Rereading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

 Earlier this year I reread Julius Caesar, probably for the fourth time in forty years. I first encountered the play as an undergraduate, and I can trace something important in my life back to that reading: it led me to Shakespeare. I read Romeo and Juliet in high school but it did not resonate then. Reading Julius Caesar a decade later after seven years in the Army I was enchanted.

I knew almost nothing about Roman history then compared with what I know now. Today I can see everything Shakespeare changed. He compressed events, moved things around, invented conversations, and gave Mark Antony a funeral oration that Antony never delivered, nor could have. The real Anthony was much less cerebral, much more soldier.

None of that diminishes the play for me.

Antony's speech remains my favorite passage in Shakespeare. I have read it again and again, and I still marvel at what happens to those Roman citizens as Antony speaks. "Brutus is an honourable man" begins almost respectfully and gradually becomes devastating. Antony never tells the crowd what to think. He leads them there. It was probably my first great lesson in the power of rhetoric—and in what a writer can do with words.

And Julius Caesar opened the door.

Over the next forty years I kept walking through it. I read the histories, tragedies, comedies, and sonnets. I found Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, hardly original choices for favorites, but I don't feel any need to be original about Shakespeare. They are loved because they deserve to be loved.

What has changed is me.

I read Lear differently five years ago than I could have at thirty. An old man raging against the loss of power, the betrayal of children, the deterioration of the body, and finally death meant one thing when I was an undergraduate. It means something else after four more decades of living. The words haven't changed. I have.

That may be one reason Shakespeare has stayed with me. His characters don't become smaller as I grow older. They become larger. Macbeth's ambition, Hamlet's inner conflict, Lear's terrible pride and grief, Brutus's disastrous idealism—I understand more of them because life has given me more with which to understand them.

Next on my list Julius Caesar is Richard III. For all his flaws, he is a soldier.

There are writers I have admired and writers I have loved. Shakespeare is something beyond either category. He has been part of my reading life for more than forty years.

I began with Julius Caesar as an undergraduate.

I'm still reading him.

And I'm still enchanted.

Sonnets by William Shakespeare

Last year I read C.S. Lewis' English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama and decided to re-read the Sonnets. In his history of 16th Century literature, Lewis says Shakespeare's Sonnets are the best sonnets ever and among the best poetry of a century that ended with great English poetry. 

This time I read every sonnet aloud. It meant I would read a few sonnets and put the book down for a week. Last week I finished re-reading.  The best of the sonnets are wonderful, but they are not all great. In the last twenty, I found none worth remembering.  

Here are some I liked best. If you have read them all you will certainly have a different list, but the best are so good I fully agreed with Lewis by the end of the book. 

The sonnet most familiar, certainly in the English-speaking world, is 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

And Sonnet 29, the last two lines are a brilliant end to the first ten:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Sonnet 55:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

Sonnet 24, love as art:

Mine eye hath play’d the painter and hath stell’d
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,
And perspective it is the painter’s art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies;
Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

Sonnet 1 is a beautiful beginning:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

Ban Shakespeare!!

Open Culture published a funny Infographic about the way people die in Shakespeare's plays.

I shared the image on my facebook page.  A soldier I know who is against any regulation of guns made the comment "Ban Shakespeare."  

When I read the comment, I knew he was trying to be funny, but he is also part of the culture that is slowly wringing the life out arguably the greatest author ever.

Part of his belief that everyone should have guns comes from his belief that he needs to defend his family and himself from invaders, thieves and dangers that lurk everywhere.  

The chart carefully tabulates the means of every death in Shakespeare, but does not measure the how close the dead person is to his or her murderer.  When you summarize Shakespeare that way, nearly al the deaths are by friends, neighbors, family or coworkers--if I can call members of the kings court coworkers.

And then you get to the terrible irony of many gun deaths in America.  The huge number of guns means that accidents will happen in proportion to the number of guns.

My Army friend conceded that neither he nor any member of his rural Pennsylvania family has ever been threatened with bodily harm by anyone.  So many of the gun owners I know who claim self defense is the reason they have guns cannot point to any incident of threat to themselves or their family.

Many, sadly, know of someone who was accidentally shot by their own gun or by a family member.

My Army friend is nearly my age so he has read Shakespeare.  It was in high school, but he could vaguely remember "Romeo and Juliet" and possibly "Julius Caesar."  His most recent contact with The Bard was watching "Hamlet" the movie starring Mel Gibson.  Don't sneer.  Hamlet is an alienated loner who sees things in the night and is crazy.  Gibson is perfect for the role.

But my Army friend has not read Shakespeare or any other creative fiction in 40 years.  His life is Guns and Prose.  He wants to restore the Constitution and roll back all kinds of rights that do not apply to white males.  And he is defending his family from a threat that has never happened.

He doesn't have to do anything to Ban Shakespeare.  His whole life has made the greatest writer in English, maybe the greatest in world, just a marginal thing for elitists.