(V. i. 101.)
This last illustration may show us, however, that Shakespeare, even when he seems to copy most literally, always introduces something that comes from himself. Despite his wholesale appropriation of territory that does not in the first instance belong to him, the produce is emphatically his own. It is like the white man’s occupation of America and Australasia, and can be justified only on similar grounds. The lands remain the same under their new as under their old masters, but they yield undreamed-of wealth to satisfy the needs of man. Never did any one borrow more, yet borrow less, than Shakespeare. He finds the clay ready to his hand, but he shapes it and breathes into it the breath of life, and it becomes a living soul.
CHAPTER II
SHAKESPEARE’S TRANSMUTATION OF HIS MATERIAL
The examples given in the previous chapter may serve to show that from one point of view it is impossible to exaggerate Shakespeare’s dependence on Plutarch. But this is not the only or the most important aspect of the case. He alters and adds quite as much as he gets. No slight modification of the story is implied by its mere reduction to dramatic shape, at least when the dramatiser is so consummate a playwright as Shakespeare. And it is very interesting to observe the instinctive skill with which he throws narrated episodes, like that of the death of Cassius, into the form of dialogues and scenes. But the dramatisation involves a great deal more than this. Shakespeare has to fix on what he regards as the critical points in the continuous story, to rearrange round them what else he considers of grand importance, and to bridge in some way the gaps between. These were prime essentials in all his English historical pieces. The pregnant moments have to be selected; and become so many ganglia, in which a number of filaments chronologically distinct are gathered up; yet they have to be exhibited not in isolation, but as connected with each other, and all belonging to one system. And in Julius Caesar this is the more noticeable, as it makes use of more sources than one. The main authority is the Life of Brutus, but the Life of Caesar also is employed very freely, and the Life of Antony to some extent. The scope and need for insight in this portion of the task are therefore proportionately great.
Thus the opening scene refers to Caesar’s defeat of the sons of Pompey in Spain, for which he celebrated his triumph in October, 45 b.c. But Shakespeare dates it on the 15th February, 44 b.c., at the Lupercalian Festival.[152] Then, in the account of Caesar’s chagrin at his reception, he mixes up, as Plutarch himself to some extent does, two quite distinct episodes, one of which does not belong to the Lupercalia at all.[153] Lastly, it was only later that the Tribunes were silenced and deprived of their offices for stripping the images, not of Caesar’s “trophies,” but of “diadems,”[154] or, more specifically, of the “laurel crown”[155] Antony had offered him.
The next group of events is clustered round the assassination, and they begin on the eve of the Ides, the 14th March. But at first we are not allowed to feel that a month has passed. By various artifices the flight of time is kept from obtruding itself. The position of the scene with the storm, which ushers in this part of the story, as the last of the first act instead of the first of the second, of itself associates it in our minds with what has gone before. Then there are several little hints that we involuntarily expand in the same sense. Thus Cassius has just said:
I will this night,
In several hands, in at his windows throw,
As if they came from several citizens,
Writings all tending to the great opinion