Last year, while writing for Broadly Textual about the political implications of staging Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar under the Trump administration, I off-handedly suggested that the play could be read as one in “which a demagogue exploits a mob of Roman citizens and preys upon their anger and resentment to compel them to destructive violence.” Later that year, when teaching the play to my lower-division Shakespeare students, we looked at Marc Antony’s famous eulogy for Caesar as an example of early modern worries concerning the power of rhetoric to incite men to violence. Marc Antony, attempting to expose the hypocrisy of the conspirators who killed Caesar, is one of Shakespeare’s finest rhetoricians and a master of manipulating public opinion, swaying a crowd that had moments ago cheered the death of Caesar.
This speech is the beginning of Antony’s revenge, the fulfillment of his promise that “Domestic fury and fierce civil strife/ Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;” and his chosen tool of revenge is a carefully constructed piece of public speaking.
The populous, reminded of their love of Caesar, takes to the streets of Rome to bring the conspirators to justice, beginning with a cry of “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!/Let not a traitor live!.” All the while, Marc Antony is careful to position himself against the crowd, claiming that he does not wish to “put a tongue/ In every wound of Caesar that should move/ The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny,” nor does he wish to “stir you up/ To such a sudden flood of mutiny.” All of this, is of course, an act, for as soon as the crowd is suitably out of his control, he muses “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,/Take thou what course thou wilt!”
This speech represents the most frequent kind of early modern anxiety surrounding the power of rhetoric, a fear that a masterful rhetorician might incite the crowd to violence or vice with simply the power of their words. When coupled with Marc Antony’s suggestion that the mischief that will follow take whatever course it will, audiences are left with a rhetorician who sets a crowd to violent action and is content to sit back and simply await the desired results, whatever the consequences may be.
In the confusion and chaos that follows, Shakespeare paints a bleak picture of what occurs in the chaos of the disordered Roman world. The mob runs into the poet Cinna on the way to capture Brutus and Cassius, and they confuse him with a conspirator of the same name, deciding to tear the man apart in the street. When they learn that this is not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet, the mob does not change course, instead simply deciding upon another reason to murder the poet (his verses are bad).
As they carry him off to end the scene, a fourth citizen answers Cinna’s claim to innocence by proclaiming, “It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his/name out of his heart, and turn him going.”* This is clearly not the result that Antony intended, that the poet Cinna should be killed, but it is of no matter to the rhetorician who has unleashed the rage of his supporters and followers upon those he wishes to see punished. In his criticism of the mob, Shakespeare also implicates the man who manipulated the mob into a violent fervor and the play centralizes the hypocrisy and falseness of Marc Antony’s claims that he had no desire to see the crowd turned to violence.
I’ve been returning to the concerns raised in this play a great deal in recent months, now more so than ever. While there is a lot left to discuss concerning the ways in which rhetoric and action become intertwined, moments such as these speak to a long, historical concern surrounding the ways that speech can be used to urge violence and the ways in which that violence becomes uncontrollable.
Now, Marc Antony is not a perfect parallel to our contemporary concerns, as we are able to see him consciously constructing his plan to set a crowd to violence, something we did not receive with Henry II and we do not receive within our contemporary moment, but he does offer a useful place to begin our examination.
This week, I hope to have demonstrated the degree to which the conversations that we are currently having about inciting speech and turbulent priests has a long-standing precedent in the world of literature. Next week, I plan to discuss the ways in which our contemporary political climate responds to the same questions that spurred Shakespeare to critique the masterful rhetoric of Marc Antony.
* In many ways, our contemporary moment is no stranger to acts such as these, as it is an all too common occurrence for Facebook pages and Twitter handles to be bombarded with death threats simply because their names are similar to those of the targets of an internet mob.
Evan Hixon is a PhD student in English at Syracuse University. His research centers on early modern British drama and political writing, with an emphasis on Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. His dissertation examines representations of spies and informants in the works of early modern English dramatists.
