Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Caesar’s Ghost:

It was always dangerous, for those who lived in a monarchy hundreds of years ago, to write that killing the king was the only way to win liberty for their country. The only safe way to write about the virtue of murder, when murder was the only way to replace the rule of one with the rule of all, was to write about a political assassination that had taken place in the past, the distant past, the ancient story of someone murdered because he wanted to be king, the story William Shakespeare told in his play called Julius Caesar, the play that all the loyal subjects of Queen Elizabeth could applaud.

The question, once Shakespeare decided to write a play about why Brutus and Cassius and the others thought Caesar’s ambition, if left unchecked, would be the end of the Roman republic, was how to do it in a way that would make an audience feel an interest in things that had happened more than sixteen hundred years earlier. How teach an audience to understand the strange names, the changing relationships, the different agreements and conspiracies that made the murder of Julius Caesar and the civil war that resulted one of the most important turning points in history? Writing a century and a half after Shakespeare’s death, Samuel Johnson, who understood Shakespeare perhaps better than anyone, thought he knew how it had been done. Shakespeare’s people, which is how he described the characters of Shakespeare’s invention, “act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”

The characters - their feelings, their motives, their vanities and ambitions - are known to us because we have observed them, and experienced them, ourselves. Shakespeare understands that. But what about the story, Caesar’s story? Caesar’s life is very far from any life we have known. Shakespeare’s audiences could only follow him through the intricacies of the drama because they “held the thread of the story in their hands.” They had the thread of the story, the story told in Shakespeare’s play of 1599, because Plutarch’s history, the parallel lives of famous Greeks and Romans, had been translated for the first time into English by Sir Thomas North just twenty years earlier, in 1579.

Among the Roman lives, Plutarch’s lives of Brutus and Julius Caesar told every English reader all he needed to know, and all he probably ever knew, about how Caesar became the first man in Rome and how a conspiracy begun by Cassius and led by Brutus ended Caesar’s life and started the struggle that on the Plains of Philippi ended any chance of a restoration of the Roman republic. Because everyone knew the story Plutarch had told, everyone could follow what Shakespeare told them in his play, especially when, as often happened, Shakespeare’s characters used some of Plutarch’s own words.

According to Plutarch, Portia, the daughter of Cato, the philosophical statesman of stern and disciplined morality, complained that Brutus did not share with his wife his secret thoughts.

“I, Brutus, being the daughter of Cato, was given you in marriage not like a concubine, to partake only in the intercourse of bed and board, but to bear a part in all your good and all your evil fortune….” She should “be admitted to…your counsels that require secrecy and trust.”

In Act II, scene ii, Shakespeare has Portia question Brutus: “Am I yourself But, as it were, in sort or limitation, to keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, and talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs Of your good pleasure? If it be no more, Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.” And then, a few lines later, she reminds him: “I grant I am a woman, but, withal, A woman well-reputed, Cato’s daughter.”

This is but one example of the method Shakespeare followed, a method by which he stays as close to the original source as possible while, at the same time, adding the depth and subtlety of his own understanding and what, in his hands, the English language could be made to do. If it is suggested that this is not what the creative arts were meant to be, it is enough to remind ourselves that it was only after Shakespeare that we began to forget that writers, and not just writers, practiced what were then called, not the creative, but the imitative, arts.

Following as close as possible, tracing in detail, what Plutarch’s histories record, Shakespeare followed an even more ancient source to provide the speech by which Brutus justified Caesar’s murder and the speech by which Marc Antony made Brutus seem, not a patriot, but a criminal. All that Plutarch says about Antony’s speech, the speech that caused the civil war that resulted in a Roman Empire in which, more than Julius Caesar ever contemplated, one man would rule, limited by nothing but his own will, is that Antony, “finding the multitude moved with his speech…unfolded the bloody garment of Caesar, showing them in how many places it was pierced, and the number of his wounds.”

Following Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War, Shakespeare writes speeches that he imagines the speaker would have given. The first sentence of Plutarch’s biography of Brutus tells where Brutus stood in the eyes of Rome. The sentence is about his ancestor. “Marcus Brutus was descended from that Junius Brutus to whom the ancient Romans erected a statue of brass in the capitol among the images of their kings with a drawn sword in his hand, in remembrance of his course and resolution in expelling he Tarquins and destroying the monarchy.” So severe was he in his refusal to abandon freedom for the rule, however benevolent, of a single man, “he proceeded even to the execution of his own sons,” when he discovered they had conspired with tyrants. This, it may be noted, was the kind of Roman, or more broadly, republican, virtue Machiavelli thought had gone missing from the world.

Marcus Brutus, though far more humane, felt the same devotion to liberty, the same abhorrence of having a king who would make slaves of everyone, a king that the Roman populace, which is to say the Roman mob, was, with Caesar’s secret approval, intent on making Caesar become. In the speech Shakespeare writes, the speech that as you hear it in the play, or read it in the privacy your study, is exactly what, knowing what you have learned from Plutarch, you would expect Brutus to say:

“If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honor him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.”

In Plutarch, Antony, given permission by Brutus over the strenuous objections of Cassius, speaks the next day; in Shakespeare, Antony speaks immediately after Brutus leaves. His speech, Shakespeare’s speech, begins with words every schoolchild used to know by heart: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend your ears: I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

Antony’s speech is more than four times longer than the speech in which Brutus argues that Caesar had to die if Rome was to remain free. In a masterpiece of misdirection, Antony repeats each accusation Brutus made, each time insisting that “Brutus is an honorable man,” a claim that soon becomes a mockery. When he gets to the central charge against Caesar, the proof that Caesar intended to be king, Antony reminds the crowd that when he, Antony, had three times presented Caesar with “a kingly crown…he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?”

Unlike Thucydides, Shakespeare adds the reaction of the crowd, the way it changes what it thinks about what it hears. “Mark’d ye his words?” asks one citizen of another. “He would not take the crown; Therefore ’tis certain he was not ambitious.” Antony makes the crowd mad with anger when he shows them Caesar’s blood-stained mantle; he makes them mad with anticipation when he tells them that Caesar in his will has left each of them money and all of them together his gardens. The crowd that had called Brutus the savior of his country now screams: “Burn! Fire! - Kill! - Slay! Let not a traitor live.”

Plutarch, the historian, told the story of Caesar’s death and the civil war that followed. Shakespeare, the playwright, took that history and made it come alive; come alive, moreover, in a way that made the assassination of Julius Caesar become immortal. And Shakespeare knew it. In Act III, scene ii, he puts into the mouth of Cassius a thought nowhere found in Plutarch: “How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted O’er, In states unborn and accents yet unknown!”

Samuel Johnson understood. Shakespeare, he wrote, “has long outlived his century, the term commonly fixed as the test of literary merit.” Shakespeare has outlived more centuries than that, in part because great actors have wanted nothing so much as to perform in one of Shakespeare's plays. In a coincidence so remarkable as to be almost beyond belief, one of the greatest Shakespearian actors was named, like Brutus’ own ancestor, Junius Brutus Booth. Born in 1796, he was enormously popular on both the London stage and in America. His performances were literally unforgettable. The 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as sober a publication as there ever was, remarks, “His eccentricities bordered on insanity, and his excited and furious fencing in Richard III and as Hamlet frequently compelled the Richmond and Laertius to fight for their lives in deadly earnest.”

The actor’s ability to confuse himself with the role he plays continued with his sons. In the introduction to Julius Caesar in the Yale edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, we are told that the “crowning achievement in America’s production of Julius Caesar will always be the magnificent double triumph of Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett in the 60s, 70s and 80s” of the l9th century. It was in the fall of 1864 that Edwin Booth appeared in Julius Caesar with his two brothers. Six months later, on April 14, 1965, one of his brothers, John Wilkes Booth, perhaps convinced that he was himself Brutus, murdered Abraham Lincoln in the Ford Theatre in Washington as Lincoln sat watching a play.

Julius Caesar was murdered more than two thousand years ago, but Caesar’s ghost will live forever, or at least as long as there are readers to turn the pages of Plutarch’s astonishing histories and Shakespeare’s marvelous plays.

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Friday, August 23, 2024

D.W. Buffa

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