Great Caesar's Ghost

One joy of directing Antony and Cleopatra has been finding moments haunted by Julius Caesar. I directed Julius Caesar for Portland Actors Ensemble in 2008 and it is among my favorite plays. Yet, I had out of hand dismissed its influence upon Antony and Cleopatra as minimal.

​I have faint recollections of accepting a teacher’s caution that the Antony of Julius Caesar need not be the Antony of Antony and Cleopatra and extended that caution beyond its logical conclusion. It is more that one can no more read the plays for faithful dramatization of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans than one can turn to Shakespeare’s English monarch plays for Tudor History. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are creative acts written at very different periods of Shakespeare’s career. Fine. So stipulated. Freed from my former excess of caution, I can now hear the reverberations of Julius Caesar throughout Antony and Cleopatra and will share a few of these here.
 
Pompey’s reminder to the triumvirate of his father’s place in history along with the fall of Brutus and Cassius constitutes the most direct and sustained reference back to the action of Julius Caesar:  

​To you all three,
The senators alone of this great world,
Chief factors for the gods, I do not know
Wherefore my father should revengers want,
Having a son and friends; since Julius Caesar,
Who at Philippi the good Brutus ghosted,
There saw you labouring for him. What was't
That moved pale Cassius to conspire; and what
Made the all-honour'd, honest Roman, Brutus,
With the arm'd rest, courtiers and beauteous freedom,
To drench the Capitol; but that they would
Have one man but a man? And that is it
Hath made me rig my navy; at whose burthen
The anger'd ocean foams; with which I meant
To scourge the ingratitude that despiteful Rome
Cast on my noble father. 
(Antony and Cleopatra - Act II Scene 6) 

​As the actor playing Lepidus pointed out the speech reads like an advertisement for the prequel. The you that is laboring can be Antony or Octavius or both. The use of honor is pointed, if one recalls that Brutus entreats the crowd “believe me for mine honor, and have respect to mine honor, that you may believe.” (JC – 3.2) His pitch is undone, of course, by Antony’s rhetorical flourish of juxtaposing Caesar’s greatest achievements with the avowed honor of his killers. Pompey justifies his insurrection in righting an even older wrong than that of Julius Caesar’s fall of which the main beneficiaries stand before him.
 
Another moment Julius Caesar’s ghost is felt is in Antony’s astonishment after the loss at Actium in Octavius new-found skill. Antony says to Eros: 

Yes, my lord, yes; he at Philippi kept
His sword e'en like a dancer; while I struck
The lean and wrinkled Cassius; and 'twas I
That the mad Brutus ended: he alone
Dealt on lieutenantry, and no practise had
In the brave squares of war: yet now--No matter. 
(Antony and Cleopatra ​- Act III Scene 11) 

Antony takes credit for the victories that drove Cassius and Brutus to suicide and wonders how Octavius has gained experience enough to effectively challenge him now. 

These references are fairly straightforward – the deeper resonance between Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra that I have come to cherish is the character’s sense of a divinity that shapes their ends; of their being a time which is ripe for their designs and times that doom them. Before Brutus presses on to Phillipi, he tells Cassius:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. 
(Julius Caesar - Act IV Scene 3) 

These lines are among the best Brutus utters. And their sense is riddled through Antony and Cleopatra as Cleopatra stays Antony’s time or when Octavius orders that his army: 

Strike not by land; keep whole: provoke not battle,
Till we have done at sea. Do not exceed
The prescript of this scroll: our fortune lies
Upon this jump. 
(Antony & Cleopatra - Act III Scene 8) 

Learning of Antony’s death, Octavius calls back to another critical moment in Julius Caesar: the thunderstorm scene in which Casca, Cicero, and Cassius attempt to divine the meaning of the strange sights encountered about the Roman streets. Casca has passed a lion and a hundred women who swear to have seen men ablaze wander the street. Octavius expects such a scene and tells us so:

The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack: the round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets,
And citizens to their dens: the death of Antony
Is not a single doom; in the name lay
A moiety of the world.  
(Antony and Cleopatra - Act V Scene 1) 

One need not have read or seen Julius Caesar to enjoy Antony and Cleopatra, however, a great many moments are made richer with that play’s remembrance. 

Caesar's ghost visiting Brutus in Portland Actors Ensemble's 2008 production of Julius Caesar directed by yours truly