Mark Rose. “Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599.

”
Woodbridge, Linda, and Edward Berry, eds. True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and
Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992.

Question of clerical authority: did it come from above (the crown) or below
(congregation)? Anglican clergy maintained the importance of episcopal ordination
and thus the principle of the monarch as final reservoir of power. The reformers
insisted that authority derived from the inward call of the spirit confirmed by the
outward call of the congregation. The prescribed role of the Roman tribunes of the
people was as spokesmen and defenders of plebeian rights. Shakespeare conceived of
an analogy between the ancient tribunes and the Puritan preachers of his day.
The language of the opening scene glances at the controversies over garments and
the use of images. The term “ceremony” was a word of extraordinary emotive power;
again and again the Puritans condemned the “superstitious” and “filthie” ceremonies
that kept them “tied to popish religion.” The Anglican establishment insisted on their
retention. Puritans were offended by the keeping of holidays not specified in the Bible.
The tribunes’ dismissive attitude towards the Feast of Lupercal may have sounded
Puritanical to Shakespeare’s audience, when the reformers were refusing to stop work
to celebrate such feasts as saints’ days. [By the 1590s the opposition to holiday had
become official puritan doctrine, and many Puritans were regularly penalized for
insisting on working on saints’ days.] The confrontations between Puritans and
Anglicans were fundamental. The discarding of the symbols of religious order might
lead, as many understood, to the questioning of other images of social authority like the
crown. No bishop, no king

The opposition between Puritanical anti-ritualism and a more conservative belief in

the efficacy of ceremony is at work throughout Julius Caesar. Caesar is concerned about
ceremonies in his first appearance. The anti-Caesar parties, both tribunes and bitter
republicans, oppose ritual. But Brutus, whom the play carefully distinguishes from the
other opponents of Caesar, is no enemy to ceremony as such; he comes to the
conclusion that Caesar must die precisely because he does believe in the power of
ritual. Anachronistic assumptions about the significance of the coronation ceremony are
present in his soliloquy in his orchard. For Plutarch Caesar is already a king de facto.
but Brutus, thinking more like an English subject than a Roman citizen, attaches great
importance to the actual crowning (2.1.12-13). Crown Caesar and he will be beyond
reprisal. The ritual itself is what must be prevented. The conspiracy, in Brutus’s hands,
is carried out conspicuously like a ceremony: one by one the conspirators kneel, and
one by one they stab Caesar. Brutus insists before the even that the assassination must
be conducted as a sacrifice. His speech, “Let’s be sacrificers, but not butchers” (2.1.166-
80), evokes both ritual slaughter and the notion of urging or bleeding a sick
commonwealth in a medicinal act that he conceives as a kind of exorcism of Caesar’s
spirit. Is Brutus an exorcist or a conjurer, Rome’s doctor or the means by which the
spirit of Caesar is permanently established in the state?
The action of the play is an attempt at exorcism that turns into a conjuration, two
rituals that are dangerously alike: each involves the demonstration of power over
spirits. [Exorcism, associated with t he enemies of the Elizabethan establishment, was
much in the news in the 1590s in conjunction with John Darrell, the famous Puritan
exorcist whom the authorities put on trial for fraud.]

The play treats Brutus’s attempt to ritualize and purify the assassination with
scornful irony, like Cassius’s sceptical vein or like Antony, who regards the
assassination as the butchery that Brutus tries to avoid. Though Antony, the cynical
exploiter of the plebeians, is disenchanted, the world of the play, with its ghost, its
soothsayer, its prophetic dreams and supernatural prodigies, is fundamentally
mysterious. The portents that prefigure the assassination are not daggers of the mind.
By the play’s end even Cassius has lost some of his enlightened skepticism and come to
grant some credit to omens.
The Elizabethan stage was filled with supernatural beings: witches, faeries,
conjurers, ghosts and others. Purged from the Church by the new enlightenment of the
reformation, magic reappeared in the make-believe world of the theater. If sixteenth-
century folk could no longer experience the real physical presence of God on the altar
in church, they could still experience the pretended physical manifestations of demons
and spirits in the theater. The Puritan objections to the theater can perhaps be
understood as part of their larger campaign against superstition and idolatry.
In Julius Caesar the assassination is so conspicuously ritualized--the kneeling, the
repeated stabbing, the ceremonial bathing in Caesar’s blood, the clasping of purpled
hands when Antony enters--that an audience may have felt that it is not only
witnessing but participating in a kind of ceremony. The ritual quality is directly
related to the special historical status of the play’s subject; for the Elizabethans, the
assassination was the single most famous event in ancient history. Again and again
Shakespeare reminds us that the story is famous and the outcome known. The night of
prodigies, the animal in which Caesar’s augurers cannot find a heart, Calpurnia’s
dream--these are riddles to the characters but not to the audience; the audience has no
trouble in construing these signs because it is participating in a reenactment of an event
whose most important meanings are already known. the name of Caesar should be
sounded more than any other because this name will become a title even grater than
king, and the ghost of Caesar will range the world because the assassination was not
the end of Caesarism but effectively the beginning.

The play’s structure as historical drama: Julius Caesar is built upon a tautology:
Caesar becomes Caesar, the past becomes the completed past which we know. The
play is built upon the tension between the present tense of dramatic reenactment and
the past of history, between the ordinary flesh and blood of life and the immobile
statues of antiquity. The play insists throughout upon Caesar’s fleshly vulnerability:
his falling sickness, his deafness, his fever and near drowning. What Shakespeare
shows us is grotesquely represented in Calpurnia’s dream of the marble statue flowing
Blood: flesh and blood aspiring to monumentality. Ironically precisely because he
aspires to monumentality Caesar is vulnerable to the conspirators’ plot: “Hence! Wilt
thou lift up Olympus,” (3.1.74) he claims moments before his death. As Caesar leaves
behind the frailty of the flesh and enters history, Shakespeare gives him the one Latin
line in the play, “Et tu, Brute?”; the vulnerable man has been revealed as the
marmoreal figure of history. Caesar has become Caesar.
Couched in terms of prophecies and omens, our knowledge of history is
represented in the drama as a magical necessity embedded in history. Dramatic irony
is raised to a metaphysical level and presented as fate. In this manner the play creates a
feeling of necessity and persuades its audience that in witnessing Caesar’s death and
the collapse of the republican cause it has witnessed something inevitable.

Considered not merely as a play about ritual but as itself a version of ritual,
Shakespeare's historical drama becomes a ceremony of sacrifice and transcendence like
a kind of political Mass. There are eucharistic overtones in Brutus’s ceremonial charge
to the conspirators to wash their hands in Caesar’s blood, an act echoing the New
Testament invocations of Christ having “washed us from our sins in his own blood”
(Rev.1:5), allusions to Christian sacrifice in Decius Brutus’s interpretation of Calpurnia’s
dream to mean that Caesar’s blood signifies a source of renewal for Rome and that
Romans will come to him, as to a saint, for “relics”(2.2.83-90). Behind all the oblique
references to Christian sacrifice lurks the notion that what the conspirators produce is a
disastrous imitation of the true redemptive action [Kaula]. The assassination of Caesar
is a parody of Christian sacrifice. Like the Mass Julius Caesar centers upon a sacrificial
death that initiates a new era in history, the emergence of imperial Rome, and perhaps
the association of Caesar with Christ. Religious forms such as the figure of the double
nature of the man-god Christ were systematically displaced onto the political sphere at
the time. Drained out of official religion, magic and ceremony reappeared not only on
the stage but in the equally theatrical world of the court, where the rejected cult of the
Virgin reappeared as the cult of Gloriana. The destruction of popish “idols” was
paralleled by the rise of the sacred image of the Queen, forever young and forever
beautiful. The Roman imperial theme had political significance in Elizabethan
England. Elizabeth, determined to maintain her independence from the threatening
powers of the Catholic continent, dressed herself in the symbolism of an empress. Even
Caesarian triumphs were part of her style: she marked her victory over the Armada
with an entry into London in the ancient Roman manner.
As a representation of the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Empire,
Julius Caesar may be understood as yet another of the many originary myths of the
Imperial Tudor State, a fable parallel to that of the descent of true British authority
from the ancestral figure of Trojan Brute or to that of the apocalyptic union of the red
rose and the white. By transforming the historical fact of the defeat of Brutus and the
republican movement into a metaphysical confirmation of the inevitability of imperial
greatness, Shakespeare’s play implicitly confirms the legitimacy of the Tudor state at
the same time that paints equivocal pictures of Caesar, the greatest man who ever lived
but also inflexible and pretentious, and Brutus, who is not a foul traitor, like Dante’s
Brutus, but a patriot and idealist.