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REVIEW
- Council, Norman. " Julius Caesar : The Honourable Brutus."
- When Honour's at the Stake: Ideas of honour is Shakespeare's
plays. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973. 60-74.
Thesis: Council, in the opening chapter of his book, surveys
Elizabethan writings about honor and comes to the conclusion that the
dominant notion of honor was that it is the reward of virtue, not a
guarantee of virtue. Brutus, in Council's opinion, made the mistake
of believing that his honor guaranteed the virtue of his actions, and
so he murdered a friend and then asked the Romans to "believe me for
mine honor, and have respect to mine honor, that you may believe"
(3.2.14-16). Here is how Council sums up his argument:
Shakespeare . . . makes Brutus' singular
dependence on his sense of honour, which becomes self-protective and
isolates Brutus from the reality of the world around him during the
course of the play, the cause of his tragedy. Shakespeare also, of
course, asserts Brutus' stature in every scene, providing a dual
judgment of his protagonist which is necessary to the structure of
the play. In a manner prophetic of the mature tragedies, the source
of Brutus' nobility— his honour—is the source of his
tragedy. Shakespeare places Brutus in a world compelled by the
demands of honour, and he is at once the noblest citizen of that
world and the most pitiable subject of its inverted ideals. After
the decision to kill Caesar, each of these important scenes of the
play dramatizes Brutus' moral and intellectual decay as being a
direct consequence of his commitment to the name of honour, and each
maintains the tragic irony of the play by surrounding Brutus with
characters who all share some form of Casca's belief that honour,
'like richest alchemy', can change offence to virtue. (73)
Bottom Line: Solid analysis
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