I’ve occasionally seen people quote or “sorta-quote” (misquote but almost get it right) Shakespeare to make some point about something non-Shakespearean, and sometimes, these people are lucky enough to have me nearby to say, “Oh, but context.” For example, do not try to use a quote by Mark Antony to soften honest critique of the dead. Yes, the good may lie interred in people’s bones. However, Antony built up Julius Caesar as a secular saint to lead a coup and to manipulate the plebeians, the citizens of Rome, out of a republic and into becoming subjects of an empire.
Antony amplifies Caesar’s divinity for the plebeian audience, using Caesar’s more than human reputation to augment Antony’s, reframing Caesar and him as more deserving of the plebeians’ voices than Brutus and company. In 3.2, Antony represents Caesar as saint-like, for should the plebeians hear Caesar’s will, the citizens would “kiss” his “wounds” and take samples of “his sacred blood” and other tokens from the corpse (3.2.133-7). Caesar’s wounds become marks of martyrdom, and Antony suggests that Roman authorities martyred Caesar, much as Christian saints like Cecilia and Valerian were martyred. Antony transforms Caesar’s corpse, already a prop on Shakespeare’s stage at this point in the play, into a saintly relic ready to receive veneration from adoring worshipers and ready to be dismembered as memorials worthy of being passed from one generation to the next. Antony manages to secure popularity through a proxy, ablating any potential backlash onto a Caesar who becomes beyond reproach because of his sacrifice and onto Antony’s rivals, whose reputations mark them as treasonous personae non gratae. While Brutus may say that he did not “[love] Caesar less, but…[he] loved Rome more,” Antony amplifies this reasoning in his oration so that Caesar dies for Rome, martyred by arrogant, self-serving men (3.2.21-2). Caesar’s wounds become mouthpieces for Antony as he “bid[s] them speak” and he “put[s] a tongue / In every wound of Caesar that should move / The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny” against the murderers who do not have Rome’s interests in mind. Antony fashions Brutus and company as men who conspire against Rome’s and the people’s interests on an almost diabolical level (3.2.219-23). Antony’s oration reframes the wounds on Caesar’s body as the wounds of a martyr, and when confronted with the supposed brutal sacrifice of their champion, the mob’s rationality gives way to violent passion. Dramatic irony then undercuts the audience’s initial response to that rhetoric by exposing Antony’s true political motivations. Antony’s private musings after he unleashes the angry citizens in 3.2 make it obvious that Antony has duped them, in case any of the play’s audience members had also fallen for Antony’s pathos-driven funeral oration. Antony relishes the “Mischief” he has unleashed and feels that the chaos he creates could potentially “give [him and his allies] anything” (3.2.251-7). Ultimately, his mischief secures an empire for him and his co-conspirators.
Media writers will borrow or paraphrase from Julius Caesar and Antony’s funerary oration when famous or important people die, especially if those who died were political figures. A quick Google of key phrases from the oration and Margaret Thatcher shows that the British media were eager to borrow from Shakespeare in talking about her death and memorials last year. This editorial from The Guardian acknowledges the context in comparing political eulogists to Mark Antony:
The political eulogy has always been distinguished from eulogies of other kind by an element of spin. And in the case of Margaret Thatcher, eulogists on all sides were bound to select their reminiscences with a particular ruthlessness – depending on the point they wished to make.
People like to allude to Antony and Shakespeare for several reasons, but I suspect three reasons dominate. Firstly, they find themselves having the opportunity to step up and perform themselves, and they get to perform their version of Mark Antony and Julius Caesar, acting as Mark Antony to Thatcher’s Caesar in that instance. Secondly, using Shakespeare lets them attempt to graft some of Shakespeare’s cultural cachet to themselves, marking them as educated, elite, and eloquent.
I’ll get to the third reason momentarily, but it and the second reason are akin to using Polonius to appear “deep” or insightful. As Ophelia and Laertes’s father in Hamlet, Polonius is one of the better known characters in the play because of his easily remembered aphorisms that have become rhetorical commonplaces, pieces of supposedly accepted wisdom that people take as true. For example:
Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged courage. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy,
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Or of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. (1.3)
I’ve bolded the more famous of Polonius’s aphorisms here, offered by Polonius to his son before Laertes heads back to university in Paris. People like to quote Polonius and to cite him as a source of wisdom. In reality, the play presents him as a foolish old man offering tedious sermons and clichéd sentiments even as he reveals that he’s a bit of a hypocrite. He was a creeper and lech in his youth, or at least likes to think he was.[1] He remembers wild party days in his youth at university, even as he counsels Laertes to avoid that kind of behavior before sending a man to spy on his son’s social life in Paris. We might think someone wise if they spoke little, but when they spoke, their words were clear and wise in some way. Notice that Polonius is reciting a string of aphorisms to his son in the above passage: Polonius has memorized and prepared this list of wise sayings. As the play makes clear, Polonius likes to hear himself talk, and most of his listeners wish he would just get to the point: “More matter, with less art,” as Gertrude says to him in 2.2.
The third reason is one I suppose exemplifies my problem with the practice of borrowing from Polonius (or even Antony or other passages from Shakespeare): folks use these passages in an attempt to close off further discussion through some kind of commonplace appeal to Shakespeare as an authority. It is ultimately no different than using Bible verses or something like that to make a point with the intent of cutting off or shaming any further discussion. If a passage helps support or illustrate a point you are making in a larger context, then fine. But if you use it as mere shorthand or rhetorical laziness for what should be more substantive discussion, then no, I’m not gonna allow that.
[1] In this sense, Polonius is akin to Justice Shallow in 2 Henry IV, where Falstaff calls out for the audience that the supposedly wild youth the Justice had was in reality far less interesting than Shallow now likes to think it was.
Words, Words, Words 