Since the end of the seventeenth century critics and editors of Julius Caesar have focused almost exclusively on the play’s unforgettable characters and gripping political drama. From their perspective, the religious bits that surface throughout the play were ‘palpable blunders’ and for a long time they did their best to ignore or repair them. When, in 1693, Thomas Rymer condemned the play’s anachronisms as ‘a sacrilege’, his language ironically registers the extent to which a fixed notion of what Shakespeare’s Roman play ought to be – classical, political and pagan – had displaced the mix of religion and politics that Shakespeare’s audience would have taken for granted. Issues Elizabethans confronted in their world and in the theatre – assassination, succession, tyrannicide, holidays – were not only steeped in but produced by religious division. Part of Shakespeare’s genius was discovering in Plutarch’s old story the fault lines of his own milieu.
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Moral qualms aside, the real problem with political assassination for Elizabethans – and Shakespeare’s play makes this abundantly clear – was that it unleashed forces that could not be predicted or controlled. Assassination was linked with chaos, blood-letting and potential civil war because this was what it invariably led to. However noble Brutus’ motives, however morally and politically justified his actions, it would have been clear to many in Shakespeare’s audience that he hadn’t thought things through. Critics who fault Julius Caesar for being a broken-backed play, who are disappointed by the final two acts and who feel that the assassination takes place too early in the action, fail to understand that the two parts of the play – the events leading up to the assassination and the bloody civil strife that follow – go hand in hand.
J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 156 and 163
This whole section on how deeply Julius Caesar is informed by the French Wars of Religion was fascinating.
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