Portia's Complaint
Bill Long
Sickness and Health
After Brutus has thrown his lot in with the conspirators during the middle-of-the-night meeting, he is surprised to find his wife up and about. Though the 70 lines from 2.1.235-305 refer over and over again to sickness and health, they are really Portia's plea to Brutus to tell her his secret. Rather than seeing this section as the bothersome interruption of an overly officious wife, I see it as indicating how Brutus cuts off the one source into his inner life and secrets that might have been able to lend some sense to the situation at hand. Silencing Portia is tantamount to attempting to silence the insurrectionary voices (2.1.69) within Brutus' heart. Her cry to him to reveal himself to her is thus not simply the complaint of one who wants information; it is a breach that can (and does) have immense societal consequences.
"Stealing" from my Bed
Portia expresses her complaint with a wonderfully double-edged word. "Y' have ungently, Brutus,/ Stole from my bed (2.1.237-238)." Brutus "stole" from the bed, in the first instance, by leaving it in the middle of the night. He "suddenly arose" and "walk'd about." He was "musing and sighing" with "arms across." He "star'd" and "scratch'd" and "stamp'd" and with "angry wafter" of his hand and gave signs for her to leave. But he "stole" from her in a more significant way. He "stole" intimacy. By leaving the bed in the middle of the night, he did not and could not utter the words that lovers whisper only to each other--about their fears, their hopes, their unresolved tensions. That this is precisely the thing on Portia's mind is evident from her final words in her opening lines, "Dear my lord,/ Make me acquainted with your cause of grief (2.1.255-256)."
Brutus's Sickness
Brutus puts her off. He deflects her concern as he tried to deflect Cassius' "mirror" in 1.2. The problem, Brutus says, is simple: "I am not well in heath, and that is all (2.1.257)." For the next ten lines Portia then picks up on language of contagion to call that statement into doubt. In fact, she concludes, "No, my Brutus,/ You have some sick offense within your mind... (2.1.267-268)."
Portia's virtue, and her undoing, is that she doesn't give up. She wants to know what stalks her husband's mind while he stalks the halls of his estate in the middle of the night. It is her "right" and "virtue" to know what is on his mind. She ties her right to their "vows of love, and that great vow/ Which did incorporate and make us one (2.1.272-273)." It is as if Brutus's secret bends him double; thus she asks him to "unfold" to her "why you are so heavy." She is not only his wife but she is "yourself, your half". She is not someone that is his, "as it were, in sort or limitation."
But this is not the Delilah-esque request of a woman who wants to whisper his secrets to the enemy so that she can in delight cry out, "The Philistines are upon you, Samson." She wants to know because she knows she is a strong woman (her self-inflicted wound demonstrates this--2.1.300); she is Cato's daughter; she is stronger than her sex. Can she bear her wounds in silence and not bear his secrets?
Portia's Reasons
Shakespeare never has Portia give reasons for wanting to know Brutus' secret other than that she is his wife and ought to share his most intimate thoughts. I would like to suggest, however, that the cost of Brutus's not sharing his thoughts with his wife is that he thereby cuts off another avenue of knowledge into his inner self, thus forcing him to rely on his mind and his judgment. The former, as we have seen, is easily deceived and the latter is poorly exercised. Brutus's earlier denial that he has an interior life is now complemented by restricting his wife's access into whatever secrets his heart harbors. By not sharing his inmost thoughts, Brutus destroys two people (himself and Portia) even before he destabilizes and destroys the Republic. The cost of avoiding the inner tugs of the heart is immense indeed.