3 - Women – or Statues?

Summary

Julius Caesar may end in war, but it opens in celebrations. As an artist, Shakespeare chooses to run the military occasion of the triumph and the religious one together on the stage, making an overt connection for his audience between the two. When Caesar enters, accompanied by friends and followed by a crowd, his movements are accompanied by sennets or fanfares. There may be no lights or statues, the usual features of church processions in the Rome of our own day, but there is no doubt that in the public spaces of ancient Rome a religious ritual is being observed. We have already been told by the tribunes that this day of festival is called Lupercal. Is that a day for worshipping Caesar, one might ask, in some sense that is not quite obvious at first? Instead of effigies or statues there are living bodies, specially selected ones, that are marked out to be the focus of ritual and of our attention as audience. These bodies seem almost to emerge from that dream of Julius Caesar which we found interfused in Hamlet. One of them is a silent woman, fully clothed; the other, a male one, is nearly naked: the directions say that Antony is stripped ‘for the course’: he's going running.

This tableau offers a powerful juxtaposition, a stage image that might prompt us as readers and critics to pause. We might decide to ask ourselves about the work that it is doing in the play. First the tribunes wanted to reduce the workmen to silence, to make them into signs or ciphers of the labour they performed, now we find Caesar ordering his wife to stand like a statue and wait. Was there a resonance that Shakespeare picked up, something he recognized in Plutarch's description of the Lupercalia, that chimed with the notes that he had already begun to strike himself in this play? Or to put it another way, was there a critique of Rome already implicit in Plutarch's language that Shakespeare was only taking up and giving amplification? Editors have often stressed how faithfully he can follow Plutarch. Let's reread for ourselves what North's version of Plutarch told him.