Page:The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (The Warwick Shakespeare).djvu/16

 ; and the great public takes very much the same view. Now it may be a very good thing for the child to have a revised version forced upon it, and it doubtless is an excellent thing for the great public to be set right in matters historical; but the dramatic interest suffers if your audience—child or great public—has its attention turned to cavilling at your innovations instead of to the leading motives of the story.

Therefore in telling the story of the fall of Cæsar and of the conspirators Shakespeare deliberately accepted the familiar version as presented in the English translation of Plutarch. It was no part of the dramatist's business to see whether Plutarch told the truth in everything; whether his estimate of the conspirators was a just one; whether the supernatural accompaniments were credible in themselves. It was legitimate from his point of view to use anything and everything that was dramatically effective, and to reject everything unsuited to his purpose.

That Shakespeare followed his original so closely as he has done is no small tribute to the admirably artistic character of Plutarch's narrative. There is hardly a point in the play which is not directly suggested in the Life of Cæsar, or Brutus, or Antony. None of the characters vary appreciably from their portraits as drawn by Plutarch. The very arguments used in the various discussions are reproduced from the same source. Omens and portents reappear with hardly a change of importance except in one particular—the substitution of Cæsar's ghost for Brutus' 'evil angel'. In short, the whole of Shakespeare's material is in Plutarch; yet the play is as completely original, as entirely Shakespearian, as a picture by Turner is a Turner and nothing else. To say that Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch would be a good deal like saying that Turner 'borrowed' from a landscape.

The play of Julius Cæsar has one characteristic in a very much more marked degree than any other of Shakespeare's plays—in the way in which it is pervaded by the notion of irresistible Destiny. Some such effect accompanies almost of necessity any serious introduction of the supernatural; but neither in Macbeth nor in Hamlet is the idea present with any