Elsewhere in Shakespeare one marvels at what he has made out of poor and meagre material. Here, history was so enormously rich, that his poetry has become poor and meagre in comparison with it.
Just as Shakespeare (if the portions of the first part of Henry VI. which deal with La Pucelle are by him) represented Jeanne d'Arc with no sense for the lofty and simple poetry that breathed around her figure—national prejudice and old superstition blinding him—so he approached the characterisation of Cæsar with far too light a heart, and with imperfect knowledge and care. As he had made Jeanne d'Arc a witch, so he makes Cæsar a braggart. Cæsar!
If, like the schoolboys of later generations, he had been given Cæsar's Gallic War to read in his childhood, this would not have been possible to him. Is it conceivable that, in what he had heard about the Commentaries, he had naïvely seized upon and misinterpreted the fact that Cæsar always speaks of himself in the third person, and calls himself by his name?
Let us compare for a moment this posing self-worshipper of Shakespeare's with the picture of Cæsar which the poet might easily have formed from his Plutarch alone, thus explaining Cæsar's rise to the height of autocracy on which he stands at the beginning of the play, and at the same time the gradual piling up of the hatred to which he succumbed. On the very second page of the life of Cæsar he must have read the anecdote of how Cæsar, when quite a young man, on his way back from Bithynia, was taken prisoner by Cilician pirates. They demanded a ransom of twenty talents (about £4000). He answered that they clearly did not know who their prisoner was, promised them fifty talents, sent his attendants to different towns to raise this sum, and remained with only a friend and two servants among these notoriously bloodthirsty bandits. He displayed the greatest contempt for them, and freely ordered them about; he made them keep perfectly quiet when he wanted to sleep; for the thirty-eight days he remained among them he treated them as a prince might his bodyguard. He went through his gymnastic exercises, and wrote poems and orations in the fullest security. He often assured them that he would certainly have them hanged, or rather crucified. When the ransom arrived from Miletus, the first use he made of his liberty was to fit out some ships, attack the pirates, take them all prisoners, and seize upon their booty. Then he carried them before the Prætor of Asia, Junius, whose business it was to punish them. Junius, out of avarice, replied that he would take time to reflect what should be done with the prisoners; whereupon Cæsar returned to Pergamos, where he had left them in prison, and kept his word by having them all crucified.
What has become of this masterfulness, this grace, and this iron will, in Shakespeare's Cæsar?
"I fear him not:
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius.
. . . . . .
I rather tell thee what is to be fear'd
Than what I fear, for always I am Cæsar."
It is well that he himself makes haste to say so, otherwise one would scarcely believe it. And does one believe it, after all?
As Shakespeare conceives the situation, the Republic which Cæsar overthrew might have continued to exist but for him, and it was a criminal act on his part to destroy it.
But the old aristocratic Republic had already fallen to pieces when Cæsar welded its fragments into a new monarchy. Sheer lawlessness reigned in Rome. The populace was such as even the rabble of our own great cities can give no conception of: not the brainless mob, for the most part tame, only now and then going wild through mere stupidity, which in Shakespeare listens to the orations over Cæsar's body and tears Cinna to pieces; but a populace whose innumerable hordes consisted mainly of slaves, together with the thousands of foreigners from all the three continents, Phrygians from Asia, Negroes from Africa, Iberians and Celts from Spain and France, who flocked together in the capital of the world. To the immense bands of house-slaves and field-slaves, there were added thousands of runaway slaves who had committed theft or murder at home, lived by robbery on the way, and now lay hid in the purlieus of the city. But besides foreigners with no means of support and slaves without bread, there were swarms of freedmen, entirely corrupted by their servile condition, for whom freedom, whether combined with helpless poverty or with new-made riches, meant only the freedom to do harm. Then there were troops of gladiators, as indifferent to the lives of others as to their own, and entirely at the beck and call of whoever would pay them. It was from ruffians of this class that a man like Clodius had recruited the armed gangs who surrounded him, divided like regular soldiers into decuries and centuries under duly appointed commanders. These bands fought battles in the Forum with other bands of gladiators or of herdsmen from the wild regions of Picenum or Lombardy, whom the Senate imported for its own protection. There was practically no street police or fire-brigade. When public disasters happened, such as floods or conflagrations, people regarded them as portents and consulted the augurs. The magistrates were no longer obeyed; consuls and tribunes were attacked, and sometimes even killed. In the Senate the orators covered each other with abuse, in the Forum they spat in each other's faces. Regular battles took place on the Campus Martius at every election, and no man of position ever appeared in the streets without a bodyguard of gladiators and slaves. "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 the 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."[2]
Compare with this picture Shakespeare's conception of an ambitious Cæsar striving to introduce monarchy into a well-ordered republican state!