The delineation of Portia is completed in a few brief masterly strokes. Once seen, the portrait ever after lives an old and dear acquaintance of the reader's inner man. Portia has strength enough to do and suffer for others, but very little for herself. As the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus, she has set in her eye a pattern of how she ought to think and act, being "so father'd and so husbanded"; but still her head floats merged over the ears in her heart; and it is only when affection speaks that her spirit is hushed into the listening which she would fain yield only to the speech of reason. She has a clear idea of the stoical calmness and fortitude which appears so noble and so graceful in her Brutus; it all lies faithfully reproduced in her mind; she knows well how to honor and admire it; yet she cannot work it into the texture of her character; she can talk it like a book, but she tries in vain to live it.
Plutarch gives one most touching incident respecting her which Shakespeare did not use, though he transfused the sense of it into his work. It occurred some time after Cæsar's death, and when the civil war was growing to a head: "Brutus, seeing the state of Rome would be utterly overthrown, went ... unto the city of Elea standing by the sea. There Portia, being ready to depart from her husband Brutus and to return to Rome, did what she could to dissemble the grief and sorrow she felt at her heart. But a certain painted table (picture) bewrayed her in the end.... The device was taken out of the Greek stories, how Andromache accompanied her husband Hector when he went out of the city of Troy to go to the wars, and how Hector delivered her his little son, and how her eyes were never off him. Portia, seeing this picture, and likening herself to be in the same case, she fell a-weeping; and coming thither oftentimes in a day to see it, she wept still." The force of this incident is reproduced in the Portia of the play; we have its full effect in the matter about her self-inflicted wound as compared with her subsequent demeanor.
Portia gives herself that gash without flinching, and bears it without a murmur, as an exercise and proof of fortitude; and she translates her pains into smiles, all to comfort and support her husband. So long as this purpose lends her strength, she is fully equal to her thought, because here her heart keeps touch perfectly with her head. But, this motive gone, the weakness, if it be not rather the strength, of her woman's nature rushes full upon her; her feelings rise into an uncontrollable flutter, and run out at every joint and motion of her body; and nothing can arrest the inward mutiny till affection again whispers her into composure, lest she say something that may hurt or endanger her Brutus.
[Antony]
Shakespeare's completed characterization of Antony is in Antony and Cleopatra. In the later play Antony is delineated with his native aptitudes for vice warmed into full development by the great Egyptian sorceress. In Julius Cæsar Shakespeare emphasizes as one of Antony's characteristic traits his unreserved adulation of Cæsar, shown in reckless purveying to his dangerous weakness,—the desire to be called a king. Already Cæsar had more than kingly power, and it was the obvious part of a friend to warn him against this ambition. Here and there are apt indications of his proneness to those vicious levities and debasing luxuries which afterwards ripened into such a gigantic profligacy. He has not yet attained to that rank and full-blown combination of cruelty, perfidy, and voluptuousness, which the world associates with his name, but he is plainly on the way to it. His profound and wily dissimulation, while knitting up the hollow truce with the assassins on the very spot where "great Cæsar fell," is managed with admirable skill; his deep spasms of grief being worked out in just the right way to quench their suspicions, and make them run into the toils, when he calls on them to render him their bloody hands. Nor have they any right to complain, for he is but paying them in their own coin; and we think none the worse of him that he fairly outdoes them at their own practice.
But Antony's worst parts as here delivered are his exultant treachery in proposing to use his colleague Lepidus as at once the pack-horse and the scape-goat of the Triumvirate, and his remorseless savagery in arranging for the slaughter of all that was most illustrious in Rome, bartering away his own uncle, to glut his revenge with the blood of Cicero; though even here his revenge was less hideous than the cold-blooded policy of young Octavius. Yet Antony has in the play, as he had in fact, some right noble streaks in him; for his character was a very mixed one; and there was to the last a fierce war of good and evil within him. Especially he had an eye to see, a heart to feel, and a soul to honor the superb structure of manhood which Rome possessed in Julius Cæsar, who stood to him, indeed, as a kind of superior nature, to raise him above himself. He "fear'd Cæsar, honour'd him, and lov'd him"; and with the murdered Cæsar for his theme, he was for once inspired and kindled to a rapture of the truest, noblest, most overwhelming eloquence. Noteworthy also is the grateful remembrance at last of his obligations to Brutus for having saved him from the daggers of the conspirators.
[The People]
That many-headed, but withal big-souled creature, the multitude, is charmingly characterized in Julius Cæsar. The common people, it is true, are rather easily swayed hither and thither by the contagion of sympathy and of persuasive speech; yet their feelings are in the main right, and even their judgment in the long run is better than that of the pampered Roman aristocracy, inasmuch as it proceeds more from the instincts of manhood. Shakespeare evidently loved to play with the natural, unsophisticated, though somewhat childish heart of the people; but his playing is always genial and human-hearted, with a certain angelic humor in it that seldom fails to warm us towards the subject. On the whole, he understood the people well, and they have well repaid him in understanding him better than the critics have often done. The cobbler's droll humor, at the opening of this play, followed as it is by a strain of the loftiest poetry, is aptly noted by Campbell as showing that the dramatist, "even in dealing with classical subjects, laughed at the classic fear of putting the ludicrous and sublime into juxtaposition."