Even at noon-day upon the market place
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,
‘These are their reasons: they are natural’:
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
(I. iii. 3.)
Here the superstitious thrill rises to a paroxysm of dread; but the effect of dispersing the subsidiary presages through so many scenes is to steep the whole play in an atmosphere of weird presentiment, till Caesar passes up to the very doors of the Capitol.
But besides selecting and rearranging the separate details, Shakespeare establishes an inner connection between them even when in Plutarch they are quite isolated from each other. This is well exemplified by the manner in which the biography and the drama treat the circumstance that the conspirators were not sworn to secrecy. Plutarch says:
The onlie name and great calling of Brutus did bring on the most of them to geve consent to this conspiracie. Who having never taken othes together, nor taken or geven any caution or assurance, nor binding them selves one to an other by any religious othes, they all kept the matter so secret to them selves, and could so cunninglie handle it, that notwithstanding the goddes did reveal it by manifeste signes and tokens from above, and by predictions of sacrifices, yet all this would not be believed.