Julius Caesar in Freytag’s View

Hi Tim,

I saw the 1953 Julius Caesar adaptation (producer, John Houseman, director, Joseph Mankiewicz, MGM) and it struck me how Freytag got a lot of his theories on structure.

It really does wind up as a 2-part structure: the first half (maybe 60% in terms of the film, I can’t speak to the underlying play) is all about the conspiracy, building to the assassination. Brutus is the hero here and must be considered the protagonist; the play almost might be titled ‘The Tragedy of Brutus’ as anything else. Brutus is the essential man. The other conspirators are hot to murder Caesar for their own (generally less-than-honorable) reasons; but only Brutus is deemed popular and honorable enough to be able to sell the killing to the populace so they might get away with it. And he does make up his mind on noble principles of freedom and opposing tyranny; he also always urges the conspirators to follow the more honorable and noble path – as when some say they ought to kill Antony too, but he says they ought not act as butchers but as surgeons.

The middle point, the climax, comes at Caesar’s funeral. Although you might say, as this half’s story goes, the climax is the killing, the aftermath the scene making peace with Antony over the corpse.

At the funeral Antony (who has had a very small role up to the assassination – getting only a couple of lines) now becomes the Counter-force or counterplayer in Freytag’s terms. He whips up the populace against the conspirators, and this launches the second half of the play, which is the downfall of Brutus and the others. Caesar himself appears as one of the counter-forces, as his ghost haunts Brutus in his tent and foretells that they will meet again ‘at Phillippi.’

It’s a history play – or at least based on one of the Roman historians (Suetonius, maybe, or Plutarch? I’m not sure) – and thus Shakespeare is somewhat hampered in the structure. Brutus falls, it seems to me, out of naiveté and being the dupe of the other conspirators, whose true nature he never can make out, being ‘too noble’ or generous to see them for what they really are.

Antony, oddly enough, does not appear in his traditional role of drunkard and skirt-chasing fool. He’s all business here, and is even cold and cynical. He gives the final speech, and judgment of Brutus, ‘Here lies the noblest Roman of them all,’ but it struck me that Antony has acted so cynically through the rest of the play that he could be played as a smart and desperate man driven to what he does out of fear of his very life after his beloved master has been murdered – or as a total cynic after power, rising on the hem of Caesar’s toga before climbing on Octavian and Lepidus after that. In this way of seeing Antony, his final speech could be delivered ironically, even sarcastically. Which one would Shakespeare have intended? I’d have to guess he meant Antony to deliver those parting lines sincerely, for this gives the audience more to feel and weep over. Being ‘chilled’ by the portrait of Antony the monster is not quite so entertaining, huh. And then, maybe Shakespeare already had in mind Antony and Cleopatra (I don’t know the order of composition) and sought to portray a strong, disciplined Antony here, the better to contrast him with the besotted pussy-clown of Cleopatra.

Brutus, does he fall through a tragic flaw, or does he just get in over his head? He ‘wins’ in one sense: facing a potential tyranny by Caesar, he ends it by ending Caesar. He fails to restore the Republic, in part because he doesn’t use Republican methods – instead of lining up the Senate and other nobles against Julius the demagogue, he takes matters into his own hands. When even those who believe in liberty employ assassination, what hope can there be that the common man (or noble) would refrain from taking what power, wealth, and vengeance as he can?

(25 March 2009)