Despite being widely regarded as the greatest writer of the English language, much is not known about William Shakespeare's personal life, and more specifically, the process by which he penned his masterpieces. We are left only to infer the finer decisions he made in poring over his sources to compose historically based plays such as Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and perhaps most famously, Julius Caesar. Rich with political drama that is as resonant in our time as it was to the questions confronting Elizabethan England, it offers a glimpse into the dramatic historiographical tradition at the time; how the past viewed the even older past, and how the perception of historical moments can evolve over the ages. With the knowledge of Shakespeare's challenge of conveying this seminal scene in Roman history to an Elizabethan audience in mind—caught between competing tensions regarding the preservation of historical truth, the conveyance of entertainment, and respecting the sanctity of the political establishment—this piece seeks to creatively fill in the gap of Shakespeare's interaction with his own past that would become such a staple of modern perceptions on ancient history.
Enjoy.
Gobs of snow cover much of the arch of the windowpanes, a white glossiness overtaking the shards of melted sand, with only peeks available through the chasms showing flickers of torchlight outside on the line of London streets. Few other windows are lit at this time—as do few sets of shoes stride along the cobbles—and only occasionally does the banal chorus of players returning from rehearsal break the silence. A light glow from the mantle on the wall illuminates only part of the study, the tablinum as the patricians would say, though much of the chamber lays blanketed by darkness, the tattered binders along the shelves invisible from a glance. Though, you possess such a spacial grasp of the shelf that your memory fills with the texts, and you can plot their places on the surface by thought: There's Hall and Holinshed declaiming at the top, unfolding the chronicler's path from London and Lancashire to Edinburgh and Fife, and from William to Elizabeth, too. These roads are paved as an infrastructural palimpsest over their Roman forebears, while Bocaccio curses in the vernacular on the lower rung, wishing he'd have his own spot in your imagination tonight.
Patientia, libri. Nam patientia esse prudens est.
You smirk to yourself and imagine the steaming look on the Italian's face, digesting your rejoinder. Alas, you aren't here to discourse with corpses nigh only three centuries old—the desiccating bodies of the early first millennium grasp your soul, the flies and leaches all the more a salve to your heart; as long as they speak lingua latina. The hardwood of your desk, dotted with all manner of cracks, crevices, and colonnades of unfinished folios, bears the frontispiece of several reams of paper, resplendent in a beige hue, your elegant scrawl festooning the pages. You admire your handiwork: with every brush of the quill, a goose's severed feather resting in your palm, the ink spreads out in distinct lines, wavy yet geometric, parallelograms of text. Few holes dot the surface, only appearing now and then as you reach a moment of summa anima, and, driven to compose the etched images of your psyche, engage the feather with such a force that the ink punctures the pages, loosening the material for the thrust of your implement.
Following these violent scenes, you gasp, dropping the feather to the wood, and inspecting the damage. Every leaf is a sacred object, itself the spirit of communication, and the linkage between your mind and the player's mouth. To deface it in such a way seems all too much an Alarician act, and yet, the hole provokes a sort of wonder. Now you can see, clearly, Brutus bowing before Caesar in one moment, and in the next ream, the reluctant furor in his eyes, driving the dagger down his back. The Acts—and acts—seep into one another, this commixture or witch's blend of chronology.
By your side, Plutarch watches with your same dualism of horror and amazement, like what Mani would cherish. His Parallel Lives sits by your left hand, its own pages ruffled and having a few holes to match. Some were inherited from the past owner (not everyone had their fill with Thomas North's translation, it seems, and an ad hominem attack on the cartis libri would thus be justified), but others were of your own doing, clasping the pages in your hands at once to scour the English for their Latin undertones.
You flip through the tome, your quill-markings popping up now and then at Brutus and Antony's passages, until you come up to Caesar himself. Far from Plutarch's usual moral didactics, Caesar's biography is literarily mundane, accounting the dictator's existence as one would for a lawyer or an up-stuck bishop. But you see between the stern words, the verbae severae, the depiction of a man thoroughly wed to the ideations of his own power.
You imagine Caesar in his own tablinum at his palace in Rome, offering conspiratorial looks towards Cornelia's cubiculum chambers as he inspects his will. Next to the scrolls, a diadem slumbers, the delicate curlicues of the leaves imparting the essence of authority, like Diana's woods themselves granted Caesar the imperium regis. And still can Caesar feel the touch of Antony's fingers as he offered it to him in the Forum some weeks prior, the captive eyes of the Roman people awaiting Caesar's ultimate decision.
His hand reaches for it, tantalized, his fingers nearly brushing the green. But then they stop, suspended in the air, and Caesar halts.
Iam non. It will have to wait for a later date.
You don't intend to put this into the script—Caesar stands for you as not a human but an archetype, an abstraction of unquenched power clad in toga—but you believe the image you've concocted for yourself establishes a sort of contrary tension in the piece.
You flip through the Lives back to Brutus, and another scene emanates in your vision.
Brutus sits at the back end of a closed-off taberna in the heart of the city, Cassius and Casca flanking him, their fists nearly raised even as their voices hush in the recesses of the tavern.
CASSIUS: He nearly accepted it! Face turns a blush red, arm shaking, teeth crackling.
BRUTUS: Never a king without a crown, Cassius? Beads of sweat do not roll down the forehead, per se, but underneath the folds of hair an inner perspiration boils, fingers tapping into the wooden curvature of the table.
CASCA: Your friend is right. How much longer will the Senate wait to make its move?
Must we flap our gums and gesticulate our fingers while Caesar dons the wreath, and dawns what he will wreak on this republic?
Bound hands together, as if in prayer, and close the eyes.
He knew the arc of his lineage. How many generations of the Brutii had stood before the march of tyrants and blocked the advance of the wretched? How many Brutii sons and daughters remembered with rote astonishment the pedigree of their original paterfamilias, who drove out the kings from Rome and watered the soil of the garden of liberty?
You imagine the stage directions for Brutus' player:
Oscillate thy shoulders.
Clench thy mouth.
Hold back thy tears of history.
In Brutus' agonizing refrain, you find your muse. A chance to display what happens when liberty is threatened, a caution as much as it is a prophecy; and yet...
You make the distinction between history and your story. You emphasize the gulf between king and the Queen: you envision Caesar trembling before his enemies in the Senate, taking the gashes one after the other in a spellbinding deliverance of justice. After coming so far, it was only natural that his fall was ordained, not simply by justice alone but by the fleeting nature of power. The sparagmos of his spirit was inevitable; you feel Aeschylus nodding in approval. His meekness, no doubt, makes him a king fit for the knives.
But still, you put feather to chin, thinking, that isn't enough on its own. The act itself must be questioned—the moral impetus at hand.
Brutus looks around the Senate, dagger still in his hand, as Caesar trembles to the ground. Faces of astonishment, outrage, and curiosity peek out from purple to purple, inspecting the fruits of the conspirators' labor.
He sees his face, wrought with sweat and tumult, in the red reflection of the dagger blade.
BRUTUS: What now?
It isn't Brutus who speaks, but the reflection.
You know well that you must keep your cards close to your chest on this front. As much as you can pose the quandary of liberty to your fellow Angles, such quandaries are often dirtied with the blood of innocent men, you concede.
Your hand shakes with this tension. You feel the Queen's aged gaze piercing down your back, and you are unable to turn back towards her, like there are snakes lingering in her hair.
Is it loyalty that compels you to dull the blade and leaven your wit, or fear?
Your face pales, and you hear the door opening gently.
ANNE: What is keeping you so late, William? You know the best images crop up at first light.
Her face softens, even as she too betrays a hint of worry, veiled under the honey of affection.
You turn back, and look at her, then back to Plutarch, Brutus, and Caesar. They themselves offer confused glances, you think—experts in biography, politics, and war, but not necessarily in marital affairs. You shrug, and smile back, indicating that you won't be gone long.
Before you retire, however, you give one last gaze out through the window, soiled in white.
The prism of life and history, you posit, lets through the truth that it wishes, and the truth that it must allow.