‘Fashion it thus’—Construal in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—
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Critics of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar have broadly fallen into two camps: those who see Brutus as the noble, tragic hero of the play, and those who try to correct what they believe to be an idealised view of his character. In many of these readings, commentators (sympathetic or otherwise) have suggested that Brutus’s soliloquy in the orchard―in which he ruminates on the question of Caesar’s assassination―is somehow faulty or defective. What seems particularly troubling is Brutus’s use of ‘common proof’, a strategy of argument which causes his reasoning to appear morally dubious, since it is not based on his personal experience of Caesar but on generalisations about ambition. A rather different picture of the speech emerges when it is contextualised against classical rhetorical strategies of argumentation that were undoubtedly familiar to Shakespeare from his time at grammar school. Read against these strategies, we can see how the speech follows a specific set of rhetorical recommendations that relies on the invocation of general, common, and universally credible arguments to highlight and even exaggerate an individual’s faults. The article reconstructs these recommendations from rhetorical handbooks such as Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, Cicero’s De inventione, and Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata and offers a close reading of the speech from Shakespeare’s play. It argues that paying attention to these rhetorical strategies can help us to better understand the movement of thought in the speech and what exactly it is that Brutus aims to accomplish with his arguments. As I hope to show, it may also even illuminate certain choices in terms of Shakespeare’s characterisation of Caesar.
Abstract
Critics of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar have broadly fallen into two camps: those who see Brutus as the noble, tragic hero of the play, and those who try to correct what they believe to be an idealised view of his character. In many of these readings, commentators (sympathetic or otherwise) have suggested that Brutus’s soliloquy in the orchard―in which he ruminates on the question of Caesar’s assassination―is somehow faulty or defective. What seems particularly troubling is Brutus’s use of ‘common proof’, a strategy of argument which causes his reasoning to appear morally dubious, since it is not based on his personal experience of Caesar but on generalisations about ambition. A rather different picture of the speech emerges when it is contextualised against classical rhetorical strategies of argumentation that were undoubtedly familiar to Shakespeare from his time at grammar school. Read against these strategies, we can see how the speech follows a specific set of rhetorical recommendations that relies on the invocation of general, common, and universally credible arguments to highlight and even exaggerate an individual’s faults. The article reconstructs these recommendations from rhetorical handbooks such as Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, Cicero’s De inventione, and Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata and offers a close reading of the speech from Shakespeare’s play. It argues that paying attention to these rhetorical strategies can help us to better understand the movement of thought in the speech and what exactly it is that Brutus aims to accomplish with his arguments. As I hope to show, it may also even illuminate certain choices in terms of Shakespeare’s characterisation of Caesar.
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