Character Analysis

Octavius Cæsar NIEBUHR (iii, 87): Cæsar in his will had appointed C. Octavius, the grandson of his sister Julia, heir ex dodrante, that is, of three-fourths of his property, after the deduction of all legacies, and his other relatives were to have the remaining fourth. . . . Young C. Octavius was in his nineteenth year when Cæsar was murdered, having been born on the 23d of September, 689. Cæsar had taken an interest in him ever since his return from Spain; whereas before that time he does not appear to have taken any particular notice of him. . . . [He] had been adopted by Cæsar, which is the first instance of an adoption by will that I know in Roman history; afterwards such adoptions are very frequent. . . . If we compare Antony with Octavian, we must admit that Antony was open-hearted; whereas Octavian was made up of hypocrisy: his whole life was a farce. It is well known that on his death-bed at Nola he asked his friends whether he had not played the comedy of his life well? He was an actor throughout; everything he did was a farce, well devised and skilfully executed. The most profound hypocrisy was his greatest talent. In the vicious and profligate life of Antony, on the other hand, there occur some actions which shew good nature, generosity, and even greatness. TOLMAN (Introd., p. xxxviii): Probably, upon the Elizabethan stage, the same actor took the parts of Cæsar and Octavius, and thus gave outward expression to the spiritual connection of the two rôles. M. Antony HORN (i, 112): Antony is one of the most perfect portraits that the poet has drawn. His overflowing nature delights in combining the extremes of thought and action with dangerous abilities. He is rash and prudent, brave and sensual, he fears not death, but, a wastrel, seeks every sort of pleasure from quickly flying life. So long as Cæsar lived Antony is but seldom to be blamed--he feels towards Cæsar an absolute love; prefers to be subordinate to him, and is therewith become, so to speak, dependent upon him, a dependence which, however, causes him enjoyment; is it not the mighty Julius who loves him in return? He desires the crown for Cæsar that thus all friction may be avoided, and that, after Cæsar, he can have the highest position, he who seems rather to desire more of the pleasures of life than the highest place. Yet all these particulars are moved to the background as soon as Cæsar is no more. He has lost his only love, and is now in the highest degree dangerous. It is impossible for him to subordinate himself to anyone else; least of all to the conspirators, the greater part of whom he values slightly. Brutus alone he regards highly; but he does not love him, the high virtue of the man is uncomfortable to Antony; towards Cassius he has no feeling other than that expressed by Cæsar (1.2.217-219), but, at peace in those pleasant days, he endeavors to place even this thought to one side. It was repugnant to him to regard anyone as repugnant. But with Cæsar dead the thought returns and will not away. DOWDEN (p. 289): Antony is a man of genius without moral fibre; a nature of a rich, sensitive, pleasure-loving kind; the prey of good impulses and of bad; looking on life as a game in which he has a distinguished part to play, and playing that part with magnificent grace and skill. He is capable of personal devotion (though not of devotion to an idea), and has, indeed, a gift of subordination,--subordination to a Julius Cæsar, to a Cleopatra. And as he has enthusiasm about great personalities, so he has a contempt for inefficiency and ineptitude. Lepidus is to him 'a slight, unmeritable man meet to be sent on errands,' one that is to be talked of not as a person, but as a property. Antony possesses no constancy of self-esteem; he can drop quickly out of favour with himself; and being without reverence for his own type of character, and being endowed with a fine versatility of perception and feeling, he can admire qualities the most remote from his own. It is Antony who utters the eloge over the body of Brutus at Philippi. Antony is not without an æsthetic sense and imagination, though of a somewhat unspiritual kind: he does not judge men by a severe moral code, but he feels in an æsthetic way the grace, the splendour, the piteous interest of the actors in the exciting drama of life, or their impertinence, ineptitude and comicality; and he feels that the play is poorer by the loss of so noble a figure as that of a Brutus. But Brutus, over whom his ideals dominate, and who is blind to facts which are not in harmony with his theory of the universe, is quite unable to perceive the power for good or for evil that is lodged in Antony, and there is in the great figure of Antony nothing which can engage or interest his imagination; for Brutus' view of life is not imaginative, or pictorial, or dramatic, but wholly ethical. The fact that Antony abandons himself to pleasure, is 'gamesome,' reduces him in the eyes of Brutus to a very ordinary person,--one who is silly or stupid enough not to recognize the first principle of human conduct, the need of self-mastery; one against whom the laws of the world must fight, and who is, therefore, of no importance. And Brutus was right with respect to the ultimate issues for Antony. Sooner or later Antony must fall to ruin. But before the moral defect in Antony's nature destroyed his fortune much was to happen. Before Actium might come Philippi. MARSHALL (p. 87): Except in the great scene in the Forum, where his speech to the people is perhaps the finest piece of oratory to be found in all Shakespeare, Antony plays no very striking part in the drama. We see him aroused by a sudden ambition from his early career of dissipation, and taking a place in the Triumvirate; and it reminds us of Prince Hal's coming to himself, like the repentant prodigal, when he comes to the throne. But Antony is, morally at least, a slighter man than Henry. His reform lacks the sincerity and depth of the latter's, and he cannot hold the higher plane to which he has temporarily risen. His fall is to be depicted in a later and greater drama, of which he is the hero and not a subordinate actor as here. OECHELHAÜSER (Einführungen, etc., p. 227): Antonius should be represented as a young man, in his thirtieth year (historically he was thirty-seven years old at the time of Cæsar's assassination), as a man of the world, of noble bearing and handsome features and insinuating manner. In outward appearance he thus offers a contrast to Brutus, upon whose character and task the poet has imprinted that of a noble patriot, as an assassin, stamping the frivolous egoist as the avenger, both characters labouring under tasks in complete contrast to their original natures. Cicero FROUDE (p. 531): In Cicero Nature half-made a great man and left him uncompleted. Our characters are written in our forms, and the bust of Cicero is the key to his history. The brow is broad and strong, the nose large, the lips tightly compressed, the features lean and keen from restless intellectual energy. The loose, bending figure, the neck, too weak for the weight of the head, explain the infirmity of will, the passion, the cunning, the vanity, the absence of manliness and veracity. He was born into an age of violence with which he was too feeble to contend. J. M. BROWN (p. 67): The only character in the whole play that stands clear of its effects is the prosaic, conceited, lukewarm Cicero. He is the incarnation of the pedant and critic who is dissatisfied with most things and people, but will never follow others into remedying the evils or even lead himself. He is the type of the commonplace man who is ever trying to impress his neighbors with his learning and importance by uttering trite maxims that face both ways, and to seem wise by expressing himself in confidential and futile mystery or in a language not understood by those around him. Like all such busybodies, he is omniscient and cannot bear contradiction or even information. His 'ferret and fiery eyes' gleam out when he is crossed. Brutus will not have him told of the conspiracy, 'For he will never follow anything That other men begin.' At the great crisis in Roman affairs, when the crown was offered to Cæsar, he 'spoke Greek' in order to look wise and yet hide the nothing he had to say; and his following wagged their heads as if they understood it and ranged high above the unlettered crowd. Such a mind would scorn to be surprised at anything in this so commonplace world; he knows too much for even nature to astonish him. And thus in the portentous night before the assassination, when the coldly sceptical soul of Cassius is stirred to passion and defiance, and the prickly humour and cynicism of Casca is awed into superstition, he assumes the most superior indifference and will not commit himself; interpretation either way might be quite mistaken: all he will venture on is that 'it is a strange-disposed time' and that 'this disturbed sky is not to walk in,' remarks of the usual type about the weather. It is such 'men cautelous, old feeble carrions,' that along with 'priests and cowards' need oaths to spur them on to redress of wrongs. What other fate was there in revolutionary times for such a Mr Facing-both-ways, such a 'dish of skimmed milk' as Hotspur would have called him, but to vanish by an ignominious death in the proscriptions? Cassius PLUTARCH (Life of Brutus, § 22): Cassius would have done Brutus much honour, as Brutus did unto him, but Brutus most commonly prevented him, and went first unto him, both because he was the elder man as also for that he was sickly of body. And men reputed him commonly to be very skilful in wars, but otherwise marvellous choleric and cruel, who sought to rule men by fear rather than with lenity: and on the other side, he was too familiar with his friends, and would jest too broadly with them. GERVINUS (ii, 339): Shakespeare has scarcely created anything more splendid than the relation in which he has placed Cassius to Brutus. Closely as he has followed Plutarch, the poet has, by slight alterations, skilfully placed this character, even more than the historian has done, in the sharpest contrast to Brutus,--the clever, politic revolutionist, opposed to the man of noble soul and moral nature. Roman state-policy and a mode of reasoning peculiar to antiquity are displayed in every feature of this contrast of Cassius to Brutus, as well as in the delineation of the character itself; the nature and spirit of antiquity operated with exquisite freshness and readiness upon the unburdened brain of the poet, unfettered by the schools. . . . According to Plutarch, public opinion distinguished between Brutus and Cassius thus: that it was said that Brutus hated tyranny, Cassius, tyrants; yet, adds the historian, the latter was inspired with a universal hatred of tyranny also. Thus has Shakespeare represented him. His Cassius is imbued with a thorough love of freedom and equality; he groans under the prospect of a monarchical time more than the others; he does not bear this burden with thoughtful patience like Brutus, but his ingenious mind strives with natural opposition to throw it off; he seeks for men of the old time; the new, who are like timid sheep before the wolf, are in abhorrence to him. His principles of freedom are not crossed by moral maxims which might lead him astray in his political attempts; altogether a pure political character, he esteems nothing so highly as his country and its freedom and honour. These principles, if they were not rooted in the temperament, spirit, and character of Cassius, would at all events have been more powerfully supported by them than the same principles would have been by Brutus' more humane, more feeling nature. . . . Throughout with eagle-eye he sees the right means for attaining his ends, and would seize them undeterred by scruples of morality; less irreproachable as a man than Brutus, he is as a statesman far more excellent. Full of circumspection, he is full of suspicion of his adversary; he is very far from that too great confidence in a good cause which is the ruin of Brutus. He possesses the necessary acuteness of judgment and action available only in times of revolution; he knows that it is useless mixing in politics, far less in revolution, unless one is prepared to exchange the tender morality of domestic life for a ruder kind; he would treat tyranny according to its own baseness; he would carry on matters according to the utmost requirements of his own cause, but not with the utmost forbearance towards the enemy; he would not use unnecessary harshness, but he would omit none that was necessary; he would think just as ill of the tyrant as the tyrant would of his adversary; he would, as far as in him lay, turn against him his cunning, his cruelty, and his power; he would go with the flood at the right time, and not, like Brutus, when it was too late. The difference, therefore, between his nature and the character of Brutus comes out on every occasion: Brutus appears throughout just as humanely noble as Cassius is politically superior: each lacks what is best in the other, and the possession of which would make each perfect. GOLL (p. 43): Cassius, with his mixture of political hatred, with his power to let the one strengthen and excite the other, is the type of one of the groups of which the adherents of revolution consists, the great haters, those who, as Auguste Comte says about the followers of the great French Revolution, are perpetually in a condition of 'chronic rage,' which enables them, whenever they consider the right moment has come, to perform the most horrible actions-- the men of whom the anarchists of the present time are the lineal descendants. Casca STAPFER (p. 365): If it were not a somewhat hazardous conjecture when applied to the most impartial of dramatic poets, one would be inclined to suspect that the type of character to which Casca belongs was a peculiar favourite of Shakespeare's. In the first place, he is a humourist, he has a strong sense of the comedy of human life, and of the nothingness of this world. It is he that relates in a tone of transcendent mockery to Brutus and Cassius, who are not at all in a mood to laugh with him, the great event of the feast of Lupercal, and describes how Antony offered the crown to Cæsar. Brutus is shocked at his levity of tone, and when Casca leaves them he expresses his disapprobation with all the weighty injustice of a stern moralist, who takes everything seriously, and who, as a matter of course, is invariably wrong in his judgments of men. Cassius, who has no obtuseness of this sort, answers that what shocks Brutus in him is only put on, and that he may be safely counted on for any bold or noble enterprise. Casca, when enrolled amongst the conspirators, soon justifies this opinion of him, and is the one to strike the first blow. This mingled good-humour and practical energy, this strength and solidity of character underlying all his merry jests and laughter, cannot but represent not only one of Shakespeare's favourite types, but the special type of his predilection, if we admit, with his most learned commentators, that Henry V., in whom these characteristics are most strongly marked, was his ideal. Casca is, moreover, an aristocrat in true disdainful English fashion. He expresses the most elegant contempt, which is all the more cutting because he speaks without any bitterness and with a smile on his lips, for the folly of the crowd, and for their dirty hands and sweaty night-caps and stinking breath. . . . One last thing to be noticed concerning Casca is the wonderful effect that the prodigies foretelling the death of Cæsar have upon him; they work a complete revolution in his nature, and give a suddenly meditative turn to his usual airiness of tone; his irony is, in reality, only a thin and superficial covering, which falls at the first serious occasion and lets the true nature of the man be seen. OECHELHAÜSER (Einführungen, p. 222): The actor is to take account of a well-calculated hypocrisy in Casca. His loyalty to Cæsar is only assumed; to Brutus also, whose attitude towards Cæsar he does not wholly understand, he expresses himself guardedly, masking his true opinion of the important occurrence he describes under an affected indifference, concealing it by a rough, coarse humor. In such a fashion is the story of Cæsar's refusal of the offered crown to be delivered. His true character is revealed for the first time when he finds himself alone with Cassius during the dreadful night of storm and rain. His mode of expression suddenly changes to the normal tone of a serious man. Cassius happily makes use of this mood in order to enrol him among the conspirators. He is to become its most zealous member, and his hand the first to strike a mortal blow at Cæsar. With that his part is finished. Casca should be represented as somewhat younger than Brutus, whose schoolfriend he formerly was. A very expressive power of mimicry should be at his command, and this should be well taken into account in casting the part. MACCALLUM (p. 286): Plutarch has only two particulars about Casca, the one that he was the first to strike Cæsar and struck him from behind; the other that when Cæsar cried out and gripped his hand, he shouted to his brother in Greek. Shakespeare, as we have seen, summarily rejects his acquaintance with Greek, but the stab in the back sets his fancy to work, and he constructs for him a character and life-history to match. Casca is a man who shares with Cassius the jealousy of greatness--'the envious Casca,' Antony described him--but is vastly inferior to Cassius in consistency and manhood. He seems to be one of those alert, precocious natures, clever at the uptake in their youth, and full of a promise that is not always fulfilled: Brutus recalls that 'he was quick mettle when we went to school' (I, ii, 318). Such sprightly youngsters when they fail often do so from a certain lack of moral fibre. And so with Casca. He appears before us at first as the most obsequious henchman of Cæsar. When Cæsar calls for Calpurnia, Casca is at his elbow: 'Peace, ho! Cæsar speaks.' When Cæsar, hearing the soothsayer's shout, cries, 'Ha! who calls?' Casca is again ready: 'Bid every noise be still: peace yet again!' Cassius would never have condescended to that. For Casca resents the supremacy of Cæsar as much as the proudest aristocrat of them all: he is only waiting an opportunity to throw off the mask. But meanwhile in his angry bitterness with himself and others he affects a cross-grained bluntness of speech, 'puts on a tardy form,' as Cassius says, plays the satirist and misanthrope, as many others conscious of double dealing have done, and treats friend and foe with caustic brutality. But it is characteristic that he is panic stricken with the terrors of the tempestuous night, which he ekes out with superstitious fancies. It illustrates his want both of inward robustness and of enlightened culture. We remember that Cicero's remark in Greek was Greek to him, and that Greek was as much the language of rationalists then as was French of the eighteenth century Philosophes. Nor is it less characteristic that even at the assassination he apparently does not dare to face his victim. Antony describes his procedure: 'Damned Casca, like a cur, behind Struck Cæsar on the neck.' Yet even Casca is not without redeeming qualities. His humour, in the account he gives of the coronation fiasco, has an undeniable flavour: its very tartness, as Cassius says, is a 'sauce to his good wit.' And there is a touch of nobility in his avowal: You speak to Casca, and to such a man, That is no fleering tell-tale. Hold, my hand: Be factious for redress of all these griefs, And I will set this foot of mine as far, As who goes farthest. --1.3.127-131. Messala APPIAN (Bk IV, ch. vi, § 38) says of Messala: 'A young man of distinction [who] fled to Brutus. The triumvirs, fearing his high spirit, published the following edict: "Since the relatives of Messala have made it clear to us that he was not in the city when Gaius Cæsar was slain, let his name be removed from the list of the proscribed." He would not accept pardon, but, after Brutus and Cassius had fallen in Thrace, although there was a considerable army left, as well as ships and money, and strong hopes of success still existed, Messala would not accept the command when it was offered to him, but persuaded his associates to yield to overpowering fate and join forces with Antony. He became intimate with Antony and adhered to him until the latter became the slave of Cleopatra. Then he heaped reproaches upon him and joined himself to Octavius, who made him consul in place of Antony himself, when the latter was deposed and again voted a public enemy. After the battle of Actium, where he held a naval command against Antony, Octavius sent him as a general against the revolted Celts and awarded him a triumph for his victory over them.'--(Trans. WHITE, vol. ii, 318.) Artemidorus THEOBALD (Nichol's Lit. Illust., ii, 491): Who told our editors that Artemidorus was a soothsayer? They were thinking, I suppose, of his namesake, whose critique on Dreams we still have, but did not think that he did not live till the time of Antoninus. Our Poet's Artemidorus, who had been Cæsar's host in Cnidos, did not pretend to know anything of the conspiracy against Cæsar by prescience or prognostication: but he was the Cnidian sophist, who taught that science in Greek at Rome: by which means, being intimate with Brutus and those about him, he got so far into the secret as to be able to warn Cæsar of his danger. Calphurnia F. HORN (i, 129): We encounter in this tragedy two women, both alike in the absorbing love for their husbands, on which their characters are founded; and yet--what a difference do we notice in them! Calphurnia lives in Cæsar's life alone, and by night and day it is her joy; but her solicitude for him is, perhaps, at times obtrusive; she wishes to be his sole possessor, and, since he has already done too much, that he undertake nothing further; he must, in short, take care and reserve himself for her alone. She loves him not only as her husband, but almost as a mother loves her child, or as a tenderly domestic wife guards and nurses her helpmate, who, although intellectually greater than she, is still weak and sickly. By a number of portents she is deeply moved to solicitude for Cæsar's safety, and herein we wish to be more lenient than many English critics, who blame, almost harshly, the superstition of this well-meaning woman without remembering that she, poor creature, had not the advantages of their education. ROLFE (Poet Lore, vi, 12): No critic or commentator, I believe, has thought Calpurnia worthy of notice, but the reader may be reminded to compare carefully the scene between her and Cæsar with that between Portia and Brutus. . . . The difference in the two women is not more remarkable than that in their husbands' bearing and tone towards them. Portia, with mingled pride and affection, takes her stand upon her rights as a wife--'a woman that Lord Brutus took to wife'--and he feels the force of the appeal as a man of his noble and tender nature must. Calpurnia is a poor creature in comparison with this true daughter of Cato, as her first words to Cæsar sufficiently prove: 'Think you to walk forth? You shall not stir out of your house today.' When a wife takes that tone, we know what the reply will be: 'Cæsar shall forth!' Later, of course, she comes down to entreaty. Cæsar, with contemptuous acquiescence in the suggestion, yields for the moment to her weak importunities. When Decius comes in and urges Cæsar to go, the story of her dream and its forebodings is told him with a sneer (could we imagine Brutus speaking of Portia in that manner?), and her husband, falling a victim to the shrewd flattery of Decius, departs to his death with a parting fling at her foolish fears, by which he is ashamed of having been moved. Portia Mrs JAMESON (p. 330): Portia, as Shakespeare has truly felt and represented the character, is but a softened reflection of that of her husband Brutus; in him we see an excess of natural sensibility, an almost womanish tenderness of heart, repressed by the tenets of his austere philosophy: a stoic by profession and in reality the reverse--acting deeds against his nature by the strong force of principle and will. In Portia there is the same profound and passionate feeling, and all her sex's softness and timidity, held in check by that self-discipline, that stately dignity, which she thought became a woman 'so fathered and so husbanded.' The fact of her inflicting on herself a voluntary wound to try her own fortitude is perhaps the strongest proof of this disposition. Plutarch relates that on the day on which Cæsar was assassinated Portia was overcome with terror, and even swooned away, but did not in her emotion utter a word which could affect the conspirators. Shakespeare has rendered this circumstance literally [II, iv]. . . . There is another beautiful incident related by Plutarch which could not well be dramatised. When Brutus and Portia parted for the last time in the island of Nisida, she restrained all expression of grief that she might not shake his fortitude; but afterwards, in passing through a chamber in which there hung a picture of Hector and Andromache, she stopped, gazed upon it for a time with a settled sorrow, and at length burst into a passion of tears. OECHELHAÜSER (Einführungen, etc., i, 229): Portia herself mentions her 'once commended beauty'; therefore it would be quite proper to represent her in the present time as a handsome woman, about thirty years old. She is, although well built and intellectual, by no means a masculine woman; of tender nature (according to Plutarch she was sickly), her emotion in the scene with Lucius completely shattered her, and almost fainting she staggered home. In the fourth act we hear that she has killed herself; she could not bear the separation from her husband and the accounts of his illsuccess. --HUDSON (Life, Art, etc., ii, 238): The delineation of Portia is completed in a few, brief, masterly strokes. Once seen, the portrait ever after lives, an old and dear acquaintance of the reader's inner man. Like some women I have known, Portia has strength enough to do and to suffer for others, but very little for herself. As the daughter of Cato and wife of Brutus, she has set in her eye a pattern of how she ought to think and act, being 'so father'd and husbanded'; but still her head floats merged over the ears in her heart; and it is only when affection speaks that her spirit is hushed into the listening which she would fain yield only to the speech of reason. She has a clear idea of the stoical calmness and fortitude which appears so noble and so graceful in her Brutus; it all lies faithfully reproduced in her mind; she knows well how to honour and admire it; yet she cannot work it into the texture of her character; she can talk it like a book, but she tries in vain to live it. Portia gives herself that gash without flinching, and bears it without a murmur, as an exercise and proof of manly fortitude; and she translates her pains into smiles, all to comfort and support her husband. So long as this purpose lends her strength, she is fully equal to her thought, because here her heart keeps touch perfectly with her head. But, this motive gone, the weakness, if it be not rather the strength, of her woman's nature rushes full upon her; her feelings rise into an uncontrollable flutter, and run out at every joint and motion of her body; and nothing can arrest the inward mutiny till affection again whispers her into composure, lest she spill something that may hurt or endanger her Brutus. O noble Portia! STAPFER (p. 370): Portia as she appears in Plutarch is, I think, an even finer and more interesting character to study than she is in Shakespeare. The poet has undoubtedly enriched the historian's account with the more vivid life of the drama, and has given more force to her words, more distinctness to her actions, but he could add no further feature of any importance to her character. History furnishes a complete and finished portrait of Portia, to which poetry may give a warmer glow and richer colouring, but which in its essential lines it can never improve. It is only fair that this should be openly and clearly stated, that Plutarch may have the full credit of his victories in a most unequal combat, in which it would seem that his highest success could only consist in not being entirely beaten. But not only does the poet's rendering not surpass his model, but it seems to me to fall a little short of it, and to leave out some of its beauties, which apparently belong peculiarly to the form of narrative and refuse to be transplanted into dramatic regions. It requires all the wooden inflexibility of a systematic admiration not to regret the absence in Shakespeare's tragedy of the beautiful scene in which Brutus and Portia take leave of each other at Elea.