4 - Portia and Calpurnia

Summary

When Portia enters and starts to speak, it is the first time, as we realize, that the voice of a woman has been heard. In public Calpurnia expressed only acquiescence and stood silent. Or perhaps we haven't even thought that was odd, for to some people the life we are shown in Shakespeare's Rome is perfectly natural and of interest only because it is such a good imitation of normal behaviour as we meet it in real life, rather than Shakespeare's play being a way of confronting us with questions about what we now think is normal and about what we take for granted.

To a woman's ear, the ear of a woman who has been married more than once, as I have, and as indeed the historical Portia herself had been, the words of Brutus strike a familiar note. The wife takes her husband by surprise; ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, rather put out as the broken movement of his first line shows: ‘Portia! What mean you? Wherefore rise you now?’ (2.1.233). As a form of greeting this leaves something to be desired, the more so perhaps if we hear in it a muted and domestic echo of the tribunes’ cry that opened the play: ‘Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home!’ (1.1.1.). Even at home there is a Roman official alert to maintain control of the space. Though Brutus goes on more smoothly, a wife might well hear reproof in his voice, under the even movement of the iambics, a reproof offered under the guise of telling Portia what is good for her. ‘It is not for your health thus to commit / Your weak condition to the raw cold morning.’ (2.1.235–6), warns Brutus, reminding his wife to think of herself as weak. If instructing Portia offers a way for Brutus to stabilize himself, after the interview with the conspirators who have only just left the stage, for Portia to answer him with ‘Nor for yours neither ’ breaks through that temporary calm. ‘Nor for yours neither’, she tells him, reminding him that what is bad for her is also bad for him, that she is not the only one who might fall sick. That a man's body is not that different from a woman's, after all.