Page:Julius Caesar (1919) Yale.djvu/117

Julius Cæsar was used for meetings of the Senate and was destroyed in the grief and rage over Cæsar's death, but the colossal statue of Pompey which it had contained (cf. line 115) was saved.

Know, Cæsar doth not wrong. Ben Jonson quoted in his Discoveries, first printed in 1641, an alternative version of this line: 'Caesar did never wrong but with just cause.' Jonson ridiculed this sentence as an 'Irish bull'—unjustly: for 'wrong' means not only 'error, mistake,' but also 'harm, injury' (as in line 242 in this very scene). Some few editors have incorporated Jonson's version of this line in the text, following it up with 'Nor without cause will he be satisfied,' on the hypothesis that Jonson was quoting either an early Quarto version which has since disappeared, or at least the acting version current in Shakespeare's lifetime which was unwarrantably changed by the editors of the First Folio.

If I could pray to move, prayers would move me. 'If I were as weak as you are, and in the position of looking up to someone more powerful than myself and entreating him to change his mind, why then I should perhaps be weak enough likewise to change my own mind on account of mere empty entreaties; but happily I am as far above one alternative as the other, for,' etc.

This line has given the commentators much trouble, and many emendations have been proposed for the puzzling phrase 'in strength of malice'—such as 'exempt from malice,' 'in strength of amity,' etc. If the Folio reading is to be preserved unchanged, the word 'malice' must clearly be emptied of all its usual meaning, for Brutus could never have applied such a term to any action by the conspirators after his overwhelming repudiation of 'envy' and similar emotions in II. i. 162–183; and the word