The Character of Authority in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” (Part 3)

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. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. 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. 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