Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me: but were I Brutus
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue
In every wound.
(III. ii. 228.)
But in this Shakespeare may have been the debtor not the creditor: and other coincidences like the “Et tu, Brute,” in Acolastus his Afterwit[142] (1600) may be due to the use of common or current authorities. One little detail has been used as an argument that the play was later than 1600. Cassius says:
There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.