Stop. Thanks for coming back. So listen to this lecture on Julius Caesar.
So. Julius Caesar comes through a period of extraordinary output by Shakespeare at the very end of the 16th century.
Strange appearance so brilliantly in his work, 50, 99 a Year in the Life of Shakespeare.
Between the autumn of 15, 98 and the end of 15, 99.
I can pretty confidently date much ado about nothing. As you like it, honey, the fifth probably initial work on Hamlet as well as Julius Caesar.
That's quite interesting grouping.
We tend to always think about Julius Caesar in terms of its Roman themes and alongside other Roman plays coronate as Antony Cleopatra,
with which obviously shares some narrative. Connexions are major types of chronicles.
The electors will be placed already. What I'm trying to just in this lecture is some of the ways in which Julius Caesar might fit in that with
99 cluster rather than in Dan's already pretty well known kind of romantic tarsa sort of narrative,
which fits it with other rhythms. OK.
So the play itself, Julius Caesar tells us about the assassination by Cassius Brutus of the Roman leader Julius Caesar.
Caesar is killed in the capital right in the middle of the plague to rival orations over
his body to persuade the people of Rome to interpret this not as a road to their freedom,
but as an act of violent treachery. The assassins are driven from Rome.
They are ultimately defeated in a battle with the forces of Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar.
Now, it's quite hard to give a more elaborate summary since the question of what all
this means and how to interpret it is in fact the whole business of the play.
So I've tried to avoid the question of judgement, but it's clearly something which was always hanging over the assassination of Caesar.
It was a classic classroom exercise in the 16th century grammar school, one that I'm sure Shakespeare did,
which was to argue both sides of the question, was Brutus justified to kill Caesar?
So it's kind of exemplary question in how you might use rhetoric persuasively to make one case or another.
That grammar school staple called in the tranquil parts and translate parts and arguing both
sides of the proposition to the question of whether Julius Caesar's assassination is justified,
meaning the language we use to talk about it.
Brutus and Cassius are often called conspirators, and we know from modern takes on dates that one man's freedom fighters and as amongst terrorists,
one man's conspirator is another man's kind of politician or whatever to the language of that is already quite difficult, I think.
But the question of the play's own politics and its position on the offensive depicts its own.
It is an uneasy one, and that makes Julius Caesar a particularly interesting place to think about through its performance history,
where performances have tended to want quite clearly to identify good and bodies or to identify the shafe.
The moral shape of this play by, for instance, having Brutus and Cassius and the others in us,
not Nazi Blackshirts, or having them as kind of Che Guevara kind of freedom people.
You can see that they're very, very different kinds of judgement.
I'm certain in the theatre the play has some that kind of political work, which is tended to clarify what in the text is rather unclear.
So the question I want to structure this lecture around kind of is that old one, was Brutus justified in killing Caesar?
But not quite. So I want to try and talk about the next murder we see moments later on, say an unconscious.
This is what it looks like, picking the wrong bit of the play to focus on and let's see whether that works or not.
So immediately after the death of Caesar, which is clearly the most important thing in the play,
a group of Roman citizens exit the stage with that ultimate political trophy.
The body, the body of Caesar, the body of Caesar is a very interesting prop in this play.
I think we get that recalled when we get Polonius, his body as a prop.
You know that there's a relation between those two plays when Hamlet and Polonius are talking
about at the play of Julius Caesar that seem to be recalling the parts of the Chamberlains man,
a play that's previously been on. And I think Caesar thinking about Caesar and Polonius is the same actor gives
us quite interesting take on what Caesar how Caesar might have been performed.
But if you're interested in anything like an object to everything, theory props the kind of phenomenology of stuff.
Caesar's body is a really interesting case. It's not quite a person and not quite a prop, but.
Lump of stuff that needs to be moved about and over, which is a huge amount of interpretive energy.
So Grumman's citizens exit the stage with the body of Caesar. And then we get a tiny vignette of the social violence,
which seems to have been unleashed by the assassination, a character we have not previously met or heard of.
It's intercepted by what the text calls for plebeians, for common people, the people of Rome.
He was interrogated briefly about who he is and why he is abroad.
He gives his name and vocation Cinner, the poet.
Now the name Cinner already echoes in the name, in the names, and it already echoes in the play.
It's the name of the plebeians immediately seise on of one of the conspirators, Cinner.
The poet haplessly attempts to escape by saying he's not some of the conspirators of sin of the poet,
but he's nevertheless set upon by the mob with cries of terror in tech.
And there's no sincerity in the FOLIA, which is the early, early text of Julius Caesar from sixteen twenty three.
But it's generally assumed that of the poet is murdered. So my question is why?
What's the purpose of this small detail and the detail which has almost always
been emitted from productions of the play before the middle of the 20th century?
So I'm thinking about the role of singer, the poet. I want to try to think about a number of related issues.
We might think about our formal structural internal to the architecture of the play and
also to try and think about the representation of the poet in Shakespeare's works.
It's hard it's hard not to be drawn to the idea that a poet figure coming on stage is some sort of self reflexive cameo of other kinds.
Let's try and see where we can get with that. But first, I want to try and think about structure.
Pretty much every commentary on Julius Caesar. Points out that Julius Caesar is a play named for a character who is killed in the middle.
Caesar appears in only five scenes of the play.
And although he continues as a ghost and as the abiding presence in the play is political imaginary,
the losers' references on vague references to Caesar in the language of the play right up to its final lines.
It's nevertheless true that this is a play where the climax is definitely, I think, in the middle.
We have a play organised around the build up to and then the aftermath of a climactic event.
So most of the other lectures I took about plays which are teleological, which have to get to the end.
And in some ways comedy is a very teleological genre. There's a point where we know we've just got to sort it all out.
Everybody's got to get married. Often comedies are quite so pragmatic about that and realise, OK, this is what's going to happen now.
So that's a kind of TV logical structure which says this is where we've got to get to.
It doesn't really quite matter what happens. It can in between.
But this is a play which I think is until you're logical. It's not the end that it's trying to get to the middle.
Now, that might seem quite obvious,
but maybe it's useful to see how different this is from the way Shakespeare structures a similar story type in other plays.
Shakespeare deals with regicide. Caesar isn't quite a king.
And in fact, the start of the play is about him refusing to become king, but nevertheless, the assassination of the political leader.
In some sense, the person who embodies the sense of the state doesn't.
That's a story type. Obviously, Shakespeare deals with a number of occasions.
Let's take two examples. One which comes before Julius Caesar and one afterwards.
So the one that's before let's get rich is the second.
So, Richard, the second two is about a play in which a powerful leader may be a too powerful leader, is toppled, is assassinated.
The image of the second Richard's own death comes right at the end of the play.
So there are two immediate effects of that on the play's politics.
Firstly, it constructs a narrative out of tragedy, a story which is structured around the life and death of one person.
It's a tragedy. We know that. And whether we feel sympathy with Richard or with his political nemesis, Bowling Brook,
the structure of that play is in the kind of mediaeval form of tragedy sometimes called dead.
Kazee was the fall of princes there catapults. So that's the first confessed effect of having Richard deferent in the play.
The second effect, though, is that there are no consequences of the regicide, even though Bolingbrook says or as now is king.
He says, you know, I feel terrible about this. And then to go to Jerusalem. I feel so guilty, really meaning to be killed.
This is so there's a sense of guilt, but it's too near the end of the play for us really to get anything, anything more than that.
So there are no immediate consequences.
All the things that were so terribly predicted about what would happen if Richard was killed don't come to pass within that play.
So, Judy, so politically, second language predates Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's writing career.
It's a play which is really all about the build up to the assassination of the leader.
This is all the build up. Let's take an alternative look at a play which comes after Julius Caesar, about the same thing.
My. My greatest play is all about the consequences of assassination.
Helpfully gives us the word assassination as well.
So it's about the unravelling of political and psychological integrity across the four acts which follow the murder became Duncan.
So in some ways, my friend isn't at all interested in in the build up or how to know how to do it or how to get on with it or why to try doing it.
It's all about the consequences and the aftermath. So it's the structural and the ethical opposite of Richard the second.
It's all about the punishment, psychological punishment, political punishment meted on my back for what he does.
In between these two versions saying we've got Julius Caesar balanced on the body of Caesar is a kind of plot fulcrum between build up and aftermath.
I related, I think, to these structural questions is the question of the antagonist or hero.
Both Richard the Second and Julius Caesar are named for the murdered ruler.
Macbeth takes its name from the assassin who can see something really important has changed about where where our interest is.
Are we interested in the person who is, you know, who is being killed or are we interested in the person who's going to kill them?
Mid 20th century critics were curiously preoccupied with the question of whether Julius Caesar ought more properly to be called.
The tragedy of Brutus is not a particularly interesting question, but they're very kind of they're very worried about it.
But it appears it does point to the fact that this is a play where we see Shakespeare's interest moving from the person who is being killed,
the Richard, the second figure to the person who is doing the killing, the Macbeth figure,
Brutus muses in soliloquy on the murder of Julius Caesar in certain ways, which very,
very clearly anticipates that fact alone in his orchard active scene one, Brutus famously begins his speech about Caesar's death with its conclusion.
It must be by its death. It must be by his death.
And he goes on to justify the killing, not with what Caesar has already done, but by what he might go on to do.
Therefore, think him as a serpent's egg which hatched would assess kind of mischievous and kill him in the shower.
What's hatching here, then, is not just the murder of Caesar, but the play Macbeth.
Like the later king murderer, Brutus cannot bring himself to name it Steed.
It must be by his death. It's directly Lifemark best if it were done.
One test done for while it were done quickly.
Both of them use a kind of a pronoun it in place of a noun which they which they can't themselves articulate.
And as Brutus puts it, since Cassius first equipped me against Caesar, I have not slept between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion.
All the interim is like a Fantasma or hideous dream.
That Sleepless Macbeth is already here in Shakespeare's sights.
Even Bruce's wife, Portia, aspires to be Lady Macbeth, but unfortunately she's trapped in a kind of history,
played rather by Hotspurs wife Kate in hand with the fourth.
That's to say she's not allowed to do anything.
So this is all to say that the very structure Julius Caesar confirms is ethical equivocation caught between a kind of tragedy of the day.
Kazee was the ruler who is brought down the Richard the second model,
and moving towards a more kind of psychological view of the assassin or that the person is doing something clearly wrong for Macbeth model.
And the play itself shifts like the Roman populace, away from a focus on the conspirators to a focus on their revengers,
the balance of dramatic power into the seeds of changes like the balance of political power.
No individual character rises to displace Caesar, the play's central focus.
So the question of the interpretation of Julius Caesar's assassination is already life.
It's already live in the reception of classical history at the end of the sixteenth century.
That question that's in the school mind was Brutus justified?
And the question is already subconsciously there in the minds of Julius Caesar as killers in the play.
So the play, that's to say, knows about its reception, even as it purports to be running through things in real time.
That's true of all of Shakespeare's history plays.
I think that they they both know that we know it's already happened even as they try and show us how it is happening for the first time.
In part, this is because the conspirators are engaged in the kind of primal scene of English classicism,
the murder of Julius Caesar, which is key to the accounts of Roman Empire.
It was so entirely foundational for the whole idea of Western culture and in part
the kind of wrestling with a very negative mediaeval history of reception when,
for example, Dante had placed Brutus at the very centre of how in his inferno, Brutus is that feeding with Satan,
along with Cassius and Judas, that the only people who were in this special most terrible places.
So we already know this story, that's to say. And the characters in the play.
No, it's to Caesar. Brutus and the rest are already subject to what the critic Linda Charm's is really interesting book called Notorious Identity,
a kind of overdetermined fame, the notorious Identity. Challenges talk in particular about Antony and Cleopatra,
about Troilus and Cressida and about Richard, the third easily develop what she's talking about.
Think in relation to Caesar and Brutus in Julius Caesar.
They themselves know that as they look on Caesar's bleeding corpse,
the assassins discuss how this act will look to the future, the very future in which it's been presented.
So this is Brutus Stewart, Roman Stupe and let us bhave our hands in Caesar's blood up to the elbows and besmirch our swords,
then walk we forth even to the marketplace and waving our red weapons over our heads.
Let's all cry. Preach peace, freedom and liberty.
Stoop man and wash, says Cassius. How many ages hence shall this our lofty ceiling be acted over in states unborn and accents.
Yet unknown.
How many times shall Caesar lead in sport to the interesting moment right at the time when the murder of Caesar is, as it were, actually happening.
We've got a strong sense that this is a reproduction of something which has already
happened and the act of murder is already understood as an interpretive act.
It's already a play. The stakes unborn and accents yet unknown are the England and the English in which the play is being performed.
Present and future are ironically collapsed as the bloodstained assassins pose for the camera of history.
Let us be sacrifices, not butchers. Brutus tells his fellow conspirators that be sacrifices, but not butchers.
The question of how to present and interpret the act is intrinsic to its planning and permission.
This is a piece of political theatre and Julius Caesar has always been a play about politics.
But the act within it are already acts of political theatre.
It's a series of soundbites, something already, always already staged.
And the play, I think, is deeply conscious of being a play. It is both the act and the representation of that act.
At the centre of Julius Caesar is a great rhetorical set, pieces is a thing everybody knows about the place.
Everybody talks about Marc Anthony speech over the body of Caesar.
Marc Anthony speech works to turn the play's allegiances decisively back to the heirs of Caesar.
And away from his assassins. But long before this moment, this pivotal moment right from the beginning of the play.
I think this is a work deeply conscious of how and events need to be interpreted.
It presents numerous examples of a distinctly interpretive conflict.
We might think of Renaissance paintings like Paul Banks, the ambassadors, which has a kind of anamorphic what's called an animal fic element to it.
You look at it from different perspectives and it looks different.
This is the anamorphic Renaissance painting might be a kind of visual metaphor for this play of perspectives.
Calpurnia screen in Julius Caesar is a striking example of this process.
Caesar reports that Calpurnia has had a terrible dream. She drank tonight.
She saw my statue, which, like a fountain with an hundreds spouts,
did wrong pure blood and many lusty Romans came smiling and did bathed their hands in it.
And these days she applied for warnings and portents and evils imminent and on her knees.
Half beg for the tide will stay at home. Today took up only the strength that these are statue runs with blood.
We all know, of course, that Caesar is going to be murdered. So when component companies dream is told us, when we kind of know it's true.
But we know that we also know that nothing can happen to stop this. So it's not going to be it's not going to affect what seems it does.
It has the curious quality of prophecy and retrospection at the same time.
So within the fiction, it's a prophecy within our reception. The fiction is a reactive retrospection.
But in Julius Caesar deck, yes, nimbly reinterprets the dream as a metaphor for this dream is all and misinterpreted, he says, comforting up.
It was a vision, fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes in which so many smiling Romans Bay signifies that from you.
Great Rome shall suck reviving blood and that great men shall press the tinctures, stain's relics and cognisance.
This by Carphone Calpurnia. His dream signified. So reinterpreting the bloody image is not real but symbolic.
Persuade Caesar that his shooting deed goes to the capital where of course he's going to
be turned into exactly that fountain of blood in which his murderers bait his hands.
So the plan is already established that the interpretation of acts and words is its most crucial theme.
That is, his language is all about kind of literary criticism. It's all a misinterpretation.
This is why Calpurnia dream is signified. This is the language of criticism being bit being deployed in the play itself.
The play that is established that the interpretation of acts and words is its most crucial theme, and further,
that it is very hard to distinguish the act itself from its interpretations when some way
in the territory of John Boatyards infamous contention that the Gulf War never took place.
What we saw was merely a standing, endless media simulacra behind which there was nothing at all.
Here in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare stages that very nothingness which is behind our interpretations,
sometimes refusing to give us access to the event itself, only to subsequent interpretations.
The play actually begins in this mode. Brutus and Cassius are talking about Caesar's tendency to tyranny and despotism.
This conversation is punctuated by off-stage, shouts and cheers.
Brutus and Cassius interpret these as the response when the people offer the crown to Caesar, which he keeps rejecting.
This doesn't reassure Brutus and Cassius about how ambitious he is, even though on the face of it, you would think he ought to.
He's offered the crown and he rejects it.
But since we don't seem to see for ourselves, we can't begin to judge whether this is simply politic on Caesar's part.
He rejects it while making it quite clear that really he wants it all genuine.
He does not want to became the dialectic between showing my meetings and telling.
Diageo says it's always intrinsic to theatre,
and therefore I think it is always worth looking quite closely at what Shakespeare decides not to show us.
There's something also about something which later cinema, I think is very clear about that.
When we're not shown something, we're kind of desperately wanting to see it.
He's close and insistent interpretive examples, what we might call the place hermeneutic consciousness.
I mean, we're already primed then for that great act of reinterpretation,
which is Marc Anthony, his famous friends, Romans and countrymen, speech in Act three.
Antony's skill is impart to persuade by introducing new information about Caesar.
He has left 75 drachmas to each Roman citizen in his will as well as his parks and villas by the Tiberg as a recreation ground.
We never know whether that's true, even though Anthony is waving about what the will is as a document.
There's no corroboration of that is tendentious. De Jesus.
Not my nieces. Of course I know.
And Shakespeare clearly knows that Digest's showing can always also be misleading.
It's not the case that not just the case that to be told something is therefore is to be suspicious of it,
but to be shown something is to have a kind of authentic relation to it. I guess that's what's going on with ocular proof in Othello.
But Marc Anthony is long seen a slowing down after the violence of the murder itself works to sketch out the incompatibility
of his evidence from Caesar's will about his generosity against the claimed group makes about Caesar's ambition all the time.
Ironically, emphasising Brutus is an honourable man.
Simple repetition of this phrase does some of the work of reinterpretation here.
Each time, Anthony says, Brutus is an honourable man.
It means something slightly different until it has gradually completed a 180 degree turn to mean quite the opposite.
So it's taken a while to get to the death of sin of the poet. Just as it takes the play a while.
But I think we may be now a little bit more ready to think about it.
The death of sin of the poet, that's to say, comes within the context of deeply contested interpretation.
It erupts as a short sequence of some 35 lines after Anthony is deliberately extended and dilated oratory of the previous long scenes I've ever seen,
which is about 300 lines making. So about 20 minutes, perhaps 25 minutes even, and then a scene of 35, 35 lines.
So just a few minutes. So it's a structural contrast in both ways.
It's about action without words or about the failure of language to effect action.
So sooner attempts to plead for his life but has no success at all.
So that's so far from the measured, extended eloquence by which Anthony persuades the same mob,
the same people, the same for business to be what he wants.
The immediate Panopto amount and its clever, elevated rhetoric seems therefore to be the barbarity of mob violence.
What Anthony was persuaded the Philippines to do by means of his rhetoric is to turn on the conspirators or people who by their names.
After the overdetermined death of Caesar, about which characters within the play.
And in that much more extensive cultural discourse have talked and interpreted so much.
So after all that, we get this bewildering and random death. But it's also a death which perhaps recaps what we have just seen in miniature.
In his short scene, sinner like Caesar or Calpurnia has a sinister and unsettling dream.
I drank tonight that I did feast with Caesar and things unluckily crushed my fantasy.
I have no will to wander forth of doors. Yet something leads me forth.
We've already had one of those kind of fated people coming out to meet their own death.
And sinner for some reason is somehow recapping that he too lives by the capital.
The plebeians tear him. They set on him as a pack just as the conspirators sat on Caesar.
So in some sense, this short sleeve is a recap or shortened version of what we've just been through, a kind of political echo or aftershock.
It would be fabulous to double Cinner, the poet with the Caesar ACDA, although I think it would be difficult to do.
Take a nifty editorial footwork, given that the body of Caesar has sort of passed in the corridor at the entrance of Cinner.
But thinking about doubling,
it's always a way to think theatrically about how localised or cameo character might be connected to and gain weight from other plots as well.
When the ghost of old Hamala plates 14 brass or the grave digger almost famously included in The Fool, a double layer.
Whenever we get a real echo in early modern plays, think perhaps about the Duchess of Malfi, for instance.
The purpose of the echo is usually to mock by repeating the ends of words or lines.
The echo disembody language sends it back kind of meaninglessly to its speaker and makes that speaker look foolish.
Turning the speaking subject into a kind of automaton. It may be that this visual echo in Julius Caesar serves something of the same purpose.
It mocks or undermines. There's a humour in this scene as well as or perhaps in conjunction with its abrupt or or absurd horror.
The plebeians fire a sequence of questions that Cinner. What is your name?
Where are you going? Why do you dwell? And then most random neval, perhaps.
Are you a married man or a bachelor? I'm sure every month, directly I am briefly eyeing wisely.
I am truly your best. The repetition here is clearly ridiculous.
So many questions. Not time for to answer. No gap for his answers to the questions.
He then answers the questions all in one speak, repeating them to answer every man directly and briefly.
So there's a kind of comedy or farce about the way the speeches unfold here.
Perhaps Marx's dictum on repeating history might work here.
Writing about the coup of Louis Napoleon in France in 1851, KOOCH, quite interestingly, is related to Julius Caesar.
It's codenamed Ruby County, which is part of Caesar's own moved to power.
But Marx cites Heikal as a brilliant subcultural kind of way.
Hegel remarked somewhat. But all the great wealth, historical facts and personages appear, so to speak.
Twice, he forgot to argue the first time as tragedy.
The second time, as far as Hegel remarked somewhere, that all the great world historic facts and personages appear, so to speak.
Twice, he forgot to add the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
So does Sydnor, the poet, represent the repetition as farce of the tragic Caesar?
Is the humour of this scene intended as a kind of relief after the extended stress?
What has gone before? What does it establish? The jesting savagery of mob rule?
Is it. That's to say a contrast with or a clarification of what has gone before?
Our Brutus and his co-conspirators more likely to look like sacrifices when they're compared to the butchers of Cinner?
Or are both acts of violence seem to be the same CINNER The poet's death is cued by the previous interpretive act as a symbol or a Maten,
and perhaps in military terms, the part for the whole some kind of snapshot of something larger than itself,
but is missing that analysis that elsewhere. The play carefully elaborates.
No one has time to interpret it. So it's left hanging. It's an emblem without its motto or a parable without the gloss.
Now, in large part,
the scene makes clear that it is because Cinner has the misfortune to share his name with one of the conspirators that he is killed.
The plebeians are perhaps unwittingly carrying out an act of dramatic hygiene.
It is not good for a player to have two characters with the same name.
Something similar happens at the end of a contemporaneous play with which Julius Caesar may seem to have almost nothing in common as you'd like it.
The dominant theme as you like it is the quarrel between brothers.
Maybe there is something similarly fraternal in the relationship between the as of Caesar Brutus and Mark Antony in as you like it, Oliver.
The bad brother and Orlando's a good one are prominent characters who we meet extensively in the play.
But early on there is mention of a third brother, Jake Kreis.
Now something has gone wrong here for the play already has an apparently entirely unrelated character who is already called Jake Rhys,
the melancholic courtier who is part of Duke seniors.
Robin Hood is caught in the forest when Jaquie is the brother of Orlando and Oliver finally enters at the end of the play.
It's a very funny momentary standoff between him and melancholic Jaquiss.
The messages that he's breaking, the rules, why does he come somewhere where there's already somebody who's got this name, one character,
one name, whether it's two characters with the same name, it's clear that one must see that in some way the structure of the play.
That's why Prince Harry's got to kill Hotspur at the end of end, the fourth one.
There just isn't room in the plan for another Henry. It's also why he's got to kill his father.
You've got to be the only Henry in the play. No names in Shakespeare are really interesting properties.
Often they're much more evident to us as readers of protection than they would be in the theatre.
My favourite example is out of Vialet in Twelfth Night. When we read the play, we absolutely know where she is because we're always reading her name.
In fact, in the play, her name is never spoken until she and Sebastian meet right at the end.
Nobody in the play and the play itself. It doesn't seem to know what her name is.
It's worth doing a search of the actual speeches in a play to see how emphatically a character is named in the play world.
Lots of people who play as we know what they're called, but the reason to during the purpose for their name,
in that in the actual story and they never mentioned by name five will announce if we do that search for the sinners in Julius Caesar.
There's obviously something going on about what sin sounds like. Not quite sure what that is.
But if you do a search for the sinners in Julius Caesar,
we can see there are eight references to sinner by name in the spoken words of the play before the second sinner enters into the frame.
So we're quite conscious that this is a name which has already been taken up in the fraternity as the conspirators.
In fact, this is a play in which names proper names are very, very emphatic.
It's part of the monumental lighting, already known quality, with which these great figures resonate,
that they often talk about themselves in the third person as if they are already their own reputations and legends.
Perhaps that idea of notorious identity. So sin in the poet thus emerges into onomatopoeic territory that is already occupied.
The plebeians work quickly to eradicate the USA. Perhaps they do their work too well.
Sydnor, the first then conspirator never reappears after this point either.
Perhaps, perhaps the two figures weren't so distinct. So it's his name then?
That's the headline reason for the attack on Cinner.
But the other reason that I want to just spend a bit of time before we finish is, of course, the fact that he's a poet.
Gary Taylor points out that of the two mentions of the death of Cinner in
North's translation of Plutarch's lives within a noble Grecians and Romanov's,
the source for Julius Caesar as it was.
We had a couple of weeks go for Coriolanus with only one of those two mentions, identifies him as a poet only in passing.
Look important to Plutarch that this murdered singer is a poet.
And in fact, it's more important to Plutarch that that singer is a friend of Caesar's.
Which we don't we don't get quite so strongly when Zinner says, I didn't I.
I could feast with Caesar here and Shakespeare's playing. That's because it's likely.
Because it's completely unlikely. It is somebody time don't doubt about.
With a famous person laugh last night.
So Shakespeare. That's to say. Brings out the poet ness of sinner and emphasises it.
He keeps saying I'm a sinner. The poet. I knew that I am sinner.
The poet. I'm sinner. The poet. One of the prevailing says take him for his bad verses, hat and face.
But first, this is another point which must be kind of funny, I think, in some way.
So Taylor suggests, therefore,
that it's significant that Shakespeare brings the poet to the fore in this scene of mindless cultural violence in Julius Caesar.
It seems as if the poet is innocent.
There is no suggestion that he himself has been involved in politics, just that he shares the name of somebody who has.
We don't know anything about what his poems are like, although the campaigns assume that they're not very good.
It does appear to be a poet is by definition to be a political.
To be a poet is to be the mistaken, mistaken target of mob violence in a scene where clearly he could not have been the real.
He comes with being the kind of person who they really are ready to go for if somehow, like vigilantes targeting paediatrician's playing to pieces,
putting the pieces scene of the poet, because perhaps one of the Renaissance is clearest pieces of iconography about poetry.
The myth of Orpheus Orpheus, the musician poet figure mentioned by Shakespeare on lots of occasions,
who was himself torn apart by a baying mobs and something about poets and being pulled to pieces, which maybe is important.
Perhaps we're supposed to think of Cinner as the ultimate scapegoat. The poet gets it, even though he's done nothing to deserve it.
So he becomes the figure who's more obviously identified usually with the central tragic
protagonist to figure out to whom social and to some extent ritualistically are projected.
But then the poet seems like the play's ultimate innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Caught up in events with which he has nothing to do. And how far, I wonder, should we see his vocation as poet a significant in that representation?
Now, poets in Shakespeare's plays tend to be objects of fun, mostly because that amateurs,
that people who turned to poetry usually badly and usually as a source of humour.
And that's particularly true in these plays around 50 99 with which I began, lovers in particular, are susceptible to become very bad poets.
When Orlando writes his lame poetry on the trees of the forest, Avadon in as you like it.
Touchstone bemoans the very false gallop verses.
And if that was lost in as you like it about what is poetry, what's good poetry touchdown in order to have a sort of rural rustic guide softs.
What's that thing called? Sydney's defensive poetry. Somehow they go through Obledo poetry, pretending and all that stuff.
So they have this. This is a discussion about what poetry is as a reference to Marleau.
So as you like, it is a play very kind of preoccupied with the idea of the poetic.
In Much Ado about Nothing.
A halting sonnet of his own pure brain fashion to Beatrice is the last nail in the coffin of Benedict's claims to be a perpetual bachelor.
It's triumphantly produced by the match makers at the end of the play in Henry the Fifth,
an extravagant and foppish French nobleman is characterised by his desire to write a sonnet to his horse.
So these are all kind of these are all stupid. How laughable attempts at poetry, amateur poetry by people who do something else, really?
What about the actual poet? The poet is vocation, master of sin, assassin.
A sinner doesn't. I write poetry? He says I'm a sinner. The poet we are against the conjunction of the lunatic,
the lover and the poet with which to Theseus Greeks the mechanicals play in Midsummer Night's Dream.
And maybe more promisingly,
a poet is amongst the parasites and hangers on who are looking for philanthropic patronage at time and at the beginning of time in Athens.
And I guess we get the rock. The so-called Leibel poet that one of the more overwrought, imaginary dramatis personae of the sonnets.
So again, searching a good online text like falta digital text.
Stop or throw up this broader context. Give you an idea.
Maybe it works. Look, look. Next, poets and poetry that are not heroic figures in Shakespeare's works are usually, I think, set up for ridicule,
even while the Sonics are explicit and other works are implicit about the power of poetry to move onto memorialised.
But poet figures must be in some way self reflexive.
It's hard to imagine putting the figure of a poet into a written,
dramatic poetry without using it as some kind of commentary, positive or negative, on writing or poetic identity.
How might this broader context help us think about why the victim of the mob is a poet?
If the role of the poet had ever been to be an innocent bystander on the political scene,
it was very hard in 15 nine to maintain that fiction of disengagement.
In my lifetime, as you like it, I talk about the fifteen ninety nine bishops ban.
The bishops found a new piece of Elizabethan legislation that imposed much more fierce and stringent
censorship on printed material and on printed material across some interesting categories.
On history plays and satires in particular,
the bishop finds a fascinating piece of legislation to think about how Licia works were conceived in this period.
So part of the bishop's banter about particular authors Nash, Thomas Nash and Gabriel Harvey's work was banned in toto.
So so the author figure there is the most important thing to be censored.
Particular works named works by satirists including Marston, Gilpin and Hall were were named and English history.
The genre, whether in print or performance, became a genre subject.
Critic Direk Privy Council control to the Bishop's barn, which results in a number of titles being publicly burned in London in June 15.
Ninety nine gives an interesting and much more fraught context for what poetry might do in the political world.
At the point when Shakespeare's writing, Julius Caesar would not only conjecture that the Bishop's band has an impact on Shakespeare's work.
The move to Roman history after a series of nine plays based on English history seems to be a direct response to the
increased surveillance of representations of the mediaeval English past and seems unusually for a Shakespeare play.
They have a pretty close idea of when Julius Caesar was performed. We know that it comes after the bishop's farm.
A Swiss tourist called Thomas Plata saw Julius Caesar at the newly built Globe Theatre towards the end of September 15, 99.
He has disappointingly little to say about it,
except that it was pleasingly performed and that at the end they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully,
according to their customs to in each group dressed in men's unto immunity parody.
What's interesting to remember that the apparently final solemnity as the victorious Mark
Antony and Octavius magnanimously arranged the funeral of the Nobilis Roman of the Moor Brutus,
they all just jump up and stop dancing a jig.
The point of Pather assessment is that really what I'm talking about now is that it puts the planned performance after the date of the bishop's ban,
which was in the early summer of fifty nine to nine.
So maybe then we should see this cameo of Sin of the Poet as some sort of gesture towards a new climate of poetic censorship.
The first casualty of the post Caesar regime in the play is a poet or poetry itself,
perhaps just as the play has reached its own poetic heights in the rhetoric overseas as fighting.
Poetry and politics are connected here. Even then, a sinner, the poet, disavows that connexion.
And although the ultimate fate of Rome is decided through military action,
Marc Anthony has already effectively won through rhetoric or through poetry.
Poetry is both the agent then and the victim of Roman political conflict.
So even though the Senate scene is so short, it seems burdened with trying to say something about the role of the poet in political life,
the poet as bystander is brought resistent me into politics.
And in case we missed it, the pope, the play has another go.
At this same suggestion, it has another poet, a figure called with a wonderful, unnecessary mess.
Another poet. If you look at the current list of any edition of the Oxford Edition bio, Arthur Humphries.
But any modern edition has another practical. Another poet. We've already had another sinner.
Now we have another poet. Something that's going a bit wrong in the second half of the play.
I think that's actually quite often the case in the second half of Shakespeare's plays, just as it all unravels Brutus and Cassius.
So it unravels a little bit. Shakespeare. We get two versions of Portia's death.
For instance, we get lots of these echoes of repetitions which arrive in mistakes or kind of ghostly repeats,
depending how you want to interpret them. Something about that repetition idea, though, that tragedy becomes farce.
Is unschooling. And inevitably, for what I've been talking about, one of those repetitions is this random poet poet interrupts Brutus and Cassius,
just at the point when they have reconciled their quarrel in at forcing two.
Unlike Cinner, this poet even shows off his vocation. It's wonderful couplet love and befriends as two such men should be, for I have seen more years,
I'm sure, than we have so many of the bad poems that were meant to see that.
But the bad is a bad poetry and the rhyming couplets stands out really in this play where there are no other couplets.
Cassius laughs that you file rhymes. The poet is banished from the stage.
It's even more random than the sin of the poet element.
What is this poet doing? How are you hanging around this old battle tanks of Brutus and Cassius?
And why does he just come to say something so, so pointless in the sources?
He's a philosopher. You can see the poets and philosophers have some relation.
But to take away the character of philosopher and put in poet instead,
I think somehow does something to emphasise the importance of the poet figure in this play.
So if this another poet is so impotent, why bother to put him there at all?
Poets keep pushing at the door of this play, it seems to me,
and that duplication must be saying something about the role of poetry in a political play.
The poets, like the play soothsayers, are marginal figures whose interventions are at once pointless and weighted with significance.
The role of the poet, then, is at once important and anticlimactic.
The two poets are implicated in and witnesses to political max machinations to which they are also constructed are strangers.
So the definition of a poet seems to me a cameo scene in Julius Caesar that we can best think about in terms of the structure of the whole play,
its rhythms, its echoes and its contrasts in a play which is self consciously about interpretation.
This scene figures a sort of interpretive void that it is important that we identify before or instead of rushing to fill it.
It's something not altogether positive, but insistent about the role of the poet in times of political upheaval that might have
resonated strongly in the immediate aftermath of the bishops banned censorship of 15 99.
Next week I'm going to talk about Love's Labour's Lost. I wish I had already wasted what now seems to be the overarching question for this play.
WTS, you wrote a script, but back in Winter's Tale, which now seems to have been out, the sad bit of a waste.
It would have been a perfect focus book. Love's Labour's Lost by going to try and talk. I think about loss.
What's lost in Love's Labour's Lost. Maybe you'll come back then.
Frankie.