“Romans, countrymen, and lovers”: Performing Politics, Sovereign Amity and Masculinity in Julius Caesar

Summary

Much of the recent criticism on Julius Caesar has focused on the language of the play, with essentially two main focal points. The first concerns the function of reflexivity in Renaissance drama: one such argument being that it “control(s) the audience's degree of involvement in the stage illusion.” This contention, of course, harkens back to the works of both Samuel Johnson and Coleridge and their comments on the audience's awareness of the play as “staged” by “players.” Another significant reading of language in Julius Caesar, derived from J.L. Austin, focuses on rhetoric and the manner in which language itself is specifically (intentionally) performative in the Roman world of the play. Cicero offers us a thesis for the play in his only speaking scene: “Indeed it is a strange-disposed time. / But men may construe things after their fashion / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (1.3.33-35). Men not only may but also do “construe things after their fashion” and, indeed, nothing is but speaking makes it so. In fact, it seems as though the figure of Cicero is ushered into this scene for the express purpose of speaking these lines. Gayle Greene offers further commentary on the importance of rhetoric and how it operates in the play as a “theme as well as a style: accorded prominence by structure and imagery, it is integral to characterization, culture, and to the central political and epistemological concerns.”