(III. i. 47.)
It has been suggested[146] that Jonson simply misquoted the passage. But it is not likely that Ben would consciously or unconsciously pervert the authentic text by introducing an absurdity, still less by introducing an absurdity that few people find absurd. In his criticisms on Shakespeare he does not manufacture the things to which he objects, but regards them from an unsympathetic point of view. It seems probable, therefore, that he has preserved an original reading, that was altered out of deference for strictures like his: and this in so far supports the theory that the play was corrected after its first appearance.
So, too, with the versification. The consideration of certain technicalities, such as the weak ending, would place Julius Caesar comparatively early, but there are others that yield a more ambiguous result. It may have been revived and revised about 1607 when the subject was again popular.
And perhaps it has survived only in an acting edition. It is unusually short: and, that Shakespeare’s plays were probably abridged for the stage, we know from comparison of the Quarto with the Folio Hamlets. The same argument has been used in regard to Macbeth.
Still granting the plausibility up to a certain point of this conjecture, its importance must not be exaggerated. It does not affect the fact that Julius Caesar belongs essentially to the very beginning of the century, and that it is an organic whole as it stands. If abridged, it is still full, compact and unattenuated. If revised, its style, metre and treatment are still all characteristic of Shakespeare’s early prime. The easy flow of the verse, the luminous and pregnant diction, the skilful presentation of the story in a few suggestive incidents, all point to a time when Shakespeare had attained complete mastery of his methods and material, and before he was driven by his daemon to tasks insuperable by another and almost insuperable by him,
Reaching that heaven might so replenish him
Above and through his art.
It is perhaps another aspect of the perfect and harmonious beauty, which fulfils the whole play and every part of it, that while there is none of the speeches “that is in the bad sense declamatory, none that does not gain by its context nor can be spared from it without some loss to the dramatic situation,” there are many “which are eminently adapted for declamation”;[147] that is, for delivery by themselves. In the later plays, on the other hand, it is far more difficult to extract any particular jewel from its setting.
It is pretty certain then that Julius Caesar is the first not only of the Roman Plays, but of the great series of Tragedies. The flame-tipped welter of Titus Andronicus, the poignant radiance of Romeo and Juliet belong to Shakespeare’s pupilage and youth. Their place is apart from each other and the rest in the vestibule and forecourt of his art. The nearest approach to real Tragedy he had otherwise made was in the English History of Richard III. And now when that period of his career begins in which he is chiefly occupied with the treatment of tragic themes, it is again to historical material that he has recourse, and he chooses from it the episode which was probably of supreme interest to the Europe of his day. Since Muretus first showed the way, the fate of Caesar had again and again been dramatised in Latin and in the vernacular, in French and in English. It was a subject that to a genius of the second rank might have seemed hackneyed, but a genius of the highest rank knows that the common is not hackneyed but catholic, and contains richer possibilities than the recondite. Shakespeare had already been drawn to it himself. The frequent references in his earlier dramas show how he too was fascinated by the glamour of Caesar. In the plays adapted by him, he inserts or retains tributes to Caesar’s greatness, to the irony or injustice of his fate. Bedford in his enthusiasm for the spirit of Henry V., as ordained to prosper the realm and thwart adverse planets, can prefer him to only one rival,
A far more glorious star thy soul will make