Abstract
Roland Barthes sardonically described the Mankiewicz film of Julius Caesar as portraying ‘a universe without duplicity, where Romans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead’.2 The film’s use of hair fringes to signify Roman identity and its use of sweat to signify thought were to Barthes examples of ‘degraded spectacle’, for according to his professed ‘ethic of signs’, ‘it is both reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified’ (p. 28). Barthes approves those signs which are, ‘openly intellectual and so remote that they are reduced to an algebra’ and those which are ‘deeply rooted, invented, so to speak, on each occasion, revealing an internal, a hidden facet, and indicative of a moment in time, no longer of a concept’. He objects to ‘hybrid’ (p. 28) forms — those which are intentionally presented as naturalistic.
‘If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.’1
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Notes
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ, 1979), p. 239. This essay originated as a seminar paper at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Vancouver, March 1992, and was presented at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting in Atlanta, November 1992. An earlier related paper was presented at the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance convention in Villanova, September 1990. Thanks to various audience members for suggestions, and to Wendy Clein, David Kranz, and John Traverse for their comments on the helpful manuscript.
Roland Barthes, ‘The Romans in Films’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), p. 26.
Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays refer to Alfred Harbage’s Complete Works (Baltimore, MD, 1969).
In Plutarch’s account Portia wounds herself and falls into a resulting fever before confronting Brutus, who is ‘amazed to hear’ what she has done (See Shakespeare’s Plutarch, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke [New York, 1909], vol. I, p. 127). In Shakespeare’s text, Brutus’ shocked response (‘O ye gods’) may indicate that Portia actually wounds herself onstage, although my interpretation does not turn on this production decision. Even if Portia refrains from showing the wound (showing it would have raised interesting problems of staging in the Elizabethan theatre) and simply gestures toward the site of a previous injury, she uses her body as a crucial signifier, thus setting its meanings into action on stage.
Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, ed. T. S. Dorsch (London, 1955), p. lix.
Reuben A. Brower, Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Graeco-Roman Heroic Tradition (Oxford, 1971), p. 212.
G. Wilson Knight, The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Including the Roman Plays, 1931 (London, 1951), p. 72.
Clifford Roman, ‘Lucan and the Self-Incised Voids of Julius Caesar’, Comparative Drama, 22: 3 (1988), 222.
Robert Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (New York, 1983), p. 95.
Madelon Sprengnether, ‘Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus’, in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY, 1986), p. 96.
Gail Kern Paster, ‘“In the spirit of men there is no blood”: Blood as Trope of Gender in Julius Caesar’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 40:3 (1989), 292. [reprinted in this volume, pp. 149–69–Ed.].
M. D. Faber, ‘Lord Brutus’ Wife: A Modern View’, Psychoanalytic Review, 52 (1965–66), 109.
Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7:1 (1981), 28.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality’, in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York, 1963), p. 151; quoted by Clare Kahane, ‘Hysteria, Feminism, and the Case of The Bostonians’, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca, NY, 1989), p. 284.
Charles Bernheimer, ‘Introduction: Part I’, in In Dora’s Case: Freud–Hysteria–Feminism, ed. Bernheimer and Kahane (New York, 1985), p. 1.
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clénient, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 95.
Harold Fisch, ‘Character as Linguistic Sign’, New Literary History, 21: 3 (1990), 593–606.
Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Reading the Signs: Towards a Semiotics of Shakespearean Drama’, trans. Keir Elam, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (New York, 1985), p. 122.
Leo Kirschbaum, ‘Shakespeare’s Stage Blood and Its Critical Significance’, PMLA, 64 (1949), 528.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, 1985), p. 4.
Sheila Murnaghan, ‘Body and Voice in Greek Tragedy’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 1: 2 (1988), 23.
Hélène Cixous, ‘The Character of “Character”’, New Literary History, 5: 2 (1974), 396.
Johannes Fabian, ‘Presence and Representation: The Other and Anthropological Writing’, Critical Inquiry, 16:4 (1990), 770, 771.
Herbert Blau makes a similar point in his The Audience (Baltimore, MD, 1990). Blau objects to sympathy as that which ‘draws things toward each other in an affinity that wants to intensify until it is nothing but the Same, so that likeness loses its difference through an assimilative power’ (p. 301), but concludes that ‘there is more to be said for empathy than might be deduced from the critique of psychological realism or the values of bourgeois humanism that it represents’ (p. 374). He suggests that theatre be considered ‘an extension of the body’s capacity to perceive’ (p. 377).
Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays: The Function of Imagery in the Drama (Cambridge, MA, 1961), p. 52.
William O. Scott, ‘The Speculative Eye: Problematic Self-Knowledge in “Julius Caesar”’, Shakespeare Survey, 40 (1988), 82.
Ralph Berry, Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (New York, 1985), p. 78.
As Lynn de Gerenday puts it, ‘Through the assassination [the conspirators] ironically establish Caesarism, thus empowering the spirit they sought to destroy’ (‘Play, Ritualization, and Ambivalence in Julius Caesar’, Literature and Psychology, 24 [1974], 29).
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© 2002 Richard Wilson
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Marshall, C. (2002). Portia’s Wound, Calphurnia’s Dream: Reading Character in Julius Caesar. In: Wilson, R. (eds) Julius Caesar. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21330-2_9
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