As they leave, Calpurnia enters bewailing the truth of her dream, and inviting to share in her laments the chorus, which denounces vengeance on the criminals. Then the voice of Caesar is heard in rebuke of their tears and in comfort of their distress. Only his shadow fell, but he himself is joined to the immortals.
Weep no more: it is the wretched that tears befit. Those who assailed me with frantic mind—a god am I, and true is my prophecy—shall not escape vengeance for their deed. My sister’s grandson, heir of my virtue as of my sceptre, will require the penalty as seems good to him.[49]
Calpurnia recognises the voice, and the chorus celebrates the bliss of the “somewhat” that is released from the prison house of the body.
It is interesting to note that Muretus already employs a number of the motifs that reappear in Shakespeare. Thus he gives prominence to the self-conscious magnanimity of Caesar: to the temporary hesitation of Brutus, with his appeal to his name and the letters that are placed in his way; to his admiration for the courage and constancy of Portia; to his final whole-heartedness and disregard of Caesar’s love for him; to his prohibition of Mark Antony’s death; to Cassius’ vindictive zeal and eager solicitation of his friend; to Calpurnia’s dream, and the contest between her and Decimus Brutus and in Caesar’s own mind; to Caesar’s fatal decision in view of his honour, and his rejection of the fear of death; to the exultation of Brutus and Cassius as they enter with their blood-stained swords after the deed is done. And more noticeable than any of these details, are the divided admiration and divided sympathy the author bestows both on Brutus and Caesar—which are obvious even in the wavering utterances of the chorus. We are far removed from the times when Dante saw Lucifer devouring Brutus and Cassius in two of his mouths with Judas between them; or when Chaucer, making a composite monster of the pair, tells how “false Brutus-Cassius,”
“That ever hadde of his hye state envye,”
“stikede” Julius with “boydekins.” But we are equally far from the times when Marie-Joseph Chénier was to write his tragedy of Brutus et Cassius, Les Derniers Romains. At the renaissance the characteristic feeling was enthusiasm for Caesar and his assassin alike, though it was Shakespeare alone who knew how to reconcile the two points of view.[50]
Of the admiration which Muret’s little drama excited there is documentary proof. Prefixed to it are a number of congratulatory verses, and among the eulogists are not only scholars, like Buchanan,[51] but literary men, members of the Pléiade—Dorât, Baïf, and especially Jodelle, who has his complimentary conceits on the appropriateness of the author’s name, Mark Antony, to the feat he has accomplished.
But this last testimony leads us to the less explicit but not less obvious indications of the influence exercised by Muret’s tragedy which appear in the subsequent story of literary production. This influence was both indirect and direct. The example of this modern Latin play could not but count for something when Jodelle took the further step of treating another Roman theme in the vernacular. In the vernacular, too, Grévin was inspired to rehandle the same theme as Muretus, obtaining from his predecessor most of his material and his apparatus. These experiments again were not without effect on the later dramas of Garnier, two of which were to leave a mark on English literature.
The first regular tragedy as well as the first Roman history in the French language was the Cléopatre Captive of Jodelle, acted with great success in 1552 before Henry II. by Jodelle’s friends, who at the subsequent banquet presented to him, in semi-pagan wise, a goat decked with flowers and ivy. The prologue[52] to the King describes the contents.
“C’est une tragedie