Subtext: Conversations about Classic Books and Films

Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman. Upcoming Episodes: Susan Sontag’s On Photography; Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:12 Erin: Okay. Welcome to part two of our discussion of Amadeus. We just got done. Sort of are still talking about Mozart's relationship to the divine and whether or not he might be something like a Christ figure. And I just wanted to talk about Salieri's own relationship with his father. We hear that his father is a man of commerce. And so Salieri, he seems to relate to God in this way, in this economic system kind of way where every prayer should be immediately rewarded and the hard work of self denial should result in God's favor. That, you know, he's making these sort of long term investments in asceticism and self denial that should see a return through the genius that God will give him and the ability to sing to him. And so some of that seems to be a result of his relationship with his father, who is not at all interested in music. And Salieri seems to think, and even asks the priest, who we haven't even mentioned is his interlocutor through the entire film, because the whole thing is one long flashback told from Salieri's perspective. You know, wouldn't you have thought this was a sign that this miracle had happened? And the miracle, of course, is his father choking on something, probably a meatball and dropping dead. And that frees Salieri up to pursue his musical career, which his father had previously denied. So I don't know. I just. I don't know that there's. There's much to be said about this that we haven't already said. But I'm so interested in this paternal relationship with Salieri and God, Salieri and his father, of the two being so diametrically opposed to each other in one way. Well, in terms of Salieri's relationship to them, right. Like he so doesn't care for his father that he thinks of killing him off as this huge convenience. And yet he's so in love with God and with wanting to sing to God that he gives up his whole life for his love of that paternal figure. Of course, it's also about his own narcissism and self glorification and looking like a really big and important person. But I don't know, I find it really knotty and difficult to untie that twin strand of these two father figures in his life. 2:40 Wes: The two father figures being his father and the. 2:43 Erin: And God. 2:44 Wes: And God. Okay. 2:45 Erin: Yeah. 2:45 Wes: Yeah. It's interesting, he says about his father. How could I tell him what music meant to me? That's when, you know, he tells his father he wishes he could be like Mozart. And the father says, why? Do you want to be a trained monkey? You'd like me to drag you around doing tricks like a circus freak? Sam, I have a homicidal feeling. How could I tell him what music meant to me? And, yeah, music is everything. Music is a religious experience for him. It's his way of connecting to God. And so it means more than commerce or a practical profession. And the miracle is that. Yeah, the first miracle is that his father dies. And we get no sense that he's sad about his father's death or that he has any sort of familial feeling, you know, typical feeling towards his. Towards his father, any love. And it's interesting he uses that word, that little transition, you know, where it's. Do you know what happened? A miracle that occurs twice in the film. The second time is when Joseph yawns. Emperor Joseph yawns, so he says. And then. And then. Do you know what happened? A miracle. With that yawn, I saw my defeat turn into victory. Mozart was lucky the emperor yawned only once. And before that, he's really getting into the music. It's the Marriage of Figaro. So he says. The restored third act was bold, brilliant. The fourth was astounding. I saw a woman disguised in her maid's clothes, hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years simply because he thinks she is someone else. There's another really great song that. That is premised on this idea. You know the song where someone puts out a classified ad to find love and it turns then the person who responds to it is his wife. 4:45 Erin: Oh, you mean if you're into peanuts in pina coladas 4:51 Wes: getting caught in the rain. Yeah. So, anyway, I don't know which one is better. Marriage of Figaro or that one. But anyway. 4:59 Erin: So, yeah, it's hard to talk about. Okay. 5:01 Wes: So offered. We hear her husband speak the first tender words he has offered her in years simply because he thinks she is someone else. I heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theater conferring on all who sat there perfect absolution. God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable. Making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar. There's this really interesting juxtaposition in Salieri between his ability to appreciate the music and to feel almost gratitude towards it. To have this very, very authentic, appreciative relationship to Mozart's music and yet to have crippling envy at the same time. And you see it at various points in the film where Mozart asks him, what'd you think of that? And he responds honestly, like, it's amazing. He doesn't hide that. He doesn't try to conceal that. And as part of his revenge plan against Mozart, he can't help himself. He can't help but completely appreciate and inhabit the music and even see its kind of divine nature. Right? One observation was that it contains longing. This other observation is that it contains forgiveness another sort of divine element. He makes the immediate switch from that to his envy and desire for revenge. And the miracle, of course, it's not a religious miracle. The religious miracle in this is replaced by the miracle that serves envy or malice or the eradication of whatever gets in his way. Whatever gets in the way of his plan to make music his life. In the first case, it was his father, and now it's Mozart. His father was the impediment. Mozart is the impediment. And the miracle is the removal of that impediment. The miracle is an expression of divine authority, right? Divine power. Something that shows up in the world and breaks the rules of the laws of nature or something like that, and so forth and therefore is illustrative of God's power. The miracle is just some chance circumstance that gets rid of an obstacle. So I thought you were talking about Father. It's not like Mozart is a father figure to him exactly except insofar as he worships him as an artist and a musician. But they do certainly stand in parallel here in being these impediments to his success which he has. To which she has to remove. Very Oedipal, as they would say in the psychoanalytic community. 7:49 Erin: Right. 7:50 Wes: Kill. Kill the father. 7:51 Erin: Right. Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting idea, that. It's almost as if Salieri is so unbothered by his own father's death because God is his. It's like a case of secret parentage, right? God is his real father because he has this extra hereditary gift that doesn't seem to really come from his father. Right. It's almost this sort of switched at birth type of thing or. And, of course, Salieri's whole identity. Well, switched at birth is maybe right, because it's as if Salieri's whole identity is about actually being this secret, divine, anointed, special boy, right. Who likes himself because everybody likes him. He's following what he thinks is this divinely appointed mission. And then maybe the entrance of Mozart. I like this idea that he's almost kind of like a father figure, but maybe it's also this. He was really the one who was. You know, Salieri maybe really was his father's son all along. And it was like Mozart again, the sibling thing. Like, you know, oh, suddenly you have this. You find out God had a second family or something like that. And those kids all, you know, like, we're these super high achievers. And you previously at the very. Thinking of yourself as being at the very end of the bell curve, you know, suddenly look to your left and discover that there's a whole lot more empty space. And then that other kid from that other family way into it. 9:32 Wes: The people who this has happened to kind of. But, yeah. 9:35 Erin: Oh, gosh. 9:36 Wes: Well, not finding out they have a second family, but when the parent moves on and has another family with a different, you know, with a stepmother, and then that new family is all shiny and pretty and highly accomplished, and the one that the father left is. Is not. 9:53 Erin: Of course. Of course. Right, well. And that. That would stand to reason, especially if the first family was a. Was sort of the means by which the father established himself. Right, right. Yeah. And then. Then he gets to sort of start over with a fresher. A person he feels he deserved. I just rewatched First Wives Club, so the. 10:12 Wes: I don't think I've seen it. 10:13 Erin: Oh, my gosh. And it's like, it's good. It's one of those movies that I just. I discovered that my best friend had never seen it. And I was like, how do you even know anything about me if you've never seen this movie? It's so, so important to me. 10:27 Wes: This is from 1996. Okay. 10:29 Erin: Yeah. If you look at the cast list, you understand Keaton. 10:33 Wes: Yeah. Now I. Yeah, I'm looking at. Yeah, it makes sense. 10:37 Erin: It's kind of like the ultimate boomer movie. But I Love it so much. It has nothing to do with anything. I'm so sorry. Maybe just to switch gears a little bit. There's also a lot, I think, being said here about criticism. I mean, really, Salieri's gift is this gift of appreciation. It is like a divine appreciation that nobody else has because they're too stupid to get it. Like, Salieri is just smart enough. I mean, this is the torture, right? He's just smart enough to really get the divinity of Mozart's talent but not smart enough to produce it himself. And that's kind of the. It's kind of the critical sweet spot. You know, if Salieri wanted to become a critic, a music critic I don't know if they had those in Vienna or. 11:20 Wes: He could have been a producer, you 11:21 Erin: know, or a producer. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. 11:24 Wes: I'm gonna make you a star. That would have been the positive way to deal with the situation. 11:31 Erin: Right, right. And that, too, I think, you know, the idea of criticism, I mean, this is a thorny one too, but there's a parental kind of relationship which criticism or the role of the critic maybe reveals. Or there's a sort of similar mechanism, the role that he ends up playing with the Requiem to kind of bring out what he's not, really bringing out the best in Mozart. Mozart doesn't really need him to produce the Requiem. He doesn't. Certainly doesn't need him to produce anything of greatness. But that semi collaboration that happens at the end is a really interesting moment. But there's. There's something where the first thing I thought of, and I thought the first thing that you would. You would think of in that scene is there's something vampiric, of course, about Salieri. He really is kind of a vampire figure. And I'm sure our listeners were expecting us to say this seeing as we've talked about that vampiric mechanism of envy in other episodes. But he does seem to be sucking the life out of Mozart. And so the film doesn't seem to be very appreciative, shall we say, of the role of criticism, on the one hand. But on the other, there does seem to be this sort of lost or forgotten trajectory or abandoned, maybe, trajectory that Salieri might have had of being the person who, of course, it would just be within the court of being the champion of Mozart. The one who. And this is an important critical function, not just to criticize. Right. But to bring greatness to other people's attention. And to say, this is worth holding up, this is important. 13:07 Wes: It's an interesting Paradox. In the end. Because he wants him to produce the Requiem so he can pass it off as his own. And so he needs to keep Mozart alive long enough to do that. But he's also somehow aware that he's using this to kill Mozart. Right. Which. It's an odd way to go about killing someone. 13:29 Erin: It is, Right. 13:30 Wes: Giving them. I'm gonna psychologically torture you to death. How about that? By pretending to be your dead father and asking for this commission. Right. He's not doing anything else I. I don't know about. Right. He's not poisoning. 13:45 Erin: No. And this is. Yeah, this gets back to my opening question. Like, what is he doing here? Is he killing him? Is what is really happening? 13:54 Wes: Oh, was that your. Was that what you meant by that? 13:57 Erin: A little bit. But also other things. Sorry, it's a complicated question and there are a lot of different elements to it, but I think. 14:04 Wes: Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point. He thinks he's killed him at the end of the film. But was that ever. Does he state. We don't. In the flashbacks, we don't really see him state that intention, do we? He wants to ruin him, but we don't. Yeah. Right. We don't ever see. Or do we. Do we say that he's right. We see the old Salieri say he wanted to kill him. But do we ever see the young Salieri say that? That's the question. 14:31 Erin: I don't think so. 14:33 Wes: Yeah. I don't remember him saying that. He wants to ruin him. He wants to get an opera passed off as his own. 14:39 Erin: The Mass passed off as his own. Yeah. And then he'll have this great joke. He does say. There is the implication somehow that Mozart will be dead and so he won't be found out. 14:50 Wes: Okay. 14:50 Erin: So that is part of it. I'm trying to find the exact moment. 14:55 Wes: So much of this is in the narrative. And the voiceover of old Salieri that does create the opportunity to wonder what's actually going on. Anyway, obviously he has ill intent and he cares about ruining Mozart. Or he doesn't. He certainly doesn't care about preserving Mozart's life except to the extent that it'll help him. 15:15 Erin: Yeah, here's the. Here's the Finish the opera. 15:18 Wes: But yeah. 15:18 Erin: The old Salieri voiceover. My plan was so simple that it terrified me. First I must get the death mass and then I must achieve his death. Achieve his death is actually a really great verb. His funeral. Imagine it. The cathedral, all Vienna sitting there. His coffin. Mozart's little coffin in the Middle. And then in that silence, music. A divine music bursts out over them all. A great Mass of death. Requiem Mass for Wolfgang Mozart. Composed by his devoted friend, Antonio Salieri. And this is where he almost does that. Hannibal Lecter, Salieri, like, you know, like he's sucking the life out of him. What sublimity. What depth. What passion in the music. Salieri has been touched. Touched by God at last. And God forced to listen. Powerless to stop it. I, for once, in the end, laughing at him. The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? How does one kill a man? It's one thing to dream about it. Very different when you. When you have to do it with your own hands. And so that sort of left open. I mean, this is total insanity. This is really why we, I guess, see him in the insane asylum because he otherwise seems sane. But the idea that he's pulling one over on God, like, you know, it's really funny. 16:34 Wes: But it does make it seem like killing would be a separate step. And then maybe he'd never had to do that just because Mozart did the job of dying beforehand. 16:46 Erin: Yeah, maybe. Something about embodying the father. Right. And hounding him. 16:50 Wes: Yeah, that's the impression I got, that the. That was. But it's an odd way to try to kill someone. I mean, so that does this. If we wanted evidence of a unreliable narrator in that sense, then that would be it. 17:04 Erin: Right. 17:04 Wes: He's recasting this whole project as. You know, it's not just, I'm gonna get the Requiem for myself but it's coming. And not just that I'm gonna ruin Mozart or interfere with his fortunes, but that I'm gonna. That I killed him as well. 17:21 Erin: Well. And in the end, he's the one who feels killed, in fact, because old Salieri tells the priest, he says, you're a merciful God. He destroyed his own beloved rather than let a mediocrity share in the smallest part of his glory. He killed Mozart. And kept me alive to torture. 32 years of torture of slowly watching myself become extinct. My music growing fainter. All the time fainter till no one plays it at all. So it's as if Mozart actually has sucked the life out of him. You know, there's a sort of reverse vampirism going on in that. Mozart getting the last laugh. But then Mozart outliving him and Salieri becoming sort of undead. 17:59 Wes: He does have that quality. 18:01 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. 18:02 Wes: Well, we are talking about the vampiric quality. 18:05 Erin: Yeah, definitely. 18:06 Wes: In a way. 18:07 Erin: Yeah. 18:07 Wes: I see the Film, in a way, is about mediocrity. And that's. You know, it's a great scene at the end where he's. He's being wheeled out and mediocrities. I absolve you. As if he's the. As if he's the priest now. Priest of the high priest of mediocrity. The torture of being mediocre. Maybe almost being a genius, but not quite having it. How do you live with that? 18:34 Erin: That's the most compelling line in the film for me. Why did God give me the longing if he wasn't going to fulfill it? Salieri has some really twisted ideas about his relationship with God in which he's been almost, if you like, set up by God in a way. I mean, part of it is his own structure of thinking, but he's also been set up to believe that his relationship with God is one of wish fulfillment. But granted, he has a lot of really parsimonious, really false, really twisted ideas of who God is and what our relationship should be to the divine and magical thinking and narcissism and all this other stuff. But that. That's the one really unanswerable question I think, that. That he asks in the film is why do I have the longing? And with that, I think, implicated in that is the just enough talent to know where you aren't. And that, I think, is a really torturous thing about being human. I think we all understand this on. On a certain level. Like on. On a level that maybe isn't still close to Salieri's. 19:48 Wes: But we didn't write 40. 40 operas. 19:51 Erin: Right, right, right. Or really understand and study and give up so much. 19:58 Wes: Right, but that's the. In a way, that's the answer to the why be given this longing if he's not going to be able to fulfill it? And the answer, in a way, is that he wants it too much. And Mozart is sort of the poster boy for not wanting it too much. And the longing goes into the art object and into what he creates, rather than stifling the act of creation itself. 20:21 Erin: Well, yes, and as I've already suggested, I think there's very little in Salieri's when he's not talking about Mozart and the beauty of Mozart's music. There's very little in Salieri's speeches talking about his own relationship to music that isn't actually just about status and wanting to be. Wanting to be the greatest. Wanting to get all the gold stars and be the smartest boy in school. And he's at the top of the heap and everybody likes him and all his teachers love him. And then of course, this exchange student comes in who's doing high level calculus in his head in the third grade and just ruining his life. Right. So in a way, it's. He deserves it, but that, you know, I wanted to just talk about that a bit and that relationship to the other members of the court and the fact that Salieri, when he's asked whether the opera that they're commissioning, for instance, should be in German or Italian, Salieri won't offer an opinion. He doesn't. When solicited for these types of musical opinions, he offers a political answer designed to keep him in with everybody else. So he's really good at being an operator. He's really good at keeping his post and being in this really cozy and obviously extremely wealthy position. He wants everybody to love him and to think that he's great and that he's this beloved son of God. And he has this obviously tremendous admiration for Mozart, but for him, the relationship with music seems really tied up in politics. And then we see Mozart's own relationship to politics on scales both big and small, and how inept he really is at controlling himself to get along in order to make any money. Like he has no understanding of how to deal with people. And he's also not interested in the political in his work, which is a point made when they talk about the Marriage of Figaro being banned, which is kind of an interesting scene we could go to. 22:11 Wes: Sure. 22:12 Erin: The emperor confronts him about how the Marriage of Figaro shouldn't be staged. It stirs up hatred between the classes, I think the emperor says. And Mozart says, well, I hate politics. You know, this isn't about politics. And then he goes into just the structure of this one musical piece that he really loves and where he keeps adding more and more people into the harmony and ultimately says that he sustains this for 20 minutes of continuous music. And he says, in a play, if more than one person speaks at once, it's just noise. But with opera, with music, you can have 20 individuals all talking at the same time. And it's not noise, it's perfect harmony. 22:52 Wes: Yeah. 22:53 Erin: So I love this idea. Like the idea that music is about harmony, not political strife, not about separating people. But of course, Joseph is talking about his sister Antoinette and how things are going really badly for her. So there's also something to be said for not inciting any more political strife than what he wants to deal with. 23:14 Wes: Get my sister killed. 23:15 Erin: Right, right. Salieri is Writing operas with the themes that the academy approves in air quotes. Academy approves, you know, these mythological subjects which are extra historical, which don't really get into the weeds. And Mozart is about the personal and the ignoring kind of the political in a way, or being oblivious to it. 23:38 Wes: Yeah. Joseph pivots from the whole politics objection to the idea that this is rubbish or vulgar. 23:47 Erin: Right. 23:47 Wes: He says, Mozart, music is not the issue here. This is in response to the whole 20 individuals in harmony. Music is not the issue here. No one doubts your talent. It's your literary judgment that's in question. Even with the politics taken out, it would still remain a vulgar farce. Why waste your spirit on so much rubbish? Surely you can choose more elevated themes. Right. And this is sort of in line with Salieri's idea that Mozart himself ought to be more elevated as a character since his music is. Right. So the content of Mozart's character and also the content of, you know, the libretto or the play it's based on should reflect the beauty of the music. Mozart says elevated. What does that mean, elevated? I am fed up to the teeth with these elevated things. Old dead legends. Why must we go on forever writing of gods and legends? And Salieri says, because they do. They go on forever. 24:44 Erin: That's van Swieten. 24:45 Wes: That's not Salieri. 24:46 Erin: Yeah, that's right. And Joseph. Yeah, and Joseph also isn't the one who says this. This thing about the vulgar farce. That's van Swieten, too. 24:55 Wes: Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's an error. I created a transcript using AI and I had to get speaker attributions. I had to get it to guess them. And for the most part, it did a good job. But. Yeah, it did. 25:08 Erin: Really. 25:08 Wes: All right. 25:09 Erin: Yeah. 25:09 Wes: So. Yeah. So they represent the eternal in us. Opera is here to ennoble us, Mozart, you and me, just the same as His Majesty. Rejection of the elevated theme in favor of, you know, what's going on in the Marriage of Figaro, which is something more, I guess you put it, it's more personal. 25:25 Erin: Yes, I suppose, because Don Giovanni, the reading of Don Giovanni. Yeah. 25:30 Wes: Oh, is this Don Giovanni? 25:31 Erin: Sorry, no, no, this is Marriage of Figaro. But I just mean in general, in Mozart's work, it seems that he wants or he includes or values a personal connection in the material. You can argue here. Well, he's sort of about farce and he's a farcical character, so perhaps that's the personal element that he connects with. But I'm. The Salieri interpretation of Don Giovanni as being a Very personal statement about his father that. That must be characterizing all of Mozart's work. And there must be something in this that's really speaking to him that he really loves, which he kind of indicates in his description of the scene that he read. So maybe not personal, but just. He likes it. He thinks this is something he can work with. 26:15 Wes: There's more, maybe, about human relationships. Right. It's a very. The way it's portrayed by Salieri. The relationship between the husband and the wife, for instance. Or Mozart himself gives us an account of the way it begins with the measuring for what, the bridal bed. 26:33 Erin: Yes. 26:33 Wes: Yeah. It's more involved in direct human concerns. It's more down to earth than just mythology that turns out to be actually a very good vehicle for the sublime. Right. For longing, unfulfilled longing. And the things that Salieri appreciates. You don't need the elevated themes to get the elevation, let's say. The content doesn't have to reflect that. 26:57 Erin: Yeah. And that seems to me a really good and important element of how the film understands art overall. And just Mozart as an artist. I think it's really smart about what really excites artists and how maybe how Salieri is lacking in ways which he doesn't even appreciate. He's very much coloring within the lines throughout his career. And this doesn't seem to be even a question for him of what he really connects with, what he really wants to be writing about. You know, that doesn't seem to cross his mind at all. Is there something big that we're missing here? I guess we haven't really talked about Stanzi much. 27:35 Wes: Good old Stanzi. 27:37 Erin: She's. She's kind of. Kind of great. Poor woman had to deal with a lot. Oh, I know. The too many notes idea, too. We should really get to. I wanted to talk about that, actually, in relationship to this whole criticism thing. Right. You know, this idea. You could only hear so much at once. 27:57 Wes: Yeah. So it's Orsini Rosenberg who brings this up earlier. Right. So calls his piece tiresome. And let's see. A young man trying to impress beyond his abilities. Too much spice, too many notes. The way Salieri characterizes us later on. This is the premiere of the Abduction, he says, showing off like the greedy songbird that she was, he's talking about is the woman he's into. Ten minutes of ghastly scales. Arpeggios, whizzing up and down like fireworks at a fairground. And then he's worried about the fact that Mozart slept with Her. And then when we get Joseph's reaction, it's good. Of course, now and then. Just now and then it seemed to touch. And then Orsini Rosenberg eventually fills it in, you know, with the whole. Too many notes. Very well put. Too many notes, Mozart. I don't understand. There are just as many notes as I required, neither more nor less. Joseph, my dear fellow, there are in fact only so many notes the ear can hear in an evening. And then he asks Salieri if he's right and then Salieri agrees. So this is one of those times when Salieri is, in fact, not honest. And Mozart said, this is absurd. Later on, Salieri. Yeah. As you pointed out, casts that in terms of the fact that Joseph is easily bored. He doesn't. What is it? The royal attention. 29:23 Erin: Too many demands on the royal ear. 29:26 Wes: Royal ear, yeah. Yeah. So Salieri understands that. Yeah. This is really a matter of their inability to appreciate. Not anything that Mozart's doing wrong. 29:39 Erin: Yeah, the too many notes idea. I suppose it's suggestive of restraint or keeping things simple. You know, Joseph is accused by Salieri of needing. Or maybe the people of Vienna, or the court, rather, of Vienna of needing to have that bang at the end of the song. So everyone knows when to clap. Or maybe that's his friend from the lower. The theater who makes that observation. I can't quite remember now. But, you know, at first we think that this is about them just being stupid, like musically stupid or Mozart being beyond all of them. But then we discover that, in fact, the common people are really into Mozart and there's a sort of, like, class distinction being made, which is odd. So the court of Vienna is more like the. A parallel would be something like the French Academy and then, say, the Impressionists rebelling against that and portraying the common people and being interested in more lowly subjects. You know, ordinary people as subjects rather than classical myth and great heroes of history and things like that. And so something about Mozart's subject and his interest in the common people seems also to be borne out by his appreciation by the common people that we see later in the film. Though I'm not sure I buy that. I mean, he did die poor. But anyway, you know, as we close 31:05 Wes: out here, a little history. What? Yeah. Why did he die poor? Too many notes. 31:13 Erin: I'm not 100% sure. I haven't refreshed my memory on that. I mean, he wasn't. He did feel that Salieri was pushing him out of certain things. That there was a cabal at court of people who were pushing him out of appointments. He was passed over to be the music teacher of that woman. I forget who it was. Joseph's niece. Maybe he was passed over to be her teacher. I don't think there was really a guy with a lot of dogs that he had to resort to, but certainly he was passed over for things as a result of jealousy. I don't know how much of that. I mean, Mozart was in the letters, a really intelligent and sensitive guy. So I doubt that he had the sort of social problems that Mozart seems to have in the film of not being able to get along with people at all and being kind of a jerk. So I'm not quite sure. Well, Wes, it's time to leave genius behind and go back to mediocrity. Is that. Is that what we're all doing? This is one of my favorite movies. I love this movie so much. So I hope you enjoyed it and weren't put off by the length. I know you were. I made you watch the Director's cut. 32:21 Wes: No, I actually. No, no, I enjoyed it. 32:25 Erin: Oh, great. Great. Yeah. The stagings of the opera scenes are also just incredible. I love the Queen of the Night. 32:32 Wes: Yeah, it's really funny. 32:33 Erin: Twyla Tharp staged it, so. All right, thank you. 32:37 Wes: Thank you.

A close look at Salieri’s rivalry with Mozart and whether divine favor can be unfair. A debate over historical truth versus the film’s dramatic mythmaking. An exploration of Mozart’s laugh, scatological humor, and how prodigyhood shapes a life. Themes of order versus chaos, longing in music, and Christlike imagery in the Requiem.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part six of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We just got done sort of. Well, almost. We're pretty much there with. Yeah, we got done with the funeral speeches. Anything more we want to say about that before we get to the killing of Cinna? 0:49 Erin: Just that if they've made it this far, I think I'm delighted to announce that I have a will here that will bequeath some public gardens to all the listeners who are still with us in part just to prove what a swell pair we are. 1:01 Wes: Right. So he does trot out the will at the end and so that seals the deal. And then the crowd goes off to riot, basically. Including. Put fire to the 75 drachmas. 1:13 Erin: That's it. Oh, yeah. How much does drachma is this? Like everybody gets in this class action suit? Everybody gets 43 cents. 1:21 Wes: Speaking of which, did I mention on one of these, the Ides of March coin by Brutus? I probably did. Do you remember that? 1:28 Erin: No. 1:28 Wes: Do you know that Brutus issued a coin commemorating the Ides of March? You're kidding. And there's quite a few of them in gold and silver, and I've seen them in at least one museum. Like at the bottom on one side of the coin there's a hat. There's like a freedom cap kind of thing with two daggers, a dagger on each side, and at the bottom it says EID MAR, abbreviated. And then you turn it over and I think it's a portrait of Brutus. It's either him or his ancestor Brutus, I forget which. But yeah. How crazy is that? 1:59 Erin: This is how you end up in Satan's mouth in Dante. 2:05 Wes: And he issued that coinage to pay his troops. There's a long period where they had to go up. Him and Cassius had to go out and conquer half the world, basically, to raise those armies. They had to go town by town all over the world that Rome had conquered and either demand their loyalty or fight them and defeat them. 2:22 Erin: Not that they wanted to, mind you, 2:24 Wes: acquire an army along the way. 2:26 Erin: Just humble Romans, right? 2:28 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus had actually had a job in the mint, basically. And so I don't know if that helped him with figuring out what coin he was going to mint with that to pay his troops, but that's pretty. It's just so nuts. 2:40 Erin: That's really nuts. 2:41 Wes: To commemorate the murder of someone who's basically a friend. Now, they had had their ups and downs of course, like Pompey killed Brutus father. I don't know if you know that. But for various. For complicated reasons, Brutus ended up on the side of Pompey during that civil war, but then ultimately switched to Caesar. And they traveled together, they. For extended periods, they traveled together on various quests. So it's a bit nuts. And there had been decades of this kind of crazy war stuff going on. It's like the. Whatever the Republic was to Brutus, it had been chaos with all this fighting and infighting for decades. 3:27 Erin: I think that did seem to be the impression that I got too, is just in reviewing this particular moment in history. The Republic was only ever. It was like the idea of the 1950s to a certain wing of the Republican Party. This version of events never existed. The glory of the Republic was just a fantasy somehow. 3:48 Wes: I mean, the murder of Caesar concealed the fate of the Republic. Right. That was the end. You know, the irony here is. Yeah. That Brutus act, instead of preserving the Republic, just made sure that that was the very end. It set in motion a kind of final reckoning, a final civil war that I think could only end with an emperor. Emperor. Sorry, was that responsive to what you were saying? 4:12 Erin: Yes. 4:15 Wes: All right, all right. So this scene with act three, scene three with Cinna, where he's murdered for his name, also in Plutarch, I think. Now I'm beginning to question everything that I think is in Plutarch. So listeners will have to take everything with a grain of salt. So I could be hallucinating it, but I'm pretty sure this is in Plutarch as well. In any case. Yeah, very important that the plebeians are indiscriminate in their violence. And then we get he's, I'm Cinna the poet. I'm Cinna the poet. Tear him for his bad verses. Tear him for his bad verses. There seems to be always some kind of self deprecating reference towards bad poets in Shakespeare's plays. The idea in Nan, you know, I'm not Cinna the conspirator. It's no matter his name, Cinna pluck but his name out of his heart and turn him going. So this is almost a variation on killing Caesar's spirit. And it's too bad if we have to kill the body as well. And then on some of these other things that we've talked about with the social construction of power, where what's in a name? Right? And then Caesar's name becoming equivalent to the name King. But what's in a Role, Right. I say you're a consul, and therefore you have such and such powers. Well, it's spooky. And I was trying to associate that in our earlier discussions with the concept of superstition. I don't usually stand on ceremony, where ceremony is ambiguous, between forms of politeness and then the kind of forms that go into the making of a state, the ceremonies of a functioning government, and then between the productions of oracles, superstition. There's something spooky and superstitious about the way that power works and the way that hierarchy works. And here it's kind of reduced to its kind of absurd premise, which is that if you have a certain name, you could be just guilty by virtue of that, if your name is the same as that of the conspirator. So it's almost like acting on a form of superstition. 6:31 Erin: I mean, what's so complicated about this, as you're already suggesting, right, is that this is a sort of recapitulation of Caesar's murder. Right. So this crowd, inflamed with rage over the murder of Caesar, is now enacting something similar to what the conspirators have just done. And we also have that proleptic idea of what Caesar's name becomes in history being applied here with the name of a conspirator. And just a coincidence coming to haunt you, it seems to me, because it has elements of both sides kind of attached to it to imply something about the idea of art being apolitical, being perhaps the most dangerous position of all. Or one might get attacked for coincidence. And depending on what use the crowd wants to give to one's art, they'll just take it and run with it, and they'll murder the work in the process or something. 7:30 Wes: Yeah. There's actually an extra layer of irony which I really love, which is that tear him for his bad verses. Poets are guilty of the same sort of identification that the crowd is making here. Juliet is the sun. Right. That's the substance of metaphor, which is to make these identifications. Cinna. He dies by a variation of his own identifications. And those identifications can be suggestive. And it's the sort of things that are happening in Antony Speech and that can manipulate people into doing things. And the general role of art in culture, the ways in which art can influence people, as you point out, I think you were hinting at that it can be a potentially pernicious, dangerous force within society. Plato wanted to kick the poets out of the republic. Right. Or at least to control what they were saying because they might represent the gods as being bad people, which they were. They were bad people. He wanted a better representation of the gods so that they wouldn't corrupt people. So there's something dangerous, I think, about metaphor, and we've talked about this in our Shakespeare episode, the ways in which reasoning can be grounded in metaphor and bad reasoning especially can be grounded in metaphor because metaphors, in a way, are treated almost like little scientific models. And you can extend the metaphor and if you don't test it against reality, you can come to all sorts of absurd conclusions. So, yeah, I think there are many ways in which metaphor is a dangerous tool. Antony has just illustrated that, that this scene beautifully captures all of that. 9:13 Erin: It puts me in mind, of course, of Brutus saying, I have the same dagger for myself when it shall please my country to need my death. You know, Shakespeare's almost doing that through Cinna. He's giving the poet the same dagger. Right. And in such a way as to. It's lucky perhaps that Shakespeare has Plutarch to keep referring back to because Brutus is saying some pretty dangerous things, you know, to maybe be saying in the Globe in front of Elizabeth and. Right. All of this is also kind of covering one's bases to turn the dagger on himself and to either inflame the dramatic moment with the scene which in, for instance, in Orson Welles Mercury Theater adaptation of Caesar apparently like, brought the house down. But then again, this is in 37. Welles was using a lot of contemporary political imagery, making Brutus a sort of anti fascist. You know, Caesar was identified with Mussolini and Hitler. Rather than being killed by a mob, I think he has Cinna killed by the secret police. 10:19 Wes: Oh, yeah, that changes it. 10:21 Erin: Right. But it brought the house down in this riotous. You know, it was considered the high point of the play. In fact, there's a very famous. I think it's sort of famous. I like Jacob Landau. I don't know how well known he is at this point. Probably not very well known. But there were, you know, artworks depicting this moment in the Welles adaptation, depending on how you want to play it. It's almost a moment of comic relief or absurdity after everything. Right. Or. 10:47 Wes: I agree, yeah, yeah. 10:49 Erin: Or in the Welles adaptation, a surprising emotional high point which seems to even. Seems to have an even greater reaction than the actual meat and potatoes of this play. You know, the two speeches. 11:02 Wes: To me, it's doing at least two different things at once, which is. It's consolidating something that's really important thematically around the name. The name, Power and the name. Yeah. Caesar. Caesar's king. Yeah. Cinna versus Cinna. And then the comments on, well, the little meta commentary on bad poetry. My impression from Shakespeare, from what I've read almost every play at this point multiple times, is that there's a kind of rough and tumble relationship between audience and players and playwright. And he was acting often, I guess, maybe early on he just went. Not that we actually know, but he was probably concentrating on playwriting and letting other people do the acting. But I imagine, right, the grunts in the audience, there's always the question, are you enjoying yourselves? No, well, sorry, yeah, I'm not that great. And some of this is explicitly said, especially when there's people giving prologues or epilogues like the Tempest. I hope you've had a good time, if not, sorry about that. So, yeah, many references, I think, to. To bad poets and bad verses throughout his play, with the implication being that he might be one of those people. He might be subjecting his audience to his bad verses and they might want to tear him to pieces. Right. So it calls out this, I think, real tension in art between artist and audience, because for some reason, you know how when you go to improv and it's bad and it's just like so excruciating with stand up comedy, it's just like you almost feel like it's happening to you, like some kind of empathetic connection. But I think it can arouse a certain amount of hostility in an audience, which is strange. Right. If you go to see a bad play, you want to throw tomatoes, you want to get violent, but it should be pretty low stakes. I'm just going to try to pass some time and if it's not great, okay, it's not that great. But do you have to kill the actors? Well, but anyway, yeah, I don't know 13:20 Erin: if this is too much of a stretch, but when I think of that, when I think of tomatoes, you know, I think of the crowd at La Scala, for instance. And one of the things that these incredibly emotional and often violent crowds are responding to is a poor performance of an opera that they know well. So there's a sort of ideal in the ether of the performance, as it should be, or a singer who originated the role, who's the best, and you're not measuring up to that ideal, betraying the text somehow, the perfection contained within the material. And so I hesitated to say that because, well, that's not the case here, but it is because he's dramatizing A story everybody knows. So there's a danger, right, of this isn't, say, an original play. It is. And it is what to add in, what to take out. You know, in a way he's doing something like what a. What a great opera singer would do, which is an interpretation of pre existing material. And the extent to which he interprets it well or doesn't is going to be what he sort of lives or dies by in this, in this. Most famous of any of his stories that he treats in any of his plays. Right. This is the most famous, I mean, I think of his Harold Bloom, who said, you know, that Caesar is the most famous person that Shakespeare will ever treat in his, in his plays. I have the inherent feeling that there's something more to be said about that. But one of the things that tear him for his bad verses makes me think of is also in Brutus's speech a little earlier in the speech when he says, which I don't think we addressed directly, as he was valiant, I honor him, but as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love, joy for his fortune, honor for his valor and death for his ambition. 15:09 Wes: Yeah, I don't know how we missed that. 15:11 Erin: Yeah, Right. So he important. Yes. Doling out justice in accordance to his characteristics. Right. You're not, you're not a person. You're a collection of characteristics which we have to treat on an individual basis. That also reminds me of this, it reminds me of, you know, tear him for his bad verses or the coincidence incidents of having the same name. And therefore you're not really a person. You're just someone with a collection of characteristics, including a name which may or may not serve you well. And maybe something like, you know, what a playwright has to deal with. Well, this part was really good, but then this part was bad. And so we want to throw tomatoes here, but we want to, we want to clap here. He should have taken out this part from Plutarch or added in this part, you know, I, I just. This idea that Brutus is picking and choosing what to celebrate and what to. To slay. Brutus is the severest theater critic of all. 16:00 Wes: You know, he, he thrice refused the crown and he did a bad acting job. 16:04 Erin: Or did he? Yeah, right. I mean, or we're also getting. Right, we're getting a constant critical interpretation too, is another thing which we're hearing from people. We're not actually seeing what we're, what we're really seeing and what we're being told, I think are constantly Being played with here, like the will, Caesar refusing the crown. We're getting it filtered through critics. Through criticism. We don't know if Caesar has. I mean, if Cinna has bad verses. So, you know. But we're getting an instant. Probably. Right. But we're getting an instant sort of critical apparatus around him. 16:38 Wes: Shakespeare's not interested in crafting original plots, which is. It's kind of why I'm not interested in plot either, when, you know. 16:47 Erin: Same. 16:49 Wes: Yeah. In this context, if it's a Netflix series, it better have a good plot. The context where I'm interested in the poetry of it and character and all that stuff. His plots are often quite loose. And then, like with King Lear, he just took someone else's play and rewrote it, basically. 17:08 Erin: Yes. 17:09 Wes: And with all this other stuff, he's faithfully. Yeah. He's adapting historical accounts and the magic is not in the plot. 17:17 Erin: Well, as I'm sure we've said before, in the Tudor era, these were just things that people were not interested in, and they weren't interested in having some sort of Christopher Nolan style, you know, with people who have never and will never live, you know, saying absolutely absurd things. But there's this really cool twist. Yeah. I mean, it's just a different set of values, it seems. 17:39 Wes: What would Shakespeare's version of Inception be? Right. Nolan isn't. Inception is one of his. Right. 17:43 Erin: Yeah. Well, that's his best one, I think. 17:46 Wes: Can you imagine? 17:47 Erin: Oh, no, it's not. I think it's the Prestige. 17:50 Wes: But anyway, the Tempest is the closest he gets to science fiction. Right. 17:54 Erin: Yes. And I think. But I think that. I think the plot or the genius or the, you know, what Nolan does say with the things inside of other things is always happening at the line level in Shakespeare anyway. You know, know, people being mirrors of each other, people infecting each other's thoughts, you know, all of that is simply being externalized in Nolan and leaving. Leaving the character sort of empty, but. 18:19 Wes: Right, right. Yeah. Very good. Very good point. 18:22 Erin: Not to go after him. I don't mean to. He made some good movies. I just. It's not really my thing. 18:28 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think I enjoyed them, but I. Most entertainment leaves me feeling unsatisfied. 18:34 Erin: Tear Nolan for his bad films. 18:35 Wes: Yes. 18:38 Erin: They're great. They're great. 18:39 Wes: All right. What do we want to say before we conclude about these final two acts, which we knew we weren't going to spend a lot of time on, But I compared this to the point in Jaws where they go out to look for the shark. And I don't have as much interest. 18:56 Erin: Yeah, I don't either. I think it's really funny when Cassius and Brutus break up and. And then get back together. Like it's fun at the infighting that goes on and the little power games and stuff. We could spend a lot of time on that. And I don't know that we would come up with anything more interesting than simply saying, isn't this how all these things work? Everybody's getting on each other's nerves. 19:19 Wes: Yeah. I mean, it shows how. From some of the commentary I read, I can see that scholars and critics take these acts more seriously than I have on the current reading. So there's a lot going. You could say there's still a lot going on thematically. I suppose what we're supposed to get out of them fighting is the way in which their lofty ideals have degenerated into a power struggle. Right. That's one part of this. But that big fight in the tent, right. They really get into. 19:56 Erin: Gets ugly in a way, which is so sort of petty. And it's not even really fun. You know, they're not like brandishing great zingers at each other or anything. It's. I think it's very well done. I mean, it's very. It's interesting. 20:08 Wes: And. Yeah, and they're mad at one. Cassius wanted Brutus to pardon someone. And Brutus is saying, you didn't send the gold I needed. And is accusing Cassius of being corrupt himself. Which, again, I think all of us in Plutarch. But in the end, the way they make up, it seems like it turns out all to be a miscommunication. It all suddenly just dissolves because Cassius says, well, that messenger was a fool. How does it end? 20:39 Erin: Yeah, the messenger informed you wrong. Brutus has this whole thing that he doesn't like Cassius's methods. He doesn't want to get his hands dirty. So he needs money to be raised. But he doesn't want to do it the way Cassius. Cassius is doing it. So Cassius has to do it for him because he's too honorable. And then Brutus accuses Cassius of denying him the money or something like that. And then Cassius says, I didn't deny you the money. The messenger just informed you wrong. So that. Yeah. So the whole thing was about money being raised. Yeah. So they literally go back and forth. I denied you, not. You did. I did not. Like. It's so petty. 21:15 Wes: It's so stupid. It. Yeah, yeah. 21:18 Erin: I did send to you for certain sums of gold which you denied me. For I can raise no money by vile means. I have no ways to get money myself. I'm too pure. But you can get it, because, you know, you. You don't have my scruples. And he was but a fool that brought my answer back. So, yes, the whole thing was leaving things up to messengers, and. And in fact, what this does is presages the messenger problem, which will end in Cassius killing himself. 21:46 Wes: Right. We also get another poet. 21:48 Erin: Right. 21:49 Wes: Let me go in to see the generals. There is some grudge between them. Tis not meet they be alone. Lucilius tries to prevent him. Nothing but death shall stay me. And then he comes in and he tries to, you know, tries to kind of mediate their fight. And Cassius says, how vilely doth this cynic rhyme. 22:11 Erin: Here's a bad. 22:11 Wes: I abuse the poet. So. Yeah. What is that scene for? What should the wars do with these jigging fools? 22:22 Erin: Yeah. I mean, if Cinna is a shadow of Caesar or of Brutus, or of Brutus and Caesar, then Cinna himself also needs a shadow. He needs a rhyme. This poet says, for shame, you generals. What do you mean? Love and friends as two such men should be. For I have seen more years, I'm sure, than ye. You know. He has his little cups. 22:47 Wes: Now that you read that out loud, that is really bad. 22:49 Erin: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a couple. It's. Yeah. So. So. 22:51 Wes: For I have seen more years, I'm sure, than ye. Yeah. 22:54 Erin: Everybody needs their little. Everybody needs their little pair. Their little couplet. 22:59 Wes: Yeah. So the poet is coming in to try to save the day and say, I've got something to add. I'm not just useless in war. Finally, I've found a purpose. I'm going to reconcile these two great generals. We get another scene where there's another critical mistake about military planning that is really Brutus fault. Cassius has the right idea. And then he. He's quickly overruled. I mean, he gives up very quickly. It's like Cassius has learned that he's just not gonna get anywhere with Brutus. And then we get the scene, another kind of poignant scene with music. And then Caesar's ghost. So it's kind of a tender scene between him and his slave boy, I guess, is what you would call it, Right. Lucius falls asleep with the instrument in his lap. 23:53 Erin: That's right. Yeah. 23:54 Wes: I guess I'm skipping over the part where Portia. 23:58 Erin: We get the two deaths of Portia, right? 24:01 Wes: Twice. Yeah. The two reveals. 24:05 Erin: And both times, Brutus is like, oh, that's too bad. 24:09 Wes: Yeah. 24:11 Erin: Forgive me. I'm too busy screwing up massively at Philippi. 24:15 Wes: Well, I think he shows. He shows. Shows? No man bears sorrow better. Portia is dead. No. You're not convinced? 24:25 Erin: I don't know. Brutus did a better job of memorializing Caesar, who he murdered, than his wife. But, yeah, it leaves me a little cold and ironic since Portia swallowed hot coals, but don't. 24:42 Wes: Humor. Yeah. So, Caesar's ghost. What do we make of that? Well, the music and. I mean, do you have anything to say about either of those? 24:51 Erin: There are lots and lots of echoes of Macbeth in here. 24:54 Wes: So what are the plays in which ghosts appear? Is it just. There's Macbeth and Caesar and Hamlet and. What else? I don't know if there's anything else. 25:04 Erin: There has to be. 25:05 Wes: Oh, Richard iii. Right. He's definitely in Richard ii. Just looking this up right now. Yeah. Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Richard iii. 25:15 Erin: Cymbeline. 25:16 Wes: Yeah. So that's really interesting to me that it happens so rarely in his place, I would say. I mean, it's used to good effect in Hamlet and Macbeth. Right. By the way, did you see Hamnet? 25:31 Erin: I haven't seen it yet. 25:32 Wes: Okay. That's a real tearjerker. But. But, yeah, I mean, is it being used effectively here? I mean, I hate to be a critic of good old Shakespeare. 25:45 Erin: Thy evil spirit, Brutus, to tell thee, thou shalt see me at Philippi. 25:50 Wes: I. 25:50 Erin: At Philippi. He doesn't get gray lines or anything. He's not Marley or something. 25:55 Wes: Right. I was about to say, remember me? 25:59 Erin: Your old partner? Yeah. 26:01 Wes: He could have all the winds with tongues in them speaking, you know? Really? I guess that'd be hard to pull off on the stage at the time. 26:09 Erin: Yeah. He doesn't say much. I mean, Banquo doesn't say anything in Macbeth. Right. He just shakes his gory locks at Macbeth. And, in fact, some stage adaptations don't even. They just have Macbeth responding to the empty chair. 26:22 Wes: But Macbeth is tortured with guilt, and Hamlet is tortured and Richard. So these usually happen in the context of. 26:33 Erin: That's interesting. 26:34 Wes: People racked with some interesting psychology, some sort of negative emotion, and here. Well, maybe that's the point. Maybe Brutus's kind of indifference to this is part of the point. 26:49 Erin: It's more about the haunted than the hauntee, You know, Brutus just doesn't. He shall not be moved. 27:00 Wes: Ill spirit, I would hold more talk with thee. Yeah. But other than that, it's almost like Brutus is. He's just kind of out of it. That whole scene with Lucius and the music, too, it's almost in. Like his heart is not in the project of war. Exactly. 27:17 Erin: Well, what is there for Brutus at this point? I mean, Brutus. Brutus's whole bag was opposition. Brutus needed a Caesar to rail against. 27:26 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. 27:28 Erin: And, you know, what's he going to do? I mean, he's powerless against the actual tide of the empire. You know, he's gotten rid of his personal antagonist and now dramatically, you know, he's sort of floundering. 27:43 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. I'm curious. I wonder how many people sort of know you. Yeah. Get less interested in this play, in Acts 4 and 5, like me. Is that the typical response? Or is it. Am I missing something? 27:56 Erin: It must be. 27:57 Wes: But anyway. Yeah. Do you have any final. Final words before we conclude we should 28:02 Erin: end where we began, with Antony's last words about Brutus, you know, because maybe absent Caesar and in light of, you know, when I was coming down hard on Brutus and you said, oh, you don't agree with Antony's assessment of him. Him, Maybe this. This long decline into the final. Into the final scene here at the end of Act 5, we can get here with Brutus or Antony can get here with Brutus because he's become mild in the absence of this force to fight against. Or the length of these scenes or the distance now we've traveled between Caesar's murder at the exact halfway point. Point has kind of made us remember. I don't know. It goes against. Goes against Antony's idea that the evil men do lives after them, but the good is often interred with their bones. But maybe Antony is remembering what was good about Brutus because there's sort of been enough dramaturgical time to come back around or memorialize him. Well. And he's been softened in light of the fact that he's lost in battle. And so Antony is going to give him his due. And also, the spark has gone out of his life now that Caesar is dead and his reason for living and fighting for the republic is dead, too. 29:19 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. I want to just compare what Plutarch has to say just to get an idea. Give people an idea of how Shakespeare adapted this so from the Marcus Brutus life. Because I think it ends the same way. By the way, also, Brutus's mom was a mistress of Caesar. Servilia. 29:43 Erin: No way. Yeah, that is. 29:47 Wes: And none of that of course, none of the Hamlet type of stuff exploited 29:54 Erin: well, but Bloom says that this is even more suggestive of that sort of Freudian conflict than Hamlet. Hamlet. I mean, I think I find that an absurd statement on Bloom's part, but I think it's funny that he thinks so and yet doesn't mention that fact in his essay on Julius Caesar. 30:15 Wes: Brutus's dead body was found by Antony, who commanded the richest purple mantle that he had to be thrown over it. And afterwards, the mantle being stolen, he found the thief and had him put to death. He sent the ashes of Brutus to his mother. Servilia. 30:30 Erin: Servilia is not a great name on a couple levels, but 30:36 Wes: especially if you're dating Caesar. 30:38 Erin: Yeah. I'll do anything for you. 30:43 Wes: Oh, you know what? It's in the Antony. I think it's in the Antony life, anyway. All right, that's it. 30:49 Erin: We made it. 30:50 Wes: That's the Antony. Six hours of discussing. What do you mean? 30:54 Erin: We didn't really cover the. The last two acts. 30:57 Wes: Yeah, I don't feel. I don't feel bad about that at all. 31:00 Erin: Neither do I. Neither do I. 31:02 Wes: But this was fun. All right, thank you. 31:05 Erin: Thank you, and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast Please send your questions, feedback, and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

A close reading of rhetoric and power in Julius Caesar, from Brutus’s bank-account metaphor to Antony’s ambiguous praise. They trace wordplay on rank, blood, and authorship, and unpack theatrical visuals like bloody hands and the will as a political prop. The conversation moves from individual virtue to how authority is institutionally grounded and publicly narrated.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part four of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We are just getting to the end of the section with the conspirators, and I just wanted to, before we move on, draw attention to Cassius's mention of superstition, because I want to get a little bit into this. Of course they're trying to figure out how to get Caesar, and Cassius is a bit worried because whether it's Caesar. Will Caesar come out to play? Maybe not for you. He is superstitious, grown of late quite from the main opinion he held once a fantasy of dreams and ceremonies. Ceremonies I take to be like religious ceremonies or something like that, but it stands in also for ceremonies of state. And later on we're going to get Calpurnia. Calpurnia will say, I've never been one to stand on ceremony, which at that point she's basically saying she's not a superstitious person either. But of course, the way we use the phrase today, we're generally thinking in terms of being formal. So this double meaning is something that Shakespeare is going to exploit in this play, the ceremony of the state apparatus and then the kinds of ceremony involved in religion and superstition, because there's a way in which the state looks Like a form of superstition and it's being socially constructed. And that same goes here for oaths as well. The fact and speech acts, right? We say, I marry. I marry you, and therefore we are married. There's something spooky about that. It's not real, Right. That's the nature of speech acts and institutions and state institutions and society in general. They're built on these speech acts. They're socially constructed. We pretend as if saying certain things makes them true. So that parallel, I think, is very important to Shakespeare because this idea that Caesar is skeptical of superstition and religion is meant to parallel the idea that he doesn't actually. Also, he doesn't respect social convention and the institutions of the state. He's all about his own power rather than in power as it's distributed in social systems. But it will turn out right. He's generally not superstitious, but he's grown superstitious of late. And Calpurnia is quite worried as well. 2:55 Erin: That's interesting because of course, Brutus conceives of Caesar's assassination as a ceremonial sacrifice to the gods. Right. And of course, Brutus is in a way sacrificing to his family gods by killing Caesar. And also, doesn't Caesar have some sort of imagined lineage that ties him back to. I mean, I know this was later made much of, but that ties him back to the gods. That ties him back to at least Aeneas, or in his own propaganda, or his family was thought to descend from Aeneas. Maybe I could be getting this wrong, but I thought he made. 3:29 Wes: I'm not sure this sort of like 3:32 Erin: Egyptian connection to, you know, I'm divine. 3:34 Wes: I mean, the Romans in general are. What's his face? Who wrote the Aeneid? 3:39 Erin: Virgil. 3:40 Wes: Virgil. He hasn't come along yet. It'll be under the reign of Augustus. Under the reign of Augustus and the boy that he writes that. So, yeah, I don't. Is that mythology? I don't know to the extent to which Virgil invented that idea that they. 3:56 Erin: I thought it was through. It is, or it's already there through Caesar's matrilineal line. But I could be wrong about that. I'm operating off of long memory. Claimed as family, the gens Julia descended from the goddess Venus through her son Aeneas. A lineage. Lineage emphasized through the mythical. Yes. His mother's family. I was right. Wow. Also connected to Mars through Romulus. 4:18 Wes: So I wonder if Virgil's picking up on that in particular. 4:21 Erin: Oh, he must be. 4:22 Wes: Since Augustus. In order to flatter Augustus and Wasn't 4:25 Erin: it Caesar's sister's son, Augustus? So that would be further strengthening his 4:31 Wes: masterfulness nephew that he adopted as his own. 4:34 Erin: Yeah. So Brutus seems to be wanting to make this sacrifice out of respect for the state and of his, as I've already suggested, this aristocratic republicanism. But Caesar too has this connection. 4:47 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus is one to stand on ceremony. In other words, he's all about the republic. But again, the question is whether is there something spooky and superstitious about that, which is not unrelated to. Is it really envy and self interest that is hypocritically presenting itself as interest in the state, the public good? That's the question that always lingers behind altruistic motives in general, but. Or an interest in the public good. I ultimately do think that there are true altruistic motives, but I think we are always posed with that question, or at least whether our motives are mixed. But I was going to take us to scene two, but that would mean skipping the Portia scene. Did you anymore. Did you have anything to say about her being in the suburbs of his good pleasure or anything else which. I love that line. 5:40 Erin: Yeah, that's great. 5:41 Wes: Before we go to scene two, I 5:43 Erin: am interested in the gender dynamics in this play. I do think they're fascinating, but also that they're not really on the central track and therefore something we won't have much time for. But I am interested in this idea that Portia accuses Brutus of treating her in this split up way and that she seems to be recognizing in him something that he's not recognizing that he's doing, even though it's all over his speech, you know, so she, she says, I'm. I'm here for you only in these certain ways. And really I'm supposed to be your whole self. I'm supposed to be united with you in this way, which is obviously extremely post Roman that she's referencing. But so she says that as a result of this not sharing his full life, but sort of being suburb ized, she is his harlot, not his wife. I thought that was an interesting. Just an interesting mirror, you know, here is Brutus's mirror, in a way, is Portia. She's sort of presenting to him this idea that he's treating her in this split way, which is in a sense of the way that he's looking at, you know, Caesar by wanting to kill his spirit rather than his body or something like that. By breaking people up into, you know, the ways that he wants to digest them. Or view them. And the wound is really interesting in that way, too, because it prefigures, obviously, the assassination and even just the. The dream of Calpurnia. But let's. Let's skip to. 7:06 Wes: Well, let me just say, before we move on. Yeah. I don't. I guess I don't Kind of. I don't quite know what Portia is doing in the play. Like, she's there in Plutarch. So that might, by itself explain it. I don't know thematically what she's doing. I think it's supposed to enhance the tragedy of all of this because she ends up dying because of what he's doing. Right. He really is kind of the tragic protagonist here. But it also highlights something that you've pointed to, which is the way in which he is closed himself off in his rumination. He's not as integrated into a dialogue with others as you might think he would be, given his interest in the Republic and that kind of. And the political. He hasn't really quite treated this as a political matter. In other words, this deliberation about whether he's going to kill Caesar in the political context of the family. She's impacted by this. She could lose him. And he hasn't paid attention to that. So he ignores that little political unit, the family. 8:16 Erin: I like that. 8:17 Wes: Which is very against principle. So maybe I do know what it's doing in the play. 8:24 Erin: Yeah. Well, you know, she becomes. In death, too. It's interesting to see his reaction, which occurs twice, or his discussion of her death, which occurs twice, which might be an error on Shakespeare's part, or it might be doing something really wonky and interestingly. 8:39 Wes: Yeah. Didn't find it very touching in the play. That's the thing. 8:43 Erin: It's not. 8:44 Wes: Yeah, well, yeah. 8:46 Erin: I mean, it's revealing in that regard. 8:48 Wes: He was supposed to be very devastated by it, historically. 8:52 Erin: Well, Brutus, the real guy, and Brutus, this guy. 8:54 Wes: Yeah. It didn't do much for me, but. Yeah. Just quickly, do you have any ideas about the wounding of the thigh and what that's supposed to do? She's trying to prove that she is capable of hearing hard truths. Right. She's got the strength to do it. So she can withstand the wound in her thigh, therefore she can withstand anything that he would communicate to her, no matter how unpleasant or terrifying, which turns out not to be true. 9:24 Erin: Yeah. 9:24 Wes: I mean, she kills herself, but yeah. 9:27 Erin: The only wound that Brutus has been interested in prior to this, other than wounding Caesar or sacrificing Caesar, is this idea of Pricking himself metaphorically in the non oath oath scene. So Portia thinks that she's appealing to him and showing some sort of manly courage by wounding herself. And in fact, I think she's hurting her argument. Because what we'll soon see, I think, with Caesar's body and what Portia should know is that the wound is a feminine symbol. Right. Brutus is all about the sword and the manliness and steeling himself with valor, as he says. And she has wounded herself to kind of show her seriousness and show that she could be just as capable as a man of whatever she imagines he accuses her of not being able to keep a secret or something, I think is part of it. And really, she misunderstands fundamentally what Brutus idea of masculinity is about, which is about wholeness rather than being wounded. But the power of that, the power of those wounds will end up being surprising and they'll end up, you know, coming back to. Literally, to haunt Brutus. Yeah. So there's something being implied here about the wound. Symbolically, it doesn't work, but she takes this, like, extreme action to prove that she's hardcore metal. And two, I think in the Brutus column, there's a wife who's trying to warn him of something or trying to help him or trying to whatever. And then there has to be the same thing in the Caesar column. So, you know, they're the only two that get wives. So since there's a Calpurnia, there has to be a Portia. This goes toward the whole. The mirroring between Brutus and Caesar idea. Yeah, I think so. I don't know. It works for me. It's an interesting scene because of that kind of gender dynamic and what that adds, the complexity that that's going to add to Caesar's wounds and the real Roman obsession that occurs throughout the play with being manly, you know, that seems to be like a big part of Roman identity. 11:36 Wes: Yeah. So in the next scene, it's a great scene between Calpurnia and Caesar. She, of course, Right. She's just had a dream about Caesar being murdered and cried out about it. And she wants to know why he's planning to go out in light of all the bad omens. And he says basically that he always faces his fears and that they will vanish. His fears will vanish when they see him. So it's not like he needs to be afraid of his fear. The fears are afraid of him. Caesar shall forth the things that threatened me Never looked back but on my back when they shall See me the face of Caesar. They have vanished. Okay, what has threatened him so? Not his fears, exactly, but what might cause fear. And then she tells us, I never stood in ceremonies, yet now they fright me. And as I've explained, there's a real double meaning there. Between the ceremony of prophecy, the people who are telling them that there are bad omens, it's a religious ceremony of a sort. And then the ceremonies of state, right? So the external trappings of offices are ceremonies. And this is something that Shakespeare harps on in many plays. You know, the rituals of kingship and the gowns of the judge, as in King Lear, what people wear. So various other rituals and forms that go. That are kind of the glue of the. Of the state. But in this case, yeah, she's saying she herself is not one to be superstitious. But in this case, she's worried. And he has this great speech, one of my favorite metaphors. Cowards die many times before their deaths. 13:19 Erin: Yes, love it. 13:21 Wes: Valiant never taste of death but once. 13:23 Erin: I have two hearts and an exclamation point. Sorry. 13:27 Wes: Of all the wonders that I have yet heard that I yet have heard it seems to me most strange that men should fear seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. So death is inevitable. Why fear it? If you fear it, in a way, you've died spiritually already. And then, true to form, he's going to interpret one of these bad omens, the missing heart of an animal, as representing the courage it would be missing if he were to stay home. So he's really putting a good face on this. And then referring to himself in the third person, he'll say he is more dangerous than danger. This is one of the sort of absolutist moments that I've been pointing out, when what Caesar says will be done. I am Caesar. And that's all you need to know. Caesar's more dangerous than danger. Fearlessness is for Caesar what honor is for Brutus, as I've pointed out before, 14:26 Erin: the way that he works. These workarounds, though, are really interesting because for one moment, he's very, l'état, c'est moi. But the one moment where he isn't is in order to justify going out where he says these predictions are to the world in general as to Caesar. So he's like, you know, why should I be worried? Because there are plenty of people in this world. It's not like these are really about me. But of course they are about him, because he is the state, which is 14:51 Wes: a dumb thing to Say, and Calpurnia has a good relationship about all of that. Right? 14:55 Erin: Right. Right. Everybody is, including Caesar, is a fan of the great man theory of history. Unless it prevents Caesar from being seen out on a nice March 15 day. 15:09 Wes: Right. Gotta go out on the ides. It's my favorite time to go out. 15:13 Erin: Gotta press the flesh. 15:14 Wes: The soothsayer already told me. But he's a dreamer. Right. We get a new omen and then some competing interpretations. Yeah. Do to. You want. Want to give that. 15:25 Erin: So Calpurnia dreamt that she saw Caesar's statue, which, like a fountain with a hundred spouts, did run pure blood. And many lusty Romans came smiling and did bathe their hands in it. And these did she apply for warnings and portents and evils imminent. And on her knee hath begged that I will stay at home today. And Decius says this dream is all a misinterpreted. It was a vision, fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes, pipes in which so many smiling Romans bathed, signifies that from you great Rome shall suck reviving blood, and that great men shall press for tinctures, stains, relics and cognizance. This by Calpurnia's dream is signified. So, yeah, I think in. In part one or two, I talked a little bit about, or we both did, about this idea of interpretation being central to the play and to the whole story. And here we have this, like, really specific moment of deliberate misinterpretation or reading of this dream, which is designed to get Caesar to come out of the house. But it's, you know, same. Exact same image, completely different message taken from that. It just, you know, reminds me of Caesar's fainting, you know, from epilepsy that we talked about in parts one and two, and the varying impressions that people are getting from his behavior. For instance. 16:41 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting, you know, Caesar conceives of himself as an unmoved mover. And here flattery is going to do the job. And that's precisely what Decius said when they were conspiring. And, in fact, you just flatter him by saying he can't be flattered. But here the flattery is more about his glory and the love of Romans and what he is to Rome. Before that, when Caesar has said that he's not going to go out, he says, I will not come today. Cannot is false. And therefore. And that I dare not false her, I will not come. And then Decius says, I'm going to be laughed at if you don't give Me a cause. And Caesar says, the cause is in my will. I will not come. That is enough to satisfy the Senate. So he's an unmoved mover in the sense that he doesn't need to give explanations through his actions. It just stops with his will. And that includes his behavior is not going to be explained by fear, but it doesn't need to be explained by any other motivation as well, as far as he's concerned. And it's certainly not answerable to the public, supposedly, or to the requirements of government and the state. So he's really not answerable, in a sense, to the Senate, but he turns out to be answerable in a sense. Right, because all you have to do is he's made answerable to the flattery of others or to the love of others. And that is what moves him. I mean, ultimately, Decius also has to say, they're going to give you the crown, or they're going to think you're afraid. So he uses other elements of manipulation as well. But there's a very stark contrast between Caesar's conception of himself as an unmoved mover, but how easily, actually, he is moved. He doesn't think he's answerable to the polity, to the public, but he is answerable. Decius proves he's answerable in a different sense to the public. He's answerable to glory. 18:53 Erin: I read that a little more generously, because I think he's demonstrating in that. That he's answerable to truth. And he just has to say, well, in the end, I just won't do it. He won't lie. And that's kind of all that's left to him in that moment. When I. I turned back the page to try and find that moment, I saw a few other instances of will being used which are kind of interesting, you know, Caesar bids his servant to go ask the priest for their opinions of his success. And the servant exits, saying, I will, my lord. There are a bunch of these instances where the servants say, I will, that I just happened to see. And then, of course, when Caesar gives that great speech that you just mentioned a moment ago, and doth say that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. You know, death's will is. Is also something to which we're all answerable. Right. He ultimately says, you know, after Decius convinces him, says, how foolish do your fears seem now, Calpurnia, I am ashamed I did yield to them. Give me my robe, for I will go. So he's ashamed he yielded to his wife's fear. And now he's willing himself to go rather than willing himself to stay or something like that. 20:01 Wes: He's afraid of being seen as fearful, then ironically. 20:05 Erin: Oh, yes, yes, certainly. But I think. No, just your reading of the word will, I think, is a really interesting one. 20:11 Wes: Yeah. Right. To say the cause is my will. Right. It becomes a little bit of a reflection on the philosophy of free will. Where to say that I freely act, does that mean it can be unmotivated? Of course. That's a nonsensical conception of what it means to freely act. To freely act is to act with reasons. But when we act with reasons, it seems like we are bound to those reasons, and in a sense, we are. But being bound to good reasons is not the same thing necessarily as being bound to some emotion or another like fear. Although we might have a good reason premised in fear. But in any case. Yeah. To say the cause is my will, well, I would say it's kind of delusional. Right. And it is kind of the authoritarian way of looking at things, par excellence. That's why in Hitler's Mein Kampf, which I've mentioned a few times on this show, it's all about will, and of course, is a bit borrowed from Nietzsche and will to power. But for the authoritarian, the concept of will becomes very, very important. The grounding of authority. Authority is no longer grounded in any other cause. It's not for the public good, it's not for this, it's not for that. It's just because I will it. The strongest will is the one that wins. And the strong man, the great leader, is the one with the strongest will. 21:38 Erin: Well, I don't want to sound like I'm supporting Hitler, but I am just. I am just saying that this is about him, whether or not he wants to go to work today. And that is often a matter of will in our own personal lives. It's not as though he's saying, will I kill you just for fun. Yeah. 21:58 Wes: But we might admit, I feel tired today, or I'm afraid because there's a bunch of people who are going to stab me. We might be able to admit that to ourselves. 22:08 Erin: That's right. I suppose I've said that interpretation is really the central idea of the play, but also will is the extent to which, to my mind, Brutus sort of wills himself into the justification for the. I mean, it's more complicated than that. But there is this idea of. I think it's about free will, in a sense. Where does the motivation come from or where does the action come from or where. In a way it's about this idea of all of this having already happened, or it being a play or it being a story that everybody already knows. In a story that everyone knows the outcome and knows what has to happen, where does the will come from? I think the play is sort of about that. So that will being behind everybody's motivations, really, it's really. It's almost an illusion. In fact, all of this has been preordained. We all know what's going to happen and it has to happen the way that it does. So I take. Yeah, that's a long way of saying I take this moment rather lightly. I think it's a comedic moment and I think we have to know it's a comedic moment because we know he has to go to work that day because he has to get stabbed. And it's really not a matter of his will at all. You know, that's kind of the fascination. 23:12 Wes: You don't think this is an attempt to illustrate an authoritarian personality like I do? You don't? 23:19 Erin: Not quite. I think it's a funny moment, you know, because he's making light of the. I mean, I think it is and it isn't. Right. It illustrates something about him just saying. Well, because I say so, certainly. But there's something light hearted about it at the same time because he's sort of struggling to come up with. 23:38 Wes: It's definitely light hearted as well. Yeah. 23:40 Erin: And ultimately it's toying with us. It's about. There's a third or fourth order motivation here, which is about him going, I'm not going to go, but we all know he has to go. So how is he. How are we going to get him to his inevitable conclusion here? It's about toying with the audience a bit and realizing that, well, he actually has no free will in the circumstance because he's inside a play or he's inside history, which has its way with him. I mean, that's rather meta. But I think a lot of that is being played with throughout the play too. So it's funny to talk about will when you're an actor on the stage in a play, which we all know the ending to, even if we haven't seen the play. Right. So there is something a bit comical. So I think ultimately the effect of that for me is it's often Caesar's pomposity or prayer tricks the pomposity, because we know that he has no free will at all in this particular circumstance. You Know, and it's, it's just about the mechanism of, of the form itself in a way that I think it exaggerates Brutus's bad. Like something about the form itself and Brutus's cogitations or self justifications or rationalizations, I should say, heightens his bad qualities. 24:51 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I don't. Yeah, I don't think. I agree. I think it's quite a negative representation of Caesar. And historically, a lot of critics, even shortly after the play came out, reacted, how dare you portray Caesar this way. But I get your point. Yeah, I think your point is well taken about. Well, I don't see Brutus as negatively as you. I think Shakespeare is trying to point to this parallel. Right. So they're both willful and in Brutus case, Brutus. And this comes out in the letters to Cicero, by the way, as well. Brutus is like, consequences be damned. I don't care about my own safety. I don't care what happens. I'm going to do what's right. That's the whole honor, virtue thing. And as I said, fearlessness is to Caesar what honor is to Brutus. Fearlessness, including all the incredible stuff he's done, like killing a million Gauls, all these feats of war that he's engaged and power and prowess. And that element of his character is supposed to ground the rightness of what he's doing. And for Brutus, it seems to be honor. You could say it's for the republic, but is it really for the republic if you're also saying consequences be damned? So motivation becomes very important here and whether one is motivated by a conception of what's right, what we call a deontological kind of motivation or a consequentialist idea, what's going to be, on a practical level, good for the republic? Maybe it's not a great idea to launch a civil war, even if not doing so will lead to Caesar having too much power. Maybe it'll be counterproductive and actually accelerate the devolution into empire. If you initiate a civil war at this point, there are all sorts of consequentialist considerations, which are the things that Brutus should have been deliberating about. But for him, it's all about honor. 26:53 Erin: Rah, rah, rah. 26:54 Wes: The Republic, consequences be damned. I'm going to do this. So it's the same. The cause in my will is actually quite a bit closer to that, to Brutus's point of view as well. And I think, yeah, Shakespeare is deliberate, deliberately drawing those parallels. But the scene ends poignantly with. It's kind of sad because all his friends show up and they have wine together, but they're really on the way to killing him. By the way, I do want to say the other thing about something just coming from one's will. It also suggests that you're beyond the causal order, which is part of the whole idea of what's natural versus unnatural. So you transcend the natural order of if your action can't be explained in terms of natural causes or motivational causes, if it just starts from your will. And that's that unnaturalness that is expressed in the storm. And that's part of the supposed unnaturalness of authoritarianism. It doesn't answer to anything. It's not a part of any causal order. 27:59 Erin: That's a really interesting idea because then how might we square this with the. There's. There's a pretense for getting close to Caesar in order to assassinate him, which is the banishment of cimber and Caesar. Caesar makes mention of this. You know, I. He says, I'm not going to be moved by, well, flattery. Right. We know, we know he can be 28:21 Wes: another unmoved mover, you know, self conception of him, you know, conception of himself as an unmoved mover. 28:26 Erin: Yeah, exactly. And he says he can't be. Uses this metaphor about hot versus cold blood, which is kind of interesting. And then he says at the end, no, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause will he be satisfied. He doesn't act unjustly by not allowing Cimber back. He won't let Cimber back in, pardon him without cause. But that seems to be like, what cause would he need to pardon him? That is the question. Because that seems. That idea of like, think pardoning is an interesting one because it's about the will. Right. You can only pardon someone according to. I mean, I suppose they would have to maybe do some sort of retributive. I'm sorry. They would have to do some sort of restitution to get back into good favor. So there would be something assigned to their will in order to win them. Win their place back into someone's good graces. But if they're banished, how can they do that? It's purely a matter of. Of Caesar's will as to whether or not he would let cimber back into Rome. I introduced this with the idea that this is a false excuse to get close for the conspirators to get up close to him so that they could stab him. 29:36 Wes: Yeah. So they know he's not going to say yes, of course, but it gives them all an excuse to. And by the way, Caesar doth not wrong, but with just cause. It's meant to be funny. It's a bit of a joke because you can't justly do anyone wrong. This is the thing. Ben Jonson excoriated Shakespeare for this line. And that's what I'm looking for here. I thought I had the quotation. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter, as when he said, in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, Caesar, thou dost me wrong. He replied, caesar never did wrong, but with just cause and such like which were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned. Now, that is a very big misjudgment on Jonson's part. That's a great line. It's part of Shakespeare's genius to put in someone contradicting themselves like that. Right? 30:31 Erin: Yes. 30:32 Wes: What Caesar is trying to say, there's a double entendre on wrong. He's not going to do violence to anyone unless there's a just reason for it. Although, of course, this is kind of the paradox at the center of the justice system in general. Right. We have a right to life and liberty, but we might execute someone or put someone behind bars. And so in the context of punishment, the right goes away. Well, then how is it a right? Right. So those sorts of paradoxes arise. But in this case, yeah, this is the. I think it's a great line, and it's one that Jonson doesn't like. But he sees his lack of mercy as a virtue because he sees it as part and parcel of his incorruptibility, and even says he's not going to turn preordinance and first decree into the law of children. So he conceives of it as being in accord with the law. He's a defender of the law. The law of children is whim, and that's the law of the tyrant. The law of the child and the law of the tyrant are the same thing, which is to do things according to whim instead of actual law. But Caesar identifies, in a way his will with the law. The imperturbability of his will is the constancy that's supposed to be there in the law. But of course, that's not the way it's supposed to go. The law has to be the imperturbable thing, and the particular actor, the leader, their will doesn't matter. They're just as beholden to the laws as anyone else. So will and law form a pair here. And the locus of authority should be in the law and not in a particular person's will. And not just in the law, but in custom, in social constructs, more generally, in ceremony. In that sense, we must stand on ceremony, even if it seems spooky. 32:23 Erin: Yeah. And the will here is also to remove Cimber from the law, remove him from the order, banish him him, in other words, so that he's no longer enfranchised. So that's an interesting idea. And he says, if I could pray to move, prayers would move me. I love this, but I'm constant as a Northern Star. 32:42 Wes: It's also a great Joni Mitchell song. 32:45 Erin: Yes. 32:47 Wes: Was it a case of you? 32:48 Erin: Yes. Do not goad me. 32:51 Wes: I just cannot read that line. I don't think of Shakespeare. I think of the Joni Mitchell song. 32:56 Erin: Exactly. Yeah. I was immediately going to start doing it. Yes, I can. 33:00 Wes: I was gonna. You gotta start doing it. 33:02 Erin: Nope, nope, nope. No. 33:04 Wes: I had to stop myself just because it would be so terrible. Would I think. 33:07 Erin: There's nothing I hate listening to more than my own impressions on this stupid podcast, so I am not going to do. 33:13 Wes: You're really depriving the audience because they are. She's really good at impressions, guys, by the way, 33:23 Erin: so I can't be flattered. 33:26 Wes: That's right. You are as constant as the Northern Star, Constantly not doing impressions. 33:33 Erin: The other. Yeah. I never, ever give in. We all know it. This time I won't. All right, so everyone does shine. Everyone. Yes. Okay. So only one holds its place, and that's me. I am the still point of the turning world. 33:48 Wes: And in particular, others are movable because of fear. I think he says, again, they're apprehensive. 33:54 Erin: Men are flesh and blood and apprehensive. But I am not man. I am Caesar. 34:02 Wes: Anyway, yeah, so I feel a bit vindicated here that he's trying to portray an authoritarian person. Oh. 34:09 Erin: Oh, totally, totally. Yeah. I just met in that particular moment. I thought it was. I thought he was being kind of funny. 34:15 Wes: Yeah. 34:15 Erin: And I think that's even maybe self lampooning a little bit. I don't know. Maybe that's a bit too far. Okay. And then he gets stabbed. Didn't see that coming. What do we have to say about that? Nothing. 34:25 Wes: They all stab him. 32. 33. It's 33, right? Jesus's age. Shakespeare changes this to be the same number of stabs as Years in Jesus's life. 34:39 Erin: See, we know what side you're on. 34:41 Wes: And I think in Plutarch, he says, you, too, child. He refers to Caesar. Well, the story is that he calls Brutus child. And it's not et tu. It's not N U. It's just. I forget what it is. But anyway, et tu, Brute? Great. 34:57 Erin: So great. Then fall, Caesar, also great. Gives his own stage direction, 35:05 Wes: right? 35:06 Erin: He becomes the playwright. 35:07 Wes: I fall because I will. Exactly. Not because I've been stabbed. I will it. 35:13 Erin: Well, it's badass. It really is. Gotta give him credit. And Brutus is telling everybody else who's witnessing this, like, don't run away. This is going exactly according to plan. Ambition's debt is paid. We're not going to kill anybody else here. Because for some reason, I don't know, they look like absolute psychos. 35:29 Wes: What comes across in these scenes following the assassination is the naivete where, okay, everyone, calm down. Nothing bad's gonna happen. Of course, they've unleashed the dogs of war, as Antony will say. I always forgot that that line is in this play as opposed to, like, one of the British history plays. But anyway, yeah, they've unleashed hell on Rome, or, you know, but they naively think that by saying liberty and freedom and. And all that stuff that they're going to get a good reception. And they underestimate Mark Antony. 36:06 Erin: Of course, Brutus does, especially after the augmented line. My second favorite love to hate Brutus moment is, stoop, Roman, stoop. And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood up to the elbows and besmear our swords. Then walk we forth, even to the marketplace, and waving our red weapons o' er our heads, let's all cry peace, freedom and liberty. Absolutely insane. Like, Brutus is insane. 36:36 Wes: They sound like hippies thinking that their protest is going to go over well with people. 36:41 Erin: Yeah, and they're covered in blood in 36:44 Wes: the middle of the road or something. And, yeah, now everyone's going to be 36:47 Erin: on our side, right? 36:48 Wes: And then the great, you know, line by Cassius, how many ages hence shall this, our lofty scene, be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown? Brutus, how many times shall Caesar bleed in sport? And then Cassius will be called the men that gave their country liberty. So they're right that it's going to be remembered and used as material for 37:15 Erin: plays and podcasts yet unknown. 37:19 Wes: Podcasts yet unknown. But they're wrong about how it's going to be remembered and certainly about the liberty part. And then the next thing is really the introduction of Marc Antony, which is really. He's now introduced into the play by a servant. In a way, this is a more consequential moment than the stabbing itself. In a sense, dramatically. Maybe I'm overstating that, but Mark Antony, who's been largely absent, is now going to take on this huge. Is he the shoe that drops? 37:51 Erin: Yes, I think in a way you're right. In another way, I think if we're reading this play rather than seeing it, then of course Antony's entrance is going to be very. It's going to overshadow the one stage direction we get, which is he dies. But of course, we have to imagine this is very dramatically done. 38:08 Wes: Conceivably, everything could have ended here. He's dead and that's it. Nothing else happens after that. But Mark Antony sets us up for he is now the main actor. He's gonna produce all the action that follows. 38:24 Erin: Yeah, there's something more to come here. 38:27 Wes: Yeah. So he's the catalyst or the igniting fuel for the rest of the play. 38:33 Erin: Yeah. And we get this really interesting proxy for Antony and his servant because Antony's smart enough to send somebody just in case they have it in for him too. And in fact, they should have. We get the list of the four adjectives which are really interesting. Brutus is noble, wise, valiant and honest. Caesar was mighty, bold, royal and loving. I really like those. The contrast between those two things, those two sets. 38:59 Wes: I should say those two sets of adjectives are right. They point to the different aspects of character that Caesar. They're self concepts. It's Caesar's might and fearlessness and courageousness. Right. Bold, fearless. That's the thing he prides himself on. And that's the thing which his authority is supposedly derived from. And for Brutus, it's honor, virtue. 39:21 Erin: And then we get. Say I love Brutus and I honor him. Say I feared Caesar, honored him and loved him. So there's an interesting. 39:31 Wes: Yeah, so why does he need to introduce the fear with Caesar? And then honor and love are reversed. Right. Loves Brutus, honors him, but honors Caesar, loves him. And then also we add fear, the 39:47 Erin: chiasmus, sort of chiasmus. Because there's, as you say, this extra thing added in, creates the sort of love sandwich here. So we begin and end with love. But it's first and therefore for secondary in the Brutus list and primary in the Caesar list, taking the last place. 40:07 Wes: Yeah. The fear seems to suggest that he didn't necessarily. Wasn't on board with everything. Caesar was doing, but was going along with it out of fear. And by implication, by leaving out the fear of them, he's suggesting he doesn't actually fear them when he. Of course he does. And he should. And he does because he sent the servant and he should. 40:29 Erin: And of course they don't want. I mean, Brutus. This is designed to appeal to Brutus. He's also emphasizing the power vacuum that's now been created, which of course Brutus cannot fill. So he's not going to fear Brutus as an emperor in the absence of Caesar. Yeah, it's designed to appeal to Brutus in a couple of different ways. Acknowledging that there's no longer anyone left to fear because Brutus is. Has restored the leaderlessness or something of Rome. Yeah. And then basically Antony wants to make sure that it's safe for him to come out and play. And Brutus assures him that it is by saying to the servant, thy master is a wise and valiant Roman. Which I love because it repeats two words that Antony used for Brutus rather than the two words two of the four he used for Caesar. Tell him so please him, come unto this place, he shall be satisfied and by my honor depart untouched. And that's when Antony really knows that he's going to be okay because Brutus has attached this to his honor and therefore we'll leave him untouched. 41:34 Wes: Cassius is still skeptical. He still fears him. And he thinks his fear is probably going to be borne out in the consequences. My misgiving still falls truly to the purpose. And yeah, this is another, what turns out to be another one of Brutus mistakes. Well, he's already rejected Cassius's suggestion that they kill him during the. During their conspirators meeting. He's not going to do it now. Cassius is worried about it. Rightly so. 42:02 Erin: What I love is that Cassius repeats of Antony a sort of scrambled version of what Caesar says of Cassius. Cassius says, I wish we may, but yet I have a mind that fears him much. And my misgiving still falls shrewdly to the purpose of Cassius. Caesar says, but I fear him not. Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know the man I should avoid so soon as that spare Cassius, the use of yet there and much and fear. 42:34 Wes: Interesting. Yeah. Caesar fears Cassius, Cassius fears Antony. Antony fears Caesar. It's a fool feared. All right, then I am afraid we have to end there. That is part four of our 30 part series on Julius Caesar. No, hopefully we'll just do two more 42:54 Erin: parts yes, we are gonna have to. 42:58 Wes: We can do what we want. The audience is gonna have to. 43:00 Erin: If we will it, then, right. Anything's possible. 43:04 Wes: Now, we can't force people to listen. 43:06 Erin: That's right. 43:07 Wes: If we were Caesar, we could, but. All right. So thank you, thank you, 43:17 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:20 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Hey, welcome to part three of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at the end of part two, which admittedly is. How long ago, Erin, was that three weeks ago that we recorded? 0:45 Erin: Oh, no, was it three? I thought it was only two weeks ago. 0:47 Wes: Oh, well, maybe. 0:48 Erin: Seems longer. 0:49 Wes: I thought we might have postponed it because of the holiday, but. Oh, maybe we're jumping back in after a bit of a gap. So I think we were done or almost done talking about the end of act one with the storm. And I think the main idea there was that there's something about the storm which represented unnaturalness, the corruption of nature. Right. Things. People walking around with their hands on fire but not being bothered by it. Nature being corrupted in the sense of things not behaving as they would normally do according to their natures. According to their natural properties, hands should. Should burn and people should be a little bit bothered by it, at the very least. And that that unnaturalness represents something about what happens to a person who's corrupted by power or to a state that's corrupted by power. And so it's interpreted in that sense by Cassius, after Cicero just kind of dismisses Casca's concerns as just superstition. And Cassius interprets it at first as representative of that kind of corruption. And so it is a warning in that sense. And then he ends with a bit of a shift to saying, well, the storm also represents the things that we're going to have to do to oppose Caesar. The storm represents the rebellion. And there you get a little bit of the reminder that the rebellion and that Caesar's authoritarianism and whatever is going on with the rebels might be mirror images of each other. And that, I think, is what Shakespeare is actually partly reflecting on. We talked quite a bit in the first two parts about Caesar and Brutus as mirrors or mirror images of each other, where in a way, their authority. Right. In Caesar's case, his authority is supposed to be a role within a republic, but it's come to be identified with him as a person is a person who has all these great feats as a person because of his personal prowess, which is a certain kind of virtue. It's a certain aspect of his character. And likewise, Brutus seems to implicitly want to make the claim and does in his own funeral. Well, it's not a funeral oration, but speech. Following Caesar's death, he will want to say, my authority in some sense is a function of my virtue and my honor. Brutus is an honorable man. And then that kind of appeal to character as a foundation for authority, we have the same sort of problem. And that, I think, is really what Shakespeare is onto. Over the vacation, I went and reread some of Plutarch's lives with Brutus and Caesar. And Mark Antony didn't get to Cassius. But it's really interesting because you can kind of see, first of all, he really heavily relies on Plutarch. In some cases, some of his lines are just slightly modified variations on something that Plutarch has said. But you get to see what he's thinking about, what Shakespeare is really doing with it. And what he's doing is a very interesting thing, which he's drawing this parallel between Brutus and Caesar and wondering if, in light of the aftermath of what Brutus and the rebels did, which kind of led to The Empire, ironically, although the Republic was kind of shit show for 90 years before all this happened. They were fighting. They were friends. It's kind of amazing to see what was going on. Brutus was writing treatises on virtue. He was a philosopher by day and by night, they were just going out and conquering half the world and fighting each other and doing all this crazy stuff. It's really quite amazing what was. Was going on in that context. And it reminded me that Brutus and Caesar were friends. 4:40 Erin: Oh, yeah. Caesar loved Brutus. 4:42 Wes: Yeah. I mean, they had been enemies at various points in the past, too. But these are people who had traveled together extensively, gone to war together. You know, it's in the background of the play that you don't. If you're not familiar with the history, it helps in a way to become familiar with it, because Brutus is. And really the rest of the conspirators are. They're involved. They're not just killing. Oh, he's. You know, it's not like some stranger is killing a. Doing an assassination of a tyrant. It's these. These people are killing their friend because he's gotten too big for his britches. So wanted to say also, there are some extant letters by Brutus between Brutus and Cicero, and they sound very much like Brutus in the play. He is a person who is entitled, in a way, by his sense of honor. You get the sense that he may have been from Plutarch as well. He might have been kind of induced into doing this by people appealing to his relationship to his ancestor. Like all that stuff happened with Cassius putting the letters. It's there in Plutarch and sounds like he might have been manipulated by concern for his reputation into acting. So we get this kind of question of is he acting for the republic and for the public good, or is he doing something out of his own honor? That, in a way, looks a bit like Cassius. It's a bit closer to Cassius motives which are envious, or to Caesar's motives, which seem to be about power at this point. And that's the question. But I just wanted to say Shakespeare took Plutarch and had an interesting idea, which is he wanted to reflect on the nature of power and how it's grounded and in particular, whether it's a good idea to ground power in the character of a particular actor as opposed to certain institutions. Right. The character of whether it's Caesar or Brutus, and then the confusion between that, because Brutus thinks he's all about the Republic and he Says this in his letters to Cicero, too. And he really chews out Cicero, because at this point, Cicero is thinking on Octavius's side. And Octavius and Antony are fighting at this point. And Cicero has taken a liking to the boy, as Brutus calls Octavius as a foil to Antony. Octavius, of course, will turn out to be Augustus Caesar, the first emperor. And he chews him out for wanting to be. What are you? You just a slave? You think he's going to be a better master than Caesar was or than Antony would be. Brutus is always on and on about freedom and slavery and honor and the republic and this and that. But is he thinking about the republic or is he thinking about his own honor and character? And it's never quite clear how you disentangle those things. And this is a very common political problem. Where am I really talking about the general good or am I talking about myself? That's kind of my recap of where we were with this. 7:35 Erin: I think, in a way, you're talking about kind of the same principles over and over again. I'm seeing, in a way to tie this all together. I'm seeing that the idea that Cassius is reverse engineering the sign of the storm to suddenly reflect him. There's this causation kind of problem, I think, that the play is dealing with up until the moment of the assassination, where cause and effect somehow seem to be reversed or confused, or maybe what the cause is kind of can't be located. So in the same way that you're describing, there's this idea of the natural and the reverse engineering of the sign that the storm represents. There's this idea in Brutus that his republican aristocratic lineage gives him the right to do away with someone who would be king or would be emperor, and to therefore violently restore republicanism. And also this idea of being honorable, that any action one performs will be honorable if one is honorable, rather than the. The honor adhering in the action itself. So I think there's this confusion or maybe something like the stickiness of the adjective. And what I think Brutus is doing in his slippery logic, especially as we get into Act 2, Scene 1, is moving the adjective from what might be its most logical place to elsewhere. Right. In this instance of honor, I'm using this sort of incorrectly because it can't really be applied grammatically in the passages that we're going to look at. But he's taking a quality and I think applying it where it doesn't belong, essentially. But a lot of what he does is play with grammar, I think, you know, famously in this, in line 10, it must be by his death. There's a reversal of order that keeps happening, I think, in terms of just temporally, where he puts the cart before the horse. So the. It in that line, it's very, very much like. Like Macbeth. There's so many, I think, parallels to Macbeth throughout this, the whole play, really, but especially in Act 2, as they're planning the murder. It reminds me of in Macbeth, if it were done when tis done, then twere well, it were done quickly, the it being the murder. Right. So it must be by his death, it meaning his overthrow, I suppose. But it's a very imprecise. Obviously very imprecise pronoun. So one wonders what exactly he means by it in that line. 10:00 Wes: So it must be by his death. And for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn him, but for the general, he would be crowned, how that might change his nature. 10:08 Erin: There's the question what might happen. Let's take a proactive approach here. 10:14 Wes: But again, this, you know, this question of nature and character. Right. Something I want to keep hammering away at, where our characters are second nature. It's not nature. The property of. The natural tendency of an acorn to grow into a tree is its nature, or the property of an electron. It has a certain nature. It behaves certain ways under certain circumstances. But human character is like a second nature. It involves a set of dispositions to think and act and feel in certain ways, and it's hard to change. It's also the locus of virtue, which is pretty much what Brutus is about, but something that's hard to change, but something that can be perverted and corrupted. And when it is corrupted, it looks like all these unnatural things that happen, like with people's burning hands. Burning. It's the burning hands and people not reacting to it are in a way, representation of something that's gone wrong with someone's character. So Caesar might have his nature change. And this is, you know, as you pointed out. Yeah. This is an interesting aspect of this because we get. We'll get several speeches in this play that kind of say, well, Caesar, he didn't really do anything yet. 11:27 Erin: Yes, right. 11:28 Wes: But he might be corrupted by this. Yeah. 11:31 Erin: Right. Well, a really great example of this is this, the Adder. And then the ladder imagery here. So we have. It is the bright, bright day that brings forth the Adder, and that craves wary walking crown him that. And then, I grant, we put a sting in him that at his will he may do danger with so, so much going on here. But first of all, it is the bright day that brings forth the adder is so fascinating because we're talking immediately about a quality that inheres in the adder itself. But first we have like these conditions that sort of create the adder in a weird way. And the conditions, the bright day, you know, in Brutus's mind, Caesar here is the snake. He's the snake in this nice scene. But the bright day might have been created by Caesar himself. Right. A favorable day, like a nice day. Oh, it's the, you know, it's the easy times. 12:23 Wes: Yeah. I think it means the glory and the adulation of the people. 12:27 Erin: Okay. 12:27 Wes: Because there are several lines, there are several comparisons like this in the the place. It's part of the same line of thought where Caesar is not, he's a colossus, but only relative to the people who cower underneath him. He's not really a colossus in and of himself. That's not his nature. And there's meant to be an explicit parallel here to you have no mirrors. You know what Cassius says to Brutus about not having a mirror, Caesar has a mirror. That's the bright day. It's the adulation of the people, it's the glory associated with his magnificent accomplishments. And that's what brings out the adder. Power corrupts, in other words, it's another way of saying power corrupts. 13:06 Erin: I see again, I think of something that I think we touched on in either part one or two, which is that I think in a way that honor isn't. Populism truly is its own defense or its own, I don't know, Popularity, I should say, is its own self evident kind of not virtue, but it's its own reward or whatever. Right. So Caesar is continually faulted for being popular or for having the love of the people. And you know, the bright day in itself has nothing wrong with it. 13:40 Wes: I think this is another part of what Shakespeare is reflecting on because Brutus is rah, rah, rah, the republic and freedom and part of that are some democratic institutions. Even though it's not not a democracy per se. It's a really complicated situation. But you have the tribunes, that's the way the play begins, chastising the people for being fickle. So if you think democracy is your way out, well, the plebeians may just have the tendency to hand over absolute power to a charismatic figure, to a strong man, to the man who has all the Glory from all his great war deeds, because they want a mirror too. They want to be able to see themselves and the magnificence of the leader. Everyone's out for their mirrors for their own bright day, so to speak. The problem is very complicated because an appeal to the republic, Shakespeare is pointing out an appeal to democratic institutions doesn't by itself. And that's the kind of thing that Brutus does in his letters. And it doesn't get you out of the problem. Again, the plebeians can just. They might be in love with authoritarianism. 14:52 Erin: Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, continuing with that thought, Brutus goes on to say, crown him that. And then, I grant, we put a sting in him. So again, I really love this imprecise that obviously it means crown him king, crown him emperor, crown him something. But the imprecision or the lack of some kind of precise noun there, I think speaks a lot to the conjecture with which Brutus is sort of thinking about this is operating, or that there's an emptiness, there's just a possibility that he's toying with at the center of his argument. So if we crown him, then I grant we put a sting in him. So Caesar's already an adder, but if we crown him, then we're giving the adder fangs like he didn't have them already. This is a fundamental perversion, as you're saying, of his nature somehow to do this. So again, there's some like, it's the bright day that's bringing forth the snake. But then only if we give him a crown, is he going to be a snake that we have to actually be wary of. Like there's something a little bit lumbering about this logic or a little bit broken. 16:02 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting. So I think, again, yeah, the crown him, as you point out, the crown him him. That. That's a great little touch by Shakespeare, because in a way, he doesn't want to say the name that's so taboo. But Caesar's name is already becoming synonymous with king. Right. Even to say Caesar's name is to say that. So as it goes on, the abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power, which I take to be, again, another form of power corrupting by a. By taking away conscience and taking away inhibitions from doing things which are unjust or terrible. And to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affection swayed more than his reason. Right. So he's not. I haven't known him to be driven by his emotions. He's been pretty reasonable. But tis common proof that lowliness is young. Ambition's ladder, where to the climber upward turns his face. But when he once attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend. The base degrees being the lower rungs of the ladder, which include his. You know, the friends who helped him rise. Supposedly, it says so Caesar may. 17:18 Erin: Yeah, yeah. This is such a fuzzy image, because ambition itself is the climber, not a person climbing a ladder. Right. This is 2 degrees removed from an actual human being. So we have ambition itself climbing the ladder, which is lowliness. And ambition, of course, we know, is Caesar, that's the adder. And lowliness is then added to it, like the L to the adder, to create a ladder. They're so far away from each other that they're both at the end of the line, ladder and adder. But they don't rise really with each other. Or they do, but only in this really delayed way. And it's almost as though he's given himself a thought. And then he augments it, if you like to use a word that he'll use in a second with a different kind of thought, a different kind of image, but it's just piggybacking off of. Off of smoke, off of something he's admitted isn't really a problem or hasn't been seen to be a problem yet. 18:13 Wes: Yeah, and I mean, this is a great point. It's a great example of what I think Shakespeare is thinking about across multiple plays, which is the role of metaphor in reasoning. Shakespeare is a great deployer of metaphor, but he's also thinking about metaphor. We saw some of that in Much Ado, where Hero was so stained by her slutty behavior, supposed slutty behavior, that not even all the water of the ocean could wash her off. This kind of. And this becomes a sort of legal indictment about her character and who she is. And in this case, the use of metaphor here is with ambition. It's ambition that's climbing the ladder. And Caesar. In a way, the argument is meant to be an indictment of Caesar, but it really is an indictment of ambition in general. It's ambition that does all this. It's ambition that turns his face and then turns his back on the lower rungs and all. All that stuff. So if Caesar is ambitious, then he might. He may do all of these things. So he's recognizing a general dynamic in ambition. And it's not to say that the argument Might not hold if Caesar is ambitious. But the reasoning is primarily about ambition. 19:27 Erin: There's something geometric happening here, too. Did you notice this? The base degrees. And we have the idea of turning one's face. So this ambition supposedly has a face, which is another thing that Brutus does. He's assigning a body to characteristics. Right. Rather than looking at a body and seeing what characteristics that body has. So ambition turns its face toward the ladder, and then climbs up the ladder, and then unto the ladder, turns his back. Well, if one climbs up a ladder, your back is already turned to the ladder. Right. Like there's something bizarre that's happening. So you climb up a ladder and you get to the top and your back is already to it. If you face the ladder to ascend. 20:12 Wes: Just to get specific about the metaphor. Right. So lowliness is like humility. Humility is young. Ambition's ladder. So ambition pretends to be humble and uses that to climb. So where to? The climber upward, turns his face. Double meaning, I think, but turns his face, as in puts on a humble face. 20:32 Erin: Right. 20:32 Wes: But also. Right. You get this idea, as you're pointing out, of facing upward as you go up the ladder. Right? 20:39 Erin: Yes. Yeah. And then turning, turning one's back to the ladder, which you can't do while you're on the ladder. You have to, you know, but once you walk away from the ladder. So once you've ascended, you have to kind of. You're already oriented past the ladder when you get off it with your back to it. 20:55 Wes: Yeah. 20:55 Erin: So it's natural, in other words, to not turn around and then look at the ladder. From once you came, as soon as you get to the utmost rung or whatever it is. Right. You're already going to be turning your back to the ladder just when you step off of it. 21:08 Wes: Yeah. These places where the metaphors kind of break down are also really interesting. And metaphors inevitably do as you extend them. I mean, part of the satisfaction of great metaphors is you can extend them to a great degree, to a larger degree than on average. Even though the two things in juxtaposition are often quite different, it makes them almost like a scientific model with predictive power, where you're saying one thing is structured like another, or this particular structure explains certain phenomena. And then I can empirically test it and see if the phenomena line up. And then in the cases, metaphors, they eventually don't. Right. So if Juliet is the sun, it may be because she's the light for Romeo and she provides what's needed for him. To grow and various other things. But she's not as hot as the sun. The sun is a ten and she's a nine. Everyone knows that. So the metaphor fails at some point. And here. Yeah, and it tells us something. Here you're pointing to the point of failure. But the ladder itself is humility. Right. So when we turn our back on. On the ladder, we turn our back on the. We turn our face towards it, which I think in part means to put on a humble aspect. To put on a humble face. And then we have this idea of turning our back on it, which means we show our true colors and become arrogant. Right. Scorn the base degrees and scorn our own humility, but also scorn the humble, the people to whom we showed humility and grace and other good qualities in order to get where we ascended to. 22:47 Erin: Yeah, I like the idea, too, that very shortly, you know, the conspirators will show up with their faces actually covered. Right. So their faces are, in fact, more turned. And Brutus will also give them instructions to sort of hide their conspiracy behind a false face. 23:03 Wes: Yeah. And to be good actors. 23:05 Erin: Exactly. 23:06 Wes: Yeah. So Brutus ends this little. This bit with something quite cynical, which is he's thinking about what he's going to tell people after they assassinate him is essentially the gist of the end of this speech. So Caesar may. Then, lest he may prevent. Right. So just. We're going to stop him before it happens. And since the quarrel will bear no color for the thing he is. Right. So the thing he is right now is not. He's not a terrible tyrant right now. And so it's not going to look that way to people fashion it thus. Which means this is the way we're going to represent it to others. That which he is augmented would run to these and these extremities and therefore think him as a serpent's egg which hatched, would, as its kind, grow mischievous and kill him in the shell. So we nipped it in the bud, people, why did we kill Caesar? You may not have thought he was a tyrant, but he was about to grow into one. And we saw the signs of that. That. And so we nipped this in the bud. 24:06 Erin: This is the number one place I could point to in my dislike of Caesar. I'm sorry, in my dislike of Brutus. Yeah. We'll bear no color for the thing he is. Fashion it thus that what he is augmented would run to these. This is truly crazy. Right? This is so annoying. Okay, I can't really make this argument right now, but what I can say is that if he were different than what he is, then we should kill him. And that's going to be my. Like this is pure fumes. What he is augmented. I know I'm representing it a little bit more extreme than what it is, but it's nearly there. It's right. Then what he is augmented. So what he is changed would run to these and these extremities. 24:54 Wes: Yeah, Augmented by being given the crown, for instance. 24:58 Erin: Yeah, but it's. But there's a beauty to it all being on the same line. Right. Like there's what he is augmented also has that other. That sort of shadow, meaning what he isn't really. Or if he were different, then this would be a problem. And so we are going to kill him under the assumption that he might become that different person. 25:20 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because there's a. This kind of reflects an interesting problem within the philosophy of science which has to do with idealization of laws, of scientific laws. So there are laws that certain, you know, that things behave in a certain way, but they never really behave in that way because there are all these confounding factors. So the law is always idealized. And then you have to say, well, the orbit of the Earth around the sun isn't exactly what we would expect because there are these other factors involved. Right. Instance. So the law that tells us how the Earth should orbit around the sun is idealized. And then we get other interfering factors, for instance, might not be the greatest example, but in this case, Caesar has a certain nature. Again, the thing I wanted to kind of hammer on here. And so he is disposed to behave in such and such a way, even if we don't see it, because there are confounding factors. And the confounding factors is that he just hasn't been given the crown yet, or he's not in the right circumstance, but given the right circumstances, we're going to see it happen. 26:26 Erin: Or we should see it happen, provided that. Right. In that scientific way you're describing. It should be this way, provided that XYZ and all the other letters are in the right spot. 26:39 Wes: Yeah. He thinks he knows Caesar's nature, which is odd. Historically, I think he's probably right. But Shakespeare is asking us to be a bit skeptical. That's why he's introducing all these interesting slips, saying, well, actually he is reasonable and I haven't seen him be terrible and emotional about things, but this is his nature. And so on. Part of the question here is, well, how do you know? How do you know what his nature is. Yes, this may be the general tendency for ambition and power corrupts. But how do you know this is Caesar's? 27:16 Erin: Because, particular Evans, don't you trust Brutus, the number one people person? Obviously, 27:26 Wes: he's an honorable. He's an honorable man. 27:28 Erin: The guy who just really gets what people are like, it seems. That's really what you know. 27:33 Wes: So, yeah, so this scene, I mean, it's a great unfolding of Brutus's character as a person. And we see him in a, you know, not quite as tortured as Hamlet, obviously, but he's, you know, we get a window into his ruminations and the overcoming of his reluctance to do something about Caesar. So Cassius manipulations have worked at this point, and he's talking himself into it. 27:57 Erin: Yeah, we see Cassius, or we see the one form of manipulation that Cassius has promised. So we see these letters that have been thrown into Brutus's window, which I love because they're just vague enough, like, Cassius does know human nature and knows that Brutus will fill in the blanks with what he wants to fill it in. So better. Better to let Brutus work himself up into a lather than try to write anything that might appeal to Brutus, because really only. Only Brutus can. Can reason with Brutus. So, Brutus, thou sleeps awake and see thyself shall Rome, etc. Speak, strike, redress, shall Rome, et cetera. And then we hear Brutus, like, working out, like, oh, what does this mean? Mean, thus must I piece it out. Shall Rome stand under one man's awe. What Rome, my ancestors did from the streets of Rome, the Tarquin drive, when he was called a king. Speak, strike, redress. Am I entreated to speak and strike? O Rome, I make thee promise. If the redress will follow, thou receivest thy full petition at the hand of Brutus. So I just. I love that. I love the idea that they're like, shall Rome, etc. He's like, just like, let me fill in the blank here with what I want to hear, and then I will be convinced. I will have convinced myself. 29:12 Wes: Yeah, it's funny, I think in Plutarch there are letters, but it's also graffiti. So his ancestor Brutus, who may, or not by the way, may or may not have been his ancestor, but everyone thought he was his ancestor, driven the. How do you pronounce it? Tarquinians. Tarquin. Anyway, it prevented the monarchy hundreds of years before and so was critical to the preservation of the Republic. There were statues of this Guy. And the graffiti was put on the statues. Oh, if only Brutus were around. And it was meant to be pointed at, of course, the living Brutus, to kind of stand up and be like his ancestor, be the kind of great man his ancestor was. And so that's one of the ways in which supposedly Brutus was manipulated into getting involved in the conspiracy. And the conspirators wanted him involved because he had such a great reputation in Rome. He had a much better reputation than any of the rest of them. Reputation for being incorruptible. One of the few people who was thought of as absolutely politically incorruptible. And so to get him on board was quite an accomplishment. And then the question is, well, was he corrupted at that point? Was he actually corrupted by the conspirators into getting involved? And corrupted by making appeals to the idea of his incorruptibility, which is precisely the thing that Decius is going to accuse Caesar of. Right. Caesar is flattered by the. If you tell him he's incapable of being flattered, he's flattered by that. And you get him to do anything he wants. 30:50 Erin: Yeah. That's another point toward the mirror idea between Brutus and Caesar. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. 30:56 Wes: Yep, exactly. 30:57 Erin: Yeah. So let's jump down a little. Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar, I thought this was an interesting idea, because in a moment, Brutus is going to talk about them being swords, the conspirators being swords, in a bit of language that I particularly like. So this idea that he's being sharpened against Caesar. But he says between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. And this is just what I was referencing a minute ago, that the acting here is second. The first motion is first. So that the. The motion is the. The proposal of the action. The idea of the action and the acting of it would be second. But here he's reversed them. He's put acting first and. And motion second in the order in which he's recounting. 31:46 Wes: Yeah. So the first motion would be the initiation of the plan, or the actual. The willing of it. Like he's made the decision to do it. So in between making the decision to do this dreadful thing and then actually doing it, it's all a hideous dream because he hasn't been able to sleep. Basically, he's tortured now, but he has made his decision. And his bed. She'll end up lying. And then we get. So the conspirators come in and he gives this really interesting speech about not having to take an oath, which I thought was quite. And I thought that was actually rhetorically powerful. And I think we've already mentioned it in our parts one or two. But the idea in his speech is that we don't need an oath. We can just appeal to the identity of being Roman. Romans don't need oaths. Real men don't need oaths. Honorable people don't need oaths will just rest on our identity rather than our communication. And this is, again, reflective of a certain type of conception of power that's rooted in character and identity instead of being rooted in institutions. Because the saying of an oath or the making of a promise, that's a form of institution. And it becomes more complex in the state. But the apparatus of the state, in a way, is built off of that type of thing. Contracts, for instance. He's saying, we don't need no stinking contracts. You don't need no badges. We don't need contracts, and we don't need the state. The implicit message of this is we don't need the apparatus of a state or anything like that. We just need to know that we're honorable men, that we have a Roman identity. 33:30 Erin: This oath would be a blood oath, would it not? They would wound themselves. I mean, this is pure speculation on my part. I probably should have looked this up. Now that I think of it, I don't know. I was reading it as though it were a blood oath, and he's basically saying. Because later he says, you know, to think that our cause or our performance did need an oath, when every drop of blood that every Roman bears and nobly bears is guilty of a several bastardy if you do break the smallest particle of any promise that hath passed from him. So he's saying, like, you know, all your blood is supposed to be, you know, great Roman blood and therefore incapable of betraying, so why spill a few drops of it in this circumstance? So I was reading this as a blood oath. 34:11 Wes: Okay, Makes sense. Yeah. Guilty of a several bastardy, meaning each would be guilty of not actually being a son of Rome. That's the bastard part, right? So you're not even Roman if you would betray this conspiracy. You don't have Roman blood, so why mingle blood in a blood oath? 34:31 Erin: This is where I. I think in either part one or two, I accused Brutus of being like a gnostic, or maybe like a Manichaean, or whichever one I thought was. Was probate at the moment. But you know, he seems to have this such high mindedness that he's not taking the bodily into consideration. He's not taking things like Caesar's popularity with the common people, or he's idealizing the body, or he's doing that thing where he splits everything into component parts. So I think this is how his logic is working. One of the things I just wanted to say, sort of generally speaking is that to me the right thing seems pretty obvious, which is don't do anything, wait and see. But instead he convinces himself, you know, he's sort of the halfway point between Macbeth and Hamlet. He's not like Macbeth where he just says, okay, I'm not going to think about it, I'm just going to rush in and do it. And then be racked by guilt and have the sleeplessness be the result of guilt. But he's also not incapable of acting. But he has to convince himself that this is a good thing. And so he's going to weave this argument, in my opinion, out of very little. And in order to do that, he can't see the forest for the trees. He can't see the obvious, obvious thing. He has to atomize everything and then build a new kind of psychological motivation or justification out of that atomization. And so I think this is what we're seeing constantly in these, in, in, you know, his, his descriptions of Caesar being like the head of a body. So we don't need to hack off Mark Antony the arm of the body. And it's like, what body? You know, he, he's not playing with a whole body, he's playing with like bits and pieces of things. And so here he has this idea that, you know, our motives are good and we don't need to spill blood in order to make this oath, because we are pure and good and whole. And let high sighted tyranny range on till each man drop by lottery. This is a connection, I thought, to what he accuses Caesar of. Just before in the latter speech that we were just talking about, where once he attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend. Right? So that's high sighted tyranny. So looking into the clouds, but in this very moment he's saying that we shouldn't be spilling our own blood or dealing with something lowly like that. You know, we should be thinking of our own motives, our own high minded ideals in order to justify this. Like we don't need an oath, we just need Our own high minded in order to go through with this. And so he's sort of aping the very orientation which he's at the same time deriding in Caesar. He's seeing the stars rather than dealing with the people right in front of him. 37:18 Wes: Yeah, well, you gave a good example of the perils of metaphorical reasoning with you fast forward to the point where he's rejecting, as he does a number of times, he rejects sensible suggestions by Cassius in this case to kill Mark Antony, because Mark Antony is just a limb. So if that sort of political alliance were like a human body, a truly organic whole where different parts can't change their functions, then he would be right. But that's not how the political body works, it turns out. So Antony is a huge power player and long has been in Rome and is perfectly capable of trying to, to become king himself, which is what he does historically. But it doesn't end well for him either. But anyway, or his girlfriend. Right, that's a play we should do soon, you know, again, let's be sacrificers, not butchers, Caius. Oh, he's using his first name there. Interesting. Will stand up against the spirit of Caesar and in the spirit of men there is no blood, so. So we're killing his spirit, not him. He's just a collateral damage, right? The real Caesar, the physical Caesar is collateral damage. We're killing the spirit, which is the ambition, the tyranny, the corrupted role that's created when a king is created. So let's kill boldly, not wrathfully. Brutus is trying to be very high minded here and make sure that no ill, nefarious motives come into this. And Cassius is just the poster boy for mixed motives. He may have some noble motives, but he's also ambitious himself and envious himself, which is what Shakespeare repeatedly makes clear in his characterization. 38:59 Erin: This is one of the moments where I think that Brutus is envious and unaware of it because he mentions envy twice in this and says he doesn't want people to think that he is envious or that they are envious. He says, you know, if we're too bloody then we're going to look like wrath and death and envy afterwards by cutting the head off and then the limbs. And then at the end of this little speech he says, this shall make our purpose necessary and not envious, which so appearing to the common eyes, we shall be called purgers, not murderers. Again, there's, there's a preoccupation with what other people think. And this repeated Idea, which I take to be pretty suggestive, you know, that we don't want to appear to be envious at all. I mean, that could. That could be legitimate. But I think Brutus doth protest too much, you know. 39:48 Wes: Yeah. And I think, well, so the way it's represented in Plutarch, the way it's represented in the end of the play. Right. Mark Antony will say, Brutus was the only one who wasn't. 39:56 Erin: You're right. 39:57 Wes: At least partly envious. And that's straight out of Plutarch. And that's the way that history is written. It makes it seem like Brutus has pure motives and Cassius has mixed motives, and the rest of them are at least partly driven not by the best motives. They might want to save the Republic, partly. But also there's other things going on. But Brutus is supposedly pure. And I think you're right to point out that Shakespeare is exploring that possibility. Is Brutus really? And even if he were. Even if Brutus were, in his own mind, purely acting out of a conception of the public good and his own virtue and honor, is that enough? Isn't he, in a way trying to be absolute himself? He's trying to be the best in one way or another, but. 40:45 Erin: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Is it possible to be as prideful as Brutus is and not be envious? And if he is a kind of mirror of Caesar in that way, I mean, we don't really see Caesar be envious, I guess. I don't really think so. But I think that there's an implication that if Brutus and Caesar are sort of of wind or something, an envious 41:06 Wes: person is worried about taking something away from another who has it. I think Brutus is worried about losing something, and that's the reputation he already has. 41:16 Erin: I see. Yeah. Which is a mysterious one because of 41:20 Wes: the letters and the right. Historically, the graffiti. It's been suggested to him, you are not really Brutus unless you act like your ancestor and stop. Your reputation is at stake here. If you don't do this, you're going to fall from this very, very high reputation that you have. And that would be the most cynical way to interpret what Brutus is doing, that it's all about maintaining his reputation. But if it is on Shakespeare's account, it is unconscious. And that's part of what Shakespeare is exploring. 41:55 Erin: The idea of being a Roman, too comes up twice in that previous speech. And that's seems to be important. Like we have to be Roman. I have to be myself if I do this. Or if I don't do this, I'm not Brutus. If I don't do this, I'm not a Roman. And yet. Yeah, I just wanted to mention, just to backtrack for one second, that he has this idea of steeling with valor, so being like a sword and basically erect and strong rather than one of the melting spirits of women. And he says, what need we any spur but our own cause to prick us to redress? So there's a, there's a slight double spur in that. So there's this inherent idea in his metaphor of drawing blood, but it's only ever metaphorical blood. And in fact, you know, Romans need all their, all their Roman blood within them to be against the bastardy of tyranny in order to successfully fight against whatever Caesar represents. And so we're going to, to spill his blood because he's not a Roman. Yeah, so it's this, this helps me, I think, see this justification a little bit more clearly because there's so much hypocrisy in Brutus without understanding that what he's trying to do is maintain this sort of ideological or the self concept, which is whole. And he's going to preserve that by any means necessary, even if it means literally punching holes in somebody, somebody else. So that's, that's helpful to me to understand, understand his psychology. 43:24 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think it's something we all do. I mean, it's for better or for worse. I think there are ethical theories which ground ethical action in general and a conception of identity preserving an identity, even if it's just a human identity, we cease to be human if we do certain things. And so we don't act certain ways for fear of ceasing to be human. But we also get ourselves into big trouble because we, and I think this is kind of what psychoanalysts refer to as death drive. Death drive, in a way, is about self preservation. It's about preservation of a certain identity, a certain image, even if it's at a practical level very self destructive. We want to preserve that because. Or it wants to preserve itself and it's lodged in us. Right. It doesn't want to be destroyed. So if it's an identity that is counterproductive, that's not its problem. It wants to continue to live. All right, so that is the end of part three. patreon.com subtextpodcast or doing that subscribing right here on Apple. Or maybe it's not here. Maybe you're not on Apple. But if you are on Apple, it is here. Otherwise, yeah, you can wait a week to listen to Part four. 44:39 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook subtextpodcast and on Twitter NYsubtext.

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated. Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:32 Wes: Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. We just got done with part of act one, scene two for one hour now. We did a big discussion of Brutus to start things off. And then we started diving into end of the play and we were talking about the character of Caesar. So I had pointed a little bit to this idea of what Caesar do it and it's performed and the way that's dreamlike. And then the accusation against the soothsayer. And then we move to the point of view of Cassius and Brutus. Right. This is the point where Brutus says he's not gamesome enough. Quick spirit. He's not going to the football game. He's just going to go home and feel depressed. 1:14 Erin: Yeah. And he comes down to he's a Stoic. You know, they're always such fun at parties. Vexed, I am of late with passions of some difference, conceptions only proper to myself. So, you know, leave me alone to think my precious thoughts. 1:29 Wes: Poor Brutus, with himself at war, forgets the shows of love to other men. So, you know, Cassius is saying, why have you been so distant with me lately? 1:37 Erin: Yeah. 1:37 Wes: And Brutus, I'm worried, honey. I'm worried about work. 1:42 Erin: I feel like you don't have time for me anymore. 1:46 Wes: Exactly. And then Cassius says, well, I have some things I want to share with you. I've been withholding them, these worthy cogitations because you've been in such a piss poor mood, but maybe it's time to share them. And then he brings up this idea of do you know what your reputation is? And later on. Well, no, it's right here in the scene. Brutus lacks mirrors. He doesn't see how highly people think of him. And this seems to be right. This is a very similar sort of. Well, here we have flattery. And flattery is going to be another big theme in the play. Caesar's going to say later on he's absolutely immune to flattery. Decius says, actually if you want to flatter Caesar, just tell him he's immune to flattery and then he'll eat it all up. And flattery is the way you win over the crowd, right? Rhetorically. So this is all very important and this is what Cassius's project right now is with Brutus. Engage in a little flattery and see if that works. Oh Brutus, you're so high minded and honorable. Everyone thinks that and that will impel him to act according to the image in that mirror. Now I'm not so sure this is actually what motivates Brutus, but yeah, what do you think? I'm not sure what Cassius is doing is actually the big motivator. And especially since his being worried suggests that he's already in this frame of mind. 3:15 Erin: Oh, definitely. Yeah. And I think you're right. I think Brutus actually picks and chooses what he wants to from Cassius. Overall spiel. I love this idea of the mirror because yeah, it's like Brutus doesn't even have a body. He's like a brain in a vat or a microchip. Brutus seems to be all about, you know, he's cogitating because he's concerned because he's of two minds. He's at war with himself and he has to resolve this, I think into a singularity. And so in a way, Cassius's method of this mirror idea seems to be the wrong move. Caesar has statues of himself everywhere. He's populating Rome with himself. And Brutus seems to be about containment or reduction or the, or the desire to reduce himself to a single cause or a single thought. He's upset, he's melancholic, because he doesn't know what to do. He really wants to kill Caesar, but he doesn't know if he can justify it or he's really concerned about Caesar's growing power and feels conflicted about what to do. And so it seems that he needs to get to a decision. And then once he makes that decision, he then has to back it up with a lot of reasons. But like it seems that he needs to rush toward a single resolve, a single resolution. When Cassius tells him that he has a hidden worthiness, he says it is very much lamented, Brutus, that you have no such mirrors as will turn your hidden worthiness into your eye, that you might see your shadow. So the mirrors are sort of for Brutus's own benefit to see something in himself that he isn't aware of. Then Cassius goes on. I have heard where many of the best respect in Rome, except immortal Caesar, speaking of Brutus and groaning unto underneath this age's yoke, have wished that noble Brutus had his eyes. So the first part of that is about I wish you had a mirror in yourself. So that you could see inside your little nooks and crannies, something which is unknown to you. Then he does this sort of wider thing. Other people look at you with such admiration. If only you could see yourself in the eyes of others, then what you need to do will be revealed to you. And what does Brutus latch on to about the first part of that rather than the second part? 5:37 Wes: Right. 5:37 Erin: So he says, into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius, that you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me? So he ignores. So this is, I think you know what you're talking about, where he's not really motivated by the flattery. He's not really motivated by this idea that other people are really, really love Brutus and really wish that he were, you know, in more control in Rome. Brutus is motivated by the thought that there might be something in him that he's not aware of. And it doesn't have to be worthiness. I mean, he's really motivated, I think, by introspection and discovering, digging up everything in himself that is in there. Because he's obsessed with this idea, I think, of self knowledge and of being as rational as possible, which means examining oneself as thoroughly as possible. And that's what he latches onto in Cassius's speech. He goes right to this, you know, what's in me that I may not know about? And therefore, like, what mischief are you up to? Because are you going to tell me there's something in me that I'm not aware of? 6:43 Wes: Yeah. So the surface content of this is everyone thinks you're so great, Brutus, and wishes that you knew you were great, right? Everyone thinks you're great, except for Caesar. Love that little parenthetical. Everyone's groaning underneath his age's yoke and wish noble Brutus had his eyes, right, to see himself. But another way of interpreting that is wishing Brutus had his eyes to see what other people see in him, which is to say, to be responsive to the crowd the way most people are, and to be responsive to the prospect of glory and the prospect of recognition, to be able to be manipulated by the crowd in the usual way into becoming a projection of their own grandiosity. Which is another way of saying to become an autocrat himself. I'm just taking that line of thought out to its most pernicious possible conclusion. Don't take all that at face value. And another way of reading this is just an even more sinister way. Cassius is, in a very subtle way, saying, look, Brutus, Caesar is becoming a tyrant. And everyone's saying, why hasn't Brutus done anything about it? Brutus is the go to guy. That's what he's doing. And then when Brutus responds and says, seek into myself for that which is not, you would have me seek into myself for that which is not in me. It sounds like he's saying, you're trying to get me to think I'm great when I'm not. But maybe back to this question of flattery. I'm kind of giving another dimension to the flattery which is kind of threat, right. Brutus, the threat of loss of people's respect because he's not doing anything about Zealand. Those are two different ways of thinking about it. And I think the latter might be the thing that is more motivating for Brutus. Not that flattery is going to work on him and that Brutus wants to be seen as great in everyone's eyes or to acquire that for himself, but that he already has that and could lose it. He could be shamed by all of this. 8:46 Erin: Yeah, I think I immediately went to a sort of deeper interpretation than the one that you're pointing to. But I think that there is concern here that there is something about himself that he's not aware of, independent of this idea that people are relying on him. I think part of the reason why the flattery angle maybe isn't working and this idea of other people's eyes being Brutus's eyes doesn't work is that Brutus isn't interested in. I'm just going to say he's not interested in other people's opinion of him, though I think he is. He doesn't understand the social component of self assessment or the importance of knowing oneself in relation to others. 9:36 Wes: And that's interesting in light of the fact that Cassius says I'm going to be your mirror. You can't see yourself, so I will be your mirror here. So I, your glass, will modestly discover to yourself that of yourself which you yet not know of. Modestly. Right. He's not going to exaggerate it. He's not going to flatter. And he'll go on and say, I'm not going to flatter you. If you know that I do fawn on men and hug them hard and after scandal them, or if you know that I profess myself in banqueting to all the rout, then hold me dangerous. So if you know me to part of this is fawning and flattery. Right. And then backstabbing after that. But he's like, you know, I'm not a flatterer. I'm going to give you an accurate representation, and I'm going to be your mirror. And I'm not just trying to manipulate you. And then there's a shouting and flourishing because we're hearing the part where Caesar first rejects the crown. And Brutus, I do fear that people choose Caesar for their king. So now we're getting into open discussion here. That's only been hinted at. And he'll go on to say, I'd rather die for the general good than have Caesar be king. And then we get Cassius kind of reposed to that, where he says he would rather die. How does he put it? Than I had as lief not be as live to be in awe of such a thing as I myself. Right? Such a thing as I myself just being another ordinary human being. And then he gives the great account of Caesar almost drowning. And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world did lose its lustre. Ye gods. It doth amaze me a man of such feeble temper should get the start of the majestic world. And then we get this idea, right? So Caesar is either an ordinary man, or he's maybe even of more feeble temper. He's epileptic. He was too exhausted to swim the river, and Cassius had to save him. And then we get this great speech. Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus. And we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time were masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. I don't think I ever fully understood this speech. I mean, in high school, I don't think I understood. Right. When Caesar is called a colossus, it almost sounds like he's being called a great man. But Cassius, point is, he's not a great man. He just seems like a colossus in comparison to our cowardice. He's just an ordinary guy, or maybe even less than that. But we're a bunch of sheep and cowards here in Rome and we're letting him take over. It's interesting because he moves on from this idea that he's gonna be a mirror to Brutus that's just kind of left behind and they get into what Caesar is to them. 12:23 Erin: Well, yes, but Cassius is being a mirror to Brutus in a deeper way first. I just wanna backtrack a second and address what you said. I do fear choose Caesar for their king. That's, I think, in relation to the shouting that they're hearing. And this is Brutus's interpretation. Right. But in fact, this is a misinterpretation. So these shouts are cheering for Caesar because he's refusing to be their king, 12:47 Wes: but he was loathe to reject that crown. 12:50 Erin: That's Casca's interpretation. So it is the occasion for him to come out and say what he fears. But even that statement is only in light of what he is hearing. Then Brutus launches into this whole thing about honor. And then Cassius says, I know that virtue to be in you, Brutus, as well as I do know your outward favor. I know you're an honorable guy. Well, honor is the subject of my story. So he is being a mirror to Brutus. He's basically saying, like, let me put this in a way that Brutus is going to listen, so I'm going to cast this as a story of honor. 13:24 Wes: Ah, I see. 13:25 Erin: So he's mirroring Brutus in the way that he trying to tell Brutus what he wants to hear. And Brutus is like, oh, oh, this is a story about honor. Now I'm listening. Right. 13:36 Wes: So they're being dishonored by, you know, if they're going to be subservient to someone like Caesar. 13:43 Erin: That's exactly right. And Cassius goes on to say, you know, for my single self, for me personally, I'm just one guy, you know, But I'm just saying, right. And then he tells. 13:55 Wes: Don't know about you. I don't know if you like. 13:56 Erin: Like, I don't know if you really like being someone who's dishonored, worshiping a loser. Right. But for me, for me, it's just. I'm just saying. And then he tells the whole swimming story, which is like the. The happens in this movie Gattaca, that we're. We have to cover on the podcast eventually, which I love, but basically, you know, but he's just this guy, this sick guy, and it seems like a dishonor for us to have to deal with that guy elevated above us. And repeatedly, I will say that so much of this, so much of this idea of honor is gendered too. I just want to point that out. Like, are we going to be beholden to this guy who is like a sick girl? He characterizes him womanish. Womanish, right. You know, how could Caesar be so great if I had to save him from the river? There's this idea of Manliness. This is also very appealing to Brutus, and it seems interchangeable. Manliness seems interchangeable with honor throughout. I just want to point that out because I think it's going to become more and more important as the play moves along. And as we see Portia, for instance. And even with the body of Caesar, what ends up happening to Caesar? I think there's some statements being made there. And there's something that is like rebuking on a basic manhood level. That seems to be a motivating factor for Cassius's upset over Caesar and maybe also Brutus's, you know, are we gonna be men and fight back? Are we gonna do something? Or are we just gonna accept our fate? And Calpurnia is really upset about signs. And, you know, this is later, right. But are we going to look outside and say, oh, no, all these bad omens are happening. Maybe don't go to work today. Because that seems to be something that, like, a woman will do in this play, right? Or are we going to actually take action? Are we going to be men and take action? That seems to be the kind of the binary, the implicit binary that's being set up here. So are you a real man, or are you just a sick girl? Nothing worse than a sick girl. I would hate to be one of those. So, yeah, and then we have this idea of, like, conjuring, too. But he amps it up more and more. Then he sort of gets into the perfect personal. But he uses this honor thing as a way in. And I think that. That it's connected to this idea of being a real man. 16:18 Wes: I think also at stake here, there's a little bit of what's in a name going on. 16:23 Erin: Yes. 16:24 Wes: Write them together. Yours is as fair a name which is funny. So beyond Caesar's mannish being manly or womanly or epileptic, feeble or not, there's just the fact that whoever Caesar is, this is just a role. He is just human, and this is just a role. And there's other actors in Rome. The role, you know, the executive role should never grow to encompass everything. It should be one part of the republic. So he'll say, upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he has grown so great age. Thou art shamed, Rome. Thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods. When could they say till now that talked of Rome that her wide walls encompassed but one man? So this idea that there's no room for anyone else to be a man or to be strong or an agent or an actor in light of Caesar crowding out that possibility. Caesar becoming everything now, is it Rome indeed and room enough when there is in him but only one man? So my point there, you know, there's two points I'm making. One is about this idea of Caesar's expansion and exclusion of manhood or agency and others. But also the fact that. And I think this is going to become very important, that there is no divine right. There's no essence here. Caesar just has this role on loan. And the man ought not. Right. The role. It might be great. The role might be very prestigious and important. The role of being a leader or a president or what does he have both consulships at this point? What's going on now at this point? I don't know his official title. I think he's got both consulships. 18:15 Erin: There's so much time collapsed here, too. I was trying to work out the 18:18 Wes: timeline, but in any case. Right. Yeah, he's not an emperor, but he's in danger of becoming one. And so the. The role is bigger than the man, and the two ought not to be conflated. The role is something like a social construct, and we ought not to lose sight of that fact. We ought not to treat metaphors as if. Or signs as if they are the things that they stand in for. There's a lot of that in this play and, of course, in Shakespeare's other plays. We ought not to treat the trapping, to think that the trappings of authority somehow confer some essential greatness upon a person. They're still human, all of that stuff. 18:56 Erin: Yeah. You know, the idea that Caesar just has this role, as you're calling it, there's such a. Such a dramatic irony throughout. I mean, throughout the whole play. But of course, the word Caesar will be synonymous with the role. Right? 19:11 Wes: Yes. No, he's consciously. Shakespeare makes great use of that irony in this play. 19:16 Erin: But yet. And I even love yours, is as fair a name. It literally isn't. Right. Brute. It's literally not as fair a name. And it will not start a spirit as soon as Caesar. It literally won't. Right. Caesar's ghost will come on stage. Caesar's name is in everybody's mouths all the time. So what I really like is the scale that happens over the course of this. We have this idea in scene one with the tribunes that Caesar is flying high above everybody's heads, and he's going to become. He's going to basically go out of sight and. And rain terror down on people without them knowing distance. Distance is separating him from everybody. And then this colossus thing where he's this huge body that's standing astride the city. So this is a giant man. And then it's this idea that Rome has shrunk to just this one guy. So you know, that. Then this is where Cassius says, there have been other men in Rome, basically. And one of them was a Brutus who would have brooked the eternal devil to keep his state in Rome as easily as a king. So there was the Brutus who. Who was. Who founded the Republic. There have been other people. Are you going to basically let this one man, you know, not only have his way or be just the number one guy, or just be the only guy who matters, but also kind of erase. Erase the legacy of your name and of your nobility? And this is where I'm seeing that there's this. You know, the republicans are behaving in ways which are actually more indicative, I think, of monarchy. Caesar and Antony both have this kind of divine right thing. And later, Antony, of course, will be making out a list of who's going to live and who's going to die. So there's that kind of autocratic power which is located in them, but in the republicans, there is this idea of nobility and of ancestry which seems to belie their whole bag. That seems to be the thing that's like, okay, I get, you know, that makes Brutus say, I get it. You know, I'm not gonna think about this anymore. But I hear you. And it does seem that Brutus is motivated by the. The nobility or the desire to keep alive this. This hereditary right to republicanism, to the idea that Rome has to be more than just one guy. It has to be a bunch of people. But it's Brutus's sort of divine right or his kingly cause, his honorable cause, to be the one who preserves Rome as a place for more than one guy. So he's sort of like uniquely ordained for republicanism. It's a very weird angle to go in on, but Cassius has to take it, you know, to basically get it so that Brutus will be flattered as being the equal of Caesar, but like, the equal and opposite of Caesar. 22:07 Wes: Yeah. So this appeal to honor ends with Brutus saying he'd rather be a villager than to repeat himself, a son of Rome under these hard conditions. And Cassius, I'm glad that my weak words have struck such a show of fire from Brutus. 22:21 Erin: That passes for fire, I guess. 22:23 Wes: Yeah. Right. So then we get this different Picture of how Caesar thinks of himself. This is where we will. Caesar is now passing by and Cassius and Brutus, they're planning to get a debrief from Casca and they can see something is wrong with Caesar and Calpurnia and Cicero, they look like they've just seen a ghost or something. And then we get this wonderful scene where Caesar observes to Mark Antony that Cassius has that lean and hungry look. Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek headed men and such as sleep nights. Young Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. And then Antony says, no, he's not. And then Caesar, I think he suddenly moves to the idea that, oh, if I'm calling someone dangerous, Antony might think that I have fear. And so now he has to defend himself against an accusation that Antony hasn't made, but is in a way perhaps implicit in Antony's. Oh, no, sorry, it's not implicit fear. Him, not Caesar. Yes, it's right there in the text. Sorry, sorry, Antony does say it out loud. Okay. Antony uses this word fear. And then Caesar has to respond to that. He doesn't like that accusation, or that would he were fatter. But I fear him not. Yet if my name were liable to fear, I do not know. The man I should avoid so soon is that spare Cassius. He reads much. He is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men he loves. No plays as thou dost, Antony hears no music. Seldom he smiles and smiles in such a sort as if he mocked himself and scorned the spirit that could be moved to smile at anything. He just. He smiles to mock. Smiling, I love it. But here we get a clear portrait of someone who is being corrupted by power to some degree. He has to have this absurd belief that he is fearless even when he's detecting danger. Of course, how would you detect danger if you didn't feel any fear? How could he possibly know Cassius is dangerous if you weren't feeling fear? That's the way a normal person would do it. And then he'll end this by saying, I rather tell thee what is to be feared than what I fear. For always I am Caesar. And this is where we get one of these several allusions, that ironic allusions that Shakespeare is making to the double meaning of the name as I am Caesar, as if he's saying, I am king, but I'm Caesar. I'm not the type of guy who could feel fear and a divinely ordained king could not either. And then another little Touch of irony. He's like, well, come over to this side because I'm deaf in this ear. So we get another. Immediately the aftermath of that is we get a little portrait of his frailty in contrast to this self conceptionist. Fearless. 25:13 Erin: Right. I mean, this is the man who crossed the Rubicon and has behaved in ways which are fearless. And he has to kind of keep that up as his body is failing. 25:21 Wes: Yeah. Have you read the Conquest of Gaul at all? 25:24 Erin: I've read parts of it. I read all of Plutarch's lives back in the day. It's been a very long time. But. 25:30 Wes: But it's a very different. Right. Yeah. It does not. This is a very different Caesar than comes across in that book or even Antony and Cleopatra. This idea of him, you know, him being kind of a little bit doddering. Right. 25:46 Erin: It makes me feel a little bit of affection for him because of the kind of the silly disjuncture between. I'm not afraid of anything. And can you also speak into this ear, please, Because I'm feeble, you know, and we've just heard Brutus say, I love the name of honor more than I fear death. You know, so there is a culture of fear as the worst thing, fear as the womanly thing. So one has to constantly pay lip service to. And that seems to be what Caesar is doing. Right. Like, I have to keep reassuring people that I don't, or I have to keep saying this out loud and hopefully it'll be true. 26:22 Wes: Could say a bit about Casca's characterization of Caesar as, you know, rejecting the crown but really wanting it. And then he has an epileptic seizure. So another pointing once again to this frailty in Caesar. And the epileptic seizure, of course, becomes the storm. And as we'll see in a. Is representative of. It's not just literally that he's sick. It has something to do with his ambition and the unnaturalness of the ambition. But I just thought we could comment briefly on this dynamic between him and the crowd, because this is another case where we're right. The crowd is the mirror, in a way. And. And then there's the question of rhetorical tricks and flattery and all that stuff. And then Casca compares it to theater performance and he does this dramatic thing where he offers up himself to have his throat cut, but he apologizes for this fit that he has. And then the wenches forgive him. Casca says, if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, it would have been the same. So something's going on here about how he Manipulates the crowd. But it's a little bit vague to me. It's Greek to me. It's a little bit vague how all that was working. 27:46 Erin: I agree. It seems like he's almost embarrassed or he realized he overplayed to the crowd with the cutting his throat thing. Like, maybe it didn't go over that well. And then when he comes to, he's like, oh, I'm sorry if I said anything inappropriate. He's testing them by seeing how far he could take it. But at the same time, the most fascinating part of this for me is that assessment that you mentioned of Casca seeing it as like a theater performance. He says if the tag-rag people did not clap him and hiss him according as he pleased and displeased them as they used to do, the players in the theater. I am no true man. I thought about that for a long time because I was like, this is kind of a bizarre power dynamic, universal scene. 28:29 Wes: Yeah. 28:30 Erin: What, is Caesar throwing a fit if they don't cheer for him like he's a toddler? Or does he have one of those light up applause signs like they have during studio recordings of sitcoms? I don't think so. Right. Again, this is the failure of these conspirators to give credit to Caesar's own popularity. So rather than saying, gee, how come Caesar is so appealing to these people? They're like, what did Caesar do to get them to cheer for him like that? You know? Or like, he must have given them something. He must have given them some sign that they have to be cheering for him. You know what I mean? It's this fascinating psychological reversal. It's very. To me, it's just very indicative of envy. You know, it's. It can't be. They can't be cheering for him because they're cheering for him. It has to be that Caesar is somehow getting them to cheer for him. Right. Like there's a circuit that their minds are doing which is leaving out that Caesar merely knows how to work a crowd. And it's bypassing that to say that he's somehow getting them to clap for him in a way which is manipulative in some far more straightforward way than simply he knows how to work a crowd. Again, there's a discounting of Caesar's popularity, which I think is. Is really is going to be their downfall. 29:51 Wes: Yeah. Although after Brutus's speech, the crowd is quick to turn on Caesar. I mean, it does seem in line with the whole idea of fickleness. The tribunes, Right. Bring at the beginning. And I do, I kind of take Casca's account at face value because I think that's part of the point of indicating that he's kind of dull witted as to make us believe this account more. But. Right. And so here when Brutus says he has the falling sickness, Cassius says, no, he doesn't, we all have it. And then Casca is confused by that. So that's one of the reasons he gets called stupid. But yeah, I'm still confused by the dynamic. He sees that the crowd, that Casca's theory. Right. So we can, yeah, you know, Casca's interpretation we could be skeptical of if we'd like. But he, because it is a very confusing account, he sees that the crowd was glad he refused the crown. Then he does this thing where he offers to have his throat cut, which I don't get. I don't understand why he would do that or what that means because it seems to indicate. Is he saying I'm. I don't know what the point of that is, but whatever it is, it goes too far. That's the thing that, that dramatic gesture, I mean the whole clap in hiss thing suggests he's. Yeah, he's pandering to the crowd. He's being a performer, he's very in tune with what, what it is they want. And he's trying to calibrate everything he's doing to that. But perhaps the throat cutting thing is a little bit. He's too in touch with maybe the aggressive qualities of the crowd. Right. Because it's always a double edged sword. Worship and then sacrifice. Right. So one, you know, or he's flying too high, so to speak. He's flying a little bit too high and then he has that seizure, maybe gets frustrated. 31:38 Erin: Oh, here I'm refusing this crown for your sake. What do you want to cut my throat now? You know, maybe. 31:43 Wes: Well, that's the end. That's one possible. I guess that's the idea. It just seems like a weird, weird thing for him to do because the whole point of refusing the crown is to show that he's not power hungry. 31:57 Erin: Right. But if Cask is to be believed, then he really wants it and he's upset at having to refuse it. And that's why they've all come away upset, because Caesar's pissed that. Yeah. 32:07 Wes: Oh, I figured they were upset just because of the fact that it ended with an epileptic seizure. 32:13 Erin: Yeah, that could be it too. But then why would Caesar be angry and everybody look like they were chastised by him or something. Sounds like he came off stage and was like, what do those people want from me? And started yelling at everybody because he's a little bit of a diva or something. I mean, obviously he's a huge diva, so. Another reason why I love him. 32:31 Wes: Yeah. So we don't have to pause for a long time on any given scene, but. Or part of scene two, just where we still are. But after Brutus exits. Well, Brutus thou art. Cassius says, well, Brutus, thou art noble, yet I see thy honorable metal may be wrought from that it is disposed. Therefore it is meet that noble minds keep ever with their likes. For who so firm that cannot be seduced uses this word seduction. Caesar doth bear me hard, but he loves Brutus. If I were Brutus now, and he were Cassius, he should not humor me. So if I were Brutus, I wouldn't be won over by me. Cassius is basically admitting here to being a scoundrel and to actually corrupting. Right. He's right. The honorable metal is being wrought in a different right from that. It is disposed away from its true nature. This idea of nature and natural dispositions and natural causality and natural explanation is very important in this play, as in many other Shakespeare plays. But Brutus has a certain kind of character, a certain type of natural disposition, a certain metal. And Cassius is bending it to his will. But. Yeah, so I just want. That's all I wanted to say about that. Before we move on, I do want to talk about the storm quite a bit. 33:50 Erin: It. 33:50 Wes: My notes say there's a crazy storm. 33:54 Erin: Mine say man with hand on fire. 34:01 Wes: I was excited to see the. The storm in the movie, the way they would handle that. And it was pretty good. 34:06 Erin: Oh, gosh, I haven't. 34:07 Wes: But you could do more with it, obviously. 34:09 Erin: I think so. I don't remember any of that. 34:12 Wes: But if they were to do a movie today, I mean, there's so much you could do with cgi. You could really see all of these. This kind of surreal scene that's happening because it's not just any old storm. It's fire falling from the heavens and all the other stuff that they describe. But the reason why this interests me so much is because there's a series of interpretations of the meaning of the storm. Casca, Cicero, and then Cassius. Casca's naive idea, the one that Cassius is going to both Cicero in a way, and Cassius are going to scoff at, is that the storm is either caused by civil strife in heaven or the World too saucy with the gods, incenses them to send destruction. Right. The old. The gods are unhappy with us, and so they're sending destruction. And then Cicero inquires and he gets the account of. I love the line passing by for some reason is my favorite one. The he did glaze me, just being looked at and glazed upon me. 35:13 Erin: Oh, yes, yes. 35:14 Wes: Yeah. And Casca will say, don't let anyone say that these can be explained by natural reasons. You see some of this in King Lear as well and elsewhere. But this conflict between superstition and natural causality, this is kind of the pivot point at this period in history for this modern science is beginning to flourish and superstition is looking more like superstition. And he says, these are portentous things unto the climate that they point upon. So now, Casca goes on to a different idea, that there's an element of prophecy in this, let's say. And Cicero says, well, men construe things after their fashion. In other words, you're just. This is a projection of your own character or of your own fears. Cicero is a realist. He's a stoic and he's a realist. He's not like this superstitious Casca. 36:13 Erin: Yeah. Casca's list of things I just think is hilarious because it ends with the most uninteresting. He's like, there are men on fire walking up and down the streets. And last thing in the list, even at noonday, upon the marketplace, the bird of night, the owl sat, hooting, shrieking. It's like, okay, so there was an. Also an owl in the middle of the day. 36:32 Wes: Yeah. And I don't think Cicero. Yeah, I don't think Cicero believes a lot of this stuff. Yeah, the owl, sure. 36:38 Erin: But I don't. I don't think Rome Live at five is going to be, you know, like, showing footage. An owl hooting in the middle of the day. I think it might be focusing on the men on fire walking up and down the street. But 36:52 Wes: anyway, the dead coming out of their graves, as we'll learn later on 36:57 Erin: from the lions walking around the Rome Zoo was empty that day. 37:04 Wes: Cicero, I take as the second interpretation, 37:08 Erin: which is no interpretation. 37:09 Wes: Yeah. It is indeed a strange disposed time. But men may construe things after their fashion, clean from the purpose of the things themselves. In other words, this is all people's superstitious imagination. And then when Cassius comes, it's going to be. Casca's worried about the storm, and for Cassius is a pleasing night to Honest men who have known the earth so full of faults. So here it sounds a bit like Casca's idea that the gods are going to punish us for something we've done wrong. But I think Cassius idea is going to turn out to be that there's a certain type of fault in authority per se. This is partly why I think that the storm is Caesar's epileptic fit. And that Caesar's epileptic fit, the one that he experiences rejecting the crown, is sort of predicated on him flying too high a bit or something like that. Predicated on him being on the precipice of absolute power and then things falling apart at that point. So here's what Cassius says. Those that have known the earth so full of faults, for my part, I have walked about the streets, shows his breasts to heaven. He just says, go ahead, strike me, storm. And then Casca says, why would you tempt the heavens that way? And Cassius, you're a dull Casca. And those parts of life that should be in a Roman you do want, or else you. Or else you use not. You look pale, gaze and put on fear and cast yourself in wonder to see these strange impatience of the heavens. And then he gives his own little list of things that are happening. Old men's fools and children calculate. I love that one. Why all these things change from their ordinance, their natures. This idea of things changing their natures is what it's all about here. Which again is in parallel to. To people changing their characters, becoming corrupt. They change their natures and preformed faculties to monstrous quality. While you shall find that heaven hath infused them with these spirits to make them their instruments, to make them instruments of fear and warning under some monstrous state. Now I cask a name to thee, a man most like this dreadful night that thunders lightnings, opens graves and roars as doth the lion in the Capitol. A man no mightier than myself or me. He's on that track again. Caesar's really not that great, but yes. So Cassius directly compares Caesar to the storm. Later on, he's going to say. He's going to change his interpretation of the storm and say that what it represents is the rebellion as well. It represents the assassination. And in a way, that's one of the deeper themes in this play, is that the rebellion itself, I think, is part of your point about Brutus. But the rebellion itself kind of incorporates some of the same autocratic authoritarian qualities as the thing that they're rebelling against. 40:12 Erin: I'm interested in this idea of nature that you're talking about, or bending things from their nature. Because then he says, I know where I will wear this dagger. Then Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius. So then he addresses the gods and says, therein, you gods, you make them weak, most strong therein. And you gods, you tyrants do defeat. Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron. In the corner, I have a little note to myself. Cassius loves lists, and being on a roll can be retentive to the strength of spirit. But life, being weary of these worldly bars, never lacks power to dismiss itself. 40:51 Wes: So suicide is always a possible route to freedom. 40:54 Erin: It's always a possible right. We could always free ourselves that way. That part of tyranny that I do bear, I can shake off at pleasure. So I can just shake all of this off. I could just shake life off. 41:04 Wes: So can I. So can every bondman: in his own hand bears the power to cancel his captivity. 41:11 Erin: That's right. I can kill myself, too. We could all kill ourselves. And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf, but that he sees the Romans are but sheep. 41:22 Wes: What trash is Rome, what rubbish and what offal when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as Caesar. What a great line. 41:32 Erin: This is all great. I just, you know, the lion thing. Yeah. So what is this about? This is about nature reflecting Caesar. Well, there's a lion walking around here because, you know, the Romans are just. I mean, I'm conflating the two, but there's an interesting contrast. This is all messaging about how the world is so bad and Caesar is causing all this, all these problems also. What can you do? Caesar's just being. Caesar's just taking advantage of the situation. You know, there's a lot of. I don't know what this is like. I can't tell quite what mood Cassius is in or whether he's sort of setting it up. So you can answer. 42:15 Wes: Yeah, I don't know if I can answer that, but I do want to emphasize, right, he makes this point, right? Things change from their ordinance, their natures and preformed faculties, Right? Because old men aren't supposed to calculate, right? By which he means, I guess, prophesy, but from the foot. From my footnote here in my text. But I just thought of. With old men, fools and children, just being really smart, doing math, like on a chalkboard, doing, like, a Good Will Hunting type of thing, and people freaked out oh my God. 42:50 Erin: What the hell is going on? 42:51 Wes: But you know. Yeah, right. The hand, when it burns, should burn up and people should be screaming in pain. But that's not happening. So it's against nature. And somehow for Cassius, that's what is monstrous. Right. What's monstrous is what stands out. It's almost like a miracle within the natural order. It stands out as not being part of the causal order or a genetic monstrosity. Right. Something has gone wrong. So when heaven makes them, uses that as instruments of fear and warning, Heaven is trying to say something unnatural is happening. And the unnatural man is the man who's most like this dreadful night is Caesar. There's something unnatural about him or there's something unnatural. And what's unnatural? Well, first of all, since authority is a social construct, it's unnatural in general. And then he's going to go on to make, make the case that by making the point that Caesar isn't a great man, that point is that no man can actually live up to the name, the role, the designation. We shouldn't equate the role and the authority of that role with the actual person. It's not of his essence, it's not of his nature. What's unnatural is when those two things get conflated. We conflate a particular person with this fantasy, right? And it can be a crowd created fantasy, the crowd mirroring back to the man some sort of monstrous self image, monstrous self conception. But if, yeah, we equate this grandiose image of power and the particular, because the role of course is powerful. But in any case, the two shouldn't be equated. And so that's where we get something perverted away from its nature. 44:43 Erin: Yeah. But then he says, well, it is natural for Caesar to have become a tyrant because the Roman people cast him in the role. 44:53 Wes: You know, that's a way of saying it's socially constructed. 44:55 Erin: Yes. 44:56 Wes: And what's socially constructed is precisely the opposite of the natural. It's not part of the essence of the thing, it's just part of. It's because the crowd believes it so that it makes it so. 45:07 Erin: But, and then I think, I think though at the end he kind of comes full circle in. There's a bit of a giving way in that, Right. You know, Caesar's this awful guy, but then also he's doing something which is natural to him. And then he says the complexion of the element and favors like the work we have in hand, most bloody, fiery and most terrible. So actually the fiery sky all of the. This is like the bloody work that we have to do in order to overcome. Right. So it comes full circle. So he sort of ends up reverse engineering the very thing that he's using as the sign of. 45:44 Wes: Yeah, he keeps changing his interpretation of the storm and where it ends up is the storm. You know, on the one hand the storm represents. And all the storm, which is to say all the unnatural, monstrous things that are happening, represent the monstrosity that is Caesar and the monstrosity that is the crown, that is the making of a monarch. The monstrosity of absolute power, let's put it this way, as opposed to power that answers the people. Although in this play the monstrous power is a function of the people in a weird sense. But anyway, he changes interpretation to say, yeah, the storm actually represents the work that we as the assassins must do. Which is, you know, an incredible pivot. 46:25 Erin: Right. 46:25 Wes: In a way you could say Cassius is sloppy. But you know, I think the real point is. Right, yeah. That the rebellion mirrors the thing that's being rebelled against. It carries the same unnatural, autocratic, authoritarian tendencies as represented by Brutus. Relationship to honor. 46:43 Erin: Yeah. What I love about this is the dramatic irony that this sets up. I mean, the fact that we know what's going to happen. The fact that even the characters on stage kind of know what's going to happen. It's as if there was a prophecy, this autocratic rule, this rule by one man and they're going to. Then, you know, and this is all part of this prophecy. And of course, by trying to eliminate, trying to eliminate a king, it produces the very thing that they tried to avoid. Right. So there's something in the circuit that Cassius's interpretation undergoes that seems to reflect this self fulfilling prophecy element of every self fulfilling prophecy. Right. And so in a way, the entire play functions that way. Or you could say the prophecy is that they're going to not be able to bring this about and die in suicide or something like that. And so it's as if the entire plot is intending to bring that about. Because it knows already what's going to happen. Because we know already what's going to happen. 47:38 Wes: So no, I think this is a really good point just because I think Shakespeare is thinking about what would have happened if Caesar had lived. You know, we know what did happen, which is just this whole sequence of events ensured that a monarchy, you know, came about and Octavius became emperor and all that stuff. What would have happened otherwise? Is it just that the conspirators made their own worst fears come true. 48:04 Erin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, let's end with worst fears come true. That's great. Okay. 48:09 Wes: Worst fears come true. All right, on that note, we'll be doing another recording of this. We could just do another two or three. I mean, we could just do this forever. Could discuss this one. Play for the most. 48:24 Erin: We'll say there will be parts three and four, and then maybe parts five and six, depending on how fast we go. 48:29 Wes: And I'm in no hurry. I don't mind if the audience doesn't like it. They can boo and hiss and then I'm gonna fall down and have a fit. That's what I'm saying. 48:38 Erin: Sounds right. 48:39 Wes: Thank you. 48:39 Erin: Thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. You can also find us on Facebook Subtext Podcast and on Twitter enjoysubtext.

The hosts dive into the complex dynamics of authority in Shakespeare’s play, examining Brutus’s self-deception and his problematic morality. They discuss the powerful rhetoric of both Brutus and Antony, revealing how words shape political reality. The parallels between Brutus and Caesar highlight their shared authoritarian traits, while the fickleness of the crowd raises questions about popular leadership. Also explored are the omens that foreshadow chaos, underscoring the play's focus on misinterpretation and the nature of power.

A close reading of The Third Man’s moral chaos in postwar Vienna. Language barriers and staged identities shape romance and betrayal. Harry appears as a corrupt catalyst and shadow figure whose rhetoric and schemes warp relationships. Penicillin dilution and lime become symbols of adulteration and moral rot. Debates probe duty, complicity, and whether crime or war drives the film’s devastation.

A dive into the “third man” phenomenon and whether Harry Lime saves or corrupts those around him. Speculation about Holly Martins’ wartime past, moral simplicity, and sentimental blindness. Close reads of the Ferris wheel betrayal, the film’s ironic narration, and the haunting zither score. Discussion of postwar Vienna’s moral compromises, black markets, language as racket, and class inequality under occupation.