Caesar as Comic Antichrist: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Medieval English Stage Tyrant

Shakespeare’s representation of Julius Caesar differs notably from those of his contemporaries, as well as from the picture of Caesar that emerges from his most obvious classical source, Plutarch’s Lives. Plutarch’s Caesar is shrewd, resilient, and relatively dignified; Shakespeare’s, in contrast, is physically weak and surprisingly obtuse, prey to laughable grandiosity. Other early modern authors such as Marc-Antoine Muret and William Alexander model their versions of Caesar on Seneca’s Hercules as well as Plutarch’s biography. Shakespeare, however, seems to draw inspiration for his departure from Plutarch from the conventional depiction of Julius Caesar’s successor Augustus, as well as other tyrants such as Herod the Great, in medieval English mystery plays. Over the course of these pageants depicting Christian salvation history, protagonists such as Moses and Isaac set up a typology of Christ.¹ Meanwhile, however, secular antagonists such as the Pharaoh of Egypt establish a contrary pattern: a typology of Antichrist. Like Lucifer, as well as Antichrist himself, “Caesar” in the mystery plays is typecast as a blustering, comically inadequate parody of Godhead. Vaunting speeches proclaiming his supreme worldly might echo the language of God the Father. These boasts are then belied, however, by his inability to forestall the coming of Christ, whom he fears as a potential political rival. Mystery plays, naturally enough, tend to focus on Augustus Caesar, emperor of Rome at the time of Christ’s Nativity.² Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, however, stands in the same medieval tradition. As a type of Antichrist, he is a foil for the future Christ. His failure sets the stage for a different and paradoxically more powerful Messiah.

The Problem of the “Two Caesars”

In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s representation of Caesar as a self-important blowhard met with cries of critical dismay.³ William Hazlitt complains, “We do not much admire the representation given here of Julius Caesar, nor do we think it answers to the portrait of him in his commentaries. He makes several vapouring and rather pedantic speeches, and does nothing.”⁴ George Bernard Shaw is less restrained: “It is impossible for even the most judicially minded critic to look without a revulsion of indignant contempt at this travestying of a great man as a silly braggart.”⁵ James Boswell, son of the famous biographer, saw the problem as evidence of Shakespeare’s proverbial “small Latin and less Greek.” ⁶ Citing Caesar’s own Gallic Wars, Boswell writes, “There cannot be a stronger proof of Shakespeare’s deficiency in classical knowledge, than the boastful language he has put in the mouth of the most accomplished man of all antiquity, who was not more admirable for his achievements, than for the dignified simplicity with which he has recorded them.”⁷ By the twentieth century, the problem of the “two Caesars” was well-established.⁸ G. Wilson Knight sums up the dilemma: “We are, indeed, aware of two Caesars: the ailing and petulant old man, and the giant spirit standing colossal over the Roman Empire to be. There is an insubstantial, miragelike uncertainty about this Caesar. How are we to see him? He is two incompatibles, shifting, interchanging.”⁹

In his commentary on Plutarch’s “Life of Julius Caesar,” C. B. Pelling observes that the Greek biographer seems to admire Caesar. Or at least, his portrait of Caesar is more studiously neutral than that of many other classical authors.¹⁰ Suetonius, for instance, praises Caesar for his “admirable moderation and clemency both in administration and as victor in the civil war” but concludes that “the balance is tilted by his other actions and words, so that he is thought to have abused his power and to have been justly killed.”¹¹ Plutarch, in contrast, ends with the remarkable claim that “nothing cruel or tyrannical sprang from [Caesar’s rule].” On the contrary, he maintains, “it seemed that the state needed monarchy, and Caesar was Heaven’s gift to Rome as the gentlest possible doctor.”¹² Throughout Plutarch’s account, Caesar comes across as a man of superlative...