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REVIEW
- Brooke, Nicholas. "Julius Caesar."
- Shakespeare's Early Tragedies. London: Methuen, 1968. 137-162.
Thesis: Brooke is uncomfortable with Julius Caesar. In
discussing the relationship between it and Shakespeare's other early
tragedies, he says that it has the "Senecan shape" of revenge
tragedy: "The play is firmly based on the Greatness of Caesar, and
the ritual crime of his murder, which is preceded by an elaborate
display of portents, storms, and portentous rhetoric; Antony fills
the role of faithful (and not very hesitant) revenger; Caesar's ghost
sustains the portentous atmosphere, and the revenge is finally
accomplished" (141). However, Julius Caesar is, according to
Brooke, a revenge tragedy with ambivalent twists:
Caesar's credulity, identified with his ageing megalomania,
discredits all credulity, discredits in fact the structure of
portents on which I have said the play is constructed; or at least
questions it, for the result is ambivalent. This ambivalence casts a
similarly indefinite shadow on the play in other ways: the great
Caesar is also absurd in his Marlowan self-assertion; Antony, with
all his devotion and skill, is offensive; a similar irony reveals in
Cassius (but only occasionally) a crude jealousy, and it calls
Brutus' high-mindedness into question. The play seems to have equal
and opposite tendencies towards the nobility of tragedy on the one
hand, and world of dust and ashes on the other. There is also a
perplexing hovering on the edge of comedy which is sometimes explicit
(as, for instance, with Casca's description of Caesar in comic prose
in I.ii), but sometimes not at all clear: there are many passages
which seem at least to invite a sense of the ridiculous without being
decisively 'meant' to be funny. (142-3)
Brooke goes into detail about the ambivalent nature of the play, and
his discussion leads him to the conclusion that the
ending—Antony's famous praise of Brutus as "the noblest Roman of
them all"—is not appropriate:
The questioning of values, the contrasting of the blood-free spirit
of man with the grotesques image of his clumsy body, the inclination
to see Roman nobility as comically or farcically degraded—all
these things have been strong in the play, but they find no place in
this noble finale. It is inevitable, I think, that their absence
should be felt as a criticism of the end. The parts of the play have
not grown consistently into a whole, and it is therefore a fragile
tragic value that is built up here, one which cannot survive
criticism. (161)
For Brooke, then, the play is interesting as an indication of "the
developing sensitivity to varying modes of utterance with which
Shakespeare experimented in his earliest work" (162).
Bottom Line: Whether or not you agree with his conclusions,
Brooke provides many valuable insights.
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