Introduction
Dazed by a rebuke from someone he considers a dear friend, Cassius has this exchange with Brutus on the battlefield in Act IV of Julius Caesar:
Cassius: … Brutus hath rived my heart.
A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities,
But Brutus makes mine greater than they are.
Brutus: I do not, till you practice them on me.
Cassius: You love me not.
Brutus: I do not like your faults.
Cassius: A friendly eye could never see such faults.
Brutus: A flatterer’s would not, though they do appear
As huge as high Olympus.1
Brutus and Cassius struggle here, in a way that all of us do daily as we decide who to count among our friends, who to trust and when we may have to disengage from a relationship because we can no longer do that.
The two men seem to have different definitions of friendship. Cassius thinks a friend should “bear his friend’s infirmities” -- given that he later insists that a friend “could never see such faults,” it probably makes sense to assume that he means, rather than “put up with,” something more like paper over or even ignore rather than highlight and “make greater” as Cassius insists Brutus does. Because he makes his faults seem worse than they are, Brutus must not love Cassius. It is an all or nothing game to him.
Brutus, however, seems better able to separate what he loves about Cassius and what he does not. He acknowledges that as long as he doesn’t bear the negative outcome of one of these faults, there is no harm done if he doesn’t ignore them. They are there, but they aren’t a problem. In fact, he says, someone who ignores faults is a flatterer, not a true friend.
Cassius and Brutus deal with the problem of taking sides. Can you still be someone’s friend if they highlight your faults? Do you have to love every part of someone? At what point do you dismiss someone for their faults -- when they “practice them on me,” as Brutus says?
When we enter into this decision with other people, both parties inevitably bring different sets of values to the table. As readers and interpreters of literature, we do the same when we attempt to make judgments about characters and “take sides.” Do we want to root for the good guy or the bad guy? What makes one character good and another bad -- or, as Brutus seems to think in the quotation above -- can a character be both and still be okay?
This unit will use William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to explore the idea that readers use a set of values to make judgments about character and that the text, rather than having a surefire “answer” contained within about each character actually might allow for and suggest multiple interpretations. Depending on which evidence is used and how each individual piece (as well as larger groups of those pieces) is judged against a reader’s moral “rules,” a different judgment about a character might be made.
In the exchange between Brutus and Cassius above (and during the rest of their “quarrel,” which goes on for several pages), the values I the reader hold may influence which character I “side” with. If I think that people who are truly friends accept each others’ faults and don’t attempt to point them out, I might feel some amount of sympathy for Cassius and join him at being upset at Brutus for “riving” his heart. If I think that ignoring someone’s faults is flattering them, and that flattering makes one a phony, I might sympathize with Brutus. I might also fall somewhere in the middle -- yes, he’d be flattering, but that’s not a bad thing.
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