Rosalind laughs at the self-consciousness of his prowess as she laughs at the extravagance of love in Troilus and Leander, but evidently Shakespeare, just as he was impressed by their stories in Chaucer and Marlowe, was impressed in Plutarch with what she calls the “thrasonical brag of ‘I came, saw, and overcame.’” Don Armado is made to quote it in his role of invincible gallant (L.L.L. iv. i. 68); and Falstaff parodies it by applying to himself the boast of “the hooked-nosed fellow of Rome” when Sir John Coleville surrenders (H. IV. B. iv. iii. 45). For to Shakespeare there are no victories like Caesar’s. The false announcement of Hotspur’s success appeals to them for precedent:
O, such a day
So fought, so follow’d and so fairly won,
Came not till now to dignify the times
Since Caesar’s fortunes.
(H. IV. B. I. i. 20.)
We have already noticed the references to his triumphs, his fate, the ironical contrast between the was and the is in Henry V. and Hamlet, the History and the Tragedy that respectively precede and succeed the play of which he is titular hero. But Shakespeare keeps recurring to the theme almost to the end. When in Measure for Measure the disreputable Pompey is conveyed to prison, it suggests a ridiculous parallel with that final triumph of Caesar’s when the tribunes saw far other
tributaries follow him to Rome
To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels.
“How now, noble Pompey,” says Lucio as the go-between passes by behind Elbow and the officers, “what, at the wheels of Caesar? art thou led in triumph?” (iii. ii. 46). In Antony and Cleopatra, of course the incumbent presence of “broad-fronted Caesar” is always felt. But in Cymbeline, too, it haunts us. Now his difficulties in the island, since there were difficulties even for him, are used as by Posthumus, to exalt the prowess of the Britons,