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The ides of March, in the Roman calendar, falls on March 15, this
day, nothing more. But Shakespeare gave the date an ominous ring in
his play Julius Caesar:
“Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on
me? / I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music, / Cry
‘Caesar’. Speak, Caesar is turned to hear.
Soothsayer: “Beware the ides of March.”
Well, we know what happened to Caesar on that
day. He was assassinated by his trusted friend Brutus and his fellow
conspirators. Brutus stabbed him last. Dying, Caesar gasped: “Et
tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar.”
Well, for us today, the ides of March are
come. Anything afoot? Caesar says, also the same thing, the ides of
March are come, but the soothsayer replies, yes, but not gone.
Should that send a chill down anyone’s spine? We wouldn’t know
till the day is over. But whatever one thinks, it is not a
consummation devoutly to be wished.
Contemporary meanings are read in various lines
from Shakespeare’s plays having to do with respublica and the fall
of kings theme. Like, “uneasy lies the head that wears the
crown.” (Richard II) Everybody seems to know who the beleaguered
one is.
And in another vein, given the long litany of
charges laid against the head of state, the lines from Macbeth are
recalled:
“When sorrows come, they come not single spies
/ But in battalions.”
But as Palace functionaries would say, all sound
and fury, signifying nothing. Yet the mounting unrest cannot be
stilled.
The Elizabethan dramatist drew much from
classics of the times like Holinshed’s Chronicles, The Mirror for
Magistrates, and Plutarch’s Lives for his histories and Roman
plays. He reconfigured individual tales of kings, invested
characters with qualities not in the historical accounts, and
resolved conflicts not in the Aristotlean mode, but rather on the
notion of the fall from grace of a ruler from a high state to a low
state, tragic flaw (hubris) notwithstanding. Most likely the ruler
simply overreached. Hence, his fall.
The Renaissance produced primers for rulers or
would-be rulers like The Prince by Machiavelli designed for survival
in courts marked by intrigue, deceit or duplicity and greed. Since
then, politicians have assimilated lessons from Machiavelli.
Shakespeare on the other hand wrote his plays
for the edification of the monarch, Queen Elizabeth, in the
hierarchy of things. He sanctified loyalty and fealty to the throne
at a time when monarchs were said to have ruled by divine right.
There is always a consequence in the precipitous fall of a
king—disorder, civil war, and personal tragedy as what happens in
Julius Caesar or Richard III when the literally fallen king cries
out, “A horse! A horse! A kingdom for a horse!”
In the Tudor scheme of things, the music of the
spheres must not be disturbed, otherwise chaos will follow. The
stability of the throne must be kept. That’s probably how the
English have maintained the constitutional monarchy through the
centuries.
Shakespeare as an artist had no illusions about
the throne as a number of his plays portrayed bad kings. In Richard
II the king reflects even before his dethronement on the sad fate of
those who wear the crown:
“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos’d,
Some poison’d by their wives, some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antick sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!”
Thoughts for the Lenten season.
eaordoñez2000@yahoo.com
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