“It must be by his death; and, for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general. He would be crown’d:
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
... And, to speak truth of Cæsar,
I have not known when his affections sway’d
More than his reason.
... So Cæsar may;
Then, lest he may, prevent.”
This speech is singular;—at least, I do not at present see into
Shakespeare’s motive, his _rationale_, or in what point of view he meant
Brutus’ character to appear. For surely—(this, I mean, is what I say to
myself, with my present _quantum_ of insight, only modified by my
experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of
beauties, where I had before descried faults;) surely, nothing can seem
more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more
lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the
tenets here attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman republican;
namely,—that he would have no objection to a king, or to Cæsar, a monarch
in Rome, would Cæsar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to
be! How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause—none in
Cæsar’s past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he not
entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the
Senate?—Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things
forward—True;—and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character
did Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?
_Ib._ Speech of Brutus:—
“For if thou _path_, thy native semblance on.”
Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this “path” as a mere
misprint or mis-script for “put.” In what place does Shakespeare—where
does any other writer of the same age—use “path” as a verb for “walk?”
_Ib._ sc. 2. Cæsar’s speech:—
“She dreamt to-night, she saw my _statue_.”
No doubt, it should be _statua_, as in the same age, they more often
pronounced “heroes” as a trisyllable than dissyllable. A modern tragic
poet would have written,—
“Last night she dreamt that she my statue saw.”
But Shakespeare never avails himself of the supposed license of
transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of
thought or passion to justify it.