I began this summer's canonical reading with Are You There God, It's Me Margaret, then moved on to Julius Caesar. This is my third summer Shakespeare, following Hamlet (2019) and Macbeth (2020).
I thoroughly enjoyed this play. There's a lot going on, with major themes related:
- political power
- leadership
- fate (see Cassius's quote above)
- guilt
- our public selves versus our private selves
- the role of ritual in society
One of the ways that Shakespeare jams so many deep ideas into a short play is by moving the action quickly; in this sense, Caesar seems different than both Hamlet and Macbeth, which develop more slowly and methodically. Particularly towards the end of the play -- when Brutus and Cassius engage in a civil war against Antony and Octavius -- there are tons of plot details omitted and major shifts in the action from one scene to the next.
The relationship between Brutus and Cassius is fascinating. They conspire to assassinate Caesar, but they agree on little else. About halfway through the play, they are incredibly rude and unkind to each other, but they eventually make up. It's not always clear what motivates the changes in their relationship, but I imagine that powerful people do, indeed, have lots of ups and downs in their attitudes toward each other (I'm thinking, currently, of the outsize role of Joe Manchin in American politics, and how his fellow Senators feel towards him).
As with Hamlet and Macbeth, ghosts and the supernatural play a role. The ghost of Caesar haunts Brutus, who struggles with guilt and second guesses his actions. I continue to think that Shakespeare was quite wise to incorporate ghosts into his drama, as a means of considering various forces -- seen and unseen -- that may affect our decisions (and our lives).
As I read Caesar, I am also listening to Song of Solomon, which I first read in the late 1990's. Toni Morrison is the audiobook narrator, and both the text and her narration are just spectacular. This has to be one of the greatest pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.
