GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR ON STAGE

 Devoted to theatrical, operatic, and balletic
depictions of the Greatest Roman of Them All.

Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω   Α   Ω

William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar is a play in a new style. It is rich in plot, character, incident and description, but unusually spare (one might almost say, by Shakespeare's usual standard, unpoetic) in language. It is almost styleless, straightforward, conversational: "If we do lose this battle, then is this / The very last time we shall speak together?" There is nothing wrong with this, but does it need Shakespeare to write it? There are more lines in Julius Caesar that we could imagine ourselves having written than in any other mature play. This play comes between Henry V and the great final comedies - only a year or so before Hamlet. Shakespeare is at the height of his powers. The masterly construction of the play shows this. Therefore this spare language must be adopted deliberately. The simple style is not by any means all loss, for the play acquires a striking lucidity contrasting with the dense obscurity of style in Timon or Macbeth. Wilson Knight describes it as "startling, picturesque, vivid". Also it allows the play to proceed at a cracking pace. There are few soliloquies because only Brutus has that kind of inner life, and Shakespeare wants to avoid making the play the tragedy of Brutus. Nor, despite the title, is it the tragedy of Julius Caesar, who is hardly more than a minor character. It is, of course, a history play, but the history does not, any more than in the other Roman plays, seem to be Shakespeare's main interest. If it has to be labelled, perhaps it would make most sense to call it a problem play. The main problem is to decide which of the characters, if any, are morally in the right. In the English histories Shakespeare usually takes sides quite unambiguously, and is not afraid of making characters black or white. Perhaps the greater distance of the Roman plays from specifically English concerns allowed Shakespeare to adopt a more complex, ambiguous and multiple moral perspective. In the days before critics came to terms with moral ambiguity, many critics did take sides, but half of them claimed that Shakespeare was justifying the assassination and the other half that he was condemning it. Virtually every character is ambivalent. There can be no doubting Brutus' integrity, but much evil has been perpetrated by honourable men. Cassius' motives are highly suspect, but that still allows for the possibility that he might be doing the right deed for the wrong reason. In any case many of the moral and political questions posed are dilemma questions Ð that is, questions to which there never have been and never will be absolute answers: for example, whether the end justifies the means, and whether public loyalties should overrule private loyalties. These are questions Ibsen and Brecht were still asking centuries later, and to which they found opposite answers in consecutive plays, or in the same play. Is it too harsh to suggest that Caesar is in the play only to be assassinated? He is all things to all men. We see Caesar through many pairs of eyes, and each is a different Caesar. At the two extremes there is the god-like Caesar presented by Mark Antony, and the weak yet megalomaniac Caesar belittled by Cassius. Caesar does not present a problem to Antony or Cassius, for each is aware of only one Caesar, but Brutus is aware of both and others between. For him Caesar the military hero, Caesar the perfect man, Caesar the tyrant and Caesar the loyal friend are indivisible.

It is impossible to tell whether any speech by Cassius is calculated or from the heart. Many critics have been convinced (should one say "taken in") by him. Wilson Knight speaks of "the rich worth of his emotional nature". He is patently a manipulator and opportunist, yet Granville-Barker finds him, despite exasperating failings, less hypocritical and more lovable than Brutus. Neither seems to notice that when Cassius near the end says "There is my dagger, / And here my naked breast" he is aping his hated Ceasar ("he plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut") and comes perilously close to Richard III's cynical playacting when he gives his "sharp-pointed sword" to the Lady Anne "Which if thou please to hide in this true breast, / And let the soul forth that adoreth thee, I lay it naked to the deadly stroke." Antony is an equally ambivalent figure. His initial response to the murder of Caesar seems wholehearted and selfless, but he is quick to turn it to political advantage. Granville-Barker sits on the fence, reading the finds the great speech rousing the mob against the conspirators both as totally calculated and false and as an expression of his true feelings. Wilson Knight takes it to be perfectly sincere. Yet Antony is able to triumph over Brutus not by questioning Brutus' honour, but by dismissing the whole concept of honour as irrelevant. Nor does he ever ask what would be best for Rome. His initial concern for "who else must be let blood" is devalued by his subsequent Machiavellian gloating over his success in loosing a blood-dimmed tide of indescriminate violence. Antony can also sound like an arch villain: Now let it work: Mischief, thou art afoot, Take thou what course thou wilt. What this means in human terms is vividly demonstrated in the murder of Cinna the poet Ð a scene which must never be omitted in production. Brutus is ambivalent in a different way. There are no doubts concerning his true motives, ("our purpose necessary and not envious"), only concerning their validity. Brutus stabs Caesar because he is "the foremost man of all this world", Cassius because he is not. How strong is his case against Caesar? The play gives only one instance of Caesar's supposed tyranny or oppression. Casca (who is hardly objective) reports that "Marullus and Flavius, for pulling scarfs off Caesar's image, are put to silence." We have seen them doing rather more than that. They have tried to prevent the citizens from participating in the Lupercalia. "Put to silence" may or may not mean executed. In any case, neither Brutus nor Cassius makes any comment on this news, and neither it not any other instance of tyranriy is ever mentioned again. Cassius' case against Caesar seems to be entirely on the grounds of his physical weakness. Brutus specifically states that Caesar has hitherto been faultless. Rather he fears the faults which absolute power might bring with it. The Roman ideal of a commonwealth must not be shattered by a king, good or bad. His intention is to bring Rome "peace, freedom and liberty". He brings exactly the opposite. Despite his shiftiness, Cassius certainly seems less cold-blooded than Brutus. Brutus' first words in the play reveal him as something of a killjoy: "I am not gamesome: I do lack some part / Of that quick spirit that is in Antony." Some vital part of himself has been suppressed, or has atrophied. It seems that the first victim of his inner conflict is love Ð love of his wife, his friends, even of life itself. If Cassius' reasons for wishing Caesar dead are too personal, Brutus' are too impersonal: "I know no personal cause to spurn at him, / But for the general." He loves "the name of honour" more than life or love. This "honour" proves fatal to Caesar, the conspirators, Portia, Brutus himself; and there is no general good to set against these deaths. His preoccupation with honour and narrow, rather abstract definition of it, provides the chink in his moral armour that Antony is quick to exploit, until the term "honourable man" comes to mean a man who can rationalize any atrocity as being for the gereral good. The bathing in Caesar's blood could only be suggested by someone whose humanity has been stifled by his principles. He sets himself apart, "self-haloed", even from his wife, who can only get herself taken seriously by giving herself a serious wound. Given the extent to which some critics have hailed Brutus as Shakespeare's version of a perfect man, there are surprising resemblances between Brutus and Macbeth. Each is divided against himself. Each projects his own inner disharmony upon the outer world "and the state of man / Like to a little kingdom, suffers then / The nature of an insurrection". Macbeth's thoughts "shake so my single state of man". Each admires the man he is to kill. Each is motivated by pride. Each justifies the act by sophistry. Each suffers loneliness and loss of sleep. Each loses his wife and receives the news without emotion. Each is visited by the ghost of his victim. Each dies an unspectacular low-key death. There is, of course, far more to admire in Brutus than in Macbeth, yet he is a less tragic figure, because he never develops or comes to know himself. Macbeth acknowledges quite early in the play his own "evil spirit", and has to live with that knowledge. When Caesar's ghost describes himself as Brutus' evil spirit, Brutus shows no sign that that means anything at all to him.

Though I described the language of Julius Caesar as less poetic that the other mature plays, there are, of course, important controlling symbols. Blood, for example, symbolizes not horror, as in Macbeth, but something closer to spirit. According to the beliefs of the time, blood was a magical substance which effected the crucial link between body and spirit. As Donne wrote: "Our blood labours to beget Spirits, / as like souls as it can, / Because such fingers need to knit / The subtil knot that makes us man." The murder severs body and spirit, leaving Caesar a "bleeding piece of earth". As the human body is related to the body politic, so that in turn affects the cosmos, and storm symbolizes "civil strife in heaven". This link between microcosm and macrocosm is what gives signigicance to all the unnatural acts and phenomena in the play, and validates the omens and prophesies (every one of which is fulfilled). To ignore them is at best foolish, at worst evil. Disorder, in the individual psyche, in the family, in the state, or in the heavens, is unnatural. And disorder in any of these will invariably have repercussions in the others. Domestic fury and fierce civil strife "Shall cumber all the parts of Italy". This bond, this interdependence, is stressed by the frequency with which a description of one is in terms of imagery drawn from another, as in the phrase "the unity and married calm of states" in Troilus and Cressida. Rome is not just a political entity. It is a community where, in peace, love in all its forms can thrive. Wilson Knight writes: The two modes, personal and political, are unified in the symbol of Caesar: he is both person and state, and so the pouring out of his life-blood is accompanied by the rending of that body which we call nature, and the disclosure of the fiery blood of a spirit-order which should normally be housed in the arterial veins of peaceful life. Caesar is the "heart" of the world. His death pours out the life-blood of communal life and order. It is no coincidence that at the time this play was written England stood on the brink of civil war. Elizabeth was obviouly nearing the end of her life, and without an heir. It was difficult to see how, after her death, a complete collapse of all order could be avoided. The line "Cry 'Havoc', and let slip the dogs of war" would have sent a shiver down the spine of any Englishman.

SOURCE: Julius Caesar by Keith Sagar (Copyright © 2001)


SHAKESPEARE'S JULIUS CAESAR ON THE WEB

Internet Multicasting Service/HarperAudio RealAudio broadcast of excerpts from William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar starring Sir Ralph Richardson and Anthony Quayle, and directed by Howard Sackler
Caesar has been warned by a soothsayer to beware the ides of March (March 15). In this scene, Caesar's wife begs him not to go to the Capitol because she has had ominous dreams and fears for his life. Brutus, Caesar's friend and a conspirator against him, appears and convinces Caesar to go to the Capitol in spite of the portents.
Excerpt 1 [.au]     Excerpt 1 [.ram]

Caesar, a great general, is petitioned by several citizens to show clemency to one of his enemies. He declines, pompously speaking of himself in the third person. The group of conspirators then proceeds to stab him. With his dying breath he gasps, "Et tu, Brute? ("And you, Brutus?") Thus falls Caesar." The conspirators exult, and Shakespeare inserts a self-referential joke as Cassius says, "How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown!"
Excerpt 2 [.au]     Excerpt 2 [.ram]

Brutus presents a rational argument in favor of Caesar's assassination at the beginning of the funeral. His logical but prosaic way of speaking convinces the attending Romans to accept his political reasons for the crime - but only temporarily.
Excerpt 3 [.au]     Excerpt 3 [.ram]

We hear the end of the funeral scene. After Brutus finishes his eulogy, Marc Antony gets up to speak. In contrast with Brutus's rational argument, Marc Antony appeals solely to emotion, rousing the crowd to pity Caesar and manipulating them by sheer force of feelings. Again, Shakespeare inserts an ironic touch; Marc Antony disingenuously claims "I am no orator, as Brutus is," even though he has just defeated Brutus in a battle of words.
Excerpt 4 [.au]     Excerpt 4 [.ram]

George Bernard Shaw: Caesar and Cleopatra

Julius Caesar

George Bernard Shaw's play tells the story of an aging Caesar, in pursuit of his rival, Pompey, coming to Egypt and stumbling into a royal court battle between young Ptolemy and his sister, Cleopatra, regarding the succession to the throne. Walking alone at night in the solitude of the desert, Caesar finds a frightened Cleopatra hiding from the threatened approach of the Roman invaders (Caesar's troops). He befriends the woman-child, and she accepts him as a harmless old gentleman. When he returns with her to her desert hiding place where she has been living in exile, however, he reveals his true identity and she falls into his arms.

Promising to make the silly girl "a real, real queen," Caesar takes her to Alexandria, where her young brother Ptolemy, supported by a powerful court faction, occupies the Egyptian throne. Ptolemy's followers are supported by Roman soldiers who had come to Egypt some years earlier to intervene in a previous dispute about the royal succession and who are now comfortably settled there under the leadership of their general, Achillas. Romans and Egyptians, anxious to uphold their "toy king" and so keep the power in their own hands, have conspired to gain Caesar's favor by slaying his enemy, Pompey, the moment he sets foot in Egypt. To their amazement, Caesar condemns their action as cold-blooded murder. He tells them that, while they have been discussing the situation, his troops have surrounded the Palace and that unless they leave at once he will take all of them prisoner. Angry, they leave, and Cleopatra seats herself in her brother's place on the throne.

In order to secure their position, Caesar plans maneuvers to control the harbor with Romans, but they are foiled by Egyptian forces. Against Caesar's strict orders, Cleopatra contrives to join him at the pharos and has herself rolled up in a carpet and carried across the harbor in a boat, rowed by a young and handsome Apollodorus. The entourage narrowly escapes capture by jumping into the sea and swimming to the Roman ships.

Cleopatra and her Roman protectors are virtually besieged in the palace for several months waiting for a relief force to come to their rescue. Fearful of Roman reprisals, the superior Egyptian forces are reluctant to make an actual attack, but the sentencing to death of the treacherous Egyptian guard Pothinus enrages them to the point of attack. It appears that Caesar and Cleopatra might fall when news arrives that the relief army has come. Caesar fights and defeats Ptolemy and his men and then, leaving behind his second-in-command to help Cleopatra govern the Egyptians, he sails for Rome. Seeing tears in his queens' eyes, Apollodorus begs her not to cry and assures her that Caesar will return some day. "I hope not," sighs Cleopatra the Queen, who is ambitious for power; and the child Cleopatra, Caesar's most dangerous conquest, tearfully adds, "But I can't help crying all the same!"

SHAW'S CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA ON THE WEB


George Frideric Handel: Giulio Cesare in Egitto

Julius Caesar

George Frideric Handel was born in Halle, Germany, in 1685 and was brought up in and about the local court of the Duke of Saxe Weissenfels. The Duke took notice of the boy's musical talent and persuaded Handel's father to give him a solid musical education. By 1703 he was in Hamburg, an important center of opera, working at the opera house as a second violinist and playing harpsichord in the opera orchestra. It was here that he got a taste for Italian opera and many important opportunities began to arise for him. An Italian journey was next, after meeting one of the Medici Princes in Hamburg who invited him to come and work in his court. In Florence, Rome and Naples he wrote opera, studied, worked with various opera companies and became thoroughly conversant with the Italian style. By 1710 he was ready to return to Germany, where he was engaged as Kapellmeister to the Duke of Hanover, the future King George I of England. That is, of course, where the eventual connection with England comes in to play in Handel's biography: he traveled to London in 1711 in the entourage of the Duke, and while there his first Italian opera for England, Rinaldo, was produced. It was an instant hit with gorgeous scenery, spectacular stage effects and the brilliant, sumptuous music of a new master of opera. By the time the Duke eventually succeeded to the British throne after the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Handel was fully established as a loyal servant to the King.

There were numerous theatres in London at the time of Handel's arrival, most of them specializing in straight dramatic plays. As a special treat, these theatres would occasionally present a semi-opera or masque. These were entertainments that were essentially plays but had generous helpings of music, dance and fantastic stage effectsÉand they incorporated so much of these elements that they verged on opera. They were often based on earlier spoken dramas so, for instance, the English composer Henry Purcell wrote a semi-opera called The Fairy Queen based on a version of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. These entertainments were quite popular and continued to be so even through the highpoint of Handel's Italian opera successes in the 1720s.

It was around 1705 that Italian opera first began to make an impact on the public in London. This activity centered around the Queen's Theatre, Haymarket where various and sundry impresarios tried to establish companies to present Italian opera using, at great expense, Italian singers from the continent. These occasional evenings of opera were attended by the royal and aristocratic class who had taken the Grand Tour and had become great fans of opera while visiting its centers: Venice, Rome, Florence and Naples. They had a particular taste for the sound of the castrato, male singers who had undergone surgical castration just prior to puberty which kept their voices in the soprano range. With maturity they were able to produce a robust and rather exciting quality if we're to believe contemporary writers. They were far more popular than any of the other voice types, and typically sang the heroic roles in Italian opera. The good castrati attained a kind of superstar status with fans which resulted in their throwing flowers, jewels and themselves at their feet giving them far more power than the composers who wrote for them or the impresarios who hired them. In 1719, under the patronage of the opera-loving King George I, the Royal Academy of Music was established, an institution which was to finally give Italian opera a foothold in London society. George gave the Academy a royal patent and a 1,000 pound-a-year subsidy and a group of aristocrats held stock in the Academy as if it were a public company. Furthermore, subscribers to the opera season were vigorously sought in order to give the new company a solid financial basis. The season was to run from December to June and the composer at the center of the company was to be George Frideric Handel. Handel wasn't the only composer connected to the company, however. As he was German and part of the newly arrived German entourage of the new King, the directors of the Academy decided that they needed actual Italian composers to work for this new Italian company. The Italian composer Giovanni Porta thus ended up being the composer of the first opera commissioned by the Royal Academy; that opera was Numitore, a version of the legend of Romulus and Remus. But Handel's real rival at the Academy was Giovanni Bononcini who was discovered by one of the Academy's aristocratic patrons on a trip to Italy early in the year of its founding.

The rivalry between these two composers was probably more a function of public relations than a real conflict. The founders of the Academy realized that stoking the fire in this way just brought more attention to the company and that, they hoped, would bring more paying customers into the theatre. The theatre was the same Queen's Theatre, Haymarket, which had been the site of so many failed opera companies in the past. It hosted the Royal Academy from 1720 to 1728 and during this period Handel produced some of his greatest works for the stage. His singers were famous: Senesino, the great castrato, and the sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni. With these three international stars and the healthy egos of Handel and Bononcini, there were bound to be fireworks. Rumors of vicious infighting amongst company members flew through London's salons. Things were particularly tense for the two ladies, Cuzzoni and Bordoni, whose supporters blew their vocal differences way out of proportion. Fits of temper and occasional outbursts finally boiled over in a performance of Bononcini's Astianatte in 1727 when the two sopranos actually fought onstage. The Princess of Wales, who was in attendance, was quite offended and the season was brought to an immediate conclusion.

The successes of the Academy before its eventual dissolution in 1728 were great. On Handel's part, he produced a series of operas, truly great works, which rival any grouping of pieces by the pen of one composer in the history of opera. They include Radamisto, Tolomeo, Rodelinda, Floridante and Giulio Cesare in Egitto. The text of this Julius Caesar mustn't be confused with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra or Julius Caesar although the libretto deals with some of the same characters. The libretto, crafted by Nicola Haym who was an occasional librettist for Handel and the Royal Academy, was based on an older libretto that was prepared for another composer. The earlier piece was much longer textually than the typical requirements of Italian opera in the 1720s, so Haym had quite a bit of editing to do. But the editing helped focus the action on the three main characters, Caesar, Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy, giving them a variety of arias that characterize their emotions perfectly.

Handel's usual stable of singers from the Academy were in the original cast, with the castrato Senesino singing Caesar, the incomparable Francesca Cuzzoni as Cleopatra and the castrato Gaetano Berenstadt, a close associate of the composer Bononcini, in the role of Ptolemy, or Tolomeo as he is called in the Italian libretto. As was true of most of the composers of the time, Handel was writing specifically for these voices making it difficult for 21st century singers and musicians without the presence of the unique castrato quality. In lieu of that voice-type mezzo-sopranos and contraltos have been able to sing these parts as "trouser roles", and today we're lucky to live in the heyday of the countertenor, many of whom now have the same range as those superstars of the 18th century.

Julius Caesar was a much more ambitious project than anything that Handel had attempted up to this point and so he took, for him, a considerable amount of time with the score. 1723 was an important year for him, having received yet another royal subsidy from King George, the responsibility of being music master to the Royal Princesses, and finally settling into the house at 25 Brook Street where he was to live until his death in 1759. There was a certain ease, then, with which he took the composition of the score. A sumptuous, gorgeous score it is with the unusual addition of four horns, recorders, transverse flute, gamba, bassoon and theorbo, a large lute-like instrument, all added to the usual pit band of strings and winds. Caesar was a great success with 13 performances after its premiere in February, 1724, and a similar number of performances in two revivals, first in 1725 and again in 1730. In the current revival of Handel masterworks for the stage, Julius Caesar in Egypt holds the primary position. Its strongly written characters hold the stage today as well as the operatic creations of a Verdi, a Puccini or a Bizet. It is a great piece of music and a great piece of theatre.

SOURCE: "Handel, Giulio Cesare and Opera in 18th Century England" by NMR, on Operapaedia


HANDEL'S GIULIO CESARE ON THE WEB


Other Works inspired by Gaius Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar

PLAYS

ALSO NOTEWORTHY: Although he does not appear onstage, Caesar figures prominently as an offstage force in John Masefield's play The Tragedy of Pompey the Great

Similarly, as an "invisible force" he certainly overshadows all of the action and motivations for the title character of Joseph Addison's Cato Indeed, I think it is safe to say that had he not taken on the role of intransigent nemesis of Julius Caesar throughout that great man's career, Marcus Tullius Cato ("The Younger") would never have even been a blip on history's radar screen. Needless to say, Addison's play was a wholly anachoronistic product of the Enlightenment, and his portrayal of the Stoic Cato as a the noble defender of liberty, a paragon that would later inspire the likes of Patrick Henry and George Washington, was a highly romanticised distortion of reality.

OPERAS


BALLETS

And a Little on the Man Himself

Julius Caesar

Portrait bust of Gaius Julius Caesar, 44 B.C.E.

CAESAR AND THE JEWS

 Julius Caesar was known to be a friend of the Jews; he allowed them to settle anywhere in the Roman Empire. "Because the Jews backed Julius Caesar on his way to success, he had reciprocated by granting the privilege of a tolerated religion, with the freedom to practice it and maintain independent judicial bodies even outside Palestine." [Jeremy C. Jackson, No Other Foundation (Westchester, Illinois: Cornerstone Books, 1980, p. 24)] According to historians, at the height of the public grief for Caesar's death by assassination in 44 B.C.E., a throng of foreigners went about lamenting each after the fashion of his country, above all the Jews, who even flocked to the place for several successive nights. It is possible that at least some Jews identified Caesar with the Messiah. After all, he had defeated Pompey, the destroyer of Jerusalem, and had himself done much for the Jews. Now that a comet was visible, all prophecies seemed to be fulfilled: the star was the sign of the Messiah, there were theories that he would die, and nobody had ever said that the Messiah had to be Jewish (Isaiah had recognised the Persian king Cyrus the Great as Messiah). It was about him that the great Rabbi Hillel said: "Because you drowned others, you were drowned; and in the end those who drowned you will be drowned." And indeed, Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius, committed suicide after the defeat of their forces at the Battle of Phillipi in 42 BCE.



ides-of-march


Return to Karen Mercedes' Main Page