To begin this blog, here is an old paper I wrote for a class on the philosophy of time several years ago. This paper seeks to explain how time and fate function in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
One of the major themes of
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is fate,
and everything in the play happens because it must. While Cassius famously
declares “men at some time are masters of their fates,” (1.2.139), it is more
often the other way around, with some all-powerful force controlling the
characters. This is obvious in the death of Brutus’s wife, Portia, and his
reaction to this tragedy. Shakespeare’s Brutus is a Stoic, believing that what
happens will happen and must be accepted. However, Brutus has a difficult time
accepting his wife’s death, and tries to convince himself for one moment that
it did not happen. This kind of action is in vain, according to Michael Dummett
in his essay “Bringing About the Past.”
The characters in a play based off
of historical events experience a strange form of fatalism. They are bound, in
an accurate portrayal, to the things that happened to them in the real world.
While Shakespeare fictionalizes some aspects of the assassination of Julius
Caesar and the events surrounding the collapse of the Roman Republic, the play
is largely accurate, and the fates suffered by the characters come directly
from the source material, Plutarch’s Lives.
This introduces a fatalism to the character of Portia, whose death is referred
to twice within the play. This essay seeks to explain the purpose of the two
accounts of Portia’s death and Brutus’s understanding of fate and time through
the structure of Dummett’s theories of fatalism and the folly of retrospective
prayer, as well as the nature of fate within the play itself.
Act Four of Julius Caesar sees an impassioned argument between Brutus and
Cassius and Brutus’s revelation that his wife, Portia, has committed suicide.
This is in accordance with history, as the most reliable account of the death
of the historical Porcia (the proper Latin spelling) is by either suicide or
sickness in 43 BCE, a year after the assassination of Caesar. Brutus informs
Cassius that he is “sick of many griefs” (4.3.143) and that “Impatient of my
absence/And grief that young Octavius with Mark Antony/Have made themselves so
strong—for with her death/That tidings came—with this she fell distract/And her
attendants absent, swallowed fire.” (4.3.152-155) He obviously knows of her
death and is shaken.
Brutus’s demeanor changes, however,
upon the arrival of two of his soldiers, Titinius and Messala. Messala informs
Brutus and Cassius, now generals fighting Caesar’s successors, of news of the
situation in Rome. He says “That by proscription and bills of
owtlawry/Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus/Have put to death an [sic] hundred
senators.” (4.3.172-174) Brutus’s previous information disagrees with this, and
he says “Therein our letters do not well agree/Mine speak of seventy senators
that died/By their proscriptions.” (4.3.175-177) Brutus and Messala have two
different versions of the past. Messala cryptically mentions Portia, and when
Brutus questions him, feigning ignorance, the soldier admits “Then like a Roman
bear the truth I tell/For certain she is dead, and by strange manner.” (4.3.187-188)
Brutus’s reply is suitably stoic. “Why, farewell, Portia. We must die,
Messala/With meditating that she must die once/I have the patience to endure it
now.” (4.3.189-191) Brutus’s blatant lie in pretending not to know of Portia’s
suicide is a point of debate in scholarship of the play, but in our case an
example of how this character views fate and time.
Either Shakespeare intended to
delete one version of Portia’s death and did not, or he intended both scenes to
exist to show Brutus at both his most vulnerable and stoic. These two sections,
when viewed as both necessary, reveal Brutus’s character and his view of time
and fate. When he says “We must die,” he acknowledges the obvious fate of
mortals is to die. In the end, Brutus does die, seeing no fate but defeat. To
him, there was nothing he could do to prevent his death, or that of Portia, or
losing the war against Caesar’s successors, the Triumvirate. Brutus would
normally be seen as Dummett’s typical fatalist, of the opinion that “Either you
are going to be killed by a bomb or you are not going to be.” To this sort of fatalist,
any preparation done by a doomed man is useless. Likewise, a man destined to
survive does so whether or not he seeks protection.[1]
However, Brutus has too active a
view of a man’s place in time to be a fatalist and to be completely convinced
that all that happens will happen regardless of what is done by a human. As he
says later in this scene, “There is a tide in the affairs of men/…And we must
take the current when it serves/Or lose our ventures.” (4.3.118, 122-124) He
believes that humans have the choice of either taking advantage of events or
not, and their fates depend on this choice. He is not a complete fatalist
thanks to his view of time being a series of events that effect humans in
different ways depending on the humans’ actions.
Brutus avoids one of the fallacies
Dummett deconstructs in “Bringing About the Past,” that of the death in a raid is inevitable fatalism but
possibly falls into another logical fallacy—the retrospective prayer.[2] Dummett describes a situation
similar to Brutus’s in his essay, in which he posits “suppose I hear on the
radio that a ship has gone down in the Atlantic two hours previously, and that
there were a few survivors: my son was on that ship, and I at once utter a
prayer that he should have been among the survivors, that he should not have
drowned; this is the most natural thing in the world. Still, there are things
which it is very natural to say which make no sense; there are actions which
can naturally be performed with intentions which could not be fulfilled.”[3] Brutus finds a chance that
Portia may not be dead after all—Messala has different information on the
situation in Rome, and if Brutus was wrong about the senators, he could be
wrong about Portia.
Dummett says that as humans, we view
the past and the future in similar ways. Because we pray about the future, we
also pray about the past, in the hopes something did not happen. This is in
folly, however. “The answer that springs to mind is this: you cannot change the
past; if a thing has happened, it has happened, and you cannot make it not to
have happened.”[4]
Brutus cannot change the past, in the end. Like the father praying for his
son’s survival, it is natural for Brutus to grasp a chance for Portia to still
be alive. The past, however, cannot be changed, no matter what he supposes on
hearing Messala’s news. The second announcement of Portia’s death makes sense
within the context of the play—it shows Brutus as a man trying to be brave in
the face of tragedy, but also a man not as accepting of fate as he claims.
Dummett says of the disanalogy of
past and future “The difference between past and future lies in this: that we
think that, of any past event, it is in principle possible for me to know
whether or not it took place independently of my present intentions; whereas,
for many types of future event, we should admit that we are never going to be
in a position to have such knowledge independently of our intentions.”[5] We can only know what we
intend to do, not what really will happen. Whether you prepare or not for a
bombing raid may save your life or it may not. Humans can only look back at the
past and assign meaning to events, saying “A is what caused B” or “A did nothing
in regards to B” and consider that to be true for events in the future.
Brutus tells Cassius of two things
that caused Portia to take her life. The causes were the strength of their
enemies and her separation from her husband, the effect was her death. In
Brutus’s situation, either Portia would die or she would not, and in this case
she did. Humans, according to Dummett, are causal agents in events. While
Brutus did not intend Portia’s death, it certainly happened, independent of his
intentions. This suggests that the world of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar truly is fatalistic, and that events will happen
regardless of human intention. Caesar, something of a fatalist himself, says in
Act 2 that “death, a necessary end/Will come when it will come.” (2.2.36-37) At
the beginning of the next act, Act 3, he is murdered by Brutus, Cassius, and
their allies, confirming his belief. Caesar believed that no matter what he
did, his fate would be the same. No matter what Brutus did, Portia’s fate was
to die, suggesting that Dummett’s view of fatalism, “the view that there is an
intrinsic absurdity in doing something in order that something else should
subsequently happen; that any such action-that is, any action done with a
further purpose-is necessarily pointless,”[6] is at least true in part
for the progress of time in Julius Caesar.
Because the play is based off of
real events and the characters off of real historical figures, they are bound
by their history. No matter how the events are portrayed or interpreted by the
author, they have the same result as their historical counterparts.
Shakespeare, while an author certainly not above pure fiction like in his
comedies, or changing history to suit his purposes as with Richard III, chose not to change time in Julius Caesar, and his Roman characters are on one track to their
fate planned by history. Within the world of the play Portia dies as a result
of hopelessness and loneliness, but she also dies because history says she
does. Brutus, a character in the play, cannot prevent it, only accept it, as
much as he wishes it weren’t true. His retrospective hope that the original
news of Portia’s death was faulty is brought on by other things he knows being
brought into question, but he finds that time cannot be changed. Brutus tries
to be something of an optimist, but he inhabits a strange fatalistic universe
driven by the outside forces of an author and history.
Dummett’s essay “Bringing About the
Past.” discusses cause and effect and their relationship to fate. He comes to
the conclusion that humans are causal agents and one cannot make
generalizations about what could or could not happen. In the world of
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the
characters are swept away by their fates, whether they do anything or not. While
Brutus is not a total fatalist, his reaction to Portia’s death show that he has
the natural desire to change the past, however useless that desire is, because
while he is a character in a story, he is still human. He cannot bring about
the past, nor can anyone else in the play, because the playwright and history
itself decide their fates. Some characters accept it better than others, but
Dummett would see in Brutus just another human trying to change what he cannot
in a universe where fate is truly decided.
[1] Michael Dummett, “Bringing About
the Past,” The Philosophical Review,
Vol. 73 (1964): 345.
[2] I use Dummett’s term
“retrospective prayer” to describe the mindset or action of hoping or believing
something in the past will be changed regardless of any religious view and not
necessarily referring to the act of prayer itself.
[3] Dummett, 341.
[4] Dummett, 341
[5] Dummett, 357.
[6] Dummett, 345.
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