Isaac Asimov - Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

—Act II, scene i, lines 11-13

That seems to be the key to the noble cause he seeks-how power might change Caesar. He decides he will

-Act II, scene i, lines 32-34

What Brutus is now thinking of is a kind of preventive assassination. Caesar must be killed not because he is tyrannical but because he may grow tyrannical.

There is appeal in this argument. Power does tend to corrupt, as history has amply proven, and it is tempting to reason that a tyrant is best removed before he has a chance to show that corruption. What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1932?

And yet, it is a dangerous view. Once we accept the fact that assassination is justified to prevent tyranny rather than to punish it, who would be safe? What ruler could be sure of not being regarded by someone somewhere as being on the high road to tyranny, which he would reach someday?

Brutus has been receiving the faked letters Cassius has prepared for him and he has managed to talk himself into believing in the nobility of the enterprise. It is clear he intends to join the conspiracy and yet he is still uneasy about it.

When the conspirators arrive at his house, cloaked in masks and darkness, he is aware of the intrinsic shame of conspiracy. He apostrophizes personified conspiracy and says it must assume a false front, for

-Act II, scene i, lines 83-85

In some of the more poetic tellings of the Greek myths, Erebus is pictured as the son of Chaos, the brother of Night, and the father of the Fates. There are no tales told of him, however, and in poetry he is merely, as here, used as the personification of darkness. (The word is also used, sometimes, to describe an underground region en route to Hades.)

The conspirators are now all together and Brutus is formally accepted among their ranks. Should still others be recruited? Cassius asks:

—Act II, scene i, lines 141-42

Cicero had a very high reputation in Rome in some ways. In an age of general corruption, Cicero was widely recognized as an honest man of high ideals. He was a true republican and favored republican institutions backed by an honest and upright Senate. He would certainly be opposed to Caesar as king. All agree at once, therefore, that Cicero would be an excellent addition.

All but Brutus, that is, for he says:

—Act II, scene i, line 150

According to Plutarch's tale, Cicero was not approached because it was felt he lacked the necessary resolution and might, in a pinch, betray the conspiracy.

And, indeed, although he was personally upright, he was indeed a physical coward and could not, through most of his life, face actual danger without quailing.

When that aristocratic hoodlum Clodius (see page I-261) set about harassing Cicero and attacking his retinue with his gang of toughs, Cicero was not the man to face him out. Cicero fled the country and satisfied himself with writing rather whining letters of complaint. When Clodius was finally killed by a rival gang leader, Milo, in 52 b.c., Cicero undertook to defend Milo but was scared into voicelessness by hostile crowds.

Again, in the civil war between Pompey and Caesar, Cicero made a rather miserable spectacle of himself as he tried to keep from being ground to death between the two, and feared to commit himself too far and too dangerously in either direction.

With this background, the conspirators would be justified in not wishing to risk their mutual safety to Cicero's courage.

This, however, is not the view Shakespeare presents Brutus as holding. He has Brutus give as his reason:

—Act II, scene i, lines 151-52

Brutus objects to Cicero's vanity and to his penchant for insisting on leading an operation or refusing to join. It is indeed true that Cicero was terribly vain, but not more so than Brutus is portrayed to be in this play.

Indeed, one can easily suspect that Brutus does not want Cicero because he does not want a rival; that it is Brutus himself whose vanity will never allow him to "follow anything that other men begin."

He has just joined the conspiracy which other men have begun, to be sure, but he is already calmly taking over the decision-making power and dictating the direction of the conspiracy. Cassius proposes Cicero and Brutus vetoes it. This, in fact, continues throughout the play. Cassius is constantly making solid, practical suggestions, which Brutus as constantly vetoes.

Almost at once Brutus forces a wrong decision on the conspirators, one that makes rum inevitable.

Cassius suggests that Mark Antony be killed along with Caesar. This is a sensible view if we accept the notion of the assassination in the first place. In planning any attack, it is only practical to take into account the inevitable counterattack and take measures to blunt it. Even if Caesar is killed, Mark Antony, an experienced general who is popular with his troops, would have the ability and the will to strike back, if he is allowed to live. Why not kill him then to begin with?

But Brutus says:

—Act II, scene i, lines 162-66

Is this Brutus' nobility? If so, Shakespeare takes considerable pains to neutralize it in the assassination scene an act later, where the conspirators do act like butchers and Brutus urges them to it.

Is it Brutus' obtuse stupidity? Perhaps, but even more so it is an example of how he, not Cicero, "will never follow anything that other men begin."

Perhaps Brutus might himself have suggested taking care of Mark Antony along with Caesar, if only Cassius hadn't mentioned it first. Now, however, that Brutus is in the conspiracy he will lead it, and the one way to do that is to contradict any initiative on the part of the others.

Cassius, uneasily appalled by Brutus' blindness, tries to argue against it. Cassius says of Mark Antony:

—Act II, scene i, lines 183-84

But Brutus won't even let him finish. Brutus has spoken, and that's that

At this point there is the sound of a clock striking, and Brutus says:

—Act II, scene i, line 192

This is one of the more amusing anachronisms in Shakespeare, for there were no mechanical clocks in the modern sense in Caesar's time. The best that could be done was a water clock and they were not common, and did not strike. Striking clocks, run by falling weights, were inventions of medieval times.

Indeed, the very same scene, at the beginning, shows Brutus speaking of time telling in a way far more appropriate to his period. He says then, peevishly, as he sleeplessly paces his bedroom: