AGAIN, POETS AND JUUUS CAESAR Margaret Maurer, Colgate University hakespeare's/«//«5 Caesar, a dramatization of Plutarch's account of the death of Julius Caesar and the consequences ofthat event in the war waged against Shis assassins by Mark Antony and Octavian, is particularly admired for the elegance of its plot. The main episodes in the history as Plutarch's Lives con- veys them are contained in a structure that, by line count, is shorter than any of Shakespeare's English histories and all but two of his tragedies.' In relation to his apparent commitment to economy in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's inclusion in his play of two episodes involving characters identified as poets invites comment and has drawn it concertedly in three essays: Norman Holland, "The 'Cinna' and 'Cynicke' Episodes in Julius Caesar" (I960); Thomas Pughe, "'What should the wars do with these jigging fools?' The Poets \n Julius Caesar" (1988); and Gary Taylor's "Bardicide" (1992).^ A curious feature of the attention paid these scenes by all three of these essays is that none of them considers all of what is known about Cinna, the poet identified by name in Shakespeare's play. Being specific about this, however, particularly about what was known by Shakespeare of Cinna's poetry (and little more is known today than what Shakespeare knew), heightens the already remarkable effect of Shake- speare including these scenes. In this light, incidental as they remain to the historical and political questions surrounding the play's action, the poet scenes make Julius Caesar eerily predictive of the dilemmas faced by teachers of the humanities these days. Because of them, Shakespeare's/«/¿MÍ Caesar stcras to be considering the value of poetry in a time of cataclysmic change; and it is a consideration that, typical of Shakespeare, is unflinching in its unwillingness to mount an expedient defense. Holland and Pughe avoid the questions attendant on Cinna's poetry by as- suming his name is no more than a counter for the figure of a poet. In accord with the critical assumptions implicit in close reading, they justify both 3.3 (the scene depicting the death of Cinna) and lines 123-36 of 4.3 (in which an un- named camp poet intrudes on the quarrel of Brutus and Cassius) by emphasizing thematic connections to what they define, differently, as the prevailing concerns of the play. Holland sees 3.3 and 4.3.124-38 as "play[ing] into one of the chief complexes of imagery" in the play (sleep) and underscoring an important theme in the play, "the separation between Brutus the idealist and Cassius the realist."^ Pughe sees the "poets, together with some of the other minor figures [in the play, as] establish [ing] a metalevel of criticism on which the discourse of reason can be seen to deconstruct itself."'* Holland, Pughe, and Taylor all notice that it is Shakespeare who makes the person who Plutarch says reconciled Brutus and Cassius in the camp scene of 4.3 into an unnamed poet, transforming him from Plutarch's "one Marcus Phaonius, that had bene a friend and follower of Cato...and [who] tooke upon him to counterfeate a Philosopher."' But only Taylor, approaching the play from a more The Upstart Crow historicist perspective, acknowledges that the Cinna of 3.3 is an actual, if shad- owy, figure in literary history. Noting that the poet Cinna's existence is a historical fact but that his poetry has all but vanished, Taylor argues that what Shakespeare does with the two episodes in Plutarch makes Julius Caesar "Shakespeare's Defence of Poetryr^ He suggests, in effect, that m Julius Caesar Shakespeare is defending poetry as Sir Philip Sidney does in a treatise published under that name, The Defence of Poesie.^ In so doing, Taylor says, Shakespeare means to distinguish genuine poetry, that is, his own, from that of writers whose topical satires and epigrams were ordered to be publicly burnt in 1599, the probable date of Julius Caesar s composition and performance. Taylor pays close attention to the changes Shakespeare makes as he adapts the episodes from Plutarch's life of Brutus, observing (somewhat tendentiously, since the detail that "poore Cinna the Poet" is "torne ... in peeces"* comes from Plu- tarch) that Shakespeare's representation of Cinna's murder is modeled on the death of Orpheus: the only wholly admirable poet would have to be a murdered poet, none of whose poems survive—that is a poet like Shakespeare's Cinna. Because ev- ery action involves political and moral choice, the perfect poet must be pas- sive, must be a victim, must be murdered. And because any surviving poem would be subject to criticism, the perfect poet's work could only be beyond criticism if it were beyond content: absent, ravaged, and murdered.' For Taylor, the implication of Shakespeare emphasizing that it is the plebeians who silence the poet is that Shakespeare distances himself from writers who, in his own day, were the object, not of public outrage, but of the government's censure: "The poet Shakespeare constructs a scenario in which the [genuine] poet is unmistakably innocent; the poet's work, unmistakably apolitical; the poet's intentions, unmistak- ably clear; the popular reading of the poet, unmistakably mistaken."'" So, Taylor argues, Shakespeare uses the episode to exonerate the real agents of censorship; and his Cinna, the martyred poet, a true poet, is nothing at all like the writers whose satires were being prohibited and destroyed. The element of Taylor's argument that requires reconsideration, however, is the inference he draws about Shakespeare's interest in Cinna from the fact that none of his poems survive. Though it is true that only a few words of Cinna's poetry are known, Shakespeare and probably many in his audience knew perfectly well what his poem Smyrna was about from Ovid's retelling of its story in Metamorphoses 10. Acknowledging Ovid's connection to Cinna's poem has important implications for interpreting the changes Shakespeare makes in the Cinna episode and, by extension, his inclusion ofa figure called a poet in the quarrel scene of 4.3. It is as 'Ú Julius Caesar, in the text of it that comes down to us, catches Shake- speare reading Plutarch's account of Julius Caesar's assassination and its consequenc- es in the civil war that followed and puzzling over the relationship between this cataclysmic event and the magnificent poetry he associated with this time and its Again, Poets and Julius Caesar 7 immediate aftermath—^with the poetry of Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, all of whom wrote their greatest works under the regime of the man who triumphed at Philippi, and one of whom, Ovid, was ultimately banished from Rome, according to the literary history Shakespeare knew, by that man for, in the poet's own account in Tristia II, "duo crimina, carmen et error" two crimes, a poem and a mistake." That is, in its representation of one of the most significant moments in Roman history, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar obliquely considers a question as old as Plato and as much alive to Shakespeare and his contemporaries as it is to humanist educators today: what good is poetry? or, if some poetry's goodness be granted, what kind of poetry is good? In his play Poetaster (ca. 1601), Shakespeare's younger contemporary Ben Jonson imagines the mature Octavian, Augustus Caesar, in conversation with poets, with Ver- gil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, and Gallus. Augustus addresses the question of poetry's value to society by asserting that poems have value, but it is for their capacity to con- vey wisdom, promote virtue, and condemn vice. Vergil, the epic poet, and Horace, a satiric one, receive Augustus's particular commendation. The play also, however, con- demns a certain kind of poet and poetry. Augustus exiles "Licentious Naso . From all approach to our imperial court / On pain of death" (4.6.52, 55-56). Augustus's taste in poetry in Jonson's play accords with the overt argument mounted by Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence.^^ In that treatise, which Shakespeare might well have known before it was printed in 1595 but which he had almost certainly read by the time he wrote Julius Caesar, Shakespeare would have found the argument that genuine poetry, which Sidney defines as "an art of imitation ... a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight,"'^ can be favorably compared to history and philosophy because it more effectively than any other form of writing can promote virtue, both in the general sense of men's manners or behavior and in the particular sense to which Sidney repeatedly reverts, valorous action in war: The philosopher, therefore, and the historian are they which would win the goal [of being the supreme knowledge], the one by precept, the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt. Now doth the peer- less poet perform both. ...''* Poetry, Sidney asserts, not history and not philosophy, is "the companion of camps,"'^ the form of writing that men take to war with them to inspire them to heroism. The point is explicitly raised in the Defence and underscored by example: This Alexander [the Creat of Macedón] left his schoolmaster, living Aristo- tle, behind him, but took dead Homer with him. He put the philosopher Callisthenes to death for his seeming philosophical, indeed mutinous, stub- bornness; but the chief thing he ever was heard to wish for was that Homer had been alive.'^ 8 The Upstart Crow In the two poet scenes in Julius Caesar, especially when considered against the form in which Shakespeare found them in Plutarch, Shakespeare seems to be calling into question if not mocking outright Sidney's argument.