Creative Vandalism

The other drawback with such a version of Julius Caesar is that ridiculing the governing elite, which of course has often been done, maintains its centrality; in the modern equivalent, it maintains the

media fiction that Washington infighting is the necessary and adequate site of political activity. To represent the potential of other forces in the state, it will be necessary to engineer a radical shift in perspective. Given the license of the theater director, I would move the plebeians to the center, challenging directly the tendency of criticism to see them as the eternal mob and the tribunes as rabble-rousers (even Annabel Patterson, who argues for a positive representation of the citizens in Coriolanus , sees them in this way).^[34] The received text certainly licenses such a view. Casca finds Cassius persuasive when he blames the people for Caesar's dominance:

And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?
Poor man! I know he would not be a wolf,
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep;
He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.
Those that with haste will make a mighty fire
Begin it with weak straws. What trash is Rome,
What rubbish, and what offal, when it serves
For the base matter to illuminate
So vile a thing as Caesar!
(1.3.103–11)

Upper-class rule is necessary, it is suggested, because the people are likely to endorse tyranny. But "the mob" is not an adequate concept with which to handle the roles of the plebeians, even in the received text. To be sure, some of them perpetrate unreasonable violence, but to a tiny extent in comparison with the patricians in their battles. The play in fact allows us to see that at other times the people are lively, independent, shrewd, and sensible.

The key figures are the tribunes, Marullus and Flavius. An attractive reading is to see the plebeians in the opening scene as unruly Bakhtinian revelers, the possessors of a traditional popular wisdom that is put down by the tribunes. Richard Wilson considers the tribunes' ordering the plebeians back to work in the light of Christopher Hill's thesis that puritans attacked popular festivities in order to control the emerging work force.^[35] However, it is a mistake to abstract carnival from historical conditions, to regard it as an absolute political quality. As Wilson shows, it was not a single, unitary discourse, "but a symbolic system over which continuous struggle to wrest its meaning was waged by competing ideologies"; the ceremonies are made to feed into Caesar's coronation and the carnivalesque "becomes a model of authoritarian populism" (pp. 42, 36). With this in mind, I would activate a fact that is widely overlooked, and that admittedly, is

scarcely registered in the Shakespearean play—namely, that the tribunes, historically, were not "ruling-class" spokesmen, but the chosen leaders of the plebeians.^[36] Their election by open popular ballot was, at least in potential, a democratic feature of the republican polity, a major constitutional check upon patrician power. In 81 B.C. the dictator Sulla undermined the role of the tribunes when they "revived the dormant sovranty of the People"; Pompey restored their rights in 70 B.C.^[37] So in the opening scene of Julius Caesar, Marullus and Flavius are understandably dismayed by their constituents' enthusiasm for Caesar and remind them of their erstwhile support for Pompey. The subversive vitality of the Cobbler is very well, but if popular rights are to be defended, it has to be blended with analysis, organization, and strategy; party discipline has to be maintained. Machiavelli argues the need for plebeian leaders: as an "excited crowd," the populace may become "cowardly and weak," he says, so "it should at once make one of its members a leader so that he may correct this defect, keep the populace united, and look to its defence; as did the Roman plebs, when, after the death of Virginia they quitted Rome and for safety's sake appointed twenty of their members as tribunes." Machiavelli adds that in hundreds of years, the Roman populace "did not make four elections of which it had to repent."^[38]

In Julius Caesar, the tribunes' political program is vastly superior to that generated among the ruling elite, for instead of plotting to murder Caesar, they exhort the people to act openly, constitutionally, and collectively against the alterations to the constitution proposed by Caesar's party. They urge them to display signs of their crafts, for class solidarity, and to organize a counter-demonstration against Caesar's triumph:

Go, go, good countrymen, and for this fault
Assemble all the poor men of your sort;
Draw them to Tiber banks, and weep your tears
Into the channel, till the lowest stream
Do kiss the most exalted shores of all.
(1.1.56–60)

That concluding image, of the popular demonstration flooding the political system, such that the "lowest" people achieve a significant voice, proves optimistic, but the people do, in fact, exercise their influence against Caesar's undermining of traditional rights. Even through the snobbish and disdainful (funny) speech of Casca, it is clear that the plebeians cheer Caesar when he reluctantly refuses the crown offered him by Antony:

He put it the third time by; and still as he refus'd it, the rabblement hooted, and clapp'd their chopt hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refus'd the crown, that it had, almost, choked Caesar; for he swounded, and fell down at it.
(1.2.239–45)

Contrary to the idea implicit in some new historicist writing, the people are not easily fooled by the theater of state that the patricians clumsily improvise. Caesar is forced into improvisation and offers his throat for the cutting, perceiving that "the common herd was glad he refus'd the crown" (1.2.260–64). Mark Hunter's assertion in his 1900 edition of the play that the plebeians are "thoroughly monarchical in sentiment" is presumably owing to political blindness; strangely, Arthur Humphreys endorses it in his recent Oxford edition (p. 97). It is the senators who want to make Caesar king (1.3.85–88, 2.2.93–94).

However, we hear shortly, "Marullus and Flavius, for pulling scarfs off Caesar's images, are put to silence" (1.2.282–83). This is a move against the political power of the people—in North's Plutarch we read that in accusing "the tribunes of the people," Caesar "spake also against the people, and called them Bruti and Cumani, to wit, beasts and fools."^[39] Hereafter, the substance of the play, in my version, is the destruction of plebeian political institutions and consciousness. Deprived of their leaders, the people gradually become pawns and victims in the power struggle of the ruling elite. In the forum scene, they plan responsibly, at the start, to evaluate the speeches of Brutus and Antony:

First Plebeian: I will hear Brutus speak.

Second Plebeian: I will hear Cassius, and compare their reasons,
                         When severally we hear them rendered.
(3.2.8–10)

But they get manipulated. Not allowing the people a serious stake in the system turns a few of them into the louts who murder Cinna. The moral for us is that lower-class and other dissident political groupings should be strengthened to resist the encroachments of the governing elite. Most of the play therefore, in my version, is the agon of the tribunes: they suffer as the people are exploited. I would represent this by having Flavius and Marullus taken, when they are arrested, one to each side of the stage. There they would be detained for the rest of the action, being tortured by the patricians' officers—all, of course, in the usual

Royal Shakespeare Company kinky black PVC, chains, and construction-site helmets. At moments of special frustration in the political process, the tormenters would intensify their activity so that the tribunes shriek out in pain. They are tortured, figuratively, by the destruction of plebeian institutions and consciousness.

Strangely enough, retaining Flavius and Marullus to the side of the stage as significant spectators is not altogether unhistorical. Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy has Don Andrea similarly placed, watching and suffering as the action of the play threatens the people he loves. Revenge assures him that it will all work out: "Here sit we down to see the mystery, / And serve for Chorus in this tragedy."^[40] They sit throughout between the audience and the action:

Be still, Andrea; ere we go from hence,
I'll turn their friendship into fell despite,
Their love to mortal hate, their day to night,
Their hope into despair, their peace to war,
Their joys to pain, their bliss to misery.
(1.5.5–10)

This prophetic frame structures the audience's perspective; it guarantees that the most bizarre twists and turns of court intrigue are governed by a higher power. Revenge may sleep (as Andrea complains), but his continuous presence shows "What 'tis to be subject to destiny" (3.15.27). So with my placing of Flavius and Marullus: it keeps before the audience a point of view that might otherwise be forgotten.

Even so, reorienting the action so as to produce such a political slant will require some violence to the received text. I call it the New Reductionism. But then in The Wars of the Roses, done for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1963, John Barton made three plays out of just over half the lines of Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, together with 1,400 lines of his own.^[41] My Julius Caesar could be accomplished by the commoner and more discreet tactics usual in the theater—namely, cutting patrician scenes (admittedly heavily) so as to make prominent the incidents where the people feature, and supplying "business." Reported events involving the plebeians would be performed in mime, the battle scenes would show, not the anguished integrity of the leaders, but the plight of the ordinary soldiers (according to Plutarch thousands were slain), and the final spectacle would be, not the funeral of Brutus, but Octavius and Antony establishing authoritarian power in Rome. My ultimate precedent, of course, is Shakespeare's political license with his sources. Plutarch,

the principal source for Julius Caesar, presents the plebeians and tribunes much more respectfully, particularly in their rejection of Caesar's monarchical aspirations; Shakespeare has slanted his representation, producing a certain political effect. In 2 Henry VI, comparably, the revolutionary leader, Jack Cade, is changed from the "young man of goodly stature and pregnant wit," a "subtle captain," "sober in communication" and "wise in disputing," described by Edward Hall, the Tudor apologist (Cade must have had some competence, after all, for he captures London). In Shakespeare's version Cade is cruel and stupid, admitting his own dishonesty, viewed skeptically even by his followers.^[42] By thus altering his sources, Shakespeare produces one story about disruptive lower-class people. My version of Julius Caesar attempts to substitute an alternative.

My aim is simply this: to check the tendency of Julius Caesar to add Shakespearean authority to reactionary discourses. Shakespearean plays are powerful cultural tokens, places where meaning is established and where it may be contested. The received text collaborates with Caesar's dictatorial tendency by removing the tribunes from the action, so allowing members of an audience to forget the principles that they may represent. The tribunes are not quite Pierre Macherey's "not-said," since they have appeared. But the putting of Marullus and Flavius to silence constitutes them as a point at which the text falls silent, and a point, therefore, at which its ideological project may be apprehended. All stories comprise within themselves the ghosts of the alternative stories they are trying to repress.^[43] Holding the tribunes at each side of the stage holds them and their political significance in view. It is comparable to the way the received text keeps the idea of Caesar before the audience by making his ghost appear.

Conservative criticism has generally deployed three ways of making literature politically agreeable: selecting the canon to feature suitable texts, interpreting these texts strenuously so that awkward aspects are explained away, and insinuating political implications as alleged formal properties (such as irony and balance).^[44] As a consequence of the long-term practice of these three strategies, the received literary canon and discourses of criticism are, of course, resistant to progressive readings. Even so, the three strategies are available also to dissident critics, who may offer their own texts, re-read canonical texts so as to produce acceptable political tendencies, and propose that formal properties inscribe a progressive politics (social realism, for instance, or internal distanciation). So dissident critics may join and perhaps take over the Englit game.

There is a fourth way: placing a text in its contexts. This strategy repudiates the supposed transcendence of literature, seeking rather to understand it as a cultural intervention produced initially within a specific set of practices and tending to render persuasive a view of reality; and seeing it also as re-produced subsequently in other historical conditions in the service of various views of reality, through other practices, including those of modern literary study. In the instance of Julius Caesar, one might consider how the play drew upon and contributed to notions of legitimacy and tyranny in 1599, and how it has done that subsequently (I attempted the latter in the second section of this chapter). Through such consideration, the processes by which textual reading is transformed into cultural significance may become manifest. And the (perhaps reactionary) values stated or implied in a text lose some of their power, since it is no longer assumed that they are simply to be endorsed as the insights of genius, transcending historical contexts. Canonical texts may then be respected as serious attempts to comprehend and intervene in the world, and we may quarrel with them as questionable constructions made by other people in other circumstances. This is a rough program for cultural materialism, and it is the dominant method of this book.

My re-handling of Julius Caesar suggests a fifth way: blatantly reworking the authoritative text so that it is forced to yield, against the grain, explicitly oppositional kinds of understanding. This strategy confronts both the attitudes and the status that have accrued to the canon. It is a strategy scarcely available in the established discourse of literary criticism. It seems out of order there (which is why my present effort has to appear humorous, something of a jeu d'esprit). But blatant reworking is used freely in other kinds of writing, for instance in plays such as Arnold Wesker's Shylock (formerly called The Merchant ), Charles Marowitz's Measure for Measure, and Edward Bond's Lear . It is what Dollimore, with reference to Howard Barker's rewriting of Thomas Middleton's Women Beware Women, calls creative vandalism.^[45]

Even with the boldest dramatic and fictive reworkings, it is often insisted that the authentic Shakespeare is being retrieved. In Charles Marowitz's Collage Hamlet, "the play was spliced-up into a collage with lines juxtaposed, sequences rearranged, characters dropped or blended, and the entire thing played out in short, discontinuous fragments which appeared like subliminal flashes out of Hamlet's life and, in every case, used Shakespeare's words, though radically rear-

ranged."^[46] And all this, Marowitz asserted, brought us closer to Shakespeare: "One has direct access to the play's ambiances" and "contact with what is essential in Hamlet ."^[47] Through such a claim, the creative vandal is protected against people who think it impertinent to interfere with Shakespeare, and may appropriate at least some of the authority of Shakespeare for the new work. This is the approach of most theater directors of versions of the received Shakespearean texts. For if they did not claim respectfully to be presenting the authentic bard, what status would they have? Would the school parties come? Most professional stage presentations are, in fact, cunning manipulations of the texts, together with conventionally permitted stage business, aiming at what the director hopes will be a relevant, vibrant (etc.) effect for the tourists. Otherwise few would understand the plays or find them interesting. But this cannot be admitted—that modern presentations produce their own Shakespeares—because that would spoil the game. And certainly it cannot be allowed that such efforts might excel Shakespeare, particularly in values, for the authority of the whole enterprise depends on that being impossible. So Peter Hall declared that The Wars of the Roses retrieved important Shakespearean values that were embedded in the first tetralogy, and Barton spoke of his changes as bringing out the historical and thematic point. Actually, as I tried to show in Political Shakespeare, Hall and Barton were creating a fashionable combination of E. M. W. Tillyard, Jan Kott, and Konrad Lorentz. In 1978 (at the RSC), Michael Bogdanov did marvelously to produce The Taming of the Shrew in a highly inventive version that foregrounded the brutality of Petruchio and the system within which he was operating. But Bogdanov had to assert that this was how the text was meant to be played, that Shakespeare was "a feminist." Jonathan Miller, conversely, thinks it wrong "to make that play into a feminist tract"; he has his own idea of the real Shakespeare, believing that patriarchal attitudes in the Shrew relate to Elizabethan Puritan belief in the sacramental nature of marriage. However, in his television production for the BBC/Time-Life series (1980), Miller also did not rely upon the received text to secure his reading. He added the singing of a psalm at the end, celebrating the orderliness and beauty of the family. Like Bogdanov, he declares that such innovation is only bringing out "what Shakespeare had in mind," the "spirit" of the play.^[48]

The drawback, from a dissident point of view, of asserting that your production is really Shakespeare—and the same applies to literary-

critical interpretations—is that it does not challenge the bardic accumulation of cultural authority. Insinuating dissident work through "privileged institutions," as Raymond Williams remarks, still leaves as the longer-term, large-scale effect "the slow building of authority, " with the inclusion of "minority elements of dissent or opposition" contributing to that authority. The apparent capacity of Shakespearean texts to speak from so many positions is assimilated happily to their mysterious protean power (Humphreys, after surveying the diversity in stage productions of Julius Caesar, concludes: "Still, Shakespeare himself takes no sides, or all sides").^[49] Blatant reworkings of Shakespearean texts may offer a more ambitious challenge to cultural power. After the Collage Hamlet, with reworkings of The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and The Merchant of Venice, Marowitz decided that his goal was "a head-on confrontation with the intellectual substructure of the plays, an attempt to test or challenge, revoke or destroy the intellectual foundation which makes a classic the formidable thing it has become." Wesker in Shylock plainly intends to correct the political emphasis of Shakespeare's play.^[50] Instead of trying to share the cultural authority of the bard, it is possible to confront it. My Julius Caesar is, self-consciously, an impudent anti-reading; a creative vandalism that might even restore some of the lively atmosphere of Shakespeare's theater before the Shakespeareans got to it.