Transcript for Lecture on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

0. Introduction

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is one of the most important achievements by the greatest master of the English language about a world historic event concerning the most influential political leader in the West, and that alone makes it worth reading. But what makes this a must-read is two reasons.

First, it describes a collapsing Roman republic that has frightening similarities to contemporary America. The central question it asks is, can Rome be saved? Can liberty survive? And its answer will illuminate our political situation today. But just as it explores the grandest of questions of the political, the national, the world historic, it also wrestles with an incredibly intimate dimension of our lives that concern all of us.

The second reason to read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is that it explores the consequences of living life as if you were on a stage. What happens when you focus on appearance over reality? What happens when you drink your own Kool-Aid? What are the costs of taking those stories you tell yourself about yourself a bit too seriously?

This is the essence of this book, and it could not be more relevant for people in the 21st century who are constantly made to dramatize their lives. When we look for a job, we need to pretend we aren’t just looking for a job, but advancing in a long career with a purpose, with a direction, with a telos. When we apply to college today, we need to write an essay that dramatizes our life as if destined to culminate in that college. Social media is literally about projecting an ideal of who you are, not just to impress others, but also to prove something to yourself. This very lecture itself, like most digital content, is theatrical.

But what happens when you don’t treat it as theater? What happens when you fully commit to these narratives even when they become disjointed from reality?

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1. Rome and America

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar explores what it’s like to live theatrically. And to give you an idea of what this means, of what is at stake, of the terrible power and danger, let me tell you an incredible story about someone who’s clearly held captive by a narrative. And that’s John Wilkes Booth, who, as we all know, is Abraham Lincoln’s assassin. What you probably don’t know is how much Brutus, the protagonist of our play, who killed Caesar, was a role model for Booth.

Brutus’ conspiracy mediated Booth’s conspiracy. It gave him the language, the self-conception. It told Booth how to think about what he was doing. In the same way that Brutus tried to kill Caesar because he was worried about tyranny, destroying the Roman Republic, Booth thought that he was also killing a tyrant.

In a very strong sense, Booth was playing Brutus in his assassination of Lincoln. And I don’t just mean the location of where it happened, which is a theater. Booth was born into a leading theatrical family of the time. He himself was brought up as no other than a Shakespearean actor. Booth took part in playing Julius Caesar months before the assassination as Mark Antony. But afterwards, Booth said that his favorite role of all time was Shakespeare’s Brutus. And get this, John Wilkes Booth’s dad is called Junius Brutus Booth. It’s almost as if through his dad’s name and his own career that Booth was fated to become Brutus. And I think that’s quite poetic because Brutus also seemed fated to become who he was. Brutus was also playing someone else when he was assassinating Caesar. Brutus was playing his ancestor, Lucius Brutus, who drove out the King Tarquin at the end of the Roman Kingdom and then founded the Roman Republic. This is the tremendous power and danger that a name narrative has even after 2,000 years. And this is a theme that we’re going to come back to again and again in this lecture about how a narrative can overtake reality itself.

So that’s one poetic parallel between Rome and America. What I want to do now is I want to give you a systematic introduction to how these two civilizations are similar because I want to show you why it’s important to read this book today. More so than any other civilization, it was the Roman Republic that America’s founders looked up to when they were building this country. It was the Republican government. It was the checks and balances. It was the institutions, the laws. It was the authors, the orders, even the architecture of the governmental buildings. But the strongest connection must be the love of liberty and the aversion to monarchy. The Roman Republic defined itself through its founding event, Lucius Brutus, Brutus’ ancestor, chasing Tarquin out in the same way that America defines its identity by chasing out the British monarchy.

Now, given the similarity of these two nations, what was extremely alarming reading this book was seeing just how much of the decay that Shakespeare depicts in Rome is mirrored in America today. And there was one single line in Act I that you will not be able to unsee once you see it. So let me give you some context behind Act I. In the first scene of this play, we are treated to Caesar’s triumph in Rome. So a triumph is a Roman military parade that a general is awarded for a great victory. And so you would parade all the enemies you captured. You would parade the slaves. You would have murals and arts. You would bring exotic creatures. Caesar once brought 40 elephants parading them around the city. So this is one of the most prestigious and honorable things that could happen to a general so that you could show the entire city all of your achievements. And it was a true festivity. But there was something very odd about Caesar’s triumph. Usually, triumphs are only granted for victory against foreign enemies. But this particular triumph was granted for Caesar’s victory over Pompey’s sons in the recently concluded civil war. So this was granted for a civil war.

Now, for some historical context here, the events of this book, which describe the fall of the Republic, happened about 500 years after the founding. For the first 400 years, Rome’s division of powers, its constitutional balances, largely prevented any strongmen from wielding tyrannical power. But for the last 100 years, so 100 years leading up to this event, Rome suffered a series of civil wars that saw one strongman usurp the next and increasingly consolidated power. So it began with Marius, then it was Sulla, then it was Pompey, and now it’s Caesar. And the effect of this century of conflict is that even though the Republic stood in name, both its institutions and its values were on the verge of collapse. The love of liberty, the love of country, gave way to friendships and allegiances with individual strongmen. And you can see that in this very first scene, for the very fact that this triumph was granted for a civil war. In an age where Romans primarily thought about themselves as Romans, you can never do that because what a civil war is, you’re celebrating the killing of other Romans.

Okay, so that’s the historical context behind this scene. In this first scene, we are treated to the mob, the people watching the triumph, and the mob loves Caesar. They’re absolutely enamored with him. And this is that one line that reminded me so much of contemporary America.

CASCA.
If Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.

(William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

So this is commenting on the mob’s love of Caesar. And what it’s saying is that if Caesar stabbed their mothers, they would still love him. Who does that sound like? If Caesar stabbed their mothers, they would do no less. If I shot someone in Fifth Avenue, I would not lose any voters. Let me be crystal clear here. I don’t think it’s wrong as much as it is uninteresting to make this a critique about individual personalities because that line that Shakespeare wrote is more damning for Rome than it is for Caesar. If Trump is right, if he really can shoot someone and not lose voters, what is to be pitied is not Trump, but America.

Because what does it say about a republic if your top leader can stab people’s mothers and shoot people without losing any respect? What does it say about the integrity of its legal institutions when it will convict and declare its top leader a felon? And what does it say about the public support of such legal institutions when most people don’t seem to care, right? This recently happened in Trump’s conviction as a felon as well as when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and was declared a felon. Every scene we are shown of the Roman people in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is always a picture of degeneration. The people are fickle. They’re incapable of deliberation. They’re lacking any degree of judgment.

So what is necessary to support a free country is an independent and freedom-loving people. And it is clear that Rome had lost that by the time of this book, by the time of Caesar. Is this also where America is today? One can certainly point to many indications that it is, right? Liberty and freedom don’t seem to motivate the new generation as much. The founding fathers are being torn down left and right. Elites are becoming less patriotic and much more willing to leave. Politicization and division are on the rise. This late Republican period of crisis in Rome happened about 350 to 400 years in. America is about 250 years old. So will America fall like Rome? Does America need her own Caesar? Studying this book will give us clues to that question. So let us dive in.