brainwagon

Today is the Ides of March, and as such, it seems appropriate to place a link to Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, and to remind everyone that all of Shakespeare’s works are in the public domain and available from Project Gutenberg.

[tags]Julius Caesar,William Shakespeare,Ides of March[/tags]

Addendum: Okay, here’s a slightly more personal story to pad out this brief niglet. Despite being a dyed in the wool science geek, I did my got my B.S. from the University of Oregon. Fine educational institution that they are, they required undergraduates to pursue a somewhat diverse curriculum, including the completion of a number of classes in “arts”, which included literature, theater, and language skills. To pad out this part of my schooling, I decided to take a class in Shakespeare, and since I did reasonably well, I decided to take two more, all from Professor William Rockett. My recollections of him was that he always came into class with a smile, and would open discussion the with the same two questions:

1. “Did you read the play?”
2. “What did you think of it?”

But for reasons which aren’t all that clear to me, twenty-some odd years later, it is our discussion of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar which are embedded in my mind. We were discussing the funeral oration of Mark Antony, you know the one:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious;
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest-
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men-
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me;
But Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept;
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And sure he is an honorable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause;
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Antony goes on to incite the crowd against Brutus and the traitors who conspired to murder him through his eloquence. Anyway, Professor Rockett said (from memory, but the general idea and flow is correct) “What did you think of this speech? Did it get you fired up? I was out in my garden, trying to transplant a rhododendren, and I was going over it in my mind again and again. You know rhododendrons have the most enormous rootballs? It took me well over an hour to dig it out, and as I was working, I kept thinking about the speech that so moved the Romans, until finally I managed to get the plant out. I then, ran in to the house and yelled to my wife, ‘My God, the traitors have slain Julius Caesar!’ She thought I was crazy. What about you?”

I took three semesters of Shakespeare from Professor Rockett, read every play, every sonnet. He had great enthusiasm and humor, and I enjoyed his classes immensely. Great stuff.

Addendum2: If you don’t have as great a passion for Shakespeare as I do, but nonetheless find yourself taking a class, try getting a recorded version of the play, and follow along by reading it. We used the Oxford Edition Shakespeare which had lots of footnotes, and I had no trouble following the language when I could both hear it and flit down to the various footnotes to figure out some of the idiomatic speech. Two hours, you can get through any play, and have a much easier time than trying to just read it.