Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page B

(Antony). The Forum scene incorporated 1,200 extras, though the individual performances were praised as much as the grand spectacle. Gielgud played Cassius as “the vulgar abstraction of personal jealousy,” 30 while Brando’s physical Antony was “all fire and ice.” 31 As with Welles’s stage production, Mankiewicz “understood the tragedy’s message … : Caesar was a Mussolini-like dictator, and Antony his chief factor—A Hitler who realises the fascist dream of his mentor.” 32 Stuart Burge directed another film in 1970, but even the presence of Gielgud (Caesar) and Charlton Heston (Antony) couldn’t salvage an obviously cheap and poorly produced production.
    In Stratford-upon-Avon, Anthony Quayle and Michael Langham’s 1950 production on an unlocalized stage was fast and efficient: “John Gielgud as Cassius has never before shown such sustained vehemence … Cassius is beyond question the most important person of every scene in which he figures, even when he isstooping low and looking daggers at great Caesar himself.” 33 The fickleness of the mob was strongly emphasized, but after the tent scene “the rest is a mopping-up operation of Caesar’s ghost, alarms and excursions, and the inevitable falling on antique swords”: 34 a regular complaint against productions. Rare praise was reserved for Portia, from whom Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies “extracts every shade of sympathy and emotion … an exquisite performance, this, sad with a melancholy that achieves a brief and touching beauty,” 35 but Quayle’s own performance as Antony was “obliterated” by the mob.
    Glen Byam Shaw’s 1957 Stratford production was played in togas against a backdrop of pillars. Returning the focus to Brutus, Alec Clunes was a “liberal idealist all too closely snared by more self-interested conspirators.” 36 Mark Dignam’s sardonic Casca, played with “a neatly calculated edge of rueful self-enjoyment,” 37 was singled out for particular praise by all reviewers, the part continuing to stand out; while the interval curtain fell on the image of “Cinna, the poet, wrongfully stoned to death by the crowd, hanging over the pulpit of the Forum from which Mark Antony has inspired a city’s mutiny.” 38
    The play’s popularity on foreign stages has taken various forms. In South Africa, following the public assassination of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in 1960, “productions of
Julius Caesar
became charged with an increased energy, became, in a sense, symbolic re-enactments of the assassination of Verwoerd, who himself had come to signify the ideals of Grand Apartheid.” 39 During the apartheid era, productions were generally read as conservative and anti-revolutionary, a demonstration of the penalty for violent uprising. In Munich in 1955, conversely, Fritz Kortner aimed for ambivalent responses: at the moment of assassination, Brutus “hesitated, and there was a long agonizing pause before ‘he resolved matters with his stab to the heart.’ ” 40 Of more interest to Kortner than judgments of “right” or “wrong” was the mindless butchery into which the climactic violence descended.
    The Shakespeare Festival at Stratford Ontario has produced the play several times. In 1978, an excitingly experimental production by John Wood received rave reviews. In brooding darkness, the stage was suddenly illuminated during the assassination: “so great was the contrast that the white light in which the slaying was bathed seemed blinding and almost obscene … the event seemed as ritualized as an act of purification and as appalling as an act of desecration.” 41 The production took the further innovation of removing the mob altogether, leaving Antony alone onstage for a funeral oration that acted as psychological self-exploration. In 1982, Derek Goldby’s production “offended many critics with its harsh violence and its forceful but simplistic treatment of mob psychology.” While individual performances were