reflection of reality, theatre operated as an active intervention in
history. New Historicism is a postmodernist reading of the premodern, in this sense, in the way that it insists that a Shakespearean text
is the ‘shaping fantasy’ of its own context, because ‘it creates the
culture by which it is created … begets that by which it is begotten’.12
For Rebhorn, this means that Hamlet’s dictum that ‘the purpose of
playing’ is to hold ‘the mirror up to nature’,13 is to be interpreted not
as a statement of art’s dependence on the real, but as a cue to view
these plays ‘with an eye to their topical interest’, and as political
events in themselves. A criticism which believes in this way that signs
precede the things they denote will read Julius Caesar as an intended
warning – signalled metadramatically by its own soothsayers – of the
nemesis soon to overtake Shakespeare’s own overlords, in their
kamikaze strikes against the ‘centralised and absolutist one-man rule’
which they themselves will help install:
In other words, Julius Caesar is not a repetition of its context, but a representation of it; it does not simply reiterate what is already known
but re-forms it, thereby helping to constitute the very context of which
it is a part. It is not a mirror but a shaping presence. What is more, as
a shaping presence, a re-presentation, the play must be recognised as
having an active, rather than a passive, merely reflective, relation to
6
INTRODUCTION
what it represents as well as to the audience viewing that representation: that is, the play offers a particular perspective on its context … a
critical analysis and clarification of what it represents. It aims to show
that the behaviour and values of its aristocrats lead them irrevocably,
albeit unintentionally, to self-destruction and the multiple suicides with
which the play concludes.14
Goaded by Hamlet to preen how he had ‘played once i’th’ university … and was accounted a good actor’, the old minister
Polonius, soon to be despatched by his tormentor, remembers that
‘I did enact Julius Caesar. I was kill’d i’th’Capitol. Brutus killed
me.’15 The intertextual reminiscence is a confirmation of the
extent to which literature and history were viewed by
Elizabethans, as Rebhorn says, for application to themselves. The
New Historicist belief that texts shape reality is also the cue for
Robert Miola’s survey of the intellectual background to
Shakespeare’s play, ‘Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate’,16
which itemises the books and pamphlets that would have persuaded regicides such as John Somerville how it was sometimes
right to kill a king. What this article underlines is that ‘The question of tyrannicide preoccupied the England of Shakespeare’s time
as it did the rest of Europe’, and that it was the assassination of
Caesar which lay at the heart of this debate. The reason, Miola
suggests, is that while there was never any doubt about the justice
of slaying rulers who were universally reviled, like Nero or
Caligula, ‘Caesar evoked the full spectrum of Renaissance
opinion’, just as Elizabeth would be glorified by Protestants at the
same time as Catholics, their ‘blazing eyes fixed on Whitehall’,
argued for her deposition. So it was the very ambiguity of
Caesar’s reputation, and the consequent uncertainty about his
killers, that Shakespeare accentuated in his play, which spoke to
contemporary tension between ‘rights of subjects and the foundations of civil order’ precisely by ‘portraying Caesar as a vain, ruthless and unjust tyrant’, whilst attributing the identical ‘tyrannical
tendencies to the self-proclaimed tyrant-slayers’. In this way,
‘Shakespeare creates a work which challenges its origins, those
confident, fiercely advocative polemics’ for and against monarchy.
The dramatist deliberately altered the historical record, it seems,
to highlight the dilemma of his audiences, torn between their subjective beliefs and their subjection to the Crown.
Within the lifetime of Shakespeare’s audience, Miola’s article
reminds us, war was indeed ‘levied against the King; bishops and the
INTRODUCTION
7
House of Lord were abolished; and Charles I was executed in the
name of his people’. So, if Julius Caesar was influenced by pre-existing literature on tyrannicide, then this play of 1599 may in turn be
one of the ‘intellectual origins of the English Revolution’, and a clue
to the historians’ puzzle: ‘How did men get the nerve to do such
unheard-of things’, when ‘For as long as history recorded there had
been kings, lords, and bishops in England’.17 Yet the radicalism of
Shakespeare’s tragedy cuts deeper than that of regicide propaganda,
Miola concludes, for in releasing ‘a confusing cacophony of claims
and counter-claims’, to show how in a crisis like that of revolutionary England there can be ‘no trustworthy source of authority’, the
play plunges us into ‘the politics of the marketplace’, where ‘government and sovereignty lie in the possession of power, pure, simple,
and amoral’. Like Rebhorn, then, Miola sees Julius Caesar as
prefiguring the jungle law of the Civil War philosopher Thomas
Hobbes, who likewise thought society ‘an universal wolf’ which
would ‘last eat up himself’.18 But he also suggests how in this world
of dog-eat-dog Shakespeare’s ambiguity might be a sign not of
artistic disinterestedness, as modernist critics maintained,19 but of
strategic withdrawal, like the inner exile of English Catholics, with
their secret priest-holes and outward conformity, or the politique
survivalism urged by moderates in the French Wars of Religion.
Miola thus endorses the new reading of Shakespeare’s famous
invisibility, which interprets it as a ‘functional ambiguity’ intentionally designed by the author in order to deny intentionality.20 He
shares the view of Julius Caesar, that is to say, of Catherine Belsey,
who in her study The Subject of Tragedy proposes that one reason
why this drama is so even-handed between tyranny and treason is
that it glimpses the possibility of a third way between them, which is
that of the future free and private individual:
In Julius Caesar tyranny and sedition are brought into confrontation,
with the effect of raising the issue the absolutist texts [on which it
draws] are compelled to exclude, the question of freedom. Roman
history, by contrasting the liberty of the Republic with Imperial
tyranny, introduced into the range of what it was possible to consider the third model of political organisation which absolutist propaganda effaced. The Roman Republic in its Renaissance
representation was to all intents and purposes a democracy … And
here the implication is that it is possible to present on the stage an alternative to absolutism, indeed to monarchy itself, in which to be a
member of the commonwealth is also to be ‘free’.21
8
INTRODUCTION
Like Annabel Patterson, who argued in a provocative book,
Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, that by emphasising the role of
‘the people’ in the Roman plays, the dramatist was advertising ‘his
own role as a popular dramatist’,22 Belsey believes that in Julius
Caesar we see how ‘tyranny and resistance to tyranny’ disturb the
claims of absolute monarchy; but (unlike Patterson) she also thinks
the play predicts how, when ‘subjects execute the monarch they
become subjects in another (not altogether distinct) sense’.23 Here
she typifies the New Historicist tendency to read the play not simply
as a register of what it was possible to say in 1599, but as a dress rehearsal for the entire English Revolution and Restoration of 1660.
This is also the scope of Richard Wilson in his book Will Power,
which situates the tragedy within the cultural battleground of the
Civil War century, when ‘two modes of life are in conflict, as
England moves out of the middle ages into the modern industrial
world’ (essay 2). On one side of this faultline stand the City Fathers,
represented by the Tribunes, whose suppression of the Roman carnival is analogous to Puritan republicanism; and on the other Caesar
and his courtiers, whose seizure of the feast of Lupercal parallels
royalist appropriation of traditional holy days. Written for the
opening of the new Globe theatre, Shakespeare’s Bankside debut is
therefore self-consciously aware that in the modern state which it
inaugurates power will go to those who control the means of mass
consumption. So, Antony’s reading of Caesar’s will – in which the
dictator bequeaths ‘To every several man’ the pitifully potent bribe
of ‘seventy-five drachmas’ (III.ii.248–50) – is a paradigm of the authoritarian populism that would reign in Britain, and neutralise the
threat of the Carpenter and Cobbler, after the failure of Cromwell’s
Republic. ‘Bread and circuses’ becomes the watchword, in this jaded
analysis, of the empire ‘that depends not on how it obstructs, but on
how it generates desire’; and far from heralding democracy, as
Patterson dreams, Shakespeare’s Rome, with its sports and welfare
benefits, is the very model of what Foucault terms our disciplinary
society.
For humanist critics like Miola and Patterson, when Shakespeare
dramatises the cry of ‘Peace, freedom and liberty!’ (III.i.110) he
prefigures something of modern democracy; but for materialists such
as Belsey and Wilson, he seems instead to anticipate how so-called
democratic freedom is ‘the very ground through which power manipulates the individual and the community’.24 What is at stake here
are two opposing views not only of the message of the play, but of
INTRODUCTION
9
the civil liberties of the Age of Enlightenment which, they both agree,
it foretells. More specifically, Julius Caesar divides critics between
those who follow the Marxist mystic, Mikhail Bakhtin, in viewing
every carnival (like the festival that legitimates the assassination) as
liberating and progressive, and those convinced by Foucault’s demolition of such liberation theologies as versions of what he calls the ‘repressive hypothesis’ – or our modern delusion of self-emancipation.
For those who write on Shakespeare, the question of carnival has
become, therefore, a litmus test not only of the value of the kind of
popular culture represented by the feast of Lupercal, but of radical
politics in consumer society. Do the wordplay and misrule of Rome’s
shoemakers’ holiday signal the demotic heritage of Shakespeare’s
Bankside, as the Marxist Robert Weimann theorised;25 or does Julius
Caesar open where carnival closes, as Wilson thinks, with ‘the return
of an army … to dampen populist enthusiasm’, and call into question
what idealists never query: ‘the motives of the licensing authorities
who indulge the plebs with cakes and ale’?26 Is this drama, in other
words, a milestone towards the police state envisaged by Brutus,
where ‘subtle masters’ deliberately ‘Stir up their servants’ to crime,
the better to control them (II.i.175–8); or is it a signpost of the contradictions of its own moment, which points as much to subversion
as surveillance? The question is pressing, John Drakakis proposes in
his essay on ‘Julius Caesar and the Politics of Theatrical
Representation’ (essay 3), not least because this tragedy of the fall of
a republic is positioned so much on the edge: as the gateway to a
new order.
Staged at the close of the Tudor century for the inauguration of the
world’s first modern medium of mass communication, Julius Caesar
was ‘a performance of the threshold’, Drakakis stresses, which
enacted ‘the precarious position of the Globe itself’, as an emergent institution ‘cast in a subversive role’ by its new audience, yet ‘confronted with the demands of censorship’, and ‘seeking legitimation’
from the old order.27 It is very relevant to this analysis, therefore, that
the turning-point of the tragedy comes with the report that the conspirators ‘Are rid like madmen through the gates of Rome’ (III.ii.271),
for what Julius Caesar makes visible is the liminal status of the theatre
as a checkpoint on the margin of society, where disorder is contained
through ‘a strategy of temporary release’, at the risk of unloosing the
‘potentially subversive voices’ of resistance. The background to this
argument is the so-called ‘subversion and containment’ debate that
deadlocked Shakespeare studies in the 1990s, when critics who as-
10
INTRODUCTION
serted that if power is invested in language, there can be no revolution
(as there is no escape from the prison-house of words), were opposed
by those who objected that, if language serves power, it also has a capacity to put power on display, by disclosing its machinery. According
to Barthes (who was himself influenced by Brecht), the language that
calls attention to its own construction like this is what we term literature;28 and Drakakis is making a similar Brechtian claim for
Shakespearean metadrama, when he remarks that when the conspirators, who at first ‘love no plays’ (I.ii.200), discover the need to play a
part ‘as our Roman actors do’ (II.i.224), and speculate ‘How many
ages hence’ their roles will ‘be acted over’ (III.i.112), the effect of this
self-consciousness ‘is simultaneously to expose, at the moment it seeks
to reinforce, the historical and material determinants of power’.29 The
essay thus concludes that Shakespeare’s text is less of a reflection of,
than a reflection on, the political reality which produced it in the
conflicted bearpit of Elizabethan London.
Discontinuous, open-ended, and contradictory, Julius Caesar presents a paradigm, for Drakakis, of Brecht’s non-naturalistic ‘epic
theatre’, that works not by means of illusion, but of the ‘alienation
effect’, exposing the conditions of its own production. Much
hinges, in this interpretation, on the play’s conclusion, travestied at
the Globe (according to a tourist, Thomas Platter) with a ‘curious
dance’ by the players, ‘two dressed in men’s clothes and two in
women’s’. Thus, while Wilson assumes this transvestite jig constitutes a literal ‘final fling’ of popular protest, for Drakakis ‘such a
gesture, in a newly opened theatre, may be interpreted as an act of
flagrant political defiance’.30 But, whatever its topical impact, ritual,
they concur, is a site and pretext, in Shakespeare’s drama, of vicious
social contest. That is also the theme of Mark Rose’s article on
‘Ceremony, History and Authority in 1599’, in which he discusses
the superstitions and anxieties that might have been provoked by a
work which, by ‘Conjuring Caesar’ in spirit, played symbolically
with fire.31 Puritan hostility to the stage – Rose is reminded by the
Tribunes in the play – was based on an awareness that ‘there is a
real connection between magic, ritual, and drama’, and for those
who condemned theatre as ‘the Pope’s playhouse’,32 Antony’s prediction that his mourners will ‘go and kiss dead Caesar’s wounds, /
And dip napkins in his sacred blood’ (III.ii.134), would have carried
ominous papist connotations. Critics have long noted that Julius
Caesar is a text fixated on cannibalistic and eucharistic symbols,
but the tendency has been to discount these as emptied of meaning.
Rose, however, believes ‘the assassination is so conspicuously
INTRODUCTION
11
ritualised’ that the original audience might well have believed it was
truly partaking in some Catholic act of worship, or that – like the
Mass – Caesar’s ‘sacrificial death initiates a new era’. So, when
actors invoke ‘Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge’ (III.i.270), they
‘invite us to consider the action as an exorcism that turns into a
conjuration’.33 Summoning Caesar’s ghost in jest, they might be
raising that ‘spirit’ of Roman despotism that in 1599 stalked the
Protestant audience for real.
It is because Julius Caesar stages the power of fiction over fact
that it has become a touchstone, Richard Burt infers in an overview
of recent criticism, for postmodern theorists: ‘It thematises a
process of interpretation called “application” in the Renaissance, a
process that links past to present. Characters apply history to contemporary events in ways analogous to those practised by
Renaissance readers … [But] characters do not simply fill in the
blanks of an indeterminate text; there is always already an interpretation.’34 It is this awareness that Shakespeare’s Romans are ‘always
already’ determined by discourse which informs Jonathan
Goldberg’s chapter on the tragedy in a landmark book, James I and
the Politics of Literature (essay 4). And since Shakespeare’s play is
itself obsessed by prophecy, Goldberg is there able to identify it as
predictive of later Stuart absolutism, given that, for its original audiences, the Roman republic always culminated with the Caesars.
This is the most extreme example of cultural determinism produced
by New Historicism, as it claims it does not matter that James only
inherited the English throne four years after the play was first acted,
because ‘Causality is not the point’. What is to the point, Goldberg
insists, is that by giving Caesar a ghostly life-in-death, Shakespeare
affirmed the absolutist doctrine of ‘the king’s two bodies’, which
held kingship mightier than the king. The provenance of this piece
of manufactured medievalism is telling, as it was largely dreamed
up by a historian, Ernst Kantorowicz, to poeticise nostalgia for the
exiled Kaiser felt by German aristocrats in the 1930s. As a Jew,
Kantorowicz fled Hitler for Princeton, whilst friends in his elite
‘Secret Germany’ club botched their 1944 Plot to kill the Führer
they despised as a usurper; but his cult of mystic kingship infiltrated
English studies via his American students, to become an ersatz reference for spiritualising critics (such as one cited admiringly by
Goldberg, G. Wilson Knight) who yearned for charismatic leaders.
There is, in fact, no proof that, except for a few lawyers,
Elizabethans had ever heard of the fantasy of ‘the king’s two
bodies’, but Goldberg’s use of Kantorowicz’s anti-Hitler fabrication
12
INTRODUCTION
shows how ominously Caesar’s ghost returns – as it did in the July
Plot – to haunt successive eras.35
For Goldberg, the power assigned Caesar’s ghost in Shakespeare’s
drama is truly ‘spectral’ because history is a hall of mirrors. What
Julius Caesar teaches us, he concludes, is that ‘History may itself be
a series of representations’, and it is this vertiginous sensation of
eternal recurrence that is the theme of Marjorie Garber’s extravaganza on the play, ‘A Rome of one’s own’, in her study of
‘Literature as uncanny causality’, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writing. For
as she demonstrates, not only is the ‘Rome’ of Shakespeare’s tragedy
‘self-evidently “in quotation”, already idealised, historicised, and put
in question’, by having been composed, like some ‘genuine antique
reproduction’, out of quotes from other Elizabethan writings, but
since it stands for world monopoly, it has also ‘ghosted’ much of
modernism. Beginning with Marx’s acid sarcasm that history repeats
itself, ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’, because its revolutionaries are type-cast in the ‘time-honoured disguise’ of ‘Roman
costume and phrases’, Garber shows how the makers of modernity
were spooked by Shakespeare’s script. Thus, for Nietzsche, too, the
moderns were ‘pert little fellows’ imitating Shakespeare’s Romans;
while for Freud it was his memory of having once played Brutus to
the Caesar of a nephew one year older than himself that prompted
his theory of the return of a ghostly past into the present, which he
called ‘The Uncanny’. In all these cases, Shakespeare’s Rome has
functioned as the site of a tyrant rival who must be overpowered, to
create, Garber puns, ‘the room to roam’, but if the anxiety of
influence experienced by modernist readers of Julius Caesar was
thereby Oedipal, she concludes, a postmodern reaction to the play is
yet more infantilised. For what we know is that the fictionalised
‘Rome’ came to occupy such an inhibiting space in the minds of
these thinkers that they could either (like Freud) never get to the real
one, or else (like Nietzsche) went mad en route. And the impasse for
postmoderns is that we grasp how Shakespeare has ‘ghost-written’
even this tragi-comedy of mistiming, with a scenario where ‘pert
little fellows’ like Polonius are dwarfed by their urge to star in the
roles of ‘Roman actors’ (II.i.226). For, ‘If it is true that all roads lead
to Rome, that is because’, our experience of Julius Caesar depressingly tells us, ‘they never get there’.36
In Marjorie Garber’s postmodern appreciation of the play,
Shakespeare’s Rome functions as the transcendental signifier of absolute power, an absence for ever beckoning us, like Caesar’s ghost,
INTRODUCTION
13
into ‘the space of phantasm, undecidability, desire, and dread’.37 She
is one of a wave of recent critics, that is to say, who have upgraded
the last two acts of the play, and understood them not as an anticlimax, but as the denouement to an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, in
which ‘Caesar’s ‘spirit walks abroad’ (V.iii.95), and returns not only
as what Marx called ‘the ghost of the old revolution’, for ever freaking out the present, but ‘the true author’ of events. It is to the point,
therefore, in this version, that, as Wilson notes, ‘the Ghost appears the
instant Brutus finds “the leaf turn’d down” in his book and opens it
to read, presumably, the ultimate avenging text’, of ‘I came, I saw, I
conquered’, from Caesar’s war memoirs.38 No other Shakespearean
play is quite so struck as this classical one by the force of classic
works, for though the stage is littered with letters, petitions, oracles
and despatches by the end, what its plot proves is that these scripts are
not all equal. Timothy Hampton observes, for instance, that the
action moves between two monumental works of art: the statue of
slain Pompey and the ‘Colossus’ of Caesar of which Cassius and
Calphurnia dream; but that if Pompey seems to be revenged when his
rival is assassinated at his statue’s feet, it is Caesar who rises from the
grave to be the all-conquering commandant of stone. This is a play,
Hampton infers, ‘haunted by rhetoric’s capacity to skew the
significance of reality’, and in which ‘Montaigne’s claim that glory is
largely the product of what gets remembered’, is underlined by ‘the
fact that the power exerted by Caesar over his contemporaries is
based on manipulation of his image’. So, what finally matters in the
tragedy is not history, by Hampton’s account, but story, for victory
goes to those, like Caesar, who can transform their intentions – or
will – into the world-shaping literature that is epitomised by his
written will – or testament:
Caesar’s heroic will remains ambiguous until it is replaced by the
textual will that is his testament. And this textual guarantee is
enough to define his relationship to the people and spell the end of a
system based on patrician power. Cassius’s lament that never before
have the ‘wide walks’ of the city ‘encompassed but one man’
(I.ii.155) is now ironically echoed as Caesar leaves ‘his walks’ to the
mob, and as the private ‘orchard’ in which we see Brutus is counterbalanced by the gift of Caesar’s ‘new planted orchards’ (III.ii.241).
The topography of the city passes out of the hands of patrician
cliques. The statues of Caesar that dot the cityscape are now replaced
by the ‘walks’ and ‘orchards’ through which the hero’s presence surrounds and engulfs public consciousness.39
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INTRODUCTION
‘By definitively interpreting the death of Caesar as a martyrdom for
the people of Rome’, Hampton states, ‘the will takes history from the
hands of the patricians and introduces the plebs as historical agents.’
In this sense, Antony’s performance of the testament highlights ‘the
close proximity’ between the Forum and the theatre, and reminds us
that the investment of his ‘will’ in play-texts was ‘also, of course, the
chosen medium of William Shakespeare’.40 What this new turn in
Julius Caesar criticism therefore seems to confirm is the importance of
the crowd as the reading community within which Caesar’s creative
intentions are realised, a recognition which might itself reflect the popularity of Shakespeare in 1990s Hollywood, and the waning of that
puritanical miserabilism that had vetoed the canonical legacies of socalled ‘dead white males’ as incorrect. For as René Girard objects in
his essay, ‘Collective Violence and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar’ (essay 5),
‘one of the errors generated by the twentieth-century love affair with
politics is a belief that the mob-like propensities of the crowd must
reflect contempt for the common man, a distressingly “conservative”
bias on the part of Shakespeare’.41 Himself a fastidiously idiosyncratic
writer, Girard identifies with Mercutio’s curse, ‘A plague on both
your houses’,42 which he takes to be a sign of how ‘nauseated’ the
dramatist became with the factions of his epoch. But though
Shakespeare viewed politics with ‘sardonic’ hauteur (comparable to
Girard’s own), this should not be mistaken for impartiality. Rather,
the reason why Caesar and his killers are pitted so dispassionately
against each other in this work is that ‘The real subject is the violent
crowd’, and what ‘democratic prudishness’ obscures is that it is to this
mob that even the aristocrats belong. Like Patterson and Hampton,
Girard thus reads Julius Caesar as a drama about carnival culture,
but one in which, instead of emerging democracy, ‘the violent essence
of theatre and of human culture itself are revealed’.43 He is deepening
the disquiet felt by his own mentor, Northrop Frye, that is to say,
when Frye declared that in this particular play the cannibal symbolism
goes too far:
We pass the boundary of art when this [violent] symbol becomes existential, as it does in the black man of a lynching, the Jew of a
pogrom, the old woman of a witch hunt, or anyone picked up at
random by a mob, like Cinna the poet in Julius Caesar.44
Francis Barker has argued that the violence of Shakespeare’s
Roman plays (which includes actual cannibalism in Titus Andronicus)
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15
works to project the savagery of Elizabethan London onto ‘another
time, in another place, among other people’,45 but Girard proposes
that, on the contrary, it exposes the barbarism of the Globe audience.
His thesis that society is built on human sacrifice as ‘the foundational
murder’, and that Shakespeare dramatises this ‘savage spectacle’
(III.i.223) with ‘intellectual and aesthetic insight’ that cuts through
mystifications, is produced by deep distrust not only of theatre, but of
all collective culture. Such anti-humanist disgust was the habitual
stance of post-war European modernists (typified by the Polish critic
Jan Kott, whose Shakespeare Our Contemporary degraded history to
a concentration camp);46 but Girard’s corollary – that, far from being
a superman, Caesar is the personification of the murderous appetites
of the mob, which is the true ‘hero’ of the play – is particularly
indebted to a dark meditation on Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti.
Traditional thinkers (and critics of Julius Caesar) have imagined that
leaders exploit the masses, but (with Nazi Germany in mind) Canetti
countered that it is the mass that exploits the leader, who merely
unleashes its primaeval lust for blood, as Antony incites the hunting
instinct to ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war’ (273). Canetti’s
book was a reaction to the so-called ‘Nuremburg alibi’ – that the
German people were ‘only obeying orders’ when they organised the
gas chambers – but its insistence on collective guilt for genocide had
profound implications for Shakespeare’s crowd scenes, enabling
Girard to turn the conventional view of the commoners upside down,
with the proposal that ‘Julius Caesar is not even about Roman history
but collective violence itself’.47 The tragedy thus became a paradigm
of Canetti’s vision of mass society as nothing but a compulsive
repetition of the primal horde:
All forms of pack have a tendency to change into one another.
Though the pack is repetitive, each reappearance resembling earlier
appearances, the very attainment of its goal is followed by a change
in structure. The communal hunt, if successful, leads to distribution;
victories degenerate into looting; lament ends with removal of the
dead man. As soon as he is where people want him to be, and they
can feel safe from him, the excitement of the pack abates and its
members scatter. But their relationship to the dead man does not
finish here. They assume that he goes on living somewhere and may
be summoned back. In the conjuration of the dead the lamenting
pack reforms. But its aim now is the opposite of its original one. In
some form the dead man, previously banished, will be recalled to his
people.48
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INTRODUCTION
Himself a Holocaust survivor, Canetti sees the dynamic of all
collective violence as one of ‘doubling’, by which the pack endlessly kills the thing it loves; and Girard takes this Cain-and-Abel
theory directly into his version of Julius Caesar, where the archaic
expulsion of King Tarquin is imitated in the assassination of
Caesar, the lynching of Cinna the Poet, and finally the carnage at
Philippi, when the ‘plague of undifferentiation’ finally levels all
rivals in mutual slaughter. But the trouble with this Nietzschean
nightmare of the envious pack, Naomi Conn Liebler argues in a
corrective analysis, is that ritual becomes an everlasting treadmill.
In ‘“Thou bleeding piece of earth”: the Ritual Ground of Julius
Caesar’ (essay 6) she affirms instead that what interested the
author in the scapegoat rite of ancient Rome was not that this eternalised the structures of the primitive hunt, but that it highlighted
the ways in which these have always been stolen and politicised.
For if ‘the tide of history is defined in this play as repetitive’, she
writes, it is ‘not altogether cyclical’, and the reason why ‘Of all the
festivals referred to in Shakespeare, the Lupercal is given the most
detailed attention’, is that these ‘most sacred rites of purgation and
fertility in the Roman calendar’ were, in fact, as Julius Caesar
shows, ‘the object of continual contestation’.49 Liebler’s essay
looks at Shakespeare’s Latin sources closely, therefore, and proposes that what he took from them was awareness, built into his
plot, that it is ‘under cover of festivity and ritual that radical political moves are made’. And what made this theme so urgent to the
London audience was that English carnival culture was being subjected to an identical politicisation in the Tudor age. All
Shakespeare’s tragedies start from ‘the absence, misconstruction,
or perversion of a necessary ritual’, Liebler contends in her book,
Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy,50 and this is because what they
stage is not some timeless wheel of fire, but the process through
which customs and ceremonies have been ‘observed, ignored or
twisted to suit particular interests’.
The sacrificial ritual which for theorists like Canetti and Girard
perpetuates the innate destructiveness of mass society becomes in
Julius Caesar, Liebler demurs, the object of contingent and motivated political struggle, epitomised (with a cynicism familiar to a
post-Reformation audience) when Antony ‘markets Caesar’s body’,
and ‘literally commodifies’ that ‘bleeding piece of earth’ (III.i.54) as
‘a collection of relics he peddles to the crowd’.51 Liebler’s critique
reminds us, then, how the very material ‘bounds’ in which a com-
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17
munity is staked are constantly ‘beaten’ and redistributed. For semiotician Alessandro Serpieri, indeed, Julius Caesar is a text centrally
about ‘the great epistemological crisis that occurred between the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, when ‘the symbolic model of
the world’ inherited from the middle ages collapsed into ‘the new
relativistic episteme’ within which all values were ideological.52 This
process of dismemberment and reinscription is put into sharp feminist focus by Gail Kern Paster’s essay, ‘“In the spirit of men there is
no blood”: Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar’ (essay 7),
where she points out that construction of sexual difference is one of
the most prescriptive means by which the Romans apportion
meaning to their bodies in Shakespeare’s play. Thus, in the key
funeral scenes, Caesar’s ‘bleeding’ corpse itself serves to justify his
victimisation by its association with the menstruating and lactating
female body. Other critics have remarked how in this gory butchers’ tragedy we are reminded that carnival means ‘farewell meat’:
carne vale; but Paster explains that when Shakespeare’s slaughtermen dissect human corpses they do so according to strict binarism,
whereby women bleed involuntarily, while men retain control over
their bodily fluids, even as they resolve to turn their ‘swords / In
[their] own proper entrails’ (V.iii.95). It is to such a gendered difference that Portia appeals, when she denies she is a female ‘leaky
vessel’ by committing a masculine act of wilful self-mutilation;
while Antony eroticises Caesar’s wounds precisely by imagining
them as orifices of some violated virgin. In the Renaissance
anatomy theatre power belonged not in the surgeon who carved,
but to the one who spoke over the meat; and in Shakespeare’s
anatomical playhouse, too, Paster confirms, the last word goes to
the orator who assigns male or female meaning to the silent
cadaver.
It cannot be chance that the first work written for the new Globe
playhouse should be so concerned to probe the way gestures of
actors are made to communicate meaning, flesh is symptomised, and
emotions are externalised. In Julius Caesar, it appears, the resources
of the most technically advanced amphitheatre put Shakespeare
under unprecedented pressure to reconsider the relation between
looking and saying in the arenas where bodies are exhibited. This
play which opens on the sports-field, with judges decreeing that
souls of men should be as legible as the class-determined ‘soles’ of
their boots (I.i.1–21), is focused on the signs that allow us to ‘say to
all the world “This was a man!”’ (V.v.75). Yet a drama whose pro-
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INTRODUCTION
tagonists ‘bathe [their] hands’ in their victim’s blood ‘Up to the
elbows, and besmear [their] swords’ (III.i.106); while their accomplice slices ‘a voluntary wound’ in her thigh as ‘strong proof’ of
silence (II.i.299), then stops her own throat by ‘swallow[ing] fire’
(IV.iii.156); and where the killers commit hara-kari by spilling their
own guts, has more in common with the balletic Japanese Noh
theatre than with any wordy classical tragedy. As Cynthia Marshall
notes, the shock of Julius Caesar springs from its physical violence,
which transcends language, and so breaks the subject/object dualism
in which western identity is fixed. Experiencing Portia’s pain or
Calphurnia’s nightmare as unspeakable spectacles, she claims in her
essay (8), returns us to that pre-linguistic empathy with the body of
the Other which, for feminists like Hélène Cixous, erases the difference between ‘I’ and ‘you’ precisely because it ‘makes breath poor
and speech unable’.53 Since it is language that alienates us from sensational life, according to this psychoanalytic theory, Shakespeare’s
theatre of blood and suffering is here re-evaluated, and turns out not
to be the monument of male domination critics supposed, but a prototype of radical feminism, redeemed by ‘visceral sympathy’ for the
wounded body. More surprisingly, this radicalism is grounded in
Caesar’s bleeding effigy:
In its concern with the ritualised production of political authority,
Julius Caesar questions the notion of stable historical identity,
and emblematises its doubts in the image of the bleeding statue. The
fixity of monumental art is betrayed by blood, by the body’s
separateness from the symbolic order (thus the bleeding statue bears
a resemblance to theatrical representation of the ‘monumental’
text).54
‘O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and
gentle with these butchers’ (III.i.254): by emphasising how in Julius
Caesar ‘the central political struggle occurs discursively as a struggle over meanings of blood and bleeding’, Paster and Marshall
make us think it no accident that in early anecdotes Shakespeare
was a butcher’s son, who ‘when he was a boy exercised his father’s
trade, but when he kill’d a calf would do it in high style, and make
a speech’.55 Hamlet’s joke about Polonius acting the role of Caesar
‘kill’d i’th’Capitol’ – that ‘It was a brute part to kill so capital a
calf’56 – suggests the assassination may indeed have been associated
with the dramatist’s own deep desire to displace his father the
tanner, and that when Brutus urges the conspirators to ‘be
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19
sacrificers, but not butchers’, and ‘carve him as a dish fit for the
gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds’ (II.i.166–74), he is
exposing the parricidal origin of Shakespeare’s creative project to
supersede ‘the bleeding business’ (III.i.168) by turning calfskin into
letters. Whether the word tragedy does derive from the ancient
goatsong, there was always an analogy in his mind, it seems,
between the ritual and written scapegoat. From rite to writ, what is
slaughtered when the butcher’s boy restages the world’s greatest political thriller in the abattoir, then, is not only paternal power, but
the status of the patriarchal classic. As James Siemon remarks, the
Shakespeare of Julius Caesar can be compared to Reformation iconoclasts who defaced statues, in daubing Caesar’s monument with
red ink ‘to mark the symbol as an empty cipher’. Such mutilation is
different, Siemon claims, from vandalism, as its aim is not destruction, ‘but insistence that one notices the arbitrary metaphors upon
which such images are founded’.57 And Alan Sinfield believes it is
because the play is about the arbitrariness of icons which legitimate
state violence that it can itself be subjected to similar ‘creative vandalism’ by today’s media. For him, this desecration would mean reproducing Julius Caesar as a tragedy not of the ruler, but of the
writer, who is represented by Cinna the Poet when he too has a
dream that he ‘did feast with Caesar’ (III.iii.1) and came to share
his power:
This is the dream and the nightmare of modern intellectuals: that they
are invited to feast with Caesar, to become significant in government.
That is why they imagine themselves as Brutus (and, indeed, Hamlet).
But the dream is fraught with anxiety about the consequences of commitment … In my version, Julius Caesar is the fantasy of Cinna. In
fact, the whole play is Cinna’s dream, his tormented vision of a political reality that constructs, entices, and destroys him. It is the anxious
fantasy of the Shakespearean intellectual, despised by the military-industrial complex and scapegoated by the people. So, explictly, I would
have Cinna on stage at the start, he would fall asleep and dream Julius
Caesar. ‘I dreamt to-night that I did feast with Caesar,’ he would say,
‘And things unluckily charge my fantasy.’ And these things would be
the play, Cinna’s play … In my version he would manifest authorial
power. So he would look like ‘Shakespeare,’ the enigmatic bust with
the noble forehead.58
In Alan Sinfield’s vandalising version of Julius Caesar, Cinna
would dream that the Tribunes, whose ‘political programme is
vastly superior’ to ruling ideology,59 survive as heroes tortured
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INTRODUCTION
onstage by militiamen, while ‘deprived of their leaders, the people
gradually become pawns and victims in the power struggle of the
elite’. However, to produce such a ‘political slant will require some
violence to the text’, Sinfield rejoices, ‘namely, cutting the patrician
scenes (admittedly heavily).’60 Thus, for one Cultural Materialist
critic, the fierce abridgement of the script becomes the paradigm of
a sanguinary politics, as the excision of rulers from the play
prefigures their ruthless liquidation from society. And it is
Shakespeare, of course, who validates such textual terrorism, in
scenes like the one where Polonius bleats how, compared to the
tragedy of Caesar he acted at university, Hamlet’s choice ‘is too
long’, and the student militant coldly retorts: ‘It shall to the barber’s
with your beard’.61 England’s national poet clearly knew very well
how, in Walter Benjamin’s chilling aphorism, ‘There is no document of civilisation that is not also a document of barbarism’, and
how what we call ‘cultural treasures’ are ‘spoils carried along in
procession’ by history’s victors.62 So, just as ‘to Robespierre ancient
Rome was a past charged with the time of now that he blasted out
of the continuum of history’ to glamorise the guillotine,63
Shakespeare’s bloodsoaked politicians rescript the Roman story to
expedite their own revolutionary massacres. It is apt, therefore, that
in the crude ‘New Reductionism’ hailed by a socialist critic such as
Sinfield, a barbarian curtailment of Julius Caesar should be seen to
signal the end of British empire:
What we make of Shakespeare is important politically because it
affects what he makes of us. It is, we may say, a theatre of war …
Shakespeare, as our cultures have produced him, has dreamt us; for
centuries he has been a key imperial site where ideology is produced
… But in the long term, the emperors could not keep out the
Vandals. We may challenge, perhaps in uncouth ways, the stories
that Shakespeare is usually made to tell; we too may intervene among
the contested scripts of our societies.64
Rewriting Julius Caesar in contemporary Britain means foregrounding the Poet Cinna as a prototypical university academic,
who hallucinates the tragedy as a critique of his own compromising
relations with authority. This is the project of Cultural Materialism:
‘to re-read canonical texts … so dissident critics may join and
perhaps take over the Englit game’.65 By contrast, American New
Historicism revolted in the 1990s against even this expropriation
of the patriarchal Bard, and in his polemic, ‘Bardicide’ (essay 9),
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21
Gary Taylor denounces what he sees as Shakespeare’s selfidealisation in the martyrdom of Cinna. He notes that the Poet is a
victim with whom intellectuals have only been able to identify since
the Romantic age, when his murder scene was restored in line with
the myth of the lone artist at odds with society. Sinfield’s misreading – in which Cinna is mugged by the monarchy, not the mob – is
actually true to the censorship under which Renaissance writers operated; but Shakespeare goes out of his way to make the people,
not the prince, the enemy of poetry. What the socialist critic has to
efface, therefore, to claim squatters’ rights in the play, is that
though ‘persecution of poets was official Elizabethan policy’, in
Julius Caesar ‘it is a plebeian mob that kills the innocent poet’;66
and that this melee is demonised when it tears Cinna to pieces, not
by mistake, as in Plutarch, but ‘for his bad verses’ (III.iii.30). As
Taylor objects, with this unprecedented episode Shakespeare initiates the entire tradition of ‘art for art’s sake’, whereby poetry is
purified of politics and the muses are murdered by the masses. No
wonder, then, this incident meant so much to the dramatist that he
drastically rewrote the source, for in Cinna’s lynching we see
perhaps the most influential idea in his play, with the genesis of the
modern dogma (analysed by Pierre Bourdieu) of the art whose disinterestedness is consecrated exactly to the extent that it is desecrated by the philistines.67 So, while the later unnamed Poet shows
the foolishness of mixing public and private – when he presumes to
lecture the generals – the death of the author in Julius Caesar
reveals the incompatibility of the truest art with politics. The fact
that this formalism is propagated in a play put on at the popular
playhouse only betrays the bad faith, of course, of the notion that
literature has no ideology:
Act III, scene iii is Shakespeare’s Defence of Poetry. As recommended
in [Philip] Sidney’s pamphlet … Shakespeare’s play … rewrites
history, the better to illustrate a philosophy. The death of the author
is attributed to a strong misreading. The ambiguous proper noun
Cinna is misinterpreted by a plebeian auditory, who attribute to it a
political meaning that it does not have. The poet Shakespeare constructs a scenario in which the poet is unmistakably innocent; the
poet’s work, unmistakably apolitical; the poet’s intentions, unmistakably clear; the popular reading of the poet, unmistakably mistaken. But this very scene, which denies that the poet is a political
agent, is itself a political act – was a political act in 1599 and has
been one ever since. Every disavowal is an avowal.68
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INTRODUCTION
The first play staged at the Globe ceased to be seen as a fanfare
for modern mass culture, and came to be reinterpreted, at the end
of the millennium, as a sign of Shakespeare’s disgust with the
emerging commercial arena, where ‘the rabblement hooted and
clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty night-caps
and uttered such a deal of stinking breath’ (I.ii.241) that it choked
his art. As Taylor points out, the self-referentiality of Julius Caesar
is such that we can never forget how – in contrast to metropolitan
playwrights such as Middleton – Shakespeare’s idea of drama is
defined by its relationship not to a public, but to a patron, nor that
in his eyes, ‘The plebeians are vulgar interlopers who do not understand what Cinna is.’ For many recent critics, therefore, it is a
central paradox of Shakespearean theatre, epitomised by Julius
Caesar, that the most successful entertainment of all time should be
at such a problematic angle to its own audience. This is the startingpoint of Richard Halpern’s reading, which sees Shakespeare as a
prophet not only of the fall of political man, personified by Brutus,
but of the rise of consumer society, incarnated by Antony (essay
10). Applying the theory of philosopher Jürgen Habermas that
modernity is characterised by the takeover of the public sphere –
where politics was debated – by the shopping mall – where private
interest reigns – Halpern turns Taylor’s analysis inside out, to identify in the tragedy a premonition of our own post-politics.
According to this newest revision, the crucial words in the play
belong to the citizens, when they cry in the marketplace, ‘We would
be satisfied! Let us be satisfied!’ (III.ii.1). The downfall of the old
order, Halpern infers, is that it takes this to mean the Romans
expect some high-minded explanation for the assassination, when
they ecstatically crave what Caesar delivers: a theme-park and a
windfall pay-out. So, while it is true that Julius Caesar diagnoses a
sickness in the state, Shakespeare’s prediction is not that this society
will become politicised, but that it will be de-politicised: like
burger-addicted, tax-cutting America.
From Bankside to Disneyland, for four centuries Julius Caesar has
remained central to debates about freedom, power and resistance.
Successive schools have valorised the would-be king, the killers, and
the communards as different ideologies have predominated, and
they have been able to do so because the play presents the modern
state in such perpetual motion. As Alexander Leggatt comments,
one of the most percipient things about this drama is that there
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23
never would be a dictatorship in England like the one Caesar seems
to prefigure, and while ‘we see the Romans groping towards a new
political structure’, using ‘the language of monarchy as the only one
they have’, their vision of the future remains uncertain. It is this indeterminacy which explains odd features of the play’s structure, like
its early climax, or ‘the discontinuity that sees all the conspirators
but Brutus and Cassius disappear’ suddenly, as well as the shock
that ‘The future belongs to a character – Octavius – we had not
even heard of till the play was half over’. These surprises are
devised, Leggatt infers, ‘to remind us that nothing in history is ever
quite finished’;69 and the point has been well taken in the United
States, where the tragedy speaks directly to concerns about the rise
of the ‘imperial presidency’ at the expense of Congress. As Daniel
Kornstein notes, the Founding Fathers ‘picked up many of their
ideas of republicanism from theatrical productions of Julius
Caesar’, so it is no wonder that opposition to executive power has
come from those who quote this text to warn against the Caesarism
of a Nixon.70 If Shakespeare’s text seems designed, then, to articulate ongoing American tensions between authoritarianism and constitutionalism, that may be because the United States is still caught
up in the unfinished business begun in Julius Caesar. For what
made Shakespearean Rome a model for those who earlier pondered
the crisis of democracy ‘brought on by monopoly capitalism, economic failure, mass politics, and mass culture’, according to
Halpern’s essay, remains as relevant today, when the first Globe
play seems like the last word on globalisation:
Among Shakespeare’s works Roman plays assume singular importance
for modern political thought because it is there, and there alone, that
something like an urban, public space emerges. It is there too that
charismatic, dictatorial leaders, the militarised milieu of the Roman
state, and the turbulent presence of the plebs, seem to anticipate the
more chaotic developments of the twentieth century.71
A play about opposition to a military coup from the end of the
sixteenth century speaks to readers and audiences at the turn of the
millennium because of the concentration it compels on the idea that
‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the full, leads
on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in
shallowness and in miseries’ (IV.iii.217–20). This sensation of being
caught in the inexorable production of both global ‘fortune’ and
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INTRODUCTION
‘miseries’ makes Julius Caesar talismanic for an era that has discovered (with Marx) that if we do make our own lives, it is not in
circumstances of our own making.72 Edward Pechter puts this neatly
when he writes, ‘For Julius Caesar, all critical roads must start from
Rome … For whatever else it may have meant to Shakespeare, Rome
meant the public world, acting in history, political power.’ So, what
this drama of ‘an extrovert who lives in the body [Antony] and an
introvert who lives in the mind [Brutus]’ makes us doubt is ‘whether
there is or can be an interior self apart from represented public action.
Perhaps the inner self is an impossibility, an illusion, and our free
thoughts are imprisoned in the language, not to say body, we inherit,
everywhere marked by the traces of history.’ For Pechter, the moral
here is that ‘Brutus tries to forget about politics, but politics won’t
forget about him’,73 and Bruce Smith argues that Shakespeare acquired this theme from the very architecture of the Roman setting,
where the theatre was an annex to ‘Pompey’s porch’ (I.iii.126) under
which the Senate sat, so ‘plays (not to mention brutal games and
bloody combats) took place side by side with political debate’.74 That
there can be no escape from the Forum into some private orchard of
art or ego is the hard lesson that makes Julius Caesar an unavoidable
reference for a generation struggling to come to terms with the dominant ideology that there is no alternative to the global market. Yet
even those crushed by the force of destiny in this tragedy only ‘partly
credit things that do presage’ their fate, and affirm that it is because
they ‘but believe it partly’ that they remain so ‘fresh in spirit and
resolv’d / To meet all perils very constantly’ (V.i.79–92).
Shakespeare’s play about the foundation of the Roman empire has
now outlasted the British one that it inaugurated, and it may be this
example of defiant intellectual resistance to the myth of world
conquest which will prove to be the most liberating message of Julius
Caesar in the fifth century of its existence.
NOTES
1. All quotations of Julius Caesar are from the Arden edition, ed.
T. S. Dorsch (London, 1955).
2. Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis,
and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca, NY, 1991), p. 66.
3. Roland Barthes, ‘The Romans in Films’, Mythologies, trans. Annette
Lavers (London, 1993), pp. 26–8.
INTRODUCTION
25
4. Calendar of State Papers: Domestic: 1581–90, pp. 129, 135; Charlotte
Carmichael Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries (revd
edn, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1907), pp. 76–81.
5. Hamlet, Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins (London, 1982),
III.i.56–60.
6. Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter
Miller (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), pp. 87–8.
7. Hamlet, I.ii.69; King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir, Arden edition (London,
1972), I.i.49.
8. See, in particular, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth
of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1977),
pp. 29–30.
9. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980).
10. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558–1641 (Oxford,
1965).
11. For an extended discussion of this context, see also Richard Wilson,
Julius Caesar: A Critical Study (Harmondsworth, 1992).
12. Louis Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping
Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture’, in Richard Wilson and Richard
Dutton (eds), New Historicism and Renaissance Drama (Harlow,
1992), p. 128.
13. Hamlet, III.ii.20.
14. See pp. 32–3. below.
15. Hamlet, III.ii.98–103.
16. Robert Miola, ‘Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate’,
Renaissance Quarterly, 38 (1985), 271–89.
17. Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution
(Oxford, 1980 revd edn), p. 5.
18. Troilus and Cressida, I.iii.121.
19. See, for example, the account of the play’s ‘divided response’ to Caesar
and the assassins in Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of
Shakespeare (London, 1963), which groups it with Measure for
Measure as well as Antony and Cleopatra.
20. See, in particular, Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation:
The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England
(Madison, WI, 1984), p. 18.
26
INTRODUCTION
21. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in
Renaissance Drama (London, 1985, pp. 101–3.
22. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (London,
1989), pp. 126–7.
23. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, p. 223.
24. See p. 60 below.
25. See Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the
Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and
Function (Baltimore, MD, 1978), p. 138.
26. See p. 62 below.
27. See pp. 87–8 below.
28. See Roland Barthes, ‘Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France’, in A
Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London, 1982), pp. 457–78.
29. See p. 86 below.
30. See p. 79 below.
31. Mark Rose, ‘Conjuring Caesar – Ceremony, History and Authority in
1599’, ELR, 19 (1989), 291–304.
32. See Stephen Greenblatt, ‘King Lear and the Exorcists’, Shakespearean
Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance
England (Oxford, 1990), p. 113.
33. Rose, ‘Conjuring Caesar’.
34. Richard Burt, ‘“A Dangerous Rome”: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and
the Discursive Determinism of Cultural Politics’, in Contending
Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the
Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Marie-Rose
Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit, 1990), pp. 109–27, esp.
pp. 112, 117.
35. For the origins of Kantorowizc’s idea of ‘the king’s two bodies’ in elite
resistance to Hitler, see Peter Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family
History, 1905–1944 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 30–7; and for the
influence of Julius Caesar on the July plotters – who staged the play as
students – see also Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, Secret
Germany: Claus von Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against
Hitler (London, 1994), p. 107.
36. Marjorie Garber, ‘A Rome of one’s own’, Shakespeare’s Ghost
Writing: Literature as Uncanny Causality (London, 1987), pp. 52–73.
37. Ibid., p. 67.
38. See p. 73 below.
INTRODUCTION
27
39. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of
Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1995), p. 225.
40. Ibid. pp. 225–6.
41. See p. 125 below.
42. Romeo and Juliet, III.ii.111.
43. See p. 123 below.
44. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton,
NJ, 1957), p. 45.
45. Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and
History (Manchester, 1993), p. 191.
46. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski
(London, 1965).
47. See p. 123 below.
48. Elias Canetti, Crowds and
(Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 149.
Power,
trans.
Carol
Stewart
49. See pp. 129–30 below.
50. Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy: The Ritual
Foundations of Genre (London, 1995), p. 25.
51. See p. 138 below.
52. Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Reading the signs: towards a semiotics of
Shakespearean drama’, trans. Keir Elam, in Alternative Shakespeares,
ed. John Drakakis (London, 1985), pp. 125–6.
53. King Lear, I.i.60.
54. See p. 183 below.
55. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London, 1949),
p. 275.
56. Hamlet, III.ii.100–5.
57. James Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley, CA, 1985),
pp. 143, 179.
58. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of
Dissident Reading (Oxford, 1992), pp. 25–7.
59. Ibid., p. 18.
60. Ibid., pp. 19–20.
61. Hamlet, II.i.494.
28
INTRODUCTION
62. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt (London, 1970), p. 258.
63. Ibid., p. 263.
64. Sinfield, Faultlines, pp. 26–8.
65. Ibid., p. 21.
66. See pp. 194–5 below.
67. See, in particular, Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and
Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Cambridge,
1996).
68. See pp. 190–1 below.
69. Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays
and the Roman Plays (London, 1988), pp. 139–40.
70. Daniel J. Kornstein, Kill All the Lawyers? Shakespeare’s Legal Appeal
(Princeton, NJ, 1994), pp. 117–21.
71. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY,
1997), p. 52.
72. Karl Marx, Selected Works (London, 1968), p. 96.
73. Edward Pechter, ‘Julius Caesar and Sejanus: Roman politics, inner
selves, and the powers of the Theatre’, in E. A. J. Honigmann (ed.),
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison
(Manchester, 1986), pp. 60–6.
74. Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the
English Stage, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ, 1988), pp. 21–22.
Index
Addison, Joseph, 22
Adelman, Janet, 152–4, 168
Adorno, Theodor, 210
Aeschylus, 218
Aithusser, Louis, 84
Anatomy theatre, 17–18, 70–1,
150–1, 177
Arden, Edward, 3
Arden, Mary, 3
Auffret, Jean, 52
Augustus, 61, 92
Aylett, Robert, 200, 208
Bacon, Francis, 44–6, 191
Baker, M., 148
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9, 89–90, 150,
167, 219–20, 222–3
Baldwin, T. W., 206
Bancroft, Richard, 190
Barber, C. L., 167
Barish, Jonas, 79
Barker, Francis, 14–15, 56, 71–2
Barker, Richard, 209
Barroll, Leeds, 145
Barthes, Roland, 2, 10, 79, 170–1,
177, 179
Barton (Righter), Anne, 64, 87, 106
Beard, Thomas, 86
Beier, Lee, 60
Belsey, Catherine, 7–8
Benjamin, Walter, 20
Bernheimer, Charles, 176
Berry, Ralph, 187
Blau, Herbert, 186–7
Blits, Jan, 53
Bloom, Harold, 231
Blount, Charles, 45
Bon, Gustave le, 195, 216, 219
Bono, Barbara, 231
Bourdieu, Pierre, 21, 28
Braden, Gordon, 34, 59
Bradley, Marshall, 231
Brecht, Berthold, 10
Bristol, Michael, 60, 226
Brower, Reuben, 107, 173, 185
Brunt, P. A., 227
Bruyn, Lucy de, 51
Bryant, J. A., 230
Burckhardt, S., 148
Burke, Peter, 57–8, 145
Burt, Richard, 11, 227, 231
Bynum, Caroline Walker, 150, 153,
162, 168–9, 167
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 195
Caligula, 6, 34
Canetti, Elias, 15–16
Cantor, Paul, 51, 107
Carducci, Jane, 231
Carleton, Dudley, 93
Caxton, William, 45
Cavell, Stanley, 107
Cecil, Robert, 47–8
Cecil, William, 48
Chamberlain, John, 93
Champion, L., 146
Charcot, Emile, 177
Charney, Maurice, 150, 187–229
236
INDEX
Chatterton, Thomas, 191, 195
Choan Revolt, 65
Churchyard, Thomas, 194
Cicero, 30, 193
Cixous, Hélène, 18, 177, 180, 186
Claar, Emile, 196
Clark, Peter, 58
Cookson, Linda, 231
Cordle, Francis, 47
Cornwallis, William, 53
Cortez, Hernan, 73
Cox, Alex, 78
Crawford, Patricia, 167
Cressy, David, 51
Cromwell, Oliver, 8, 71–2, 134
Cunningham, Bernadette, 206
Davies, John, 83
Davis, Nathalie Zemon, 63
Dekker, Thomas, 62
Derrida, Jacques, 61, 67–9, 81,
128, 130, 145
Dollimore, Jonathan, 65, 81
Donne, John, 199
Dorsch, T. S., 172–3
Dove, John Roland, 53
Drakakis, John, 9–10, 77–91, 231
Duffy, Eamonn, 146
Dutch Revolt, 3, 65
Easthope, Antony, 89
Eastwood, Clint, 77–8
Eccles, Audrey, 167
Eco, Umberto, 60–1
Egerton, Thomas, 46–7
Elias, Norbert, 157, 168
Eliot, T. S., 210
Elizabeth I, 2–5, 21, 45–50, 160
Erasmus, 52
Esler, Anthony, 45, 53
Essex Rebellion, 5–6, 45–50, 51
Evil May Day Riots, 57–8
Faber, M. D., 175, 186
Fabian, Johannes, 180, 186
Finlay, John, 221
Fisch, Harold, 177, 183
Fiston, Thomas, 45
Fleissner, Robert, 230, 231
237
Fletcher, John, 191, 203
Foakes, R. A., 52
Ford, Boris, 87
Foucault, Michel, 3–4, 9, 58–9,
106, 176–7, 196
Freedman, Barbara, 1–2
Freud, Sigmund, 12, 63, 79–80,
176–7, 179, 195
Frye, Northrop, 14
Fulbecke, William, 86
Gamble, Peter, 53
Garber, Marjorie, 12–13
Gentleman, Francis, 227
Gerenday, Lynn de, 50–1, 146,
187
Gilbert, Anthony, 231
Gill, Roma, 229
Girard, René, l4–16, 108–27, 167
231
Gless, Darryl, 231
Globe Theatre, 5, 8–10, 22, 55–88,
79–82, 148, 204, 228
Goldberg, Jonathan, 11–12, 52,
92–107
Gower, John, 129
Goy-Blanquet, Dominique, 231
Granville-Barker, Harvey, 146
Gray, Thomas, 195
Green, Frank, 229
Greenblatt, Stephen, 4, 65
Greene, Gayle, 53, 187
Greenhill, Wendy, 231
Greville, Fulke, 30, 39, 44
Habermas, Jürgen, 22, 210–12,
217, 223–4, 226
Halpern, Richard, 22–3, 210–28
Hampton, Timothy, 13–14, 232
Hannibal, 30
Hapgood, Robert, 203
Harrison, Mark, 206
Harrison, William, 30
Hartsock, Mildred, 50
Hassell, R. C., 148
Havel, Vaelev, 193
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 195
Heinemann, Margot, 199, 207
Henslowe, Philip, 57
238
INDEX
Herrick, Robert, 64
Heywood, John, 138
Heywood, Thomas, 78, 95–6
Hill, Christopher, 6–7, 57, 64, 72
Hitler, Adolf, 1l–2, l5, 195
Hobbes, Thomas, 7
Hobsbawm, Erie, 192, 205
Hogarth, William, 59
Holderness, Graham, 229
Holland, Philemon, 78, 132
Holquist, Michael, 85
Homer, 73
Horkheimer, Max, 210
Howard, Jean, 226
Hugo, Victor, 195
Humphreys, A. R., 229
Ireland, bards of, 194–5, 198, 201,
206–7
Iselin, Pierre, 232
James I, 92–106, 162–3, 201
Jameson, Frederic, 51, 80
Jonson, Ben, 190, 209
Jowett, John, 209
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 11–12, 26
Kaula, David, 161, 169
Kayser, John, 52
Kearney, Colbert, 50
Keats, John, 195–6
Kemble, John Philip, 220–1
Kernan, Alvin, 208
Kett’s Rebellion, 57–8
Kirsch, Arthur, 209
Kirschbaum, Leo, 147, 178, 186
Kleist, 195
Knight, G. Wilson, 11, 40, 53,
106–7, 173, 185
Kornstein, Daniel 23
Kott, Jan, 15
Kraemer, Don, 232
Kranz, David, 174
Kristeva, Julia, 175, 181, 186
Ku Klux Klan, 65
Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 65
Lamos, Mark, 190
Landor, Walter Savage, 195
Laqueur, Thomas, 151–2
Laroque, François, 145, 232
Leavis, F. R., 210
Leggatt, Alexander, 22–3
Leicester, Earl of 45
Leopardi, 195
Lermontov, Mikhail, 195–6
Lettieri, Ronald, 52
Levin, Richard, 209
Levitsky, Ruth, 52
Lewalski, Barbara, 199, 208
Liebler, Naomi Conn, 16–17,
128–48
Linton, David, 206
Lippmann, Walter, 215
Loughrey, Brian, 231
Luce, Richard, 87
Lupercalia, feast of, 9–10, 16–17,
63–4, 71, 128–45
McLaren, Dorothy, 162, 169
MacLean, Ian, 151, 167
Maclierey, Pierre, 80, 89
Mankiewicz, Joseph, 2, 170–1
Manning, Brian, 206
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 190, 196
Maquerlot, Jean-Pierre, 232
Marlowe, Christopher, 45, 84, 90,
230
Marshall, Cynthia, 18–19, 170–87,
232
Marx, Karl, 12–13, 24
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 3
Middleton, Thomas, 22, 196–202,
208–9
Miles, Gary, 230
Miles, Geoffrey, 232
Mills, C. Wright, 212
Milton, John, 191, 199
Miola, Robert, 6–7, 51, 90, 174,
185
Mith, Robert, 230
Montaigne, Michel de, 13, 126,
200–1
Montrose, Louis, 51, 168
Motohashi, Edward Tetsuya, 232
Mowat, Barbara, 229
Mullaney, Steven, 61, 79
Murnaghan, Sheila, 179, 186
INDEX
Nashe, Thomas, 57–8, 61, 190,
197, 201, 204
Naunton, Robert, 45
Nero, 6, 34, 52, 78, 96
New Historicism, 4–5, 11, 20–1,
31–2, 106
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 189,
203–4
Nixon, Richard, 23
North, Thomas, 78, 129
Novalis, 195
Orpheus, 189, 191, 197, 199–200,
204–5
Ovid, 129–30, 133, 189
Palmer, G., 148
Parker, Barbara, 230, 232
Pascal, Blaise, 126
Paster, Gail Kern, 17–1 8, 147,
149–69, 174, 186, 232
Pater, Walter, 196
Patterson, Annabel, 8, 14, 205, 226
Peasants’ Revolt, 57–8
Pechter, Edward, 24
Pembroke, Countess of, 199
Perrot, John, 194
Peterson, Douglas, 50
Petrarch, 30
Phillips, James, 50
Piccolomini, Manfredi, 230
Plato, 61
Platter, Thomas, 10, 55–6, 59, 79,
148
Plutarch, 21, 66, 78, 122, 129–33,
136–7, 140, 142, 145–7,
160–1, 168, 180, 185, 188–92,
194, 202–3
Poe, Edgar Allen, 195
Prior, Moody, 50
Pushkin, 195–6
Rabkin, Norman, 50–1, 146–7
Rebborn, Wayne, 4–6, 29–54, 232
Rembrandt, 70–1
Rhodes, Neil, 208
Ribner, Irving, 50–l
Rice, Julian, 52–3
Rigney, James, 229
239
Robespierre, 20
Romans, Carnival Massacre at, 58,
65
Ronan, Clifford, 174, 185, 230
Rorty, Richard, 185
Rose, Mark, 10–11, 89, 232
Rosen, Barbara, 51, 229
Rosen, James, 51, 229
Rowley, William, 199
Rubin, Gayle, 169
Rubinstein, Frankie, 169
Rude, George, 192, 205
Rushdie, Salman, 201
Sacharoff Mark, 53
Sawday, Jonathan, 76
Saxe-Meiningen, Duke of, 193,
195
Scarry, Elaine 178, 180, 186
Schanzer, Ernst 25, 83, 146
Schmidgall, Gary 208
Schoenbaum, Samuel 200, 208
Scipio 30
Scott, Walter, 195, 207
Scott, William, 183
Seneca, 34, 52, 78, 87
Serpieri, Alessandro, 17, 169, 177,
186
Seward, Timothy, 230
Shakespeare, John, 3
Shakespeare, William:
Antony and Cleopatra, 40, 94
As You Like It, 32–3, 61, 206–7
Coriolanus, 86–7, 107, 152–6,
161, 163, 169, 213, 218
Hamlet, 3–6, 12, 18–20, 29–30,
56, 96, 153, 183, 198
Henry IV, Part One, 60
Henry IV Part Two, 147
Henry V, 46, 81, 107, 203,
206–7
Henry VI, Part Two, 195,
217–18, 227
King Lear, 142, 178, 230
Love’s Labour’s Lost, 198
Macbeth, 168, 174, 178
Merchant of Venice, 203
Midsummer Night’s Dream, 55,
60, 178, 198, 203
240
INDEX
Shakespeare, William: continued
Rape of Lucrece, 198, 203
Richard II, 5, 81
Richard III, 206–7
Romeo and Juliet, 61
The Tempest, 61, 198
Timon of Athens, 198
Titus Andronicus, 14, 154–5,
160–1, 165, 203
Troilus and Cressida, 99,
110–12, 153, 161
Twelfth Night, 61
Two Gentlemen of Verona, 53,
203
Two Noble Kinsmen, 53
Venus and Adonis, 198
The Winter’s Tale, 138
Shelley, Percy, 195–6
Sidney, Henry, 194
Sidney, Philip, 21, 30–2, 39, 45–6,
190, 194, 199
Siemon, James, 19, 187
Simmons, J. L., 106–7
Sinfield, Alan, 19–21, 81, 232
Slack, Paul, 206
Smith, Bruce, 24
Smith, Gordon Ross, 53
Smith, Hilda, 167
Smith, Lacey Baldwin, 47, 54
Smith, Thomas, 30
Sohmer, Steve, 230, 232
Somerville, John, 3, 6
Southampton, Earl of, 48, 198
Spencer, Tecrence, 50–1, 107,
145
Spenser, Edmund, 30–1, 194,
199
Spevack, Marvin, 204, 230
Sprengnether, Madelon, 169, 174
Spriet, Pierre, 51
Stallybrass, Peter, 150, 167
Stapfer, Paul, 193, 206
Stewart, J. I. M., 52
Stirling, Brents, 218
Stone, Lawrence, 5, 48–50
Stow, John, 63
Strachniewski, John, 199, 208
Strong, Roy, 168
Stubbes, Philip, 57
Suetonius, 78
Tarde, Gustave, 219
Tarlton, Richard, 56
Tarquin, l6, 36, 121–2, 124, l41
Taylor, Gary, 20–2, 188–209, 232
Teague, Frances, 230
Thomas, Vivian, 233
Thompson, Edward, 192, 205
Throeckmorton Plot, 2–3
Tiberius, 34, 93
Tice, Terence, 233
Todorov, Tzvetan, 73
Tricomi, Albert, 154, 168, 208
Tulp, Nicholas, 70–1, 76
Tupper, Frederick, 216–17
Vauter, Marvin, 53
Vautroullier, T., 129
Vega, Lope de, 196, 207
Velz, John, 51, 145, 147
Vigny, Alfred de, 191
Virgil, 32–3, 189, 199, 203
Voltaire, 214–16
Volosinov, V. N., 79–81
Walch, Gunther, 90–1
Warwickshire, 2–3, 143–5
Wecimann, Robert, 9, 82
Welles, Orson, 190–1, 216
Wells, Charles, 230
Werstine, Paul, 229
Whigham, Frank, 51
Whitaker, Virgil, 50
Whitgift, Archbishop, 190
Wilde, Oscar, 196
Will, Caesar’s, 8, 12–13, 66–70,
104–5
Wilson, Arthur, 92
Wilson, Edmund, 207
Wilson, John Dover, 79
Wilson, Richard, 8–9, 13, 55–76,
82, 89–90, 134, 145–6, 164,
168, 205, 213, 226, 233
Wilson, Robert, 233
Wilson, Roderick, 230
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 62
Yoder, R. A., 51
Zola, Emile, 195, 207
Zucker, David, 77–8