Reviews

Julius Caesar

This is a review of the Arden Third Series edition of Julius Caesar, edited by David Daniell (1998, Thomas Nelson and Sons). References are to the paperback edition.

Students, Scholars, Researchers, lend me your eyes.
I come to praise Daniell, not to bury him.

It stands green in memory the day I first, as a lad, opened an Arden edition of one of the plays (Frank Kermode's The Tempest it was) and saw before my eyes the briefest passage from a speech, followed by pages of tiny text, bristling with parentheses, solidi, square brackets, obscure abbreviations, ellipses, obscurantist Latinisms, italicized references to Pope, Theobald, Malone, superscripted notes buried within notes... It was love at first sight.

The Arden 3 series (and the paragraph above is not meant to be construed as a criticism of Arden 2, which retain enormous value) strikes a better physical balance between presentation of the text of the play on page and the notes and textual apparatus below. They are well designed volumes, printed with a far more readable typeface than series 2 on much brighter paper. In all, the design is superior (though this will undoubtedly be perceived as a prejudice of taste by future readers). So much for physicality.

The standards of scholarship are just as high, the editors legendary (in Shakespearean circles), and the insights fresh, provocative and ultimately authoritative. The Arden 3 Julius Caesar exceeds some of its fellows in this respect. They are the inexpensive paperback editions of choice for serious students and scholars (the current volume sells new from Amazon for $13.99 USD). They are not for bare beginners, of course, unless the beginner displays inordinate enthusiasm. There are myriad less daunting editions to serve that audience, the Signet Classics being my own favorite. Nevertheless, the Arden 3 editions differentiate themselves from those that have gone before by an emphasis on Shakespeare in performance, and a better balance regarding the needs of newer readers.

Daniell's Julius Caesar is no exception in this tradition of excellence. The fresh and lively introduction is worth the price alone. The notes to the text are provocative and fascinating, the textual apparatus minimized but essential. The volume also offers a long Appendix extracting the relevant passages from North's Plutarch, some fifty pages of small font addenda.

Daniell's introduction calls Julius Caesar Shakespeare's "first great tragedy" about "...the most famous event in the West outside the Bible..." In it Daniell takes seriously Steve Sohmer's Shakespeare's Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 wherein (amid dizzying discussions of calendars and times) Sohmer argues that Julius Caesar was probably the play to open the new Bankside Globe Theatre. (See also Sohmer's "12 June 1599: Opening Day at Shakespeare's Globe" in EMLS). There is little doubt Caesar was written between the latter half of 1598 and mid-1599 (actually, according to Daniell, "...not likely to have been written before the autumn of the previous year, 1598," noting it is not listed in Meres' Palladis Tamia), and was of a certainty viewed by a Swiss tourist, Thomas Platter, at the Globe in September of 1599. It follows Henry V in composition, and Daniell throughout makes references to similarities between Julius Caesar and Hamlet, the latter work being undoubtedly in the planning stages while Caesar was being written.

Since it is possible, perhaps very likely, that this is the play that opened the Globe in 1599, Daniell devotes space to reviewing the account of Shakespeare's troupe dismantling the Theatre and moving its timbers across Thames to hurriedly construct the Globe, noting "A sharp, permanent, drop in Henslowe's takings at the nearby Rose Theatre after June 1599 suggests the presence of a rival on Bankside" (16). Perhaps too much emphasis is laid on the timing of the plays first performance--a discussion of calendars, moons, tides at Southwark, and other sidereal phenomena being engaged at length.

Daniell leads us through a discussion of the political environment in Elizabethan England at the time of the play, emphasizing the governments sensitivity to charges of tyranny and noting "...there was in England, and associated with Caesar, a sharp political awareness that it was possible to challenge the rigidity of rule..." (22). Daniell reminds us that these were the months leading up to the Essex rebellion, with a barely suppressed debate over the civil response to tyranny among the wider Essex circle. Daniell expands this discussion to address the Renaissance debate over the question of Caesar: hero or tyrant? The background loam out of which Shakespeare's play grew included Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars, especially in relation to Shakespeare's own Richard II, and most especially John Hayward's Henry IV, for which Hayward was imprisoned until after the death of Elizabeth, and whose book was used as evidence at Essex's trial.

Sympathy for Brutus' opposition to tyranny, and indeed Plutarch's own "surprising sympathy for republican Rome," frame the issues in the play and condition the treatment of Brutus. Daniell names Orlando Pescetti's Il Cesare (1594) as a possible source for Shakespeare's play itself growing out of Italian intellectuals' readings of Lucian, Plutarch, Seutonius, Cicero, Appian and Petrarch (see p. 27). Daniell also draws attention to the backward glance at the intellectual ferment and right to rebellion that can be found in Donne's Pseudomartyr (1610)--long after the execution of Essex.

Certainly North's translation of Plutarch's Lives (in turn a translation from Amyot's French, the second edition of which was printed by Shakespeare's friend Richard Field in 1595) was the primary source for the play. Accordingly Daniell provides a lengthy appendix to this edition containing extracts from the relevant lives. (See also Shakespeare's Plutarch, being a selection from the lives in North's Plutarch which illustrate Shakespeare's plays; ed. W. W. Skeat, Macmillan, 1892, from Google Book Search, full view and PDF, 332 pages. This edition includes "lives" of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus, Marcus Antonius, Octavius Caesar Augustus, Theseus and Alcibiades). For long decades it was customary to regard Brutus as the tragic hero of the play, but in later decades (led perhaps by Trevor Nunn's 1972 RSC production, noted by Daniell in his section of the play in performance) we have grown unsure. Is Brutus the heroically stoic champion of republicanism, or an umepathic, high-minded hypocrite? Is Caesar a rightly executed tyrant, or a sympathetic donor to his people? The debate continues and, as always, Shakespeare is careful to reveal the facets of the dramatic conflict without pronouncing a final dictum.

One of the most engaging analyses in Daniell's edition is the one on Shakespeare's use of language in the play. He notes the conscious spareness of language, used to suggest, in A. R. Humphrey's phrase, a "Roman air" (38-39). He draws attention to the characters' own consciousness of being important historical figures acting out an historically important event: "Cassius calls himself 'Cassius' fourteen times...Brutus calls himself 'Brutus' thirteen times.." and so on with the use of pronouns of self importance. What is most interesting in Daniell's analysis is his observation on the use of "new" words by Cassius--meaning new as in having been first used in the 1590's. Cassius is one of the "new" men, "...thin, unsmiling, nervously articulate Caius Cassius, a modern intellectual and anarchist...he shows a characteristic of using the most modern vocabulary" (60). This insight is carried through to the textual notes. For example, at 1.2.134 Cassius' "Why man he doth bestride the narrow world," is noted by Daniell as being the first OED usage of the word "bestride." Cassius' use of "ill-tempered" at 4.3.115, and "vildly" at 4.3.131 are further examples.

Also revealing is Daniell's analysis of Antony's great set speech, "Friends, Romans, countrymen..." He notes that "The man who is 'no orator, as Brutus is...a plain blunt man' (3.2.211-12) speaks at three times Brutus' length and uses over twice as many rhetorical figures as Brutus" (citing Fuzier--see p. 73).

Daniell also, for the benefit of new readers, rehearses the critical commonplaces about the play: its two part structure, its indebtedness to North's Plutarch, and so on. Thankfully Daniell is having none of the debate about Caesar's "et tu, Brute" that, following Suetonius, so much has been made. Suetonius has it that the saying means "and thou, my child" which critics and gossips alike expand to suggest Caesar's paternity of Brutus. We are spared any consequent Oedipal conflations in this volume.

Even more thankfully, Daniell parts company with the legion of eighteenth and nineteenth century critics who have drawn attention to the plays' many anachronisms: the chiming clock, books with leaves, chimneypots and togas with sleeves... Daniell notes that this is Shakespeare's first "city play," and as such we should expect these things, since he had London more in mind than Rome. He also makes a case for the thematic use of the striking clock in the compression of time so often observed in the play. Daniell expands the argument over time to embrace the Elizabethan controversy over the Julian vs. the Gregorian calendars. Whether this is actually so or not I am not sure. Tellingly, however, Daniell admonishers his critical predecessors in a feeling comment: "Eighteenth-century editors, knowing themselves not only later but better educated and thus wiser, automatically assumed that Shakespeare needed 'correcting'. That Shakespeare in his world was not only very different, but knew exactly what he was about, did not occur to them" (135). Even more trenchantly, notice Daniell's note to 2.1.190: "The anachronism of a striking clock in 44 BC is only distressing to those shut off from imaginative time." Though Daniell's target here is the arrogance of long dead (and largely unlamented) critics, jibes about Shakespeare's anachronisms are current, and thus deserve this rather pointed answer.

As an example of Daniell carrying on main points from the introduction throughout the notes to the play, consider his note to 1.2.178, at which Cassius says to Brutus "As they pass by, pluck Caska by the sleeve." The note, in quotations, says "'togas had no sleeves' (Cam¹);'" [citing the 1949 J. Dover Wilson edition known as Cambridge 1] "[and now Daniell:] but Shakespeare also had London in mind. A toga covered the body except the right arm: cloak at 214 and doublet at 264 do suggest another mental image" (175). Daniell distances himself from the petty notation of Wilson, but goes on to add insight into Shakespeare's state of mind and suggest, further in the note, the thematic use of plucking at the sleeve: "Cassius' pluck and sleeve necessarily suggest a slight, almost furtive, gesture..." making further reference to the Peacham drawing in Jonathan Bate's Arden 3 Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare's usage elsewhere in the play. It is this sort of suggestive prompting within the notes of the Arden 3 editions in general, and this play in particular, that make for such a rich cognitive experience.

Remarkable in Daniell's analysis are the constant comparisons within the play to Hamlet. We gain insight into the flights of introspection in Hamlet by the very restraint of Julius Caesar. At appropriate points Daniell draws our attention to the similarities between the two. In Daniell's note to the portents of 2.2 (empty graves, crying ghosts, and so on), he says, "The list of unsettling phenomena...overlaps with Horatio's account of the disturbances 'A little ere the mightiest Julius fell' (Ham. 1.1.114) also triggered by the word 'watch'" (219).

I could go on praising the notes. My only complaint is they are too succinct, but then, I never met a footnote I didn't like.

As stated above, the hallmark of the Arden 3 series is an emphasis on the plays in performance. Daniell starts his section on performance with a quote from Ripley (Julius Caesar on stage in England and America 1599-1973):

"To reveal itself fully, the play requires an uncut text, fluid stagecraft, and actors of heroic power. And these three factors, sadly enough, have never conjoined" (99).

With that inauspicious start (smelling a little more of the closeted scholars lamp oil than the actor's grease paint) Daniell goes on to review landmark productions of Julius Caesar through history, emphasizing the 1972 Stratford-upon-Avon production by Trevor Nunn: "still thought the best in recent decades."

Regarding the text of Julius Caesar, its history is pleasantly uncomplex. It is, in fact, "unusually orderly." It was printed for the first time in the First Folio, in all likelihood from the King's Men's fair copy, with no inconvenient and contrarian quartos to muddy its aspect. There are some compositors' errors with which editors have to be satisfied, but for the most part textual particularists are not needed.

In all, this volume is a tremendous value considering its low price and high quality. One must be serious about Shakespeare studies to undertake it, and having a history with Shakespearean criticism will be awfully helpful, but once the enthusiasm for Shakespeare sets in, this volume will fan the flames.

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