How many ages hence…
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar slaps. One of the reasons it slaps so hard is that it is a play, and so made of words, but it also has the power of words as one of its main themes. There is a lot to say about how the characters in Julius Caesar use words, but especially with regards to the relation between words and violence. Cassius’ words “whet [Brutus] against Caesar” as if Brutus were a knife. When Casca is about to stab Caesar, he yells “Speak, hands for me!”, equating actions to speech and blows to words. Notably, Casca only has one, short line after this, as if he had surrendered his words to actions entirely. Actions take the place of and come before words: Brutus is advised to “Speak, strike, redress!”, but because he strikes before speaking, his speech seems like a mere retrospective justification of Caesar’s assassination, which is then overwritten by Antony’s subsequent speech. And Antony moves on from the images of Brutus-as-knife and Casca’s blows-as-words to claim in a soliloquy that Caesar’s wounds “like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips, / To beg the voice and utterance of [his] tongue”, while in his funeral speech returns to the image of Caesar’s wounds as mouths, this time telling the people that he will
[…] Show you sweet Caesar’s wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me: but were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar […]
Antony speaks through Caesar’s wounds just as he had earlier said they wanted him to, and as he claims here that he would if he were Brutus, but he presents it as if the wounds were the speaking for him. Very sneaky trick from the same character who claims that he is “no orator, as Brutus is”, before launching into an alliterative tricolon.
A similar comparison between words and physical violence comes before the battle of Philippi:
BRUTUS: Words before blows: is it so, countrymen?
OCTAVIUS: Not that we love words better, as you do.
BRUTUS: Good words are better than bad strokes, Octavius.
ANTONY: In your bad strokes, Brutus, you give good words:
Witness the hole you made in Caesar’s heart,
Crying ‘Long live! hail, Caesar!’
Brutus claims that Antony and Octavius are cowardly for speaking before striking. He thinks Philippi, like the Ides of March, should speak for itself. Octavius accuses Brutus of being all talk — maybe they wouldn’t be in this situation if Brutus had taken decisive action after Caesar’s assassination. Antony equates Brutus’ actions with his words, saying that Brutus’ words have the power to wound, while also saying that what allows his words to wound is their duplicity.
So words can be violence. One of the other things they often are in Julius Caesar is prophetic. Obviously there is the soothsayer’s warning that Caesar “Beware the Ides of March,” as well as Calpurnia’s dream of Caesar’s death (and it’s reinterpretation by Decius Brutus, who oddly enough doesn’t try to claim the dream doesn’t predict Caesar will die, only that Calpurnia is wrong in thinking that his death would be a bad thing). But there are moments of ‘accidental prophecy’ as well. Before the assassination, Brutus wishes that they could “come by Caesar’s spirit, / And not dismember Caesar!” But because Caesar does bleed for it (although the conspirators don’t dismember him — Antony is “but a limb of Caesar” that they decide not to cut off) they get the reverse: instead of Caesar’s spirit dead while the man himself lives, Caesar is killed and Caesar’s spirit, now freed from Caesar’s body, ends up “ranging for revenge, / With Ate by his side come hot from hell”. Antony prophecies/curses exactly that over Caesar’s corpse, and exactly that comes true when Brutus is visited by Caesar’s ghost. The difference between Brutus’ accidental prophecy and Antony’s curse is that Antony’s is intentional and comes true in the way he wants, whereas Brutus comes by “Caesar’s spirit” in a way that goes very badly for him.
One of the reasons the conspirators fail in freeing Rome from Caesar is that although they kill the physical Caesar, soon after his death they lose control of the idea of him that can be expressed in words. After Caesar is killed, Brutus uses his speech to defend the act and the reasoning before it. Antony in his funeral speech doesn’t criticise the assassination so much as convince the people that Caesar was not ambitious, and that “when that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept”. Crucially, the audience never gets to find out if Antony’s statements about Caesar’s relationship with the people are true or not: because we haven’t seen much of “Caesar’s spirit”, it is malleable to Antony’s (re)interpretations. From Caesar’s assassination onwards, the play turns into a propaganda war where each side tries to use words to control and repurpose “Caesar’s spirit”.
I think the example of this that slaps the hardest comes right after the assassination, when Cassius asks:
How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!
The metapoetic joke is not hard to miss. But it’s also more than a joke. The conspirators’ deed becoming immortal involves every aspect of it becoming immortal, including Caesar himself: killing him the way they did is what allows his spirit to live on. Additionally, although Cassius sees the aftermath of the assassination as something that will be “acted over” in future plays, “[his] sight was ever thick” — he cannot see beyond the assassination to his own death, which will also be “acted over” again and again. The immortality of the conspirators’ deed almost locks them into a time-loop where yes, Caesar is killed over and over, but his spirit also refuses to die, while the conspirators themselves lose the civil war and die over and over as well. Finally, Cassius doesn’t realise that plays, like history, can never represent the events they depict perfectly. Reperformance requires reinterpretation, and so Cassius’ “lofty scene” being acted over, repurposed for states unborn, and translated into accents yet unknown is really however many ages of it being twisted into different shapes.
Anyway! For the above reasons, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar slaps so hard that I wrote a poem about it.
how many ages hence
you told the story on the telephone.
here’s what you’d done, here’s what you hoped they’d say
in states unborn and accents yet unknown.static. your voice sounded not quite your own.
the line crackled — i ached to hear the way
you told the story on the telephonewhile i was far away, and you alone
my source of news. you asked me every day:
in states unborn and accents yet unknown —will memory of this contain a bone
of truth? i answered: who knows? anyway,
you told the story on the telephone.it’s no surprise your words would lose their tone.
memory’s threads get tangled up and fray
in states unborn and accents yet unknown,and once the stitches rip they’ll be resewn.
they’ll weave your words into a different play,
cut lifelines, landlines, smash the telephone,
hang up on states unborn and accents yet unknown.
Do you have a suggestion for a future topic? Do you have an idea to share with your friends? Send us a message and follow the Durham University Classics Society on Twitter (@DUClassSoc) and Facebook (@DUClassics Society) to keep up with this blog and our other adventures!
