Shakespearean Perspectives by Lucking David;

Author:Lucking, David; [Lucking, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Published: 2017-02-17T16:24:27+00:00

Casca has no difficulty in grasping Cassius’s point, responding that “’Tis Caesar that you mean, is it not, Cassius?” (I.iii.79). But if Casca here arrives at his identification of the meaning of the storm through a description that is framed in such terms as to make this the only possible conclusion, the reverse occurs two scenes later when Caesar must interpret the significance of the same event. Calphurnia warns her husband not to venture forth on the Ides of March because numerous incidents have occurred in the course of the night that would seem to be sinister in their import, but Caesar dismisses her argument because “these predictions / Are to the world in general as to Caesar” (II.ii.28–29). At this point it is Calphurnia who, like Cassius though for very different reasons, argues that the portents must have an application to Caesar in particular, and not to the world at large, that “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes” (II.ii.30–31).

Calphurnia is unsuccessful in her efforts to prevail upon Caesar not to go to the Senate, as are the augurs who advise him to remain at home because they have failed to find a heart in the beast they have examined (II.ii.38–40). Though it is presumably he himself who has commanded that the auspices be taken, Caesar does not accept the conclusion the augurs have arrived at, choosing instead to interpret the anomaly that so disturbs them as a token of what he himself would be if he succumbed to his own apprehensions: “Caesar should be a beast without a heart / If he should stay at home today for fear” (II.i.42–43). Immediately afterwards the point concerning the relativity of interpretation is driven home when Caesar confides to Decius Brutus that Calphurnia has been visited by an ominous dream of a statue of himself from which blood is gushing forth, a nightmare which she construes in terms of “warnings and portents / And evils imminent” (II.ii.80–81). Anxious to lure Caesar to the Capitol, Decius proposes his own reading of the dream, and in this case the act of construing becomes not simply an exercise of interpretative licence, with all the risk of error this already entails, but a calculated imposition of meaning:

This dream is all amiss interpreted;

It was a vision fair and fortunate:

Your statue spouting blood in many pipes,

In which so many smiling Romans bath’d,

Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck

Reviving blood, and that great men shall press

For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance.

This by Calphurnia’s dream is signified.(II.ii.83–90)

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