Thus Shakespeare has his Act of Oblivion for all that might give an unfavourable impression of Caesar’s past, and presents him very much as the incarnate principle of Empire, with the splendours but also with the disabilities that must attend the individual man who feels himself the vehicle for such an inspiration.
He somewhat similarly screens from view whatever in the career of Brutus might prejudice his claims to affection and respect: and carries much further a process of idealization that Plutarch had already begun. For to Plutarch Brutus is, so to speak, the model republican, the paragon of private and civic virtue. The promise to the soldiers before the second battle at Philippi of two cities to sack, calls forth the comment: “In all Brutus’ life there is but this only fault to be found”: and even this, as the marginal note remarks, is “wisely excused”; on the plea, namely, that after Cassius’ death the difficulties were very great and the best had to be made of a bad state of things. But no other misconduct is laid to his charge: his extortionate usury and his abrupt divorce are passed over in silence. All his doings receive indulgent construction, and the narrative is often pointed with a formal éloge. In the Comparison, where of course such estimates are expected, attention is drawn to his rectitude, “only referring his frendschippe and enmitie unto the consideracion of justice and equitie”; to “the marvelous noble minde of him, that for fear never fainted nor let falle any part of his corage”; to his influence over his associates so that “by his choyce of them he made them good men”; to the honour in which he was held by his “verie enemies.” But already the keynote is struck in the opening page:
This Marcus Brutus ... whose life we presently wryte, having framed his manners of life by the rules of vertue and studie of philosophie, and having employed his wit, which was gentle and constant, in attempting of great things: me thinkes he was rightly made and framed unto vertue.
And the story often deviates from its course into little backwaters of commendation, as when after some censure of Cassius, we are told:
Brutus in contrary manner, for his vertue and valliantnes, was well-beloved of the people and his owne, esteemed of noble men, and hated of no man, not so much as of his enemies: bicause he was a marvelous lowly and gentle person, noble minded, and would never be in any rage, nor caried away with pleasure and covetousness, but had ever an upright mind with him, and would never yeeld to any wronge or injustice, the which was the chiefest cause of his fame, of his rising, and of the good will that every man bare him: for they were all perswaded that his intent was good.
This conception Shakespeare adopts and purifies. He leaves out the shadow of that one fault that Plutarch wisely excused: he leaves out too the unpleasant circumstance, which Plutarch apparently thought needed no excuse, that Brutus was applicant for and recipient of offices at the disposal of the all-powerful dictator. There must be nothing to mar the graciousness and dignity of the picture. Shakespeare wishes to portray a patriotic gentleman of the best Roman or the best English type, such “a gentleman or noble person” as it was the aim of Spenser’s Faerie Queene “to fashion in vertuous and gentle discipline,” such a gentleman or noble person as Shakespeare’s generation had seen in Spenser’s friend, Sir Philip Sidney. So Plutarch’s summaries are expanded and filled in partly with touches that his narrative supplies, partly with others that the summaries themselves suggest.
To the latter class belongs the winning courtesy with which Brutus at his first appearance excuses himself to Cassius for his preoccupation. His inward trouble might well have stirred him to irritability and abruptness; but he only feels that it has made him remiss, and that an explanation is due from him:
Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself,