5 - What Calpurnia Knows

Summary

There seems to be a general impression, one that I shared myself until I began to pay more careful attention to what Shakespeare wrote, that Calpurnia is almost like a Cassandra, a voice of demented prophecy, an embarrassing figure. Kindest to overlook both of them, never mind if what they claim about what is coming turns out to be accurate. But Cassandra, so the story goes, received her gift of clear vision and her power to articulate it from Apollo and she was being punished by him when she was not believed. Let's see if we can decline to comply with that ancient curse, a curse that might remind us of the sterile curse that Caesar spoke of as he told the silent Calpurnia where to stand. Let's start treating Calpurnia as if she were an ordinary woman, with both her feet on the ground. There's every reason to do so, for she makes no claim that her experience is exceptional. On the contrary, Calpurnia presents herself as one whose experience is shared with other people, others whose voices she carries on her own, rather as Shakespeare himself was telling this very story by means of drama, using many voices.

There is one within,

Besides the things that we have heard and seen,

Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.

(2.2.14–16)

‘Remember what we heard and saw together during the storm last night?’, she asks Caesar. ‘Well, there's someone inside, one of the servants, who says that the police who were on duty saw things going on in the streets that would make your hair stand on end.’ Of course, Calpurnia doesn't say ‘police’ but she doesn't use a Roman term either, she speaks of ‘the watch’. Shakespeare makes her use the language of his first audience as a way of reminding them that this is not only a story about the past, it is about the present that they are inhabiting too. Readers who think of his reminders of the world of clocks and hats and the watch as lovable slips of the pen, failures of creative imagination on Shakespeare's part, are underestimating him as an artist, or perhaps trying to keep his vision firmly tied to the world that he lived in and apart from the one in which they are living themselves.