Overview Act III
Bill Long
Themes and Scope
The dominant issue of Act III is the murder (or sacrifice, if Brutus's interpration carries the day) of Caesar. Occurring as it does only halfway through the play, Caesar's death and its aftermath nevertheless dominate the rest of Act III and, arguably, the remainder of the play. But Act III pullulates with other themes, I shall further illustrate in more specific mini-essays.
3.1. Caesar's Death. A. Caesar's graciousness and insufferability alternate, with the latter winning the day. He will not pay attention to Artemidorus' plea that "touches Caesar nearer" (he knows the realities of the conspiracy) because "What touches us ourself shall be last serv'd (3.1.7-8)." A nice touch of selflessness. But then the images of arrogance predominate, culminating in Caesar's rebuke to the kneeling Cinna, "Hence! wilt thou lift up Olympus (3.2.74)?" B. After the murder of Caesar, the conspirators make peace with Antony in a scene rife with deception, prevarication and misjudgment. Blood drips not only from Caesar's lifeless body but from the hands of the conspirators, and Antony even says, "Let each man render me his bloody hand (3.1.184)." C. Finally, when Antony is alone, he reveals his true colors and predicts a war so dreadful that "mothers shall but smile when they behold/ Their infants quartered with the hands of war (3.1.268)."
3.2. Funeral Orations. A. But the death of Caesar isn't complete until an interpretation is put on it. The tumult of 3.1 is quieted in 3.2 as the people patiently gather to hear Brutus, and then Antony, speak and give reasons for the death. One of Brutus's major misjudgments in the play (2.1) was to permit Antony to live; now he compounds that error by giving Antony the chance to speak at the funeral. He errs further by letting Antony go second, thus giving him the final interpretive moment. Finally, he errs by leaving not just the podium but also the scene itself when Antony speaks. The chaos that Antony wants to set loose at the end of the scene (3.2.260-261) has, as it were, already been unleashed through Brutus's repeated blunders.
There is also a great contrast between Brutus's and Antony's addresses. Brutus's speech is neither an appeal to the reason or the emotion but rather a statement of his own honor. He simply cannot get over how honorable he feels he is. His basic point to the crowd is that he is honorable and wouldn't have done anything less than honorable. Anyone who disagrees with him would rather be a slave.
The crowd is temporarily awed. To highlight the crowd's fickleness (already evident in 1.1), Shakespeare has one of them shout out that Brutus should become "Caesar" and have a "triumph," two signs of incipient kingship.
B. Antony's speech is pure emotion and is one of the more powerful displays of oratory in Shakespeare. Memorable themes in it are the repeated references to Brutus as an "honorable man" (with contrary evidence given in between the choric references to Brutus's honor) and the visual and tactile character of the speech. Antony descends from the rostrum to hold the garment that Caesar was wearing when he was slain. He names each of the tears in the robe and personifies Caesar's blood escaping from him as a worried householder "rushing out of doors" to see if "Brutus so unkindly knock'd or no (3.2.179-180)." Then, at the end, he reveals the contents of Caesar's will to the people, showing them that he was not a tyrant at all, but a true democrat, because he wanted to share the largess of his estate with the people as well as to turn his abundant orchards and estate into a public park. By the end of this magnificent speech, Brutus and the conspirators are completely discredited.
3.3. At the end of 3.2. Antony prays for "mischief" to descend on the scene and for Rome to be reduced to confusion (3.2.260-261). 3.3 gives a sad indication of that mischief. The poet Cinna is confronted by crazed citizens. He and a conspirator share the same name and he tells the people he is not the conspirator, but they rend him limb from limb nevertheless. Why? Because of his "bad verses (3.3.31)." Order has given way to murderous chaos. We can possibly hear in this a very dim echo of Euripides Bacchae, where a crazed mother, under the influence of the divinity, ends up murdering her son. The murder of Caesar will not be the last instance in human history where a country thought it was deposing a tyrant only to have that same country descend into civil war after the tyrant's deposition.
Copyright © 2004-2007 William R. Long |