Caesar, especially Shakespeare’s Caesar, condenses leadership, with all its positive and negative qualities, into a singular figure. He has been made to symbolize both popular will and tyrannical excess; the words Kaiser, Czar, and Tsar all derive from his name. Shakespeare has been similarly overburdened with cultural significance, a single playwright rendered by decades of historiographies into a Colossus. His work has been used as a linguistic weapon in English and American imperial projects, as well as a site of artistic resistance against that very colonization. We live among these titanic ghosts that drift through our cultural landscape, dragging accumulated meanings like tattered banners. We cannot exempt ourselves from history, therefore, nor the telling of it. Doing nothing is doing something. Therefore, what can we do, here, in this theater, with our time and our breath? We can go into the field, into the fray of meanings around our two ghosts. Into the choices that made them, and into the choices we make. The world of this play is a version of Rome on a slant. Here, the veil of time is thin, and many parallel stories run alongside this one: the stories of every tyrant, every riot, every civil war, every political figure dubbed a Caesar or a Brutus, in all their complexity. The stories where Caesar, or the conspirators, or the people, make a different choice, or a dozen different choices. In holding this moment and examining it from many angles, we feel its justice and injustice throbbing together in a common pulse.
No matter how it is interpreted, the loss of life—beginning with Caesar’s body on the Senate floor and ending in civil war—hits us in the gut. The senators of this world use words to erase the reality of violence, but no rhetoric can counteract the sticky facts that a human is dead and the conspirators have killed him. They have witnessed the fleshy fact of another living thing’s end and must then carry that reminder of their own fragile membranes. From the moment of Caesar’s death, the people of Rome begin a violent process of making meaning, meting out honor, and setting down history. So much of what they choose to record, though it is soaked in blood, is their love for each other. Cassius, furious and vulnerable in the thick of war, reaches out for Brutus with an open heart. This fact does not stem the tide of war, but it does remind us that a person who does violence remains capable of choosing to act in love, and that matters. Beyond the “great men” of history, I invite you to find the ensemble of Romans, who tell us other ways this story could have been told. Ancient Rome was more than tyrants, senators and soldiers. There were also wives and servants and enslaved people and prisoners. Though they were not granted the rights of Roman citizenship, they were an essential part to how Rome worked. This is not far from us. The United States runs on an underclass of labor, too. The United States is an empire too. What choices will we make? How will we live with our ghosts? —Emma Bee Pernudi-Moon, Production Dramaturg and Co-Adaptor
SHAKESPEARE REPERTORY PROJECT | 2022–23 SEASON