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Julius Caesar: Tyrannicide Made Unpopular Murat Öğütcü Julius Caesar: Tyrannicide Made Unpopular Murat Öğütcü The late Elizabethan Period was marked by socio-economic discontent. Amid this, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) featured a prominent debate: whether or not tyrannicide could solve problems. Around 1599, Essex formulated a like-minded political revolution only to dismiss it until 1601. Yet, as providentialist and republican debates failed to provide solutions against misgovernment, the 1601 Essex rebellion also proved abortive. Essex was considered another regicide Brutus rather than a saviour. Contrary to the majority of apolitical or ahistorical critical analyses about tyranny in the play, a historicized analysis of Julius Caesar, therefore, illustrates how tyrannicide might have been perceived by Elizabethan playgoers. The Globe was the first theatre to be owned exclusively by actors1 and opened with Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar in 1599. Although the title character of the play seemed to be a mere marketing trick to attract the audience to a newly established playhouse with a popular character, as Julius Caesar was murdered in the beginning of Act iii, the very fact of his absence almost from the entire play afterwards formed the contextual political debate prominent in the Elizabethan period: that is, amid dissatisfaction with the present Elizabethan regime, whether tyrannicide could be approved or not. The majority of the critics of the play have mainly divided it from Elizabethan socio-political incidents, almost in the vein of New Criticism. For instance, M. E. Hartsock makes only a textual reading and focuses on the polysemous nature of the play by making a parallel reading between Plutarch’s and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.2 Similarly, Lucy de Bruyn refers to Shakespeare’s classical education at grammar school and how he twists his sources about Julius Caesar through ‘irony’.3 R. S. Miola tries to focus on the political side of the play and gives a brief survey of the debates, asks questions how to differentiate tyrants and kings, ‘murderers’ and heroes, and justified and An earlier, shorter version of this article was presented at the Ninth International IDEA Conference at Inonu University, Malatya, Turkey, in 2015. 1 David Scott Kastan, ‘Is There a Class in this (Shakespearean) Text?’, Renaissance Drama, 24 (1993), 101–21 (p. 107). Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 196. 2 M. E. Hartsock, ‘The Complexity of Julius Caesar’, PMLA, 81.1 (1966), 56–62. 3 Lucy de Bruyn, Mob-Rule and Riots: The Present Mirrored in the Past (London: Regency, 1981), pp. 219–26. Parergon 34.1 (2017) 110 Murat Öğütcü unjustified ‘assassination’.4 Yet, Miola fails to incorporate these debates into the play and does not refer to any contemporary political associations except, yet faintly, that Catholics, on religious grounds, considered Elizabeth I as a tyrant.5 In a similar fashion, John Roe extensively compares Julius Caesar to political works, especially those of Machiavelli, even arguing lengthily on how Julius Caesar’s assassination was received in the Medici period, yet bluntly dismisses the possibility of any associations of the play with ‘Elizabeth I’ and her regime.6 More recently Daniel Juan Gil even argues that the play is ‘antipolitical’, which can be seen in the lack of any Elizabethan reference throughout the article; despite acknowledging the clash between ‘absolutism’ and ‘elite civic republicanism’, Gil claims that the play is more concerned with individual liberation from the constraints of political structure in the figure of Mark Antony,7 which, however, downsizes Mark Antony’s political manoeuvres. One of the notable exceptions in the critical tradition is William Rosen and Barbara Rosen’s reading of Julius Caesar where they try to associate contemporary fears about the succession question as Shakespeare’s principal authorial motivation, which slightly focuses on the historical resonances of the play.8 Likewise, a more recent article by Paulina Kewes is important to figure out the need for a historicized political turn in analysing Julius Caesar, as the article points out contemporary Jacobean debates, political and literary works about tyranny, and illustrates the political aftermath of James I’s self- portrayal as Caesar.9 Similar to Kewes’s approach, however, there is a need to historicize the Elizabethan debates about the consequences of amending socio-political grievances that are also depicted in Julius Caesar. Therefore, this article will illustrate Elizabethan political tracts about tyranny, analyse how tyrannicide was depicted in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar 10 and discuss how issues regarding tyranny and tyrannicide might have been perceived by playgoers in the late Elizabethan period. 4 R. S. Miola, ‘Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate’, Renaissance Quarterly, 38.2 (1985), 271–89 (pp. 271–73). 5 Miola, pp. 271–89. 6 John Roe, ‘Julius Caesar: Conscience and Conspiracy’, in Shakespeare and Machiavelli (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002), pp. 113–69. 7 Daniel Juan Gil, ‘“Bare Life”: Political Order and the Specter of Antisocial Being in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar’, Common Knowledge, 13.1 (2007), 67–79. 8 William Rosen and Barbara Rosen, ‘Julius Caesar: The Speciality of Rule’, in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Julius Caesar, ed. by L. F. Dean (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 109–15. 9 Paulina Kewes, ‘Julius Caesar in Jacobean England’, Seventeenth Century, 17.2 (2002), 155–87. 10 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. by David Daniell (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998) (hereafter JC and cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number). Parergon 34.1 (2017) Julius Caesar: Tyrannicide Made Unpopular 111 As an extension of the clash between the established feudal order and the emerging capitalist system, the last decade of the Elizabethan regime faced several problems. In particular, the post-Armada period was predominated by socio-economic and socio-political crises and shortage of financial resources. These were rooted primarily in bad harvests, plagues, the rise in the prices, disunited and unsuccessful uprisings, and the hot-cold war with the Spanish in the Netherlands and Ireland.11 The uneven and rather subjective distribution of these limited financial resources within the top-down patronage system that was polarized between the aristocratic circle of the followers of the Earl of Essex and the meritocratic Cecils, whose clash of interests wasted most of these resources in fraudulency or unprofitable war investments,12 further increased criticisms towards the regime that was gradually perceived as a tyranny. The status quo tried to maintain loyalty to the regime, in spite of its arbitrary policies and the growth of dissatisfaction, through Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs).13 Yet, these measures were used by the dissatisfied Elizabethans to support their claims that the rule of Elizabeth I was equivalent to tyranny. As for the ISAs and RSAs, the Elizabethan government aggressively propagandized obedience in its subjects through several media. According to the providentialist tradition that preceded her, Elizabeth I, as the head of the government, derived her power from divine ordination through legitimate succession based on 11 Penry Williams, The Later Tudors: England 1547–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 160–62, 203, 228, 357–60; John Guy, ‘The Tudor Age: (1485–1603)’, in The Oxford History of Britain, ed. by Kenneth O. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 257–326, (pp. 316–17); Kristen Deiter, The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 13–25, 79–96; Lloyd Edward Kermode, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.77; Barrett L. Beer, Rebellion and Riot: Popular Disorder in England During the Reign of Edward VI (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), p. 9; Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 354–55; Roger Burrow Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England: 1509–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp.55–57; Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Religion: 1558–1603 (London: Routledge, 1994), pp.69–70; J. B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth: 1558–1603, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 408–10. 12 Simon Adams, ‘The Patronage of the Crown in Elizabethan Politics: The 1590s in Perspective’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. by John Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 20–45 (pp. 34–35); Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 155–59; D. M. Loades, Politics and the Nation 1450–1660: Obedience, Resistance and Public Order (London: Fontana, 1974), p. 306; Williams, pp. 364–65; Black, pp. 406–11. 13 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–87 (pp. 142–45). Parergon 34.1 (2017) 112 Murat Öğütcü primogeniture. Because of such divine legitimisation, she and the policies of her government were propagandized as perfect and flawless, which made her and her government immune to human intervention.14 While royal portraiture,
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