24: Julius Caesar

A play by William Shakespeare

Everyone loves a winning streak. Or do they? According to a 2020 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the answer is muddled. We love individuals to keep on winning, but teams…not so much. Put a different way: “Everyone wants Usain Bolt to win another gold medal for sprinting. Not so many people want to see the New England Patriots win another Super Bowl.”

Individual hot streaks do not just exist in sport. Bob Dylan’s run of eight near-perfect albums between 1963’s The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and 1969’s Nashville Skyline is mind-blowing. And film buffs love to squabble over which director’s oeuvre includes the hottest of hot streaks. The BFI put out a piece in May acknowledging 17 of the best examples on celluloid, including immaculate five-film runs from Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights to The Master), Charlie Chaplin (The Gold Rush to The Great Dictator), and Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove to The Shining), and a seven-er from Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to Spirited Away). For what it’s worth, I think the criminally-underrated Rob Reiner deserved a mention for putting out Stand By Me in 1986, A Few Good Men in 1992, with Misery, When Harry Met Sally, and The Princess Bride in between.

Written in 1599, Julius Caesar comes amid arguably the hottest streak in William Shakespeare’s none-too-shabby career, a streak which also included As You Like It, Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, and Hamlet. I was compelled to buy a copy of the play after it was heavily referenced in James Shapiro’s superb Shakespeare in a Divided America (which I wrote about last month), both in relation to John Wilkes Booth’s faux Brutus emulation, and 2017’s controversial Donald-Trump-as-Caesar production at New York’s Delacorte Theater.

Julius Caesar was not a play I studied at school, nor have I ever seen it performed live or on film, so my knowledge of it was limited to “Beware the Ides of March”, “Friends, Romans, countrymen”, and “Et tu, Brute?”. After reading Shapiro’s book, I felt this needed to be rectified.

So to the plot. (Is this necessary? Perhaps not.) Cassius and Brutus want to get rid of Caesar because he’s getting too powerful, they stab him along with some other chaps, Mark Antony turns public opinion against the conspirators with some high-level speechifying, it doesn’t end well for Cassius and Brutus.

One hesitates, as a non-academic, to attempt to say anything profound about any work of Shakespeare. So I won’t. Instead, here are some incredibly superficial, trite observations on Julius Caesar:

1.) It’s very good. And the very-goodest bit is in the middle (Act III). Despite the fact that you know it’s coming, the assassination is genuinely shocking. And Antony’s various speeches are just brilliant. Here’s Brando taking temporary ownership of your ears:

2.) Caesar is definitely not the central character—he only appears in five scenes and dies halfway through. But it would be odd were this play to be called anything other than Julius Caesar. And in the little we see of him it is easy to understand how he would prompt both adoration and hatred.

3.) The Trump angle is a really interesting one and I envy those who saw the Delacorte Theater production Shapiro discusses so brilliantly in his book. Trump is unquestionably an arrogant and ambitious man. For many, he is a tyrant. But attempting to unseat him using illegitimate methods would only lead to further turmoil. As Shapiro writes: “Brutus is hoping that this assassination will be seen as a liberation. But the moment the knives come out it is a horror show.” On a lighter note, Mary Beard’s waggish discussion of the Trump-Caesar comparison is worth a read.

4.) Julius Caesar is a remarkably easy read. I’ve seen plenty of Shakespeare since I left school in 2007, but I haven’t actually read one of his plays beginning to end since I stopped studying. More fool me. It’s a pleasure and a thrill, and takes very little time. Quite clearly, though, reading is not the very best way to consume Shakespeare. That would be to see it performed on stage. It is hugely regrettable that is not possible at the moment, but goodness it’s going to be brilliant when a night at the theatre is back on the agenda again.

In lieu of a proper end to this piece, I’ll leave you with this, from Brutus to Cassius in Act IV, Scene ii:

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

*Anything even vaguely intelligent in this piece must be attributed to Emma Smith, a professor at the University of Oxford, whose “Approaching Shakespeare” podcast is brilliant.