Caesar's gaze defines the world.

When the soothsayer calls out to Caesar from the crowd, Caesar demands to see him, and thereby to judge him.

Set him before me. Let me see his face. (I.2.24)

“He is a dreamer. Let us leave him,” renders Caesar. His judgment is not a judgment of the contents of the soothsayer’s vision. He does not judge the truth of the soothsayer’s message—clearly not, for we know how the play will end. His judgment does not distinguish truth from falsehood, but reality from dreams. Caesar’s response demonstrates in a single word the nature of the power that he wields. His gaze determines whether the soothsayer even shares a common reality.

The gaze of Caesar distinguishes between what is subject to him, and is thereby real, and what might threaten him, and is thereby a shadow.

Caesar shall forth. The things that threatened me
Ne’er looked but on my back. When they shall see
The face of Caesar, they are vanishèd. (II.2.10)

His gaze eliminates threats in the most effective way imaginable — it determines the very existence of things. And what threatens him can be eliminated through a negation of sight. That which Caesar sees is that which supports him, upholds him, gives him power and recognizes him as powerful.

However, as the play opens, it is Caesar who is seen first. Caesar is lit by the eyes of the multitude. The honorable men of Rome materialize him, and the citizens of Rome illuminate him and thereby make him real.

When in Act I the tribunes attempt to shame the “mechanicals” into going back to work, the cobbler replies that he leads them “about the streets…to wear out their shoes, to get myself into more work.” The cobbler is aware of what he is participating in. The people construct the tyrant, illuminate him, but do so with an ironic self-interest. They are savvy. A politics of abstractions is not a politics of the tradesman. Before Caesar, there was Pompey, and Marullus cannot comprehend how these same people who cheered for Pompey now cheer for his destroyer. The dialectical turn is that in ironically rejoicing at Caesar’s triumph, the people acknowledge that Caesar is an abstraction.

The whole problem of repetition is here: in this passage from Caesar (the name of an individual) to caesar (title of the Roman emperor). The murder of Caesar —historical personality—provoked, as its final result, the installation of caesarism: Caesar-person repeats itself as caesar-title.¹

The people create the concept of caesar, which is a kind of universal frame that any man could fill. The caesar-title is a symbolic mandate imposed on a person by a “network of intersubjective relations of which he is a part.”² Caesar is not “objective”, but depends on “notional” determinations by the people. “It is true, as Kant says, that having a concept of 100 thalers is not the same as having them in your pocket; but let us imagine a process of rapid inflation which totally devalues the 100 thalers in your pocket; in this case, the same object is there in reality, but it is no longer money, having become a meaningless and worthless coin. In other words, money is precisely an object whose status depends on how we ‘think’ about it: if people no longer treat this piece of metal as money, if they no longer ‘believe’ in it as money, it no longer is money.”³ The cobbler tells us that much the same is true of the tyrant. “Knew you not Pompey?” asks Marullus, angrily insulting the crowd.

And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way.
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood? (Julius Caesar, I.1.53-56)

This anaphora — “and do you now” — is an appeal to their emotions, and to the audience’s emotions. Beneath the anger that Marullus and Flavius display, isn’t there some amount of fear? Fear that reduces them to this kind of emotional plea? How can the people (You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!) be so cruel and so self-serving in their transactional relationship to power?

Why does Shakespeare open the play with this scene of the tribunes shaming the tradesmen of Rome as they stand in the street? It’s a strange way to begin. The audience first sees Caesar only through this reflection, indirectly through the eyes of the cobbler. The mirror is the working class of Rome, and in it, we see a contradiction. The people’s belief in Caesar simultaneously determines him as a distinct man separate from all the rest and yet hollows him out as an abstraction that allows anyone to fill that role, so long as they enable the belief. Caesar is he who creates triumphs, and triumphs put money in the cobbler’s pocket.

All Romans see Caesar, and in their eyes they see their own version of him. But Caesar can’t see himself through their eyes, can’t see the objective. The cobbler sees in Caesar an opportunity to make money. Brutus sees a friend and yet convinces himself that he sees a future tyrant, a “serpent’s egg”.

Opening the play by observing Caesar through the eyes of the commoners establishes a point of reflection that we maintain ironically throughout the rest of the play. As Rome is remade in the course of events — coups leading to civil war leading to the rise of the emperors and the death of the republic — we should remember to ask how this all looks through the cobbler’s eyes.

Connections:

• The theory of vision changed in the 16th-century when intramission was rediscovered in Europe.
• Shakespeare’s political vision
• 2024-02-04