Sez You

I just read Gary Wills Rome And Rhetoric, his looks at Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar--how Shakespeare creates the characters and their rhetoric, versus what he know about them from Plutarch.

It's an erudite book (actually taken from the Anthony Hecht lectures at Bard) that has some different takes on the play.  For instance, though it's called Julius Caesar, the big parts are Brutus, Cassius and Antony. Yet in the original production, Burbage played the title role.  Wills suggests two things--that Burbage had huge roles in the other plays that season, so he needed to take it easy, but also that Caesar (played by an actor who also probably took on Cicero--they doubled parts then, which also explains why certain characters don't appear at the same time), as opposed to how he's often interpreted today, must maintain a certain dignity and power, so his ghost will haunt the rest of the action after his death.

Wills looks at Brutus's big speech, which is generally considered a decent piece of rhetoric that's completely overshone by Antony's.  Wills claims that Brutus overrelies on certain rhetorical devices--devices that ancient speakers warned against overusing--and worse, was unresponsive to the audience, relying (in a way that shows his character's flaw) on the crowd not doubting his honor as his justification.  No wonder the wilier Antony easiliy turned things against him.

Shakespeare was hardly the only playwright of his time to write about the ancient world, but his humanity makes these portraits live above others.  Ben Jonson's Catiline is a more learned work, and probably more historically accurate. But Shakespeare knew how to create living, breathing characters, so his work is not only the one we remember, but the one that helps us conjure up, fairly or not, what ancient Rome may have been like.