Rome En-gendered

There don't seem to be many women in the Rome of Julius Caesar , only Calpurnia and Portia, and they seem to exist less as characters in their own right than as opportunities to see into the private lives and decisions of their husbands. Caesar's willingness (at least at first) to be swayed by Calpurnia's premonitions, deciding to stay at home because of a woman's "humor", stands in contrast with Brutus' reluctance to give in to his wife's entreaties to know his thoughts. Keeping one's thoughts to oneself is manly, while women are considered unable to govern their tongues -- a commonplace in Shakespeare's England and not just in Rome.

It is only when Portia gives a sign of her own 'manliness' (which in this play is equated with 'Romanness'), that Brutus gives in and promises to share with her the secrets that he has already yielded to his male friends. Interestingly, the sign that Portia gives of being a manly Roman woman, able to keep secrets, is a voluntary wound to the thigh (2.1.301-2). This is a sign of her Stoic self-control. But it is also an act of self-penetration: like a man, she wields the sword, but suffers for it as a wounded woman.

Roman manliness is in fact associated with health. Immediately after the scene in which Portia reveals her wound, Brutus receives his sick friend, Caius Ligarius, speaking with "feeble tongue" and with a "kerchief" on his head. But when he joins the conspiracy to restore manly republican virtues to Rome, he throws off his sickness. Julius Caesar, with his epilepsy, his deafness, and his barren wife, symbolizes the weakness and effeminacy that sets in when those republican virtues are abandoned. (Cassius' mean-spirited story of his sickness on campaign, crying for something to drink "as a sick girl" is intended to make this same point.)

Thus, Republican Rome can only be governed by men, and can only admire women who are like men. It's opposite, called 'tyranny', is associated with feminizing degradation, as when Cassius exhorts Brutus with this passage of inflaming metonymies:

... our fathers' minds are dead,
And we are governed with our mothers' spirits
Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish ....
(1.3.82-84)

The popularity of Julius Caesar

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar seems to have been extremely popular. It was the play that the Swiss tourist Thomas Platter crossed the Thames to see in September 1599, reporting it acted "very prettily in the house with the thatched roof". Nearly forty years later, the poet Leonard Digges recalled the hit made by Shakespeare's Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius:

So have I seen, when Cesar would appeare,
And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were,
Brutus and Cassius; oh how the Audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went hence ....

It's striking to think that Shakespeare's audiences might have found the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius before the battle of Philippi 'ravishing'. What particularly might they relish in it? Perhaps the complexity of these "honourable men", whose high principles and touching friendship combine with pettiness and irascibility?

Another draw would simply have been the title character, Julius Caesar. As well as a key figure from Roman history, whose writings were standard fare for Elizabethan grammar schools (one of which Shakespeare attended), he also featured in the popular culture of the period. In Richard III, one of the doomed little princes asks about the ancient story that Julius Caesar built the Tower of London. A stranger story about JC from medieval legend was that he was the father of the fairy king Oberon by the Morgana, the fairy half-sister of King Arthur!

Shakespeare may also have drawn on the widespread tradition of performing the downfall of Julius Caesar (there were a number of contemporary plays on which he might possibly have drawn, and it was a favorite subject for university students to dramatize). Although Shakespeare definitely used historical sources for his play which located the assassination in Pompey's Theatre, he may have bowed to another old popular tradition that located his murder in the Capitol. In Hamlet, Polonius recalled the time when he "did enact Julius Caesar" (probably as a student) and "was killed in the Capitol". As David Daniell, editor of the Arden Julius Caesar, notes, "Elizabethans wrongly understood ‘the Capitol’ as the citadel of ancient Rome, where the Senate met".

(For more information on the kinds of dramas, histories, and legends on which Shakespeare might have drawn for JC, as well as his other Roman plays, see volume V of Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. You can download this in its entirety -- as well as the other seven volumes of Bullough and other neat stuff -- from playShakespeare.com

http://www.playshakespeare.com/library/cat_view/509-reference-documents?orderby=dmdate_published

On the Wheel of Fortune, going down

In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (as it is titled in the Folio of 1623), as in The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, Shakespeare is concerned with the downward swing of the Wheel of Fortuna, and even with what happens after a great historical ruler has reached bottom. After all, as Stanley Wells points out in his introduction to Julius Caesar, "Caesar is dead before the play is half over".

So in Richard II, the King's headlong fall takes place in the exact middle of the play, in 3.2. This is a highly compressed scene which begins with Richard's return from Ireland and his bold assertions that the very English stones and the angels of heaven too will fight for his divinely given kingship. But almost immediately after these assertions, by around line 150, Richard is dramatizing his fall by inviting his astonished court to sit upon the ground with him and "tell sad stories of the death of kings," all deposed by the various means of war, poison, murder. (Some are haunted by the ghosts of the rulers they've killed, as we'll see Brutus is in Julius Caesar.)

To an audience sensitive to the proper physical deportment and position of a king -- he is literally to be above his subjects -- this sitting on the ground is a stark gesture of abdication. (Remember there are very few stage directions in the early texts of the plays; but the Bishop of Carlisle's reproach, "My lord, wise men ne'er sit and wail their woes," suggests that the actor playing Richard really did sit down on stage, in all his 'kingly' robes.) It looks forward to the highly symbolic gesture of Richard coming down from the "walls" of Flint Castle in the very next scene -- from the balcony above the stage to the level of the other actors on the stage. This kind of physical enacting of high and low points in the career of a ruler also resonates through the more metaphorical allusions to "mounting Bolingbroke" and to Bolingbroke and Richard as "two buckets" in 4.1.189-90:

That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.