Julius Caesar: The Wisdom of Shakespeare

(1995-2005)

Author’s Preface

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a powerful and challenging play based on a famous episode in history concerning a famous man, and written by a world-famous author. This alone is sufficient to give it a great name. But there are other reasons too, one of which is that the play would seem to have been composed partly for the purpose of opening the newly built Globe Theatre in London on Midsummer’s Day 1599. This book, a commentary on the play, is written to commemorate the 400th anniversary of that occasion, as a complement to the first production of Julius Caesar at the new Shakespeare Globe Theatre on Bankside which is being staged to celebrate that anniversary.

The play is a vehicle for esoteric wisdom teachings, incorporating important elements from the great Mystery traditions, especially Freemasonry. It is a tragedy, and it deals with the prime tragedy enacted in Freemasonry in the Craft’s third degree of initiation. It also makes a pointed and deliberate analogy with the Christian story concerning the murder of Jesus. It is a story which is just as relevant today, both individually and on the world stage, and poses major questions that we need to be able to answer satisfactorily.

This book is written to provide an insight into these matters, so that the wisdom and philosophy of Shakespeare may be more easily grasped and the play more richly enjoyed.

For the plan of the book, I begin with a sketch of the play’s background history, which for this play is immensely important. It sets the drama in the context of its time and helps to show why it may have been written. This is followed by a chapter outlining the actual history upon which the play is based, so that the story of the play may be better understood and comparisons may be made between the actual history and the dramatic inventions of Shakespeare. The third chapter summarises the story of the play, scene by scene. This is for the benefit of the reader who might not know the play very well, but also for others, as it picks out the key points of the story which will be discussed in the book.

After laying down this foundation, the fourth chapter takes a look at the basic plots and themes which underlie the main story, whilst the remaining chapters are designed to take you, the reader, ever deeper into the hidden stories and meanings of the play. Chapter six, for instance, focuses on the importance of time and the festivals that form such a key part of the drama; whilst chapter seven deals with the alchemical and initiatic cycles embodied in the play as its underlying structure, together with their ‘power points’. Chapter eight looks specifically at the Freemasonic aspect of the play, and the final chapter gives hints at what more there is to be found in this play and in ‘Shakespeare’ generally.

I have used both the second and third Arden editions of Julius Caesar when quoting from the play, which I recommend both for their text and their notes. As with the other books in this Wisdom of Shakespeare series, I have placed all references to the text of the play in brackets in the main text of the book, to make it easier to look up the passages in question as you read this book, whilst all other references are added as endnotes printed at the end of the book. Many of the references are to books which I have used for research or to quote from, and can be used as a short bibliography.

I hope you enjoy reading this book and that it proves helpful to you. Shakespeare is one of the great masters of our time—‘our’ time because his poetic and dramatic works are, like those of Homer, embued with a wisdom, relevance and interest that stretches over centuries, perhaps millennia. He dramatises human behaviour and opens doors to the mysteries of life so that we might see and understand more clearly, yet at the same time he remains an enigma. I hope that this book will help you to discover a little more about Shakespeare as well as about his play, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.

P.D. (March 1999)

1. Background

Shakespeare’s great Roman play, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, is a powerful drama based upon the pivotal event in the history of classical Rome—the assassination of the Roman dictator, Julius Caesar, in 44 BC, and the subsequent civil war that took place which ended the Roman Republic as such and led directly to the installation of the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar. The play was first printed in the 1623 Shakespeare 1st Folio of Comedies, Histories & Tragedies under the title of The Tragedie of Iulius Caesar, but referred to in the Folio’s Catalogue as The Life and death of Julius Cæsar. There is no record of the play existing in print before then.

Julius Caesar was most probably written in the first half of 1599. Certainly it was unlikely to have been composed before the Autumn of 1598, since it does not appear in Francis Mere’s famous list of Shakespeare plays which Meres gives in his Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury, registered on the 7th September 1598 and published shortly after. In fact, Julius Caesar appears to have been written in the same period as the writing of Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing—the sequence and dates of composition possibly being Much Ado About Nothing (Winter 1598), Henry V (Spring 1599) and Julius Caesar (early Summer 1599), to be followed soon after by As You Like it. All these plays refer, in oblique ways, to the newly opened Globe Theatre, in which they would have been performed by Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

In addition, both Henry V and Julius Caesar have political overtones relating to the military expedition into Ireland led by the Earl of Essex. When Essex left London on the 27th March 1599, with a royal commission to crush the rebellion led by the Irish leader, the Earl of Tyrone, his public popularity was still running high. He had been for many years the darling of the Queen and a good many of her subjects, all of whom entertained high hopes of his performance. As the deputy of the sovereign, he could indeed, on Elizabeth’s behalf, be likened in their dreams to a victorious Henry V. Such a play, therefore, could well have been used as a statement of people’s hopes, including the Queen’s, as also to help gain the necessary support and taxes for such a costly venture. In the Prologue to the last act of Henry V, for instance, King Henry is compared to Caesar, and both are likened to the Earl of Essex:

…But now behold,

In the quick forge and working-house of thought,

How London doth pour out her citizens!

The mayor and all his brethren in best sort –

Like to the senators of th’antique Rome,

With the plebeians swarming at their heels –

Go forth and fetch their conqu’ring Caesar in:

As, by a lower but by loving likelihood,

Were now the general of our gracious empress,

As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,

Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,

How many would the peaceful city quit

To welcome him!…²

At the same time, however, such an analogy had dangerous overtones and could conjure up the ghost of Shakespeare’s earlier play, Richard II, which in 1597 caused such agitation to the Queen, who was being likened to King Richard by certain of her courtiers who followed Essex, whilst Essex was being likened to Henry Bolingbroke who deposed and murdered Richard, supposedly for the good of the country. In February 1599, just before Essex left for Ireland, a book referring specifically to the deposition of Richard II (and which seemingly derived much of its textual material from Shakespeare’s play), The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, was published. It was written by a young doctor of civil law, John Hayward, who dedicated the book to Essex, associating the Earl with the popular usurper Henry Bolingbroke and seeming to hint that Essex should do as Bolingbroke did. The Queen was incensed by this book. Its second edition was suppressed and the author was arrested on a charge of treason.

Hayward’s book appeared just at the time when Essex had successfully pressured the Queen into appointing him as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and commander-in-chief of the expeditionary forces to Ireland, heading the largest army ever sent abroad in Elizabeth’s reign. Essex obtained this position despite counsel given to both him and the Queen by their respective advisers that this was unwise. He had already been made the Queen’s Earl Marshal in 1597, having gained a great military success in the summer of 1596 when he was General-in-Chief of the expeditionary force which raided the Spanish coast, sacked Cadiz and frustrated Philip II’s attempts to fit out a second Armada against England. There were those who suspected that Essex’s motives were questionable and his position dangerous, and that even if he was not already secretly plotting to raise a rebellion against the Queen he might be seduced into doing so—a suspicion that indeed was later to be proved correct. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar could thus be seen as a vivid reminder, from those who either suspected or knew the truth, of what such deeds might lead to, or indeed as a timely warning to the ageing and increasingly despotic Queen who, like Caesar, had finally presented herself as immortal. It could also be seen in the nature of a warning to Essex, lest he become a Brutus. There is also a fourth possibility, which I discuss in Chapter 6, ‘Time and Sovereignty’.

Essex returned unexpectedly and without permission from Ireland six months after his departure, on the 28th September 1599, completely dashing the high hopes presented in Henry V. His expedition was a complete failure from the point of view of what he was charged with doing. He had disobeyed orders, wandered aimlessly over Ireland, lost twelve thousand men, squandered the huge and unprecedented sum of £300,000, and carried out secret discussions at a highly irregular one-to-one private meeting with Tyrone. The Queen had Essex confined to his room in disgrace, followed by giving him a public admonition in the Star Chamber on the 29th November. Telling evidence of his insubordination and disloyalty was gathered, and the following Summer, on the 5th June 1600, Essex was given a private trial in Essex House before the High Court judges, as a result of which Essex threw himself on the Queen’s