general opinion: fall in a hole and die | don’t like them | eh | they’re fine I guess | like them! | love them | actual love of my life hotness level: get away from me | meh | neutral | theoretically hot but not my type | pretty hot | gorgeous! | 10/10 would banghogwarts house: gryffindor | slytherin | ravenclaw | hufflepuffbest quality: Okay we’re talking a brave, wise, loving heroine. What more could you want. To narrow it down, I think her best quality is how well she understands Brutus and how to communicate with him.worst quality: I’d say none but she is pretty self-destructive. So yeah.ship them with: With Brutus and Cassius obvs.brotp them with: With her brother Marcus.needs to stay away from: Sharp objects and fire.misc. thoughts: Portia is a very sadly underrated heroine/Shakespeare character. She deserves better than to be an afterthought. One (female, from the late 19th century) author I read said she’s powerless to stop what happens, and I quote “So much for a woman’s philosophy” which is not only misogynistic and stupid but ignores the theme of fate in the play and how EVERYONE is powerless. Portia differes from others in that she was most concerned with saving someone else.
I know your love of Portia. Do you have any advice for someone just cast in the role?
Oh wow! I’ve never been asked about acting before! I’m not an actor but I’ll do my best.
Portia is one of the great tragic women of Shakespeare and her part is actually pretty important to understanding Brutus’s psychology, especially when it comes to Act IV. She has to be a combination of mature and worried, you can’t play her as innocent/ignorant (which is what happened with the TNT miniseries). She’s innocent in the sense that she’s one of the few characters without an ulterior motive, but she’s not clueless. She’s a mature woman who knows her husband well. Don’t forget that she’s passionately, desperately in love with Brutus. ...And also smarter than him.
Unlike, say, Kate Percy (who has a similar scene in Henry IV), there’s very little room in the text for Portia to be combative. I bring this up because I’ve seen a version (that’s otherwise very good) where Portia is very shouty, and that’s not really how she’s written- although with her injury we’re given the hint of someone unraveling, which we see happening in her second scene, in the street with Lucius. She’s written in a very calm, persuasive way. She’s very legal-minded, several of the things she says are legal terms, like “In sort or limitation” which was a real estate law term (I could not make this up if I tried), so we’re dealing with a really smart, practical lady who doesn’t take any bull. Weird probably useless fact- some productions take “your weak condition” to refer to pregnancy. Don’t know why I threw that in there but hey.
As with any character, think about what her motives are, what’s driven her to this point. To be honest, I don’t have much advice for acting because as I said, I’m not an actor, but whatever you do to get in character is fine. Watch different versions of her and see how actresses handle her- I for one really love Deborah Kerr’s Portia in the 1953 version- does a version come off as more naive or strong? Does her argument sound convincing? What would it take to convince Brutus? When we see her again at the end of Act II, do you get the feeling she knows the truth? How about her chemistry with Brutus- does it make sense in Act IV that the real reason Brutus is upset and snaps in the tent scene is Portia’s death (which it actually is)?
I hope some of that helped! Portia is such a great character and I wish she were more well-known. In fact, she’s so important in Shakespeare’s canon that in Merchant of Venice, we find out that the Portia in that play is named for “Cato’s daughter, Brutus’s Portia.” Do the lady justice, my friend.
Okay so after reading @shredsandpatches brilliant comparison of the Family Shakespeare edition of Richard II to the regular text, I kinda want to do that for Julius Caesar since I’m interested how they handled that play. Also I am beginning to want to do something scholarly again. Anyone want me to do that? @ardenrosegarden? @kitkatullus?
Okay but people always ask "Why is it called 'Julius Caesar' if he dies in Act 3 and Brutus is the main focus? Why isn't it called 'Brutus?'" and I have the answer: it's because no matter what happens, to anyone, to pretty much every character from Antony to Cinna the Poet to Cassius to finally Brutus, Caesar is standing by and is essentially the cause or related in some way. His presence never leaves the play or the characters, and that's why the supernatural in this play is so darn spooky.
Bringing About the Past in Rome: What the Theories of Michael Dummett and the Death of Portia Reveal About Fate and Time in Julius Caesar
My final paper for my class on the philosophy of time, in which I write about my OTP and got 100 on it.
One of the major themes of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is fate, and everything in the play happens because it must. While Cassius famously declares “men at some time are masters of their fates,” (1.2.139), it is more often the other way around, with some all-powerful force controlling the characters. This is obvious in the death of Brutus’s wife, Portia, and his reaction to this tragedy. Shakespeare’s Brutus is a Stoic, believing that what happens will happen and must be accepted. However, Brutus has a difficult time accepting his wife’s death, and tries to convince himself for one moment that it did not happen. This kind of action is in vain, according to Michael Dummett in his essay “Bringing About the Past.”
The characters in a play based off of historical events experience a strange form of fatalism. They are bound, in an accurate portrayal, to the things that happened to them in the real world. While Shakespeare fictionalizes some aspects of the assassination of Julius Caesar and the events surrounding the collapse of the Roman Republic, the play is largely accurate, and the fates suffered by the characters come directly from the source material, Plutarch’s Lives. This introduces a fatalism to the character of Portia, whose death is referred to twice within the play. This essay seeks to explain the purpose of the two accounts of Portia’s death and Brutus’s understanding of fate and time through the structure of Dummett’s theories of fatalism and the folly of retrospective prayer, as well as the nature of fate within the play itself.
Act Four of Julius Caesar sees an impassioned argument between Brutus and Cassius and Brutus’s revelation that his wife, Portia, has committed suicide. This is in accordance with history, as the most reliable account of the death of the historical Porcia (the proper Latin spelling) is by either suicide or sickness in 43 BCE, a year after the assassination of Caesar. Brutus informs Cassius that he is “sick of many griefs” (4.3.143) and that “Impatient of my absence/And grief that young Octavius with Mark Antony/Have made themselves so strong—for with her death/That tidings came—with this she fell distract/And her attendants absent, swallowed fire.” (4.3.152-155) He obviously knows of her death and is shaken.
Brutus’s demeanor changes, however, upon the arrival of two of his soldiers, Titinius and Messala. Messala informs Brutus and Cassius, now generals fighting Caesar’s successors, of news of the situation in Rome. He says “That by proscription and bills of owtlawry/Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus/Have put to death an [sic] hundred senators.” (4.3.172-174) Brutus’s previous information disagrees with this, and he says “Therein our letters do not well agree/Mine speak of seventy senators that died/By their proscriptions.” (4.3.175-177) Brutus and Messala have two different versions of the past. Messala cryptically mentions Portia, and when Brutus questions him, feigning ignorance, the soldier admits “Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell/For certain she is dead, and by strange manner.” (4.3.187-188) Brutus’s reply is suitably stoic. “Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala/With meditating that she must die once/I have the patience to endure it now.” (4.3.189-191) Brutus’s blatant lie in pretending not to know of Portia’s suicide is a point of debate in scholarship of the play, but in our case an example of how this character views fate and time.
Either Shakespeare intended to delete one version of Portia’s death and did not, or he intended both scenes to exist to show Brutus at both his most vulnerable and stoic. These two sections, when viewed as both necessary, reveal Brutus’s character and his view of time and fate. When he says “We must die,” he acknowledges the obvious fate of mortals is to die. In the end, Brutus does die, seeing no fate but defeat. To him, there was nothing he could do to prevent his death, or that of Portia, or losing the war against Caesar’s successors, the Triumvirate. Brutus would normally be seen as Dummett’s typical fatalist, of the opinion that “Either you are going to be killed by a bomb or you are not going to be.” To this sort of fatalist, any preparation done by a doomed man is useless. Likewise, a man destined to survive does so whether or not he seeks protection.[1]
However, Brutus has too active a view of a man’s place in time to be a fatalist and to be completely convinced that all that happens will happen regardless of what is done by a human. As he says later in this scene, “There is a tide in the affairs of men/…And we must take the current when it serves/Or lose our ventures.” (4.3.118, 122-124) He believes that humans have the choice of either taking advantage of events or not, and their fates depend on this choice. He is not a complete fatalist thanks to his view of time being a series of events that effect humans in different ways depending on the humans’ actions.
Brutus avoids one of the fallacies Dummett deconstructs in “Bringing About the Past,” that of the death in a raid is inevitable fatalism but possibly falls into another logical fallacy—the retrospective prayer.[2] Dummett describes a situation similar to Brutus’s in his essay, in which he posits “suppose I hear on the radio that a ship has gone down in the Atlantic two hours previously, and that there were a few survivors: my son was on that ship, and I at once utter a prayer that he should have been among the survivors, that he should not have drowned; this is the most natural thing in the world. Still, there are things which it is very natural to say which make no sense; there are actions which can naturally be performed with intentions which could not be fulfilled.”[3] Brutus finds a chance that Portia may not be dead after all—Messala has different information on the situation in Rome, and if Brutus was wrong about the senators, he could be wrong about Portia.
Dummett says that as humans, we view the past and the future in similar ways. Because we pray about the future, we also pray about the past, in the hopes something did not happen. This is in folly, however. “The answer that springs to mind is this: you cannot change the past; if a thing has happened, it has happened, and you cannot make it not to have happened.”[4] Brutus cannot change the past, in the end. Like the father praying for his son’s survival, it is natural for Brutus to grasp a chance for Portia to still be alive. The past, however, cannot be changed, no matter what he supposes on hearing Messala’s news. The second announcement of Portia’s death makes sense within the context of the play—it shows Brutus as a man trying to be brave in the face of tragedy, but also a man not as accepting of fate as he claims.
Dummett says of the disanalogy of past and future “The difference between past and future lies in this: that we think that, of any past event, it is in principle possible for me to know whether or not it took place independently of my present intentions; whereas, for many types of future event, we should admit that we are never going to be in a position to have such knowledge independently of our intentions.”[5] We can only know what we intend to do, not what really will happen. Whether you prepare or not for a bombing raid may save your life or it may not. Humans can only look back at the past and assign meaning to events, saying “A is what caused B” or “A did nothing in regards to B” and consider that to be true for events in the future.
Brutus tells Cassius of two things that caused Portia to take her life. The causes were the strength of their enemies and her separation from her husband, the effect was her death. In Brutus’s situation, either Portia would die or she would not, and in this case she did. Humans, according to Dummett, are causal agents in events. While Brutus did not intend Portia’s death, it certainly happened, independent of his intentions. This suggests that the world of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar truly is fatalistic, and that events will happen regardless of human intention. Caesar, something of a fatalist himself, says in Act 2 that “death, a necessary end/Will come when it will come.” (2.2.36-37) At the beginning of the next act, Act 3, he is murdered by Brutus, Cassius, and their allies, confirming his belief. Caesar believed that no matter what he did, his fate would be the same. No matter what Brutus did, Portia’s fate was to die, suggesting that Dummett’s view of fatalism, “the view that there is an intrinsic absurdity in doing something in order that something else should subsequently happen; that any such action-that is, any action done with a further purpose-is necessarily pointless,”[6] is at least true in part for the progress of time in Julius Caesar.
Because the play is based off of real events and the characters off of real historical figures, they are bound by their history. No matter how the events are portrayed or interpreted by the author, they have the same result as their historical counterparts. Shakespeare, while an author certainly not above pure fiction like in his comedies, or changing history to suit his purposes as with Richard III, chose not to change time in Julius Caesar, and his Roman characters are on one track to their fate planned by history. Within the world of the play Portia dies as a result of hopelessness and loneliness, but she also dies because history says she does. Brutus, a character in the play, cannot prevent it, only accept it, as much as he wishes it weren’t true. His retrospective hope that the original news of Portia’s death was faulty is brought on by other things he knows being brought into question, but he finds that time cannot be changed. Brutus tries to be something of an optimist, but he inhabits a strange fatalistic universe driven by the outside forces of an author and history.
Dummett’s essay “Bringing About the Past.” discusses cause and effect and their relationship to fate. He comes to the conclusion that humans are causal agents and one cannot make generalizations about what could or could not happen. In the world of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the characters are swept away by their fates, whether they do anything or not. While Brutus is not a total fatalist, his reaction to Portia’s death show that he has the natural desire to change the past, however useless that desire is, because while he is a character in a story, he is still human. He cannot bring about the past, nor can anyone else in the play, because the playwright and history itself decide their fates. Some characters accept it better than others, but Dummett would see in Brutus just another human trying to change what he cannot in a universe where fate is truly decided.
[1] Michael Dummett, “Bringing About the Past,” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 73 (1964): 345.
[2] I use Dummett’s term “retrospective prayer” to describe the mindset or action of hoping or believing something in the past will be changed regardless of any religious view and not necessarily referring to the act of prayer itself.
His father was murdered by Pompey when Brutus was still a child. He was raised by his mother and uncle, who adopted him.
For a while he was called Quintus Caepio, since he had been adopted by his uncle Caepio.
Brutus was at one point possibly engaged to Julia Caesaris, daughter of Julius Caesar.
Porcia was not his first wife. Brutus originally was married to Claudia Pulcher, from the Appia family. After Cato died, Brutus divorced her on unclear reasons and married Porcia.
Brutus and Porcia had one child, a son, who died early. He never had any children with Claudia.
His mother, Servillia Caeponis (vilified in both HBO Rome and Colleen McCollough’s books unfairly) remarried, to another man of the Junius family (but a different branch). Via him, Brutus had three half-sisters, all of course called Junia and called Prima, Secunda, and Tertia to separate them, of course.
One of these sisters was married to Lepidus, a Second Triumvir. Another, Tertia, was married to Cassius, making Brutus and Cassius brothers-in-law to one of Caesar’s successors.
Brutus was friends with Cicero and we know a lot about him via Cheech’s letters. We know Brutus sent a letter offering condolences when Tullia died. When Porcia died, Cicero returned the gesture and wrote to Brutus “What you have lost has no equal on Earth.”
Shakespeare blatantly ignores some of Brutus’s history in the play. In the Tent Scene Brutus says he would never be involved in bribery/money laundering/the like but, long before he was praetor and senator, Brutus worked on Cyprus and not only lent money at 47% interest but basically extorted it out when it was due. He seems to have later cleaned up his act and learned something about ethics, but still.
Brutus and Porcia were actually, weirdly enough, cousins. Brutus’s mother and Porcia’s father were half-siblings. The “Young Cato” who appears in the play by Shakespeare is Porcia’s brother, Brutus’s cousin/brother-in-law. Since Cato was Caesar’s sworn enemy, marrying Cato’s daughter would not endear Brutus to Caesar. It appears he married her more for love than anything else.
Brutus wrote several books- on duty, family, and in defense of Cato.
Many historians believe that the Brutus that Caesar considered like family was Brutus’s distant cousin, Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus, incorrectly called Decius in Shakespeare. Marcus Brutus probably had a more shaky relationship with Caesar than many people think.
When Junia Tertia died sometime in the reign of Emperor Tiberius (for reference, Christ was alive then!), her family was not allowed to carry busts of Brutus and Cassius in her funeral, as they were obviously not liked by the Imperial office. One historian remarked that because of this absence, they outshone everything.
John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, was a huge fan of the play Julius Caesar and fancied himself a modern Brutus. His father was named Junius Brutus Booth.
I have a question: Did you like Cassius from the beginning? Or did it take a while for him to grow on you?
Interesting question! I read Julius Caesar first on my own, no prompting, assignment, anything. I was writing a novel centered around the Lincoln assassination and Booth was obsessed with the play and saw himself as a modern Brutus so I decided to read it... little did I know it would relaunch my second Roman obsession (currently I’m in my third). Anyway, when I first read the play I had no idea what to pay attention to or who would be important in my head. I only knew the basic outline of what had happened and I didn’t know anything about Cassius.
As I read it Cassius was interesting to me because he was a rationalist, didn’t believe in signs and the supernatural, and I like to think that I don’t believe in that nonsense... then I see something in the woods and take way too long to register that it’s not a spook, it’s a possum. Cassius is a brat, needy, and selfish, but he can’t bring himself to admit that he wants Brutus to like him. I could relate to that.
I immediately began shipping Portus and it surpassed Han and Leia as my OTP. I knew people shipped Brutecass and very few fanartists/writers shipped Portus but I just could never bring myself to ship them until last year I watched HBO Rome and really liked how they portrayed Cassius’s relationship with Brutus. He is a lot nicer to Brutus in that, and you get a sense that Guy Henry was playing Cassius to be in unrequited love with Brutus. Anyway, Henry’s Cassius in HBO gave me kind of a new perspective on the character, and on rereads of the play it adds to how Shakespeare writes him, and I see a loneliness, a desire for Brutus’s approval, in him.
Basically, every time I find something new for Julius Caesar it gives me new insights into the characters. I liked Cassius when I first read the play, but he’s grown as I understand him in new ways. So it’s a bit of both!
@ardenrosegarden Here's a review for the JC manga I like- https://whatsnotwrong.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/review-shakespeares-julius-caesar-the-manga-edition/ and interestingly enough he mentions the whole thing about Portia being pregnant and asks why that is (it's a combination of historical fact and some stage adaptions have used it) and I have to admit, he's right about always seeing her as pregnant, the first book I read the play from had some cast interviews from a production and the actress playing Portia says they decided to go with her being pregnant. That and the comic, I've always seen her as pregnant around the assassination (the other manga I have has her pregnant too). Tbh I don't see why that would change her motives, except for adding the fact that she's going to soon have a child with a man who's acting so strangely, so that'd be a stressful position to be in.
Aaaaaannnyyyyway, this is a fantastic version, most of the character designs are perfect (I don't like Cassius though) and it really gets the scene and themes down. I want to disagree with the reviewer here too, the play is primarily rhetorical in nature, even when it gets poetic- some of the most passionate lines, like Portia's plea and Antony's funeral speech (especially that) are to persuade in some way. Persuasion and public speaking can be poetic, kinda like Kennedy's inaugural address, but JC isn't like Romeo and Juliet in the flowery lyrical style. In this comic, the poetic parts- Portia's pure, desperate love, Brutus's mental breakdown, Antony's raw anger and persuasion, Calpurnia's psychotic dream- are portrayed visually and have their own motifs to signal their meaning and you can miss them on your first readthrough.
Great, now I want to write a rebuttal to that review, even though I agree with him on basically everything but the poetry and Portia. God help me, my brain is stuck in academic mode. Also, I have the book, and I've been meaning to make a pdf, so if you want to read it, you can.
