Chapter 2 - The Spirit of Caesar and the Second Circle

Summary

Julius Caesar presents the theatrical creation of “the spirit of Caesar”. The chapter turns to Hobbes to help articulate how Shakespeare captures the role of the popular imaginary in the generation of the sovereign spirit, the Leviathan that subsumes the raucous multitude. Negation is here central. First, the spirit of Caesar is raised in and through his sacrificial death. Second, we see the power of the people (deciding Rome’s fate) as it is not seen, as it is lost, as it is given away to Antony’s manipulative theatricality and all the future Caesars. The play’s conclusion also reveals what haunts monarchical sovereignty: “a man”. Brutus is negated, but the negation, like Caesar’s before him, raises him to spiritual status. The spirit of Brutus becomes an imaginary rival to the victorious spirit of Caesar. It raises a haunting republican “what if”, a spectral, negative carrier of justice or the common good. Brutus becomes our spirit in the second circle of the audience. The audience is constituted as an alternate crowd, an overarching seat of judgment, able to see the potentially radical implications of this sceptical play: that supposedly divinely ordained sovereignty is an imaginative creation of the theatrical crowd.