Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

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Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar Pub. Date: 11/22/2011 Publisher: Yale University Press

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Overview

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two classical Roman plays. Garry Wills, focusing his attention on Julius Caesar, here demonstrates how Shakespeare so wonderfully made these ancient devices vivid, giving his characters their own personal styles of Roman speech.

In four chapters, devoted to four of the play’s main characters, Wills shows how Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius each has his own take on the rhetorical ornaments that Elizabethans learned in school. Shakespeare also makes Rome present and animate by casting his troupe of experienced players to make their strengths shine through the historical facts that Plutarch supplied him with. The result is that the Rome English-speaking people carry about in their minds is the Rome that Shakespeare created for them. And that is even true, Wills affirms, for today’s classical scholars with access to the original Roman sources.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Pulitzer Prize–winner Wills, who penetrated Abraham Lincoln’s rhetoric in Lincoln at Gettysburg, now shows how the four major characters in Julius Caesar reveal Shakespeare’s uncanny, effortless, and intuitive mastery of Quintilian, Socrates, and other rhetorical stylists of the ancient world. Although Shakespeare draws from Plutarch—at third hand, from a French translation that was itself translated into English—his familiarity with the art of rhetoric gives playgoers a far more fleshed-out depiction of Roman life at its height than does his hypereducated rival, Ben Jonson. Along the way, Wills treats readers to many observations and speculations on the bread and butter of Shakespearean theatrical magic: for example, “the economy of Shakespeare’s casting practice” suggests that both major women characters in Julius Caesar were almost certainly played by a single boy actor, and how Caesar’s relatively few appearances in the play are in part explained by the same actor playing both Cicero and Caesar. Overall, this tour de force, based on a lecture series at Bard College, shows why our view of ancient Rome is very much Shakespeare’s. (Nov.)

John Simon

Rome and Rhetoric is as entertainingly readable as it is broadly informative.
—The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300152180
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 11/22/2011
Pages: 200
Sales rank: 144,762
Series: The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities Series
Product dimensions: 5.00 (w) x 7.75 (h) x 2.19 (d)

Meet the Author

Garry Wills

Garry Wills is professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Wills is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other publications.

Biography

Born in Atlanta in 1934 and raised in the Midwest, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and distinguished religion writer Garry Wills entered the Jesuit seminary after high school graduation, but left after six years of training. He received a B.A. from St. Louis University (1957), an M.A. from Xavier University of Cincinnati (1958), and his Ph.D. in classics from Yale (1961).

After graduating from Xavier, Wills was hired to work as the drama critic for National Review magazine, where he became a close personal friend and protégé of founding editor William F. Buckley. But as the winds of change blew across the 1960s, Wills got caught up in the cross-currents. A staunch Catholic anti-Communist in his youth, he began to drift away from political conservatism, galvanized by the civil rights movement and the Vietnam debate. He parted ways with National Review and began writing for more liberal-leaning publications like Esquire and the New York Review of Books, a defection that left him slightly estranged from Buckley for many years. (They reconciled before Buckley's death in 2008.)

In 1961, while he was still in grad school, Wills's first book, Chesterton: Man and Mask was published. [It was revised and reissued in 2001 with a new author's introduction.] Since then, the prolific Wills has gone on to pen critically acclaimed nonfiction that roams across history, politics, and religion. He expanded one of his Esquire articles into Nixon Agonistes (1970), a probing profile John Leonard said "...reads like a combination of H. L. Mencken, John Locke and Albert Camus." (The book landed Wills on the famous Nixon's Enemies List.) He has also written penetrating studies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Wayne, and Saint Paul; he has won two National Book Critics Circle Awards; and his 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Something of a rara avis, Wills is a Catholic intellectual who has produced thoughtful, scholarly books on religion in America. His translations of St. Augustine have received glowing reviews, and he has acted both as an outspoken critic of the Church (Papal Sin) and as an ardent advocate for his own faith Why I Am a Catholic). Proof of his accessibility can be found in the fact that several of his religion books have become bestsellers.

1. Date of Birth:
  
  May 22, 1934
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Atlanta, GA
1. Education:
  
  St. Louis University, B.A., 1957; Xavier University, M.A., 1958; Yale University, Ph.D., 1961

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Anonymous

Posted December 21, 2011

Characterization illuminated by style

I happened to be reading J.C. when I saw the NY Times review of this book. It is everything it purports to be -- a very good examination of the 4 major characters of the play (Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius) as evinced by their different rhetorical styles. Don't be put off if you are not well-versed in the terms of formal Rhetoric -- the book is full of illustrative quotes from the play. You will also find discussions of core Roman concepts (e.g. honor, friendship), examples of where and how Shakespeare differed from historical texts (e.g. Caesar not being able to swim), and interesting tidbits on historical production (e.g. why Caesar has so few lines). There is also much interesting information from the writings of the almost absent Cicero (e.g. what he really thought about his friend Brutus). This book will probably make you want to go back and read the play again.
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