Note 167 — Chapter III · THE TITULAR HERO OF THE PLAY

All this is so obvious that it can hardly be overlooked, yet overlooked it has been, though it has frequently been pointed out. In his not very sympathetic discussion of this play, Dr. Brandes makes the truly astounding statement: “As Shakespeare conceives the situation, the Republic which Caesar overthrew, might have continued to exist but for him, and it was a criminal act on his part to destroy it.... ‘If we try to conceive to ourselves’ wrote Mommsen in 1857, ’a London with the slave population of New Orleans, with the police of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of modern Rome, and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris of 1848, we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory, the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their sulky letters deplore.’ Compare with this picture Shakespeare’s conception of an ambitious Caesar striving to introduce monarchy into a well-ordered republican state” (Brandes, William Shakespeare). Of course Shakespeare had not read Mommsen or any of Mommsen’s documents, save Plutarch; and if he had, neither he nor any one else of his age, was capable of Mommsen’s critical and constructive research. But considering the data that Plutarch delivered him he shows marvellous power in getting to the gist of the matter. I think we rise with a clearer idea, after reading him than after reading Plutarch, of the hopelessness and vanity of opposing the changes that Caesar represented, of the effeteness of the republican system (“Let him be Caesar!” cries the citizen in his strange recognition of Brutus’ achievement), of the chaos that imperialism alone could reduce to rule. If Shakespeare’s picture of Rome is that of “a well-ordered republican state,” one wonders what the picture of a republic in decay would be. And where does Dr. Brandes find that Shakespeare viewed Caesar’s enterprise as a criminal act?