Caesar, Lincoln and Shakespeare

Today (March 15) in 44 B.C., Roman dictator  Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of noble conspirators led by Marcus Brutus and Caius Cassius.

When John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln and yelled sic semper tyrannis (Latin for “Thus always to tyrants”), some attributed it to what Marcus Brutus uttered when he stabbed Caesar, given the fact that Booth was a Shakespearean actor; he and his brother (Edwin Booth, an even more famous Shakespearean actor in his days) acted in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 1864 (see photo)—the year before Lincoln’s assassination.  In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, we read “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” uttered by Cinna (another conspirator) the moment when Caesar was dead.

Caesar was assassinated in Act 3 Scene 1 and there are two famous speeches at Caesar’s funeral by Brutus and Antony in Scene 2.  “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more” is basically Brutus’s defense.  One will fall in love with Shakespeare if one reads Antony’s lengthy speech (soliloquy).

Marcus Brutus also had another soliloquy in his orchard before he assassinated Caesar.

I always think Shakespeare must have put a lot of thought and time in his numerous soliloquies.  But then again it might not be so, as Alfred Whitehead said of the Bard, “I don’t believe Shakespeare ever had to grope for a word.  Can you imagine him chewing the end of his quill pen until he could think of the right one?  There is such exuberance in him that I believe once he had clearly imagined a scene, the words came of themselves, in a rush.”