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REVIEW
- Doran, Madeleine. "'What should be in that "Caesar"?'
- Proper Names in Julius Caesar." Shakespeare's Dramatic Language.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. 120-53.
Thesis: Doran's book is a collection of essays, each one of
which examines how Shakespeare's use of language contributes to a
particular play's distinctive effect and significance. She
acknowledges that in all of his plays Shakespeare uses language as a
marker of character and situation (clowns don't talk like courtiers,
and Hamlet doesn't talk to Horatio the way he talks to Polonius), but
she also asserts that each of the plays she studies has its own
unique tone, created largely by a particular feature of language. In
Julius Caesar, the feature is the use of proper names.
Doran focuses on three names: "Caesar," "Brutus," and "Rome."
About "Caesar" and Caesar, Doran makes some acute points. She says
that "when he is present, the interplay of the several forms of the
second and third persons, of direct and indirect address, is a
wonderfully adroit way of moving back and forth between Caesar the
man and Caesar the public figure" (131). And she says of his habit
of referring himself in the third person:
How are we to take this third-person habit of Caesar's? this
deliberate use of his own name? As evidence of character? As a
manifestation of the hubris of the tragic hero whom the gods
mean to destroy? As a way to suggest the greatness Caesar had assumed
in tradition, hence to prepare the way for the magnitude of his fall?
These several ways of looking at the speeches in question need not be
incompatible, provided one entertains all the quick impressions one
receives in the theater, or even the more thoughtful impressions from
reading, and does not insist on an exclusive and consistent
intellectualized theory. (136)
About Brutus and his name, Doran says, "the name is used in more
varied ways, often more spontaneous, hence less obtrusive, ways than
Caesar's" (141). An interesting point is that Brutus, like Caesar,
speaks of himself in the third person when he is thinking of his
public position, "when he thinks of himself as Roman republican and
patriot, assimilated to the ancestral Brutus as tyrant-slayer" (143).
About the scene in which the Roman commoners tear apart Cinna the
Poet because of his name, Doran says,
Caesar had sought to invest his name and with some kind of greatness
of position or will and to live by the meaning he gave it. Brutus
has found in the name he shares with his ancestor the same obligation
to patriotism and tyrannicide. And the people tear apart the
innocent Cinna merely on account of his name. Is there some
fascination in names which makes men endow them with reality, even if
that assumed reality may lead to catastrophe? Is what we call people,
and even things or deeds, more important than what they are?
(150).
Evaluation: Doran provides some good insights, but she often
drags us through more detail than she makes meaningful, and she has
no vision of the play which would unify all of her individual
observations.
Bottom Line: A lot of interesting material.
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