CHAPTER 8
“AFTER YOUR WAY HIS TALE PRONOUNC’D”: THE APPROPRIATION OF STORY IN SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet is not the only Shakespearean character who evinces the desire to impart narrative coherence to his life in the final moments of ebbing consciousness. Nor is Hamlet the only play in which it is the final words pronounced by the protagonist that reveal his deep concern with story, his awareness of the degree to which identity is bound up with narrative. In trying quite literally to get their stories right in the final instants before their deaths, a number of Shakespearean personages reveal the extent to which they have always conceived their lives as story, endeavouring to establish their identities through means that are, in the last analysis, narratological in inspiration. As the example of Hamlet’s postmortem transformation at the hands of Fortinbras illustrates, however, the conception of life as a deliberately fabricated story, and of identity itself as a function of that story, is not in the least an unproblematic one. Since there exists no one in whom narrative authority is vested in any exclusive or definitive sense, the identity of an individual constructed by narrative means is inevitably vulnerable to the caprice of anyone who happens to be endowed, for whatever reason and with whatever object in view, with the power to tell stories that pre-empt all alternatives. As is perhaps only to be expected, the personages in Shakespeare who are most susceptible to manipulations of this kind are those who are most overtly disposed to perceive themselves in narrative terms in the first place, who in one way or another consciously interpret their own lives on analogy with stories. One such individual is Brutus in Julius Caesar, whose announcement a few moments before commit- ting suicide that “Brutus’ tongue / Hath almost ended his life’s his- tory” suggests not only that he has been organizing his life along nar- rative lines from the very beginning but that he is at least subliminally 180 Making Sense in Shakespeare aware of the fact (V.v.39-40). The irony is that while he is fashioning his own identity in narrative terms other people are refashioning him through what are essentially the same means, and of this aspect of the situation he seems to remain oblivious. The role Brutus has played in the conspiracy against Caesar has at least in part been charted out for him by Cassius, who has slyly invoked the history of Brutus’ pre- sumed ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus – credited with ending Tarquin rule and inaugurating the Republic – as a model worthy of emulation in his own conduct:
There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d Th’ eternal devil to keep his state in Rome As easily as a king. (I.ii.157-59)
As the Earl of Warwick remarks in the second part of King Henry IV, “There is a history in all men’s lives / Figuring the nature of the times deceas’d” (III.i.80-81). Not only do human biographies constitute sto- ries in themselves, but they also reproduce stories that have already been enacted in the past. In Brutus’ case, the story that is his life must be patterned on that of the forebear whose name he shares. “Honour”, Cassius says, “is the subject of my story” (I.ii.91), and it is this story of honour as he conceives it that he shrewdly proceeds to weave into Brutus’ narrative of self as well. One of the ironies lurking in this assimilation of the story of Brutus’ life to that of his illustrious namesake is that the role played by Brutus, even as he is most strenuously striving to act in the spirit of the ancestor who “did from the streets of Rome / The Tarquin drive, when he was call’d a king” (II.i.53-54), will in some ways invert that of his antecedent. Whereas in the story of the overthrow of the Tar- quin dynasty, as it is recounted by Shakespeare himself in the Argu- ment of The Rape of Lucrece, it is Brutus who conveys the body of Lucrece to Rome and uses it to incense the Roman populace against their rulers, in Julius Caesar it is Mark Antony who will bring Cae- sar’s body into the marketplace and stir the people to revolt against Brutus. While the earlier Brutus enjoins a solemn vow upon other dis- affected Romans to collaborate with him in extirpating the Tarquin family, the later Brutus declares that it would be demeaning for the conspirators to pledge themselves to their undertaking by means of an