Julius Caesar, fair and balanced

One of my favorite books to pick up and read random sections from is Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom. He means the title literally: "Our ideas as to what makes the self authentically human owe more to Shakespeare than ought to be possible." I don't know if I'd go that far, but no writer can deny the primacy of Shakespeare, and you ignore it at your peril.

In high school, everyone has to read Julius Caesar. It's a perfect introduction to Shakespeare: narratively it's a simple play, it has a speech second only to "To be or not to be..." in the public consciousness, and it features gang murder and ghosts. I remember reading it aloud in English class, and marveling at how the archaic-looking speech came to life when spoken. Then I got beat up for being a dweeb.

But Julius Caesar has a surprising timelessness. Consider the speeches of Brutus and Antony following the assassination of Caesar. Both face a crowd of panicky, easily-swayed citizens (described earlier as "you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things," almost as if they sat home every night watching The Hills and Dancing with the Stars) who demand an explanation.

Brutus speaks first. He is calm, rational, and he lays out the reasons for killing Caesar in a logical fashion. He appeals to the citizenry to judge his actions for themselves ("...censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses, that you may the better judge."). And then, in one of the dumbest moves ever (right up there with "Put on those gloves, O.J."), he lets Caesar's friend and acolyte Mark Antony address the crowd.



(Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in 1953's Julius Caesar)

Antony, in observing the chaos when Caesar's death is leaked, makes a key observation: "Passion, I see, is catching." In his famous speech, he turns the crowd entirely against Brutus by appealing to their emotions, by producing bogus documents ("But here's a parchment with the seal of Caesar; I found it in his closet, 'tis his will.") and of course by claiming he isn't trying to do exactly what he's doing ("Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up to such a sudden flood of mutiny."). The result is civil war.

Not to belabor the point, but Antony would fit right in with the calculating, maniacal voices on the Right screaming about socialism and Gomorrah with virtually no interest in actual facts; Brutus, while he does have the courage to get his own hands bloody, is as effective a public speaker as Al Gore on the campaign trail. And the Roman citizens, as already noted, are just as content to have their opinions handed to them as many of us are.

So what, ultimately, does the 400-year-old Julius Caesar tell us?

About ourselves: that in the war between passion and intellect, passion always wins.

About Shakespeare: that Harold Bloom just might be right.

Bloomin' Shakespeare, part 2

Man, did I hate Romeo and Juliet. We had to read it in high school, along with the perennial Julius Caesar. At least JC had brutal gang stabbings, political intrigue and ghosts. And true, R&J had swordfights. But they were swordfights by boys our age in tights. Believe me, in small town West Tennessee in the Seventies, no one openly admitted identifying with boys in tights. Plus Romeo, the twit, kills himself over a girlfriend. With our limited dating pool, neither we nor the girls in town could imagine getting that upset over someone. After all, we'd all known each other since before toilet training.

Flash forward about two decades. As a movie, I really dug Baz Luhrman's 1996 take on R&J. Not only was the setting brilliant, but the actors' intensity gave rise to the most surprising epiphany of all: about twenty minutes before the end, I found myself in suspense. That's right: I doubted the outcome of the single most famous love story in all creation. Happily, Baz didn't let me down, and even came up with a moment of eye contact between the two lovers that rammed the tragedy home in a vivid new way.

But the play itself...still hated it. Until, that is, I read Harold Bloom's treatise on it, and especially Juliet. In his take, greatly paraphrased here, Juliet is a simple young girl until she falls--totally, completely, and at first sight--for Romeo. When that happens, this shallow creature is transformed into a master of language and self-knowledge. Romeo, sincere schlub that he is, can barely keep up. It's a classical version of a Judd Apatow relationship, really, with the good-natured doofus landing the out-of-his-league hottie. Only in this case, doofusness and hotitude are determined verbally, not visually.

That's a broad generalization, I'll grant you, and scholars could probably rip it apart in moments. But I prefer to see it that way, and I wish someone would mount that production so I could see it that way. And I have Harold "My Way or the Highway" Bloom, master of all things Shakespearean, to thank for it.

Bloomin' Shakespeare, part 1

In the process of cleaning out my study for its current use as the boys' playroom (already the scene of an epic Nerf-sword battle between the Squirrel Boy and me), I came across Harold Bloom's ginormous Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. As only someone absolutely certain of himself could do, Bloom gives you the correct (i.e., his) interpretation of every single Shakespeare play, with specially large sections on Hamlet, King Lear and Henry IV (a.k.a. The Adventures of Falstaff). And in his case, the ego of such an undertaking seems backed up by some serious insights. Don't you hate it when that happens?



The ones that stuck with me the most enhanced my appreciation of both my favorite Shakespeare play (Antony and Cleopatra) and the one that always set my teeth on edge (Romeo and Juliet). I'll talk about A&C first.

Specifically, Bloom points out that Cleopatra is, in the vast emotional range she displays (tragic lover, mercurial friend, queen, spoiled brat, mature woman), the feminine equivalent of Hamlet and thus Shakespeare's greatest female role, the more so for being, in his opinion, virtually unplayable. I'm not sure if he means that no actress is capable of it, or that simply because it's a female role there can be no actress capable of it. Certainly it's never attained the universal status of the Denmarkian Dynamo; perhaps it's because we don't allow actresses the same prestige as actors? I mean, even people who've never seen it know Olivier was "the best Hamlet ever." But who recalls Kim Stanley, whose recent biography was called Female Brando in recognition of her enormous talent? Katherine Cornell played Cleopatra in what was probably the only successful American run of the play, back in the late 1940s; I can hear the voices now saying, "Katherine who?"

The late Charlton Heston often chastised fellow movie actors like Robert De Niro for not attempting the great roles on stage. He himself constantly returned to the "man-killer" stage parts like Macbeth throughout his career, a process he called "waltzing with the Old Gentleman." Are there no actresses who see the gold in a part like Cleo? I mean, in a world where Ethan Hawke can make a passable Hamlet, surely someone like Charlize Theron should make a run at Cleopatra.

There are several film and video versions of the play, including one directed by and starring Mr. Heston as Mark Antony. My favorite, though surely not the best, is this one for its absurdist casting. While Timothy Dalton and Lynn Redgrave make a perfectly adequate Antony and Cleopatra, it's in the supporting cast that the head-scratching begins. Star Trek alumni Nichelle Nichols as Charmain and Walter Koenig as Pompey? General Hospital heartthrob Anthony Geary as Caesar? It has to be seen.

Next post, how Bloom helped make me able to stomach Romeo and Juliet.