Abstract
But a play is felt a brick at a time. Its parts are perceived not simultaneously but one by one. Even at play’s end, though we have seen every part, only one is before us; the others are present in memory only, and imperfectly. No one mind, not even Shakespeare’s, can contain King Lear in a single act of perception. Furthermore, though all bricks are more or less alike, all scenes, all speeches, all lines of poetry are not, but vary in quality from marble to papier-mâché.
His real power is not shown in the splendour of particular passages but by the progress of his fable, and the tenour of his dialogue; and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.
Dr Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’1
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Notes
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor, 2 vols (1930) I, 224. 3. I am using ‘scene’ loosely, here and throughout, as my analysis does not include the entirety of the scene, as defined by the usual formal criteria. A certain arbitrariness of definition is inherent in the study of moments. We must begin and end somewhere, but, as the only logical beginning and ending are those of the play itself, any other division will inevitably be more or less unsatisfactory, and based (as mine here is) on a fairly subjective sense of the limits of an ‘episode’ or ‘movement’.
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (1957–75) v, 85. Ann Pasternak-Slater, in Shakespeare’s Stage Direction (1982), argues that we must assume that Shakespeare intended the same action that he found in his source. Aside from the absurdity of this as a general principle, nothing in the dialogue alerts us to such a role for Metellus; it is Casca who is to be ‘the first’, a direction surely superfluous if Metellus must, by the time Casca strikes, already have initiated hostilities with his ‘sign’. Moreover, Metellus Cimber’s role, in the scene as Shakespeare wrote it, is to ‘prefer his suit to Caesar’; after initiating the subject of discussion, he then fades from the dialogue, as the other conspirators press forward. An audience could hardly be expected to attend to an unprepared ‘sign’ by a minor conspirator whose place in the dialogue has already been usurped by other and more important characters.
For Tieck’s description of the 1817 production, see Julius Caesar, ed. H. H. Furness, Jr (1913) p. 440. For the two Gielgud performances, I rely on personal experience. The assassination has been performed slowly or ritualistically in other productions; but these are the only ones where I can testify to an audience’s response.
See The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951) p. 983: ‘They stab Caesar. Casca strikes the first, Brutus the last, blow’; Humphreys adopts my more economical formula.
This is a fundamental principle, analysed in a variety of contexts: see Vernon, Psychology of Perception, pp. 25–31, 36–9; Hunter, Memory, pp. 68–9; George A. Miller, Psychology: The Science of Mental Life (1962) pp. 166–9.
See Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage, pp. 125 (Booth), 94 (Macready), 98 (Phelps), 258 (Papp), 272 (Nunn).
Stanley E. Fish, Self-consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972) p. 400.
Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols (1925–52) VIII, 583–4 (spelling modernized).
See for instance M. C. Bradbrook’s allusion to the Hamlet passage in Shakespeare: The Poet in his World (1978) p. 161.
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© 1985 Gary Taylor
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Taylor, G. (1985). Julius Caesar The Noblest Moment of Them All. In: Moment by Moment by Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07544-7_2
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