Rome and rhetoric : Shakespeare's Julius Caesar /

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award, Wills (history, emer., Northwestern Univ.) takes a creative approach to helping both novice and fluent readers of Shakespeare's plays understand particular cultural contexts and social mores of the Elizabethan period. The book is structured in four chapters, and each chapter provides specific information and interpretations of one of Julius Caesar's major personas--Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius. Wills also offers readers a glimpse of the historical sources Shakespeare used in his characterizations of various characters in the play. Drawing extensively from the works of Cicero, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Aristotle, Wills not only places readers in "Caesar's world" but also demonstrates how Shakespeare's characters, themes, and conflicts left lasting legacies that are still a part of the human psyche when one thinks of Rome and Julius Caesar, one of its most historic leaders. This book will be of particular value to those interested in immersing themselves in the traditions and values depicted in Julius Caesar. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. T. J. Haskell Northwestern of Connecticut Community College

SHAKESPEARE scholarship is one of the world's thriving industries, with no factories but worldwide workshops. While you are reading this, there must be hundreds (thousands?) of worthies turning out articles and books from pole to pole. But Garry Wills has upped the ante with a simultaneous pair of books. Though modest in size (hardly a drawback), they gain added interest from being the works of an eminent historian who has frequently ventured elsewhere - e.g., to the Roman poet Martial and St. Augustine - but here strikes out into, for him, not entirely new but for many of us surprising territory. The longer of the books, "Verdi's Shakespeare: Men of the Theater," is as much about the playwright as about the composer turning three of the plays into operas. "Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar'" is about Roman history interpreted and reinterpreted by Shakespeare, largely through the four principal characters in "Julius Caesar." Even more than their actions, Wills examines their diverse individual rhetoric. The shorter book is a reworking of the Anthony Hecht Lectures delivered at Bard College in 2009, and is in the main what the French call explication de texte and we, textual analysis or close reading. The oratorical and conversational styles of Caesar, Antony, Brutus and Cassius are scrutinized for the use of such devices as ironia, praeteritio (making a point by saying one would avoid it), interrogatio, partitio (breaking down a theme into its parts), anaphora (beginning consecutive phrases with the same word), aposiopesis (stopping in midsentence and scoring through implication) and chiasmus (phrases or clauses in mirror image, e.g., Quintilian's "I live not in order to eat but eat in order to live," a sort of crossed order), which, for some reason, Wills calls chiasm. Other things too are considered: why Caesar's part is so short (in the same year, 1599, Richard Burbage, the star, had to memorize also the long and difficult parts of Henry V and Hamlet); Shakespeare's dealing with such classical sources as Plutarch, Cicero, Dio Cassius and others; how the play was enacted and, if possible, by whom. Reviewing an early book of Wills's in 1961, Evelyn Waugh opined about the writing, "It is not uniformly bad." But a whole lot can be learned in half a century of being at it. "Rome and Rhetoric" is as entertainingly readable as it is broadly informative. Take this, about Shakespeare's "ability to intuit Rome": "Nothing shows that better than his appreciation of the importance of friendship in the Roman ethical system. Perhaps he had some schoolboy memory of Cicero's 'De Amicitia,' or he may have picked up echoes of it in other authors - he clearly had a capacious and tenacious memory. But his ability to grasp the ethos of a culture like that of Rome goes far beyond mere homework of Ben Jonson's sort. The book he read most surely is the human heart." Nothing here of the "jargon of the lecture room" deplored by Waugh. But one might wonder just what is meant by "Brutus makes himself an inner object of the plot that he is outwardly planning against Caesar." One hopes for a mere typo in "a secret horde of papers" (for "hoard"), and "Caesar's and Antony's bond," which should be "Caesar and Antony's." Even more riveting is "Verdi's Shakespeare," a double-barreled salvo that hits two bull's-eyes. Concerned with the three plays Verdi made operas of - "Macbeth," "Othello" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" - it discusses what they say and how, and by whom they were performed when new and after; what Verdi and his librettists made of them; how Verdi made music fit the action and texts, but also how he would depart from them. Also how and by whom they were performed in Verdi's day and more recently, and how elaborately, minutely and exigently the composer worked with the singers and musicians. Wonderful when geniuses meet: Shakespeare's greatness only Voltaire and Tolstoy tried to dispute; regarding Verdi, Benjamin Britten remarked that there were very few composers about whom he felt, when he disliked a work of theirs, convinced that it was his fault - "Verdi is one of those." Still, I venture to say that Verdi's "Macbeth" is small potatoes compared with those supreme masterworks "Otello" and "Falstaff." But it was the one Verdi rehearsed most assiduously, subjecting the original Lady Macbeth to 150 rehearsals of one duet - which Wills questions, though other authorities affirm. There is a fair, but not daunting, amount of musical analysis, as well as much acknowledged borrowing and quoting from other relevant writers. This only makes the book more useful, what with burrowings (rather than borrowings) a worm would be proud of, and a panorama worthy of a fly's multifaceted eye. We get, it seems, everything known about the circumstances of the plays' and operas' productions; the number and locus of performances, probable casting (much about boy actors) and reception on stage and page, the exact nature of collaborations when and with whom, how much and why various versions or editions differ. Also sources in history and in works by others, treatment of the same material by other composers (e.g., Rossini's "Otello" and Nicolai's "Merry Wives"). Further, contemporary evaluations by critics and witnesses, as well as modern views. Where information is lacking, Wills provides shrewd and judicious guesses. Moreover, fine portraits of actors and singers, and details about Verdi's directorial modus operandi, earning the composer the great director Giorgio Strehler's tribute that his way of directing was a century ahead of the times. ONE must love the now lightly worn erudition of Wills's writing. Herewith a paragraph: "The witches are too jolly for some tastes, as in their giddily swirling dance just before Macbeth first enters, 'Le Sorelle Vagabonde': 'The roaming sisters flit across the waves, skilled to weave a circle enclosing land and sea.' They seem to be having too much fun. But Dante, as opposed to Milton, showed that there can be humor (if of a self-lacerating kind) in hell. The Mephistopheles of the various Faust operas laughs defiantly and sings humorous songs. It is true that he does not giggle, as some of the witches' music suggests. But witches are lower in hell's social order than Mephistopheles. Modern directors must keep searching for a modern diabolism, at a time when that category is less defined than it was in the Renaissance or the Romantic Era." We read with awe Verdi's painstaking analysis of how this or that should be sung or acted. He had difficulties persuading lionized singers that much required sotto voce or cupo (hollow) singing, which their grandstanding resisted. Although Verdi did not know English (his helpful wife, Giuseppina, did), he knew the translations well, and drove his librettists crazy. Also his singers. He was "determined to break away from 'the tyranny of good singing,' from the empty beauties of bel canto," insisting "not only that the characters' singing should be ugly but that they should themselves look ugly, like medieval symbols of vice. . . . 'I want the performers to serve the poet'" - i.e., the librettist - "'better than they serve the composer.' He went so far as to say that his singers should not sing." For "Macbeth," in Francesco Maria Piave, Verdi had a good and patient librettist; for "Otello" and "Falstaff," in Arrigo Boito, a great one. Highly cultivated, from a music-loving family, he was himself a talented though dilatory composer. Verdi's genuine friendship and inspired collaboration with Boito rivals the celebrated one of Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Conventions were defied and major novelties devised. It could not have been easy to assemble so much information from so many far-flung sources, involving also sedulous opera and operatic-movie frequentation, and get it all into two such compact books. "Nomen est omen" goes a Latin adage: the name is a signifier. So the noun "Wills" suggests manifold motivation, multiple resolve. Whatever Garry undertakes, trust Wills to get done. Verdi made three Shakespearean operas - it's wonderful when geniuses meet. John Simon, a longtime critic of the arts, is the theater critic for The Westchester Guardian and The Yonkers Tribune.

Although Wills doesn't note that Julius Caesar probably contains more lines that have become famous quotations than any other Shakespeare play, his analysis of its principal characters indicates why. Shakespeare, like other schoolboys of his time, learned rhetoric, the study of figures of speech and their uses for persuasion. Julius Caesar is a tissue of rhetoric, fraught with conspiracy, oratory, and self-justification. Moreover, its characters hold the fate of the world in their hands. They'd better speak words of fire. Informed by Rome's great rhetoricians, Wills scrutinizes the kinds of rhetoric employed by Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius in turn, showing how these disclose their characters. Caesar really is a great man; Brutus is far more ambitious and self-regarding than he paints himself; Antony is pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness but not cynical; Cassius is enviously deceptive but not vicious; and all are noble, though only Caesar is great, so great that he haunts Brutus, Cassius, and, beyond the play's action, Antony to their deaths. Shakespeareans must read this penetrating, provocative analysis.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist

Pulitzer Prize-winner Wills, who penetrated Abraham Lincoln's rhetoric in Lincoln at Gettysburg, now shows how the four major characters in Julius Caesar reveal Shakespeare's uncanny, effortless, and intuitive mastery of Quintilian, Socrates, and other rhetorical stylists of the ancient world. Although Shakespeare draws from Plutarch-at third hand, from a French translation that was itself translated into English-his familiarity with the art of rhetoric gives playgoers a far more fleshed-out depiction of Roman life at its height than does his hypereducated rival, Ben Jonson. Along the way, Wills treats readers to many observations and speculations on the bread and butter of Shakespearean theatrical magic: for example, "the economy of Shakespeare's casting practice" suggests that both major women characters in Julius Caesar were almost certainly played by a single boy actor, and how Caesar's relatively few appearances in the play are in part explained by the same actor playing both Cicero and Caesar. Overall, this tour de force, based on a lecture series at Bard College, shows why our view of ancient Rome is very much Shakespeare's. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.