"Shrewdly to the Purpose": Metacognition, Induction, and the Place of Practical Experience in Julius Caesar

Transcription

1 "Shrewdly to the Purpose": Metacognition, Induction, and the Place of Practical Experience in Julius Caesar Ty Buckman, Wittenberg University My Shakespeare teacher in graduate school, Professor Arthur Kirsch, offended us once by announcing to our seminar that it was his firm belief that Shakespeare s readers grow into their understanding of the plays, and that some plays can only be fully appreciated by readers who have reached a certain age and commensurate life experience. I remember bristling as a twenty-three year-old at the claim that my apprehension of King Lear was impaired by the mere fact that I was not yet old enough to have parents confronting the imminent end of their lives. Of course, I now think he was right. We grow with a play, a play grows with us, and the questions that we bring to the play are, in a more literal sense than we generally allow, our questions. I begin with this personal, readerly note by way of confessing that after quite a few years of teaching, I find Claudius to be a more engaging object of study and contemplation than Hamlet himself, and in Julius Caesar, the character of Cassius more fascinating than Caesar, Brutus, and Mark Antony combined. As someone who has turned away from the honorable Georgian labor of full-time teaching, however temporarily, for the allures of provostial middlemanagement, I cannot imagine how I arrived at a fixation on a character who martials all the best arguments to no effect and ends up falling on his sword. I.

2 There is a danger, I know, in bringing a character of secondary importance to a play into the foreground as an object of study. The mix of faintly contradictory qualities that make Cassius intriguing to me may in fact be a function of his positionality, not of his character per se; some of his integrity as a character could be consistently sacrificed or distorted for the benefit of a contextually-dependent dramatic purpose. Cassius, after all, belongs to an order of characters who will not lend their names to the titles of subsequent plays and did not warrant titled sections in North s translation of Plutarch s Lives. With that caveat, there is one moment in particular that seems revealing of something at work in Cassius and the political logic of the play that transcends his otherwise catalyzing and secondary role. In Act 3, Scene 1, immediately after the assassination of Caesar, Antony cautiously sends his servant to inquire of the conspirators if it is safe for him to approach. Brutus guarantees his safety and expresses confidence in their ability to win Antony to their cause, but Cassius demurs: Brutus: Cassius: I know that we shall have him well to friend. I wish we may; but yet have I a mind That fears him much; and my misgiving still Falls shrewdly to the purpose. Brutus: But here comes Antony. ( ) The contrast between Brutus s use of the indicative here claiming to know the outcome prior to its taking place and Cassius s use of the optative mood his wish that events will transpire in the way that Brutus has asserted is instructive and clearly marked for the benefit of the audience. Brutus from the beginning of his involvement in the plot shows himself eager to take for granted questions that Cassius regards as subject to interpretation. Brutus s assurance that

3 Antony will set aside his close relationship with Caesar and reconcile himself with the conspirators must strike the audience as improbable, given the dialogue between Antony and Caesar witnessed in Act 1. In particular, Brutus s phrase, have him well to friend, suggests by its obvious overstatement his powers of misperception. The difference of opinion over whether Antony can be turned extends a disagreement that began in Act 2, when Cassius advocated the killing of Antony and Caesar together for clearly stated, politically pragmatic reasons: I think it is not meet, Mark Antony, so well beloved of Caesar, Should outlive Caesar: we shall find of him A shrewd contriver; and, you know, his means, If he improve them, may well stretch so far As to annoy us all: which to prevent, Let Antony and Caesar fall together. ( ) Brutus s response to Cassius s argument has him quickly and characteristically entangled in his own rhetoric: Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius, To cut the head off and then hack the limbs, Like wrath in death and envy afterwards; For Antony is but a limb of Caesar: Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius. [ ] And, gentle friends,

4 Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully; Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods, Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds: [ ] And for Mark Antony, think not of him; For he can do no more than Caesar's arm When Caesar's head is off. ( ) Brutus s commonplace of the political leader as head of the body politic recalls Menenius s speech to the obstreperous rabble in Coriolanus, but here it is deployed to less coherent effect. The orderly execution of Caesar to cut the head off gives way to a startling suggestion of human sacrifice with Caesar carved up to become a dish fit for the gods. Brutus then mistakenly draws causal inferences from his collapsing metaphors, in a sense, substituting his figure for the actual circumstance a literal-mindedness that will be credited to Brutus throughout the play as proof of his plain-dealing honor. Shakespeare s immediate source points clearly to the pivotal nature of the question of how to deal with Antony, as North s Plutarch identifies Brutus s disastrous misreading of Antony and his motives as a two-part flaw that marred all. He describes the two decisions to spare Antony and to let him preside at Caesar s funeral thus: All the conspirators, but Brutus, determining upon this matter, though it good also to kill Antonius, because he was a wicked man, and that in nature favored tyranny: besides also, for that he was in great estimation with souldiers, having bene conversant of long time amongst them: and specially, having a mind bent to great enterprises, he was also of great authoritie at that time, being Consul with Caesar.

5 But Brutus would not agree to it. First, for that he sayd it was not honest: secondly, because he told them there was hope of change in him. For he did not mistrust, but that Antonius being a noble minded and coragious man (when he should knowe that Caesar was dead) would willingly helpe his contry to recover her libertie, having them an example unto him, to follow their corage and vertue. So Brutus by this meanes saved Antonius life, who at that present time disguised him selfe, and stale away. (342) And later: Then Antonius thinking good his testament should be red openly, and also that his body should be honorably buried, and not in hugger mugger, least the people might thereby take occasion to be worse offended if they did otherwise: Cassius stowtly spake against it. But Brutus went with the motion, & agreed unto it: wherein it seemeth he committed a second fault. For the first fault he did was, when he would not consent to his fellow conspirators, that Antonius should be slayne: and therefore he was justly accused, that thereby he had saved and strengthened a stronge & grievous enemy of their conspiracy. The second fault was, when he agreed that Caesars funerals should be as Antonius would have them: the which in deede marred all. (343-4) Shakespeare credits Cassius with opposition to both decisions not merely the latter and creates two separate opportunities for Cassius s superior political skills to forestall the tragedy to come from Antony s revenge.

6 II. When Cassius says quietly to Brutus, almost in an aside: but yet have I a mind / That fears him much; and my misgiving still / Falls shrewdly to the purpose, his observation belongs to a plane of discourse which Brutus cannot reach. Cassius s reflection on the accuracy of his predictive ability is a species of metacognition thinking about his own thinking that suggests he has anticipated the outcome based on a pattern of results. Brutus, by contrast, seems fixed in an eternal present in which all of his decisions occur independently, as though he had no awareness of the cumulative effect of his earlier choices. Cassius s indirect appeal to an inductive basis for his authority is not the play s only foray into epistemological concerns. In a paint-by-numbers treatment of the range of available interpretations for unexpected weather in Act 1, Cicero s skeptical contribution could be applied as well to Brutus s inability to separate what he thinks will happen from what he hopes will happen: Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time: But men may construe things after their fashion, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. ( ) In further dramatic irony, the superiority of Cassius s powers of insight is attested to by Caesar himself, who describes Cassius to Mark Antony: He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men ( ). Cassius s political acumen, his awareness of the weaknesses in Brutus s arguments and the relative strength of his own, have no apparent effect on the outcome of the play. Why is there so little to be gained from being right in this play?

7 Long ago, Northrop Frye in Fools of Time advanced an intriguing claim for the political context against which tragedies of social order like Julius Caesar should be read: In Shakespeare and his contemporaries what commands loyalty is a specific social order embodied in a specific person. In the histories there is no conception of any loyalty broader than England, and even when Shakespeare s subject is the Roman Empire in which Stoicisim grew up, loyalties are still concrete and personal. It is a comitatus group that gathers around both Caesar and Antony. In the tragedies, as in the comedies, Shakespeare s settings are deliberately archaic. The form of society in them is closer to that of the Iliad, or of Beowulf, than it is to ours or to his own. (97-8) If, as Frye argues, Cassius is bound by a kind of comitatus loyalty to sacrifice his superior insights to the weaker arguments of his leader, this helps explain as well why a character who was incensed at remaining an underling ( ) to Caesar, meekly yields to Brutus. But it raises yet more troubling questions. It would certainly be anachronistic and unhelpful to draw a quick, clear distinction between the personal and the political in Julius Caesar. However, Frye s evocation of an archaic political setting for the play reveals how little these Romans -- the archetype for civic virtue in the western tradition -- refer to the interests or welfare of the people on whose behalf they apparently are willing to act. As the play moves into Acts 4 and 5, Frye s observation that Cassius is emotionally dependent on Brutus: that is, his loyalties, like his resentments, are personal (98), only becomes more apt. When, as a direct result of Brutus s refusal to heed Cassius s advice, Antony finally arrives at the reading of Caesar s will to the frenzied crowd, he reminds them of the contrast

8 between the conspirators inspired by devotion to each other and to an abstract political principle and a leader who sought to attend to them as individuals in very practical ways: Here is the will, and under Caesar s seal: To every Roman citizen he gives, To every several man, seventy-five drachmaes. [ ] Moreover, he hath left you all his walks, His private arbors and new-planted orchards, On this side Tiber; he hath left them you, And to your heirs for ever common pleasures, To walk abroad and recreate yourselves. Here was a Caesar! when comes such another? ( ) Cassius s political skills are ultimately circumscribed by the narrow nature of his politics: at the crucial moment, his sphere of concern does not extend far enough to place the good of his people ahead of the good opinion of Brutus.

9 Works Cited Frye, Northrop. Fools of Time. London: Oxford UP, Excerpted as The Tragedy of Order: Julius Caesar. In: Twentieth Century Interpretations of Julius Caesar: A Collection of Critical Essays. Excerpted from Fools of Time ( Excerpted in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Julius Caesar. Ed. Leonard F. Dean. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Print. Plutarch s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes. Trans. Sir Thomas North (1579). Excerpt in: Julius Caesar: Arden Shakespeare. 3 rd ed. Ed. David Daniell. New York: Bloomsbury Arden, Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Print.