Abstract
There is a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that I have found funny-both amusing and peculiar, that is-for a long time now. Julius Caesar was the first Shakespeare play I read at school, so the humor I found in it was one that appealed to a certain teenage cynicism. The line appears in a passage in which Shakespeare chooses very deliberately to depart from his source in North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Romans, giving us a line that, as Hamlet might have put it, puzzles the will. In the so-called Orchard scene, having been given a paper that has been found by his servant, Brutus begins to read it aloud:
Brutus, thou sleep’st. Awake and see thyself! Shall Rome, et cetera. Speak, strike, redress! (2.1.4–5)1
Brutus continues, suggesting that he must piece out what this “et cetera” means. However, there is an ambiguity perhaps in his phrasing: “Thus must I piece it out.” This could be a musing (“so, now I have to work out what this means”). But it seems more likely that the “Thus” is more emphatic (“it has to mean this”), since Brutus tells us he has already received several other letters that said more or less the same thing. The meaning of et cetera in this instance is already known.
And are etceteras nothings? —2 Henry 4 (2.4.181)
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Notes
All quotations from the play will be taken from Julius Caesar, ed. Arthur Humphreys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. Marvin Spevack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
See Mark Robson, “Jonson and Shakespeare,” in Ben Jonson in Context, ed. Julie Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 57–64, which pursues some of these ideas more fully.
Jacques Derrida, “Et Cetera… (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so iiberall, etc.),” in Jacques Derrida (Paris: L’Herne, 2004), pp. 21–34; 24; trans. Geoffrey Bennington with same title, in Deconstructions: AUser’s Guide, ed. Nicholas Royle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 282–305; 287–88 (trans. sl. mod.).
“L’aphorisme a contretemps,” in Psyche: Inventions de l’autre, 2 vols (Paris: Galilee, 2003), 2: 131–44;“Aphorism Countertime,” trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 2 vols (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 2: 127–42.
On the status of anachrony in Shakespeare studies, see my “Shakespeare’s Words of the Future: Promising Richard III,” Textual Practice, 19.1 (2005): 13–30. For a broader discussion, see Jeremy Tambling, On Anachronism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), p. 411.
See for example, the discussion in Cary DiPietro and Hugh Grady, “Presentism, Anachronism, and the Case of Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare: A Journal, 8.1 (2012): 44–73.
See, most obviously, Jacques Ranciere, Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000); The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). See also Mark Robson, “Jacques Ranciere’s Aesthetic Communities,” Paragraph, 28.1 (2005): 77–95.
For less schematic surveys, see Hugh Grady, “Shakespeare Studies, 2005: A Situated Overview,” Shakespeare: A Journal, 1.1 (2005): 102–20; and Lucy Munro, “Shakespeare and the Uses of the Past: Critical Approaches and Current Debates,” Shakespeare: A Journal, 7.1 (2011): 102–25.
Hugh Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 33.
This is not to say that it is a play without love. See Helene Cixous, “What is it o’clock? or The Door (We Never Enter),” trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 57–83.
Hannu Poutiainen, “Autoapotropaics: Daimon and Psuche between Plutarch and Shakespeare,” Oxford Literary Review, 34.1 (2012): 51–70.
For a fuller treatment of early modern attitudes to suicide, see Mark Robson, “General Introduction,” The History of Suicide in England 1650–1850, 8 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 1: vii-xxvi.
Shakespeare’s Plutarch. B.Litt. Vol. 1: Containing the Main Sources of Julius Caesar, trans. Thomas North, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (London: Chatto and Windus, 1909), p. 163.
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Robson, M. (2013). The Hour is Unknown: Julius Caesar, et cetera. In: DiPietro, C., Grady, H. (eds) Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137017314_10
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