Hi, this is Eliot Cohen.
Welcome back to Rough Magic: Shakespeare on
Power.
In previous lectures, we've talked about kings
who become kings through some process of legitimate
succession.
We saw one king, Richard II, who was profoundly
incompetent, therefore lost his crown and
indeed his life.
Another king, Prince Hal, who becomes Henry
V, who is the very opposite.
He goes through a real education, we talked
about that education, and becomes a successful
King.
In this lecture and several of those that
follow, I would like to talk about what happens
when people seize power illegally or at least
in a profoundly irregular and almost unnatural
fashion.
We're going to begin by talking about a coup.
That is to say when power is seized in a violent
fashion, but it's not simply one ruffian trying
to succeed another.
So it's not like Macbeth, who just wants to
be king, and so he's willing to kill the previous
king.
This is something different.
This is the overthrow of an order, in this
case, the dictatorship.
Soon to be perhaps the monarchy of Julius
Caesar.
And I would like to talk about two questions
in the play, Julius Caesar.
First, why did the plotters do what they do?
And the second is, and this is just as important,
why is Caesar vulnerable to the plot?
Because it, the plotters aren't going to succeed
unless there's a vulnerability that they can
exploit.
Let's begin with Cassius, who is in many ways
the ringleader, even though Brutus becomes
the formal leader, some people might think
the figurehead, although I'm sure he didn't
think of himself that way.
He gives two reasons, Cassius does, for the
decision to launch the coup.
This is the first: “Why, man, he [Julius
Caesar] doth bestride the narrow world, like
a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his
huge legs and peep about, To find ourselves
dishonourable graves."
Then, famously, “The fault, dear Brutus,
is not in our stars But in ourselves, that
we are underlings.”
So Cassius is in many ways putting the blame
on political figures, aristocrats like Cassius
and Brutus themselves who are envious of the
way in which Caesar bestrides the world.
But he's mainly focused on the fact that because
of Julius Caesar's overwhelming power, they
are dishonored.
They don't have the opportunity to distinguish
themselves and win glory and the way that
they would have earlier in the Republic.
Later on in the play, Cassius changes his
tune somewhat.
He has a somewhat different explanation for
why he wants to overthrow Caesar.
“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.”
And so on.
So in other words, Cassius is indicting Caesar
to be sure, but he's indicting Rome.
And this is a common theme in Shakespeare's
Roman plays.
He's writing a lot about Rome, halfway between
Republic and monarchy.
It's a corrupt Republic in many ways.
And although Brutus really as we will see,
tries to, would like to reform Rome, Cassius
is reacting against a Rome that is loud, someone
as despicable as he thinks Caesar is to seize
power.
And so, he intends to overthrow Caesar.
But it's not out of great love of the Roman
Republic, which he refers to as trash, rubbish
and awful.
Brutus is quite different.
This is again, quite early on the play.
And notice he begins by saying “It must
be by his death.”
He's already figured this one out.
“And from my part, I know no personal cause
to spurn at him, but for the general,” in
other words, the general cause, he, Brutus
is insistent first and foremost that he has
nothing against Caesar.
It would be intolerable for Brutus to think
that there was anything personal about this.
Of course, one of the lessons of the play
may be that, you know, that old line from
the Godfather, “it's nothing personal, just
business” is false.
Because in the movie the Godfather, it turns
out everything is personal.
There's nothing that's just business.
Well, Brutus I think deceives himself here
as well.
And the second thing to notice his argument
is problematic.
He can't really identify anything that Julius
Caesar has done that is particularly wrong.
Instead, his thesis or his theory is the theory
of the serpent's egg that, Julius Caesar's
like a serpent's egg, and if you let it hatch,
it will grow michevious and otherwords dangerous,
and so therefore we have to kill now before
he can turn into that.
It’s very different from someone like Calvin
Coolidge who said, famously said once that,
“If you see 10 troubles coming your way,
you can be sure that none of them will run
into a ditch before they ever reach you.”
So the plotters all have very, very different
motives.
They may not even really know their own motives.
I think that's probably particularly true
of Brutus, and that's actually sets them up
for various failures as you see in the play,
and that's an important point.
But what about the way in which Caesar is
vulnerable to this plot?
And when asked to say that Caesar is not portrayed
in a particularly admirable way.
For one thing, he's always talking about himself
in the third person, which is somewhat unusual.
But look at, for example, his last speech.
The brother of a man that he has banished
is urging him to rescind the banishment, and
Caesar doesn't just say, well, let me think
about it, or I'm afraid I just can't do that.
He begins with an insult.
“I could be well moved if I were as you,”
in other words, if I were the lesser kind
of man that you are as opposed to me, “but
I am constant as the northern star of whose
true, fixed and resting quality.
There is no fellow in the firmament.”
This is appalling arrogance and of course
he's going to end up paying for it.
And, he really has this view of himself, which
is infuriating to men like Cassius, who know
him and who know his weaknesses, which Cassius,
by the way, is quite careful to tell us about.
Well, why did the plotters fail?
There are many reasons, but I want to make
reference to a play that we'll be looking
at in a couple of lectures down the road and
that's Macbeth.
And you may remember that lady Macbeth has
to persuade her husband to really screw up
his courage to the sticking point as she says,
and murder King Duncan in his sleep.
And while Macbeth is hesitating, she says
the following,
“What thou wouldst highly, That wouldst
thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet
wouldst wrongly win.”
She, she puts her finger on it.
Yes, you want to be King, you want to do this
thing, but you want to have a clean conscience.
That's really the story of Brutus, isn't it?
“Would not play false yet would strongly
win.”
Brutus never faces that.
Macbeth does.
Of course, Macbeth gets himself into a different
set of troubles as a result.
But, Brutus, as we shall see, makes a number
of terrible mistakes in dealing with the aftermath
of the coup because he wants to win it holily,
as Lady Macbeth says.
And one of the lessons here I believe that
Shakespeare can teach us is that when you
violate order like this, by staging a coup
and murdering somebody, it doesn't all, you
can't really do it in a way that's going to
leave you with a clean conscience and you
have to think about the second and third order
effects that necessarily follow.
Well, with that in mind, I would like you
to take a look at Macbeth, particularly the
scenes that I've mentioned, and compare Macbeth
to Brutus or even Cassius, who is a less principled
figure.
In our next session, we're going to talk about
demagoguery.
We'll talk about the famous scene around Caesar's
corpse, where Brutus gives a speech, which
falls completely flat and Mark Antony whips
up the crowd against the conspirators and
thereby sets the course for the rest of the
play.
See you later.
Hello, this is Eliot Cohen.
Welcome back to Rough Magic: Shakespeare on
Power.
In the previous lecture, we talked about the
coup that was launched against Julius Caesar.
We talked about why the plotters undertook
it and why perhaps Julius Caesar himself was
vulnerable to it.
Now, there are other ways than waylaying somebody
like Julius Caesar and stabbing him to death
whereby you can take power, and in this lecture
we're going to explore one of them, and that’s
sheer demagoguery.
That's where you turn the mob against the
established order, in this case, the new established
order that was created by Brutus and the conspirators.
Remember this is a conspiracy of a very large
chunk of the Senate, so it's not as if it's
simply one or two ambitious men who have decided
to take over the government.
So what I would like to do is begin with Brutus,
who immediately after the murder decides that
he's going to try to sell the people on why
they did this.
And, he starts by saying to all the conspirators,
“let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood
up to the elbows and besmear our swords.”
Let's judge this by the Shakespearian test
of political theater.
Is this smart political theater?
Well in another part of Shakespeare in Hamlet,
Hamlet famously give some very good advice
to a bunch of actors who says “suit the
action to the word and the word to the action.”
Well, the words here are peace, freedom, and
liberty, and the action is that you've soaked
your hands up to the elbows in blood, and
you have to wonder, does it occur to Brutus
that maybe this is not the best symbolic gesture
to win the crowd over?
He goes on and gives a speech.
Now Brutus’ speech is not given in iambic
pentameter.
It's in prose.
It is serious, that's for sure, but it is
clunky.
I doesn't have drive.
It doesn't have rhythm.
It isn't particularly compelling.
It's got some very stylized phrases.
“Not that I loved Caesar less, but that
I loved Rome more...As Caesar loved me, I
weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice
at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; But
as he was ambitious, I slew him.”
And he kind of moves through that parallel
structure, in a rather ponderous way.
By the way, note something about Brutus’
speech.
It's all about him.
There's no we.
He doesn't really refer to the other conspirators
at all.
“Hear me for my cause.
Believe me for mine, honor and have respect
to mine honor,” “Censure me in your wisdom.”
He just goes all the way through this and
it's all about Brutus.
And furthermore, as he goes all the way through,
he has these rhetorical questions and that's
a standard feature of his speech.
But, think about it.
What he's doing is he's asking the rhetorical
questions and he isn't really trying to engage
the audience.
“Who is here so base, that would be a bondman?
If any, speak, for him have I offended.”
Well, all you can get from an audience out
of something like that is just silence because
who's going to say, sure.
And then he ends with this somewhat pompous
conclusion.
This is a truly terrible speech.
Now, foolishly Brutus turns down Cassius’
advise to kill Mark Antony who is really Caesar's
best friend.
Foolishly, he decides to leave the scene when
they let Mark Antony give a speech at, over
Julius Caesar's corpse and thereafter results
some of the best demagogic speaking in Shakespeare
or indeed the English language.
He begins by insinuating himself into the
good graces of the crowd.
He's not going to praise Caesar.
He's going to bury him.
He praises Brutus, and you'll notice of course
that, he insists that Brutus is an honorable
man and “For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men?”
And of course there's great irony.
He keeps on repeating that over and over again
and it becomes quite clear that he doesn't
think they're honorable men in the slightest,
but, he's done it in quite an indirect way.
He makes, it's very interesting, he's in some
ways responding to Cassius’ critique of
Caesar, of Caesar's infirmities, and what
he does is he takes that and he turns those
into strengths.
“When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath
wept.
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”
Then, there's a lot of theatrics here.
“My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar.
And I must pause till it comes back to me.”
Sometimes the most effective thing you can
do in giving a speech is just be silent.
Any of us who have engaged in public speaking
knows that can be really hard.
He moves the audience, physically “make
a ring about the corpse of Caesar,” and
he actually comes down close to the body.
He asks rhetorical questions, which are going
to get the mob saying things.
“You will compel me then to read the will?”
Well, no kidding.
They're going to compel him to read the will
cause he's just told them that there are all
kinds of goodies in the will for them.
“Shall I descend and will you give me leave?”
Then he's brilliant in his use of props.
“See what a rent the envious Caska made.”
So he's holding up the toga.
And then of course, very famously “the well-beloved
Brutus stabbed, this was the most unkindest
cut of all.”
Then he tries a very common ploy for a demagogue.
“I am no orator, as Brutus is, but, as you
know, me all, a plain blunt man.”
Well he's anything but a plain blunt man,
but that shtick is one that demagogues always
use.
I'm just a plain, simple person.
I speak, you know, the man in the streets
language.
I don't use fancy language.
I don't use fancy rhetorical forms the way
Brutus does, and that of course, carries him
very far.
And then finally he uses the most powerful
props of all, Caesar's wounds.
He shows them the wounds, “poor, poor, dumb
mouths.”
Well, it's a brilliant scene and it of course,
completely turns the situation around.
The crowd had been more or less on the side
of the conspirators.
They go bezerk.
And that's important too because we have to
think about what demagoguery then unleashes.
And there's quite a chilling line at the end
as Mark Anthony sees what he has unleashed.
“Now let it work.”
Again, that short little sentence that Shakespeare
will sometimes give us that says it all.
“Mischief, thou art afoot; take thou what
course thou wilt.”
Mark Anthony knows that he's just lit a bunch
of matches and he's tossing them into cans
of kerosene, and that is in part the nature
of demagoguery, that because what you're doing
is you're inflaming a mob.
All kinds of things will now become unpredictable.
There'll be violence and it can go in any
kind of direction, and that's what Mark Antony
wants.
Remember, this is also the man who says "Cry
'Havoc!,' and let slip the dogs of war."
And there's a little bit, which sometimes
gets overlooked where there's a poet named
Cinna who there was also a conspirator named
Cinna, and the mob comes on and they get Cinna
the poet.
“I'm not Cinna the conspirator,” he says,
and they kill him anyway.
“Tear him!
Tear him!” and they do kill him.
And I think it's Shakespeare's way of saying,
this is what happens when you go down, when
you go down that path.
And I think this really is an essential part
of Shakespeare's teaching about these tools
to acquire power, which can be very effective,
but can have all kinds of unforeseen consequences.
So, here's what I would like you to do for
the next lecture, but first I think I'd like
it to reflect on this lecture and look at
the lines that the plebeians have.
They don't get iambic pentameter, but they
do have various observations and it is interesting
to see in Shakespeare what members of the
crowd are like, why did they say the things
they do?
What is their reading of the situation?
Do they have a certain kind of common sense
or are they simply there to be molded by the
aristocrats?
And if you're familiar with the plague Coriolanus
you might want to take a look at that as well.
Well, next time we're gonna talk about crime,
about simple murder, and for that there's
nothing better than the Scottish play, of
course, Macbeth.
We’ll look at the end of Act 1, beginning
of Scene 2.
This is the point where Macbeth decides on
the murder, and from this, everything else
in the play follows.
And I posted a couple of questions to you.
Is he evil or merely easily tempted?
Is he truly independent or is he dominated
by his wife?
Is he impulsive or disciplined?
Of course, those are either or questions.
The truth may be somewhere in between, but
I'll leave that for you to figure out.
See you next time.
Hello, this is Eliot Cohen.
Welcome back to Rough Magic: Shakespeare on
Power.
We've been talking about various illegitimate
ways to acquire power and with this lecture
we'll discuss the most illegitimate of them
all, mere murder, crime, and the case will
be, of course, Macbeth.
Where Macbeth, a noblemen who deserved well
of his King, King Duncan, commits murder and
replaces him, and of course it ends pretty
badly.
There are two questions to explore here.
Why does Macbeth commit the murder?
And secondly, what are the consequences of
seizing power by crime?
Now Macbeth is a complicated play in many
ways and one of them is that Macbeth himself
is a very complicated character.
He's not simply evil, like Iago in Othello
or Richard III in the play of that name.
He has some scruples.
He hesitates.
He is self-aware.
So why does he commit the murder?
What is it that allows him to do so?
Well, I would say there are two clues.
One is at the very beginning when Duncan is
told about Macbeth’s success against the
trader MacDonald and the messenger is reporting
the final duel hand to hand fight, “which
ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
til he unseamed him from the nave to the chops,
and fixed his head upon our battlements.”
The nave can either be the navel or the crotch,
and the chops, of course, are the jaws.
So think about that, it's actually a more
violent image than the sword coming crashing
down from the head down.
This is the sword coming up, and it's a pretty
grizzly picture, and of course he puts the
trader's head on the fortress.
The point here is this is a very violent man.
He's capable of a great deal of violence.
At the moment it's controlled, in support
of his King, but perhaps not always.
The second clue lies in the prophecy of the
three weird sisters.
“All hail Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of
Glamis.
Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor.
All hail Macbeth, that shalt be King hereafter.”
And what they're doing is they're using three
titles.
The title he currently has, the title that
he ends up being given by the King, as Thane
of Cawdor, and then that shalt be King hereafter.
Well, how does Macbeth react to that?
“This supernatural soliciting cannot be
ill, cannot be good.
If ill, Why hath it given me earnest of success,
commencing in a truth?”
So in other words, he begins by saying, well,
even though these are three pretty scary creatures,
often referred to as witches, that this can't
be bad.
Well, really?
And the reason why is because they correctly
predicted that he would become Thane of Cawdor.
But it can't be entirely good, not because
they're suggesting that he might do something
terrible, but rather because there's something
about what they're saying that makes me really,
really uneasy.
And here's the interesting thing, “my thought,
whose murder yet is but fantastical.”
This suggests that he may have already begun
thinking about the murder of Duncan, but he
just hadn't resolved on doing it.
It made him uneasy, and so he's somewhat at
a loss for what to do.
The point is, this is not a man with a deeply
fixed moral compass, far from it.
He has scruples, he has reservations and we'll
see those.
But that's not what's making him move.
He then makes the decision, “If it were
done with ‘tis done, then ‘twere well,
it were done quickly.”
I'd say a very much a kind of a military leader’s
view of things, let's act decisively.
But he thinks about it cause he's not, he's
very smart, and he says "If th'assassination.
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
with his surcease success; that but this blow
might be the be-all and end-all, here.
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
we’d jump the life to come.”
In other words, if by killing Duncan, that
would be it, I would just be King and all
would be good, then I wouldn't worry that
much about the afterlife, divine punishment.
But, and again, there's no moral constraint
here, it’s what I've learned is that “we
but teach bloody instructions, which being
taught return to play th’inventor.”
So in other words, I know that if you do this
kind of thing, then other people are going
to do this, try to do this kind of thing to
you, and I know more over that this is a real
problem, his kinsmen, and then, you know,
he is a, was a meek and virtuous guy and that
fact will make me extremely unpopular.
He doesn't say that it's a moral, he doesn't
say that it's wrong.
He knows the consequences.
So Macbeth is a highly rational, highly intelligent
man who lacks something of a moral center.
Certainly doesn't have the kind of moral compass
that would just say, I'm not even gonna think
about this.
And of course he knows where this is gonna
go.
“We have scorched the snake, not killed
it.”
And so he goes from murder to murder, to murder,
to include going after women and children,
as well as other aristocrats.
And he knows, again, because he's smart, he's
going to pay a psychological price for this.
He loses the ability to sleep, and he talks
about this quite at some length about, you
know, that he, he talks about how sleep is
a great restorative and that I'm gonna lose
the ability to sleep.
And this is a common theme in Shakespeare.
Kings don't sleep easily.
Uneasy lies that wears the crown.
Henry IV and Henry V both talk about this
of course.
And so he knows where this is going.
And where does take him?
Well, at the end of the play when his wife
has died, we know that it's a very close marriage.
It's usually portrayed, actually is sexually
quite intense, but they are clearly a partnership
together.
He hears that she's died and she's apathetic.
“She should have died hereafter, there would
have been a time for such a word.”
And then this famous speech “Tomorrow, and
tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty
pace from day to day, to the last syllable
of recorded time.”
It's funny because this is not a man whose
the pace of whose life has been petty at all,
but that's where he is.
It's a bleak, colorless world and “All our
yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty
death.”
Again, there is Shakespeare's theatrical metaphor,
“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound
and fury signifying nothing.”
I think the message for us in all this is
that when you gain power by great crime, it
eventually burns you out on the inside.
In general, it seems to me most Shakespearian
figures where they have gained power lose
some of their humanity, and I think that's
a pretty fair observation actually of the
world as we know it, but it is particularly
the case for someone who has gained power
through crime and above all the crime of murder.
And of course in the end of that prize that
he sought, the crown, doesn't exist.
It doesn't even refer to as a crown.
It's a title hanging loose about him like
a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief.
He has nobody who supports him.
He has nobody who loves him.
He has nobody who will be with him.
He is like Richard III at the end, utterly
alone.
And that too is in the nature of power, particularly
power illegitimately gained, at the end, you
are completely alone.
Now, as you reflect on this lecture, I would
like you to consider the possibility that
Macbeth is not the only figure who's been
seduced by power.
You may wish to go back and look at some of
the other figures in the play, because you
can certainly argue that they too, but in
different ways, are seduced by power, including
some of the good guys like Malcolm.
So you may want to think about that.
For the next lecture, we're going to begin
the third part of the course, which deals
with the exercise of power.
The theme is going to be inspiration, and
we're going to discuss the most inspirational
speech in Shakespeare, perhaps in the English
language, and that's the St. Crispin’s Day
speech that King Henry V gives on the eve
of the battle of Agincourt.
Please read it, enjoy it, and I look forward
to speaking with you next time.
