And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg,
Which, hatch’d, would as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell.
(II. i. 10.)
These words are so unlike, or, rather, so opposite to all that we should have expected, that Coleridge cannot repress his amazement. He comments:
This speech is singular:—at least, I do not at present see into Shakespeare’s motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus’ character to appear. For surely ... nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman republican; namely,—that he would have no objection to a king, or to Caesar, a monarch in Rome, would Caesar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be.
(Lectures and Notes of 1818.)
And this in a way is the crucial statement of Brutus’ case. Here he has tried to get rid of the assumptions that move himself and the rest, and seeks to find something that will satisfy his reason. It is thus a more intimate revelation of his deliberate principles, though not necessarily of his subconscious instincts or his untested opinions, than other utterances in which he lets feeling or circumstance have sway. Of these there are two that do not quite coincide with it. One of them is not very important, and in any case would not bring him nearer to the antique conception. In his plea for a pure administration of affairs, he asks Cassius:
What, shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world