Shakespeare
Essay title: Shakespeare
into Brutus’s house that evening.
Analysis
While the opening scene illustrates Caesar’s popularity with the masses, the audience’s first direct encounter with him presents an omen of his imminent fall. Caesar’s choice to ignore the Soothsayer’s advice proves the first in a series of failures to heed warnings about his fate. Just as Caesar himself proves fallible, his power proves imperfect. When Caesar orders Antony to touch Calpurnia, Antony replies that Caesar need merely speak and his word will become fact—that is, Caesar’s authority is so strong that his word immediately brings about the requested action. However, while the masses may conceive of Caesar’s power thus, Caesar’s order to Antony alerts us to the reality that he and his wife have been unable to produce a child. The implication that Caesar may be impotent or sterile is the first—and, for a potential monarch, the most damaging—of his physical shortcomings to be revealed in the play.
This conversation between Brutus and Cassius reveals the respective characters of the two men, who will emerge as the foremost conspirators against Caesar. Brutus appears to be a man at war with himself, torn between his love for Caesar and his honorable concern for Rome. He worries that it is not in Rome’s best interest for Caesar to become king, yet he hates to oppose his friend. Cassius steps into Brutus’s personal crisis and begins his campaign to turn Brutus against Caesar, flattering Brutus’s pride by offering to be his mirror and thus relaying to him the ostensible high regard in which the citizens hold him.
Cassius compounds Brutus’s alarm about Caesar’s growing power with references to his weak physical state: he lacks stamina and is probably epileptic. But Cassius observes only Caesar’s frail human body, his private self. When he urges Brutus to consider that the name of Brutus should be as powerful as the name of Caesar, he fails to understand that Caesar’s real power is not affected by private infirmities but rather rests in his public persona, whose strength is derived from the goodwill and good opinion of the populace.
Caesar, on the other hand, shows much more perceptiveness in his analysis of Cassius; he observes both Cassius’s private and public personas and notices a discord. He is made uneasy by what appears to be Cassius’s lack of a private life—Cassius’s seeming refusal to acknowledge his own sensibilities or nurture his spirit suggest a coldness, a lack of human warmth. Caesar comments to Antony, “He loves no plays,