I mentioned on Twitter the other day (if you don’t follow me there… that’s probably for the best) that one of the best productions of Julius Caesar I’ve ever seen was at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2014. This is a play that doesn’t make a lot of sense to modern readers: we find it hard to understand why it continues for so long after the best scenes and the apparent conclusion: Mark Antony’s funeral speech, which leads to the assassins of Caesar being chased out of the city. Most major productions now find a way to abbreviate the play to around 90 minutes and get from the funeral speech to the ending of the play where everyone dies as quickly as possible.
This structure works, more or less! But it does tend to leave the play feeling weirdly unbalanced, the latter stages truncated and rushed. And it particularly hollows out the role of Cassius, who seems so important and first and then largely fades away. But of course, this works in reverse, too: understanding Cassius is a key to understanding the baffling final third of the play.
“Men at some time are masters of their fates.”
You would be forgiven for thinking that Cassius is going to be one of the essential central characters—perhaps the central antagonist—of Julius Caesar, given how he is introduced. As with so many (links) characters we’ve discussed so far, he’s the first to directly address the audience and gets another big monologue shortly after, but doesn’t quite live up to the ‘main character’ energy that these gestures bring.
We meet him trying to lure Brutus, his close friend, into temptation, trying to get him to acknowledge out loud his discomfort with Julius Caesar’s ambition for power. Cassius himself comes off as bitter and envious, and we soon get a hint about why: Caesar makes a point of mocking Antony in public, and tells Mark Antony—in a line that may be an aside, but may be spoken in front of everyone, it really isn’t clear-- that he doesn’t like or trust Cassius at all: “He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous. … He reads much / He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men.”
People in Julius Caesar— and this opening scene in particular—spend a lot of time describing people, assessing their fellow senators’ characters either based on how they look (Cassius is “lean and hungry,” Caesar is old and weak, men like Antony are “sleek-headed”) or how they behave (Caesar did this and that, and that means he’s ambitious; Casca plays dumb but is actually very smart). Cassius stands out by also accurately assessing himself: Caesar boasts in terms that feel empty, Brutus is plainly conflicted, but on the whole Cassius seems to see himself for who he is: much less honorable than Brutus, but much more determined. The master, as he hints, of his own fate.
In his next major scene, he gleefully embraces fate and portents, wandering fearlessly through a chaotic night of storms and wonders, confident that he can and will turn these signs of doom to his own ends.
And that’s just about it. He’s a key presence as the conspirators gather to persuade Brutus and then to make a plan to assassinate Julius Caesar. He also is dismissed when he attempts to repeatedly raise concerns about Mark Antony—concerns which turn out to be spot on. But the focus shifts to Antony, to Brutus, to the chaotic aftermath of the assassination—and Cassius never quite steps to center stage in the same way again.
“Cassius is aweary of the world”
...except once. One of the most dramatic scenes in the latter half of the play, one of the only ones that tends to remain in its entirety even in heavily cut and adapted versions, Cassius and Brutus confront each other as they prepare to fight the armies of Mark Antony and the dead Caesar’s nephew, Octavian.
Once again Cassius and Brutus are presented as foils, though the subject they’re actually talking about is confusing and ultimately pointless—did Cassius take bribes, did Brutus ignore his request for a pardon, did Cassius refuse to send Brutus money for soldiers. But early on, Brutus brings the topic around to its real point: they stabbed Caesar together—and if they did that out of selfishness and not justice, then what has all this been for?
It transitions one again into an assessment of each man’s character. Cassius’s hot temper comes in for scrutiny and criticism, while Brutus displays his much-vaunted stoicism by seeming to refuse to rise to Cassius’s bait. It’s a deeply passionate, emotional scene. In truncated versions of the script, it seems to conclude a story we haven’t quite been telling, to resolve a question we didn’t have about the dynamic between the conspirators. But maybe that’s precisely the problem: the state of Brutus and Cassius’s friendship should be what we’re wondering about. If they can understand who one another are, they can know why they did what they did.
Cassius recognizes from the beginning of the play that killing Caesar is not the only goal. Someone must step up as a figurehead in his place—and that’s why he needs Brutus. The tragedy of Julius Caesar is the tragedy of Brutus and Cassius: not only of what they did, but of what comes of it—what Cassius, personally and specifically, persuaded Brutus to do in all its cascading consequences. Cassius began it, Brutus took it on, and they must see the story out together. That’s why this scene in the tent is so violently charged despite the inconsequential subject matter: if they don’t trust each other, if they don’t love and depend on each other, if each isn’t the man the other thought he was, then they’ve committed a terrible crime for no reason.
“Forever and forever farewell, Brutus.”
So back to that Globe production I mentioned (which you can watch online, by the way), which works by placing Brutus and Cassius at the heart of the production. Casting helps: often, the celebrity roles in Julius Caesar are Brutus and Mark Antony, leaving Cassius feeling overshadowed. In this production, Luke Thompson (now of Bridgerton fame) plays an extremely young, carefree Mark Antony, one who roars to power with a force that takes everyone by surprise. Brutus and especially Cassius om McKay and Anthony Howell—are slightly older, but then younger than Caesar and many of the other senators, which helps them feel like a unit, set apart from everyone but one another.
But what it really does is pull the threads of fate taut. Visually and especially musically, the production makes clear how every step forward traces back to that decision to kill Caesar, to the moment they actually did it. And when these narrative threads are pulled so tight, they take shape around Brutus and Cassius, the two characters who travel all the way through together, whose paths only end when they part from one another.
In the fifth act, right before the culminating battle, the generals of the two armies face each other: Brutus and Cassius, Antony and Octavian. And they engage in the play’s favorite pastime: trying to define one another, though this time mostly in the form of insults. For a character often treated as secondary, the play certainly never misses a chance to ask us to reflect on who Cassius is.
As always, thank you so much for reading dramatis personae. If you’re enjoying the newsletter, do share this post and invite a friend to subscribe.
Thank you for illuminating the significance of the violent argument in the tent scene. I hadn’t thought of it in that way before. I recently read the play with my middle school grandson and shared your paragraph about the tent scene argument with him. He agreed that your analysis gave him a better way to understand it, too.