CHAPTER V.—EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT: ACT 3.

I.

THOUGH the first scene opens outside the Senate House,

most of it is a representation of indoor occurrences.

The

stage directions that assist the modern reader of the play are absent from the Folio. Undoubtedly in this clear but unmarked change of place is to be recognised the primitive arrangement of Marlowe-common to the plays of the early nineties—which Beaumont has not seen fit to alter. It is, of course, Marlowe's Soothsayer with whom the dialogue opens, though the earlier poet may not have been responsible for the introduction here of that fateful figure. Such touches of irony are not too common in the plays of Marlowe, while they abound in Beaumont's. But, with the appeal of Artemidorus, surer ground is touched. The phrase of Decius, "at your best leisure," is neither used by Marlowe nor Shakespeare outside Julius Caesar, but Beaumont has it twice, once in the Woman Hater, iii. 1, and again in one of the scenes (i. 1) he contributed to the Scornful Lady.

Attention has been drawn (p. 18) to the likeness between the words of the anxious knot of conspirators watching Caesar and those of the group of lords concerned in the conversation between Young Mortimer and the Queen in Edward II. On this account, though Plutarch, and not Suetonius, is the authority, Marlowe is the probable writer of the incident in question (lines 16 to 26). A play by Marlowe without the word "resolute," so much used by him, is something of an anomaly. It may be that Beaumont has suppressed that word wherever he found it, for he did not

always put the same shade of meaning upon it as Marlowe did. There can be no doubt that Marlowe's transcript has undergone many slight, as well as important, alterations, and it is part of the writer's task to indicate such likely changes. A careful student of Marlowe would naturally expect, in answer to the speech of Cassius

'Brutus, what shall be done? If this be known,

Cassius or Caesar never shall turn back,
For I will slay myself"

-the recommendation to be "resolute." And this is what I think Marlowe wrote, and not "Cassius, be constant," which is the language that Beaumont was using at the time:

Note, also, the use of "blood," for temper or disposition, so frequent in Julius Caesar. It was a very much favoured word indeed with Beaumont, and it is twice used in the speech of Caesar (35 to 48). This speech contains the passage that has caused such a deal of discussion:

"Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied."'

Whether the lines have been altered or not does not concern me here; but I wish to draw attention to the peculiar circumstances attending Jonson's criticism of them. His earlier allusion to Julius Caesar shows that the tragedy was in existence in 1598. The reference is, of course, to the lines:

"O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason."

Besides this, we find in Every Man Out of His Humour (written, probably, in 1598), Caesar's dying reproach, "Et tu, Brute?" well as a recollection of, or a sneer at, a speech by Cassius in the Fourth Act:

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My heart is thirsty for that noble pledge.

Fill, Lucius, till the wine o'erswell the cup;
I cannot drink too much of Brutus' love."

Jonson's possible allusion is contained in the Induction to the play cited:

"I could wish my bottle here among you; but there's an old rule, No pledging your own health. Marry, if any here be thirsty for it."

It is doubtful whether a sneer was intended.

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Indeed—but for the repetition of Et tu, Brute?"-there is little reason to think that Ben referred to "Shakespeare's" play.

As the date of Julius Caesar has been ordered to be 1600-1, the editors of the play usually either ignore these allusions altogether or dismiss them with the remark, "This cannot refer to Julius Caesar, since," etc., etc. It was, doubtless, Marlowe's play that Jonson knew. Probably, it did not contain the lines that he so roughly handled a quarter of a century later. If it did, it is difficult to account for his long silence. It is almost obvious that the lines in question were added by Beaumont. For, though Jonson knew Marlowe's play, he does not seem to have been aware of "Shakespeare's" until very late. Bear in mind these dates and facts. The First Folio was published in 1623, and the same year brought forth the Staple of News. The Discoveries was issued some years later. The Players, or their mouthpiece, wrote that Shakespeare had never blotted a line. In the Discoveries, Jonson mentions that the Players had told him this. He then goes on to show that in the "Know, Caesar passage correction would have been advisable. In the Staple of News, he again pillories the line. Is it not a reasonable hypothesis to assume that Jonson was not intimately acquainted with the Julius Caesar of "Shakespeare" until-either as editor or literary adviser, or just as simple reader-the Folio brought him knowledge of it? And, farther, that he lost no time, as soon as he had discovered something worth a gird, in sneering at a passage, the supposed author of which had been lying in his grave for five years? The reader may well ask why Jonson waited till this indecent time to expose an absurdity that he should have recognised in 1601.

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From these and other reasons, the revising hand of Beaumont is inferred in the speech of Caesar (35 to 48). He may also be seen in lines 56 and 57:

"As low as to thy foot doth Cassius fall,

To beg enfranchisement for Publius Cimber."

Compare this with

'Right noble sir, as low as my obedience,
And with a heart as loyal as my knee,

I beg your favour,''

of Philaster, i. 1, and this:

"As low as this I bow to you; and would

As low as to my grave,"

from A King and No King, iii. 1. Note the repetition of "as low as," not found elsewhere in such speeches in Shakespeare. He, unlike Beaumont, usually remarks upon the act, not the position, of kneeling.

Caesar's reply (68 to 73) is mostly by Marlowe. The first two lines

"I could be well moved if I were as you;

If I could pray to move, prayers would move me

-are re-echoed in Dido, Act v. :

"

"In vain, my love, thou spend'st thy fainting breath:
If words might move me, I were overcome."'

Caesar proceeds:

"But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality,
There is no fellow in the firmament.
The skies are painted with unnumber'd sparks;
They are all fire and every one doth shine;
But there's but one in all doth hold his place:
So in the world; 'tis furnish'd well with men,

And men are flesh and blood and apprehensive;
Yet in the number I do know but one

That unassailable holds on his rank,
Unshaked of motion."

The hero of Tamburlaine (Part 1, iv. 2) epitomises this speech in one line:

"For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth."

Probably, the idea at the bottom of the passage quoted is borrowed from the Pharsalia, Book II.:

'Better alone without arms wilt thou live in tranquil inactivity, just as the stars of heaven ever unmoved roll onward in their course. The air nearer to the earth is inflamed with the lightnings, and the lowermost regions of earth receive the winds and the flashing streaks of flame; Olympus, by the will of the Gods, stands above the clouds."

Riley's Translation, Bohn's Library, p. 61.

It should be observed that Caesar, in his next speech, compares himself with Olympus, thus magnifying the likelihood that Marlowe has again been dipping into the pages of the poet who so frequently "anticipated" the author of Julius Caesar.

It would be interesting, perhaps, to follow the fortunes of Caesar's dying phrase, "Et tu, Brute?" It is not recorded in Plutarch, and its presence here may be due to a free translation by Marlowe of the words of Suetonius. It is, however, more likely to have come from Caesaris Interfecti, the Latin play acted at Oxford in 1582, which we could have been sure Marlowe had seen, had he not been a Cambridge man. But he may have known of it. Did the two Universities exchange dramatic visits, or did they lend plays to each other? We also meet with the phrase in the True Tragedie, from which some critics have somewhat ridiculously assumed that Shakespeare took it. There can hardly be any reasonable doubt that it was in Marlowe's old play. It is clear that the writer of the True Tragedie-could it have been Marlowe ?-was thinking of Julius Caesar, for we find, not fifty lines away from the "Et tu, Brute?" speech in the chronicle play, the line,

"What is the bodie when the head is off?"

which, it has already been seen, has a Marlowean origin. Again, is not the apparently misplaced and corrupted line

"'Tis euen so, and yet you are olde Warwike still"

-a recollection of Antony's jibe in the Fifth Act: "Old Cassius still"?