All Hail Caesar

You might have guessed that I did not run out to see the Public Theatre’s new production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Central Park. And not because I don't like Central Park. As a general rule, if you want to see Shakespeare done well you go to London, or to some place where they actors are trained in diction. You cannot mumble and emote your way through Shakespeare.

Worse yet, American productions have been contaminated by political correctness and want to turn Shakespearean tragedy into a leftist morality play.

Apparently, that’s what happened in Central Park when director Oskar Eustis, in an act of consummate moral cowardice, turned Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into a Donald Trump effigy and had him murdered by a suitably diverse Senate.

The moral of the story was that Caesar was killed for crimes against political correctness. To Eustis this meant that Trump/Caesar had committed crimes against democracy. Everyone else knows that Rome was not a democracy and that neither Caesar nor the Senators who killed him were elected democratically, but don’t bother with the facts when you are promoting an ideology.

Naturally, the director and his satraps in the media are kvelling over their moral courage for speaking truth to power. Ann Althouse exposes them for the cowards they are. In her words:

It seems to me that theater should disturb, upset, and provoke the audience in the theater, not show them the things they already firmly believe are disturbing, upsetting, and provoking. So I'd say you are not doing your job. You're presenting hatred of Donald Trump in the center of Manhattan. Don't preen, and don't bring God into it. You've got "the mirror." Look at yourself. 

In another context, it’s called preaching to the choir.

Coming fast upon Kathy Griffen’s posing with a severed head, covered in blood, that resembles President Trump, some have suggested that the Public Theatre production is in bad taste. In truth, it’s beyond bad taste. It borders on a death threat.

Killing someone in effigy is not merely an expression of a wish. It’s not an attempt at good natured humor. If you hear that someone has stabbed a voodoo doll-- one that looks like you -- through the heart you are not likely to think it’s funny. Murdering an effigy is not a joke. It is not a bad joke. It’s a death threat. We will say that it’s covered by the first amendment, but it’s appalling nevertheless.

However much those who portray the death of Donald Trump believe that they are not really promoting such acts, members of the general public might hear things differently. When the audience stands and applauds the murder of Caesar/Trump, for all I know, some crank out there might come to believe that he will be applauded for shooting some Republican Congressmen.

To return to Shakespeare, the director’s political correctness has also made the play’s hero Marc Antony into a woman. One assumes that the director thinks that Marc Antony was a woman trapped in a man’s body, but since the play is an historical tragedy, it is profoundly offensive to play gender politics with the central character.

Perhaps the director imagined that male and female were interchangeable, in which case he’s an imbecile. Or else, he imagined that the audience would not notice or care, in which case you’re the imbecile. Otherwise he is trying to see whether the New York theatre audience has been sufficiently brainwashed to believe anything that is presented as advanced political correct thinking.

By changing Marc Antony into Marcia Antony the play now says that murdering of the patriarchal oppressor led to the advent of feminism and girl power.

Like much of modern art, the joke is on the audience. It must count as what the French would call: une bande d’abrutis. (The term, abruti, you see, comes to us from one Brutus.]

Even Daily Beast columnist Janice Kaplan declares that the feminized Marc Antony is whiny and weepy. Duh? For those who want to see the character done right, I recommend the non-Shakespearean HBO series Rome where Marc Antony is played to perfection by James Purefoy. The Public Theatre sacrificed Shakespeare to the gods of political correctness.

Critic Kenneth Burke argued cogently that Marc Antony is the play’s hero, the manifestation of a Caesar principle that lived on after the death of Caesar. And no, the assassination was not the equivalent of gender reassignment surgery.

But, what did Shakespeare think? What does the play say? Is it a paean to a lost democracy or is it something else? Did Shakespeare believe that the assassination was justified? Did he portray Brutus and Cassius as heroic figures trying to defend democracy by the wrong methods?

For the record Marc Antony’s funeral oration is one of the great speeches in English literature. By contrast, the oration offered by Brutus is worthy of a thug and a brute. Where do you think that the word “brute” comes from? Where do you think the notion of brutality comes from? Saying that Antony is brute for avenging the murder of Caesar is to miss the point entirely.

One notes, in passing, for those who care about such things, that Caesar’s killers, especially Cassius and Brutus were consigned by Dante to the lowest circle of the Inferno. They were going to live out eternity in Satan’s anus, sharing the space with Judas Iscariot himself. The Roman senators gained their eternal damnation for being traitors, for having betrayed civil authority.

I suspect that the people of Shakespeare’s day would have connected the assassination of Julius Caesar with the crucifixion of Christ. They would have seen it as a precursor of the crucifixion. We have two murders, of two people with the same initials, whose unjust deaths gave rise to different forms of salvation, whether through a republican Europe or through Christianity. 

Surely, people who took seriously the Biblical injunction: “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; render unto God that which is God’s” would not have missed this obvious point. As Bernard Lewis once pointed out, the Biblical statement forms the basis for the separation of Church and State.

When Marc Antony keeps the Caesar principle alive, he enacts a secular resurrection. That is, a return to the Republic.

In the Central Park production Cassius and Brutus are presented as heroes, but not completely as heroes. The director has not problem with their effort to overthrow a tyrant—sic semper tyrannis, says Brutus—but they apparently did it the wrong way. They did it by an assassination, not by the ballot box. Thus, the director has chosen to be duped by the lead conspirators, clearly not the point Shakespeare was trying to make.

Anyone who believes in the noble intentions of Brutus and Cassius has misread the play completely. It’s almost as bad as thinking that Rome was a democracy.

Brutus was not an honorable man. As Janice Kaplan suggests, the ending of the play, with the death of the conspirators and the return of Marc Antony renders a meaning that Eustis missed completely:

But Marc Anthony, fighting to continue what Caesar started, has the big speech and the triumphant ending. Anthony’s forces win and take over Rome—so Caesar (in effect) lives on. 

The play’s director and his defenders believe that the play’s message is that you should not try to overthrow a democratically elected leader with violence.

They tell us that they are not promoting the assassination of the president. Did the audience that stood up and applauded the death of Caesar/Trump have the same sentiments?

As for the merits of assassination, would these great thinkers have expressed the same sentiment if the victim of the assassination were named Adolph Hitler?

Of course, the play has nothing to do with the facts. The director imagines that Rome was a democracy and that Caesar was a democratic leader who was trying to assume despotic powers. In truth, Rome was not a democracy and the Senators were not elected democratically.

The notion that Brutus and Cassius—by deposing Caesar the wrong way--put an end to democracy for two thousand years is rank silliness. Does anyone really believe that lowlifes like Cassius and Brutus, in rank defiance of the will of the people, were defending democracy?

Has anyone pointed out the obvious point, namely that Caesar was a conqueror, a man who created an Empire. He was not a demagogue and did not lead by making eloquent speeches.

People who win wars tend to be popular and much loved by the people. Such was the case in Rome. In modern parlance, of course, he becomes an imperialist who oppresses certain groups of people—the people who are placed by the director in the Roman Senate and who murder him for his crimes against diversity.

Is the following description of Caesar as buffoon consonant with Shakespeare or with history?

From Variety:

[Trump-Caesar is presented as a] preening Goldilocks who wears embarrassingly long ties, makes triumphal hand gestures and knows how to work the crowds. Our own crowd of complicit theatergoers roared with delight when he lowered himself into a golden bathtub. Here the hero was joined by his wife Calpurnia, deliciously played by Tina Benko in the slender, beautifully draped (by costumer Paul Tazewell) figure of a professional model speaking in the unmistakable accents of a native-born Slovenian.

This works on only one plane. It affirms the prejudices of the audience and shows that New York theatre-goers live in an echo chamber where they yearn for nothing other than to hear their own thoughts played back to them. They are open to anything that affirms their dogmatic beliefs and reject anything that does not.

For those whose brains have not been completely addled by political correctness, Shakespeare was not expressing an opinion about the current political scene. His or ours. He was not telling us how to think about the current political scene. He was telling a story, a story that was of extraordinary importance in the founding of Western civilization.