Second, it's pretty easy for us as readers to recognize a bad omen when we see one. First, we know how things will end in the play, because Shakespeare is writing about historical events. So does this mean we should talk about how dumb Caesar is to ignore Calphurnia's scary dream or the soothsayer's advice to "beware the Ides of March"? Should we criticize Cassius for failing to anticipate his own doom? Not necessarily.Īs students of history and literature, we have an edge over the play's characters. Point 2: You've probably already figured out what our second point is, but we'll say it anyway: the true meanings of the play's omens tend to be lost on most of the characters until it's too late to do anything about them.
#JULIUS CAESAR SHAKESPEARE FULL#
The play is full of people running around misinterpreting omens. Of course, it turns out Calphurnia was right, but nobody believes her (partly because she's a woman), so Caesar ends up getting stabbed 33 times. Calphurnia correctly guesses that this is a bad thing but Decius convinces Caesar that the dream means he will be Rome's savior.
And yes, we are most definitely drawing a parallel between how characters (mis)interpret omens and the way we perform literary analysis.) Take, for example, Calphurnia's dream about a bunch of Romans standing around washing their hands in Caesar's blood (2.2). (Kind of like all of Shakespeare's plays are subject to interpretation. Point 1: Just about every omen in the play is subject to interpretation. We talk about each of these omens in more detail below but here are two overall points we want to make, so pay attention.or else something terrible might happen. Julius Caesar is full of cryptic omens: the soothsayer's advice for Caesar to "beware the Ides of March," bad weather, wacky animal behavior, scary dreams, and, of course, ghosts. It's a jab against both ancient Rome and Elizabethan England, but mostly it's an example of Shakespeare using a little of his own influence to promote his craft. So perhaps Shakespeare is suggesting that men of state should also be men of learning to ignore poets and what they have to teach is to court doom. The poets we meet are on innocent and important missions, all of which are deterred or slighted with not-so-awesome results. He can't just insert important poets into history, but he can do his best to argue within the play that poets and learning should be central to politics. None of those instances move the plot along.īut think about it: Shakespeare is a writer. There's no real reason to have a scene solely devoted to killing Cinna, or for the strange little exchange with the poet at the end. In all three instances, men of words seem pretty randomly inserted into the play. They just laugh at him, threaten him, and finally dismiss him. (Probably a good idea, considering that they almost killed each other.) The poet points out that he has lived longer than they have and might have something to teach them. He asks them to love each other as brothers and suggests that they shouldn't be alone together. The final poet we encounter shows up outside Brutus and Cassius' tent after their quarrel. Even after the mob realizes he's not that Cinna, they kill him anyway as punishment for his "bad verses." (That the mob is ignorant enough to be this blood-lusty casts some doubt on whether they're qualified to be literary critics.) Next we see Cinna the poet torn to shreds for having the wrong name. Caught up in his affairs of state, Caesar ignores this learned man's teaching, which costs him his life. The first and only person who can explicitly warn Caesar in detail of the plot to kill him is a teacher of rhetoric, Artemidorius. Within that context, the presentation of the men of letters in Julius Caesar makes a little more sense. The idea of writing for writing's sake wasn't popular. Livy's History of Rome, Caesar's own Gallic Wars, Tacitus' Histories, and Virgil's Aeneid had history at their core. The most important pieces of literature from that time, whether poetic or not, focus on history and tradition. While Shakespeare's work was considered important enough to get him royal patronage from King James I, poetry during Caesar's time was decidedly different. These purveyors of words aren't central to any of the play's action, but they do stand out because of how widely they're disregarded, even when they have important things to say.
0 kommentar(er)
