Here are a few 19th century comments comparing the historical Julius Caesar with Shakespeare’s character. These comments and others are all collected in the “New Variorum Edition” of The Tragedie of Julius Caesar, edited by Horace Howard Furness, Jr., Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1913. The second passage, by Hudson, veers no doubt on the side of hagiography of Shakespeare.
A. Mezieres, Shakespeare ses Oeuvres et ses Critiques (1860, page 360):
H. N. Hudson, Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters (1872, Volume 2, page 224):
H. M. Ayres, [title of work not given by Furness] (p. 188):
A. Mezieres, Shakespeare ses Oeuvres et ses Critiques (1860, page 360):
Shakespeare presents us with a conventional Caesar, very different from that of Plutarch – a proud and arrogant Caesar, whose dictatorial language forms a marked contrast to the simplicity of the Commentaries so well preserved by the Greek historian. He does not tell us of those lofty thoughts which engaged the mind of the master of the world up to the very hour when the swords of the conspirators struck him down. Above all, he does not give sufficient prominence to his generosity, his clemency, and that high-minded liberality which, justly estimating its enemies, takes no precautions against them. It is but a weak justification of Shakespeare’s conception to urge, as have several critics, that, having taken the life of Brutus as his main subject, he had the right to show only the weak side of Caesar, his vanity, his ambition to reign, and his insolence, in order to furnish a motive for the conspiracy. The decision to tell but a part of the truth does not excuse him who makes the decision. The poet was under no obligation to follow the plan which he adopted, and we do not render his work immune from blame in appealing to a choice which depended upon him alone to make. At all events, it must be observable that here, contrary to his usual custom, he is lacking in impartiality. [ . . .]
H. N. Hudson, Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters (1872, Volume 2, page 224):
As here represented, Caesar is, indeed, little better than a grand, strutting piece of puff-paste; and when he speaks, it is very much in the style of a glorious vapourer and braggart, full of lofty airs and mock-thunder, than which nothing could be further from the truth of the man, whose character, even in his faults, was as compact and solid as adamant, and at the same time as limber and ductile as the finest gold. Certain critics have seized and worked upon this as proving that Shakespeare must have been very green in classical study, or else very careless in the use of his authorities. To my thinking it proves neither the one nor the other, though I am not quite clear as to what it does prove.
It is true, Caesar’s ambition was, indeed, gigantic, but none too much so, I suspect, for the mind it dwelt in. And no man ever framed his ambition more in sympathy with the great force of Nature or built it upon a deeper foundation of political wisdom and insight. Now this ‘last infirmity of noble minds’ is the only part of him that the play really sets before us; and even this we do not see as it was, because it is here severed from the constitutional peerage of his gifts and virtues; all those transcendent qualities which placed him at the summit of Roman intellect and manhood being either withheld from the scene or thrown so far into the background that the proper effect of them is mainly lost. Yet we have ample proof that Shakespeare understood Caesar thoroughly. In fact, we need not go beyond Shakespeare to gather that Julius Caesar’s was the deepest, most versatile, and most multitudinous head that ever figured in the political affairs of mankind. And, indeed, it is clear from this play itself that the Poet’s course did not proceed at all from ignorance or misconception of the man. For it is remarkable that, though Caesar delivers himself so out of character, yet others, both foes and friends, deliver him much nearer the truth; so that, while we see almost nothing of him directly, we nevertheless get, upon the whole, a pretty just reflection of him. Especially in the marvelous speeches of Antony and in the later events of the drama, both his inward greatness and his right of mastership over the Roman world are fully vindicated. For, in the play as in the history, Caesar’s blood just hastens and cements the empire, which the conspirators thought to prevent. They soon find that in the popular sympathies, and even in their own dumb remorses, he has ‘left behind powers that will work for him.’ He proves, indeed, far mightier in death than in life; as if the spirit were become at once the guardian angel of his cause and an avenging angel to his foes. And so it was in fact. For nothing did so much to set the people in love with royalty, both name and thing, as the reflection that their beloved Caesar, the greatest of their national heroes, the crown and consummation of Roman genius and character, had been murdered for aspiring to it. Thus their hereditary aversion to kingship was all subdued by the remembrance of how and why their Caesar fell; and they who before would have plucked out his heart rather than that he should wear a crown, would now have plucked out their own, to set a crown upon his head. Such is the natural result when the intensities of admiration and compassion meet together in the human breast.
I am moved to add, though it is not strictly pertinent to my theme, that the man Julius Caesar was in no sort a philosophic enthusiast or patriotic dreamer. With his clear, healthy, practical mind, which no ideal or sentimental infatuation could get hold of, he stood face to face with men and things as they were. It was not in his line, therefore to bid old ‘Time run back and fetch the age of gold.’ He knew – he would not have been Julius Caesar if he had not known – that it was both criminal and weak to suppose that the great wicked Rome of his day was to be crushed back into the smaller and better Rome of a bygone age. If he sought to imperialize the State, and himself at its head, it was because he knew that Rome, as she then was, must have a master, and that himself was the fittest man for that office. We all now see what he alone saw then, that the great social forces of the Roman world had long been moving and converging irresistibly to that end. He was not to be deluded with the hope of reversing or postponing the issue of such deep-working causes. The great danger of the time lay in struggling to keep up a republic in show, when they already had an empire in fact. And Caesar’s statesmanship was of that high and comprehensive reach which knows better than to outface political necessities with political theories. For it is an axiom in government, no less than in science, that Nature will not be the servant of men who are too brain-sick or too proud to perceive and respect her laws. Great Caesar understood this matter thoroughly in reference to the political state of his time; and his ambition , if that be the right name for it, was but the instinct of a supreme administrative faculty for administrative modes and powers answerable to the exigency.
Now I feel morally certain that the Poet understood all this perfectly. I have no doubt he knew the whole height and compass of Caesar’s vast and varied capacity. And I sometimes regret that he did not render him as he evidently saw him, inasmuch as he alone perhaps of all the men who ever wrote could have given an adequate expression of that colossal man.
This seeming contradiction between Caesar as known and Caesar as rendered by him is what, more than anything else in the drama, perplexes me. I am sometimes at a loss how to account for it. Shall we say that, upon the plan of making Brutus a dramatic hero, no other course was practicable? Was it that the great sun of Rome had to be shorn of his beams, else so ineffectual a fire as Brutus could not command the eye?
I have sometimes thought that the policy of the drama may have been to represent Caesar not as he was indeed, but as he must have appeared to the conspirators; to make us see him as they saw him, in order that they too might have fair and equal judgment at our hands. For Caesar was literally too great to be seen by them, save as children often see bugbears by moonlight, when their inexperienced eyes are mocked with air. And the Poet may well have judged that the best way to set us right towards them was by identifying us more or less with them in mental position, and making us share somewhat in their delusion. For there is scarce anything wherein we are so apt to err as in reference to the characters of men when time has settled and cleared up the questions in ‘which they lost their way’; we blame them for not having seen as we see; while, in truth, the things that are so bathed in light to us were full of darkness to them; and we should have understood them better had we been in the dark along with them. Caesar, indeed, was not bewildered by the political questions of his time; but all the rest were, and, therefore, he seemed so to them; and, while their own heads were swimming, they naturally ascribed his seeming bewilderment to a dangerous intoxication. As for his marvelous career of success, they attributed this mainly to his good luck; such being the common refuge of inferior minds when they would escape the sense of their inferiority. Hence, as generally happens with the highest order of men, his greatness had to wait the approval of later events. He, indeed, far beyond any other man of his age, ‘looked into the seeds of time’; but this was not nor could be known till time had developed those seeds into their fruits. Why, then, may not the Poet’s idea have been so to order things that the full strength of the man should not appear in the play, as it did not, in fact, till after his fall? This view, I am apt to think, will both explain and justify the strange disguise – a sort of falsetto greatness – under which Caesar exhibits himself.
H. M. Ayres, [title of work not given by Furness] (p. 188):
Shakespeare’s Caesar is admittedly not Plutarch’s; his Calpurnia, his Portia, are Plutarch’s, and no more; his Antony, his Brutus, his Cassius – by reason of the contrasts of character his art sets before us – are more, but his Caesar has ever seemed something less and different. Nowhere does one get so complete a sense of the greatness of Caesar as in Plutarch. Lucan’s Caesar is great in his almost diabolical competence beside the helplessness of Pompey, but Lucan showers upon him a constant flood of vilification and depreciation. Suetonius deals out his gossip curtly; Dion Cassius leaves a pale, second-hand impression; Appian is slow, though of historical value. But Plutarch is writing lives, not history. Plutarch sets Caesar forth as, above everything else, astute; as a man marked to rule, thrusting his way with unerring political sagacity into popular favor; cultivated, brave, of inhuman energy, and renowned for a clemency designed to be something more than its own reward; a man of humor and of pithy utterance; toward the close of his life somewhat under the domination of his adherents, and restless in the desire for future achievements . . . . Another trait which distinguished Caesar from the valiant knight-errant is his wily political forehandedness, which Plutarch does not allow us to forget. Like a wrestler he ‘striveth for tricks to overthrow his adversary.’ . . . Such, briefly, is the impression one bears away of the heroic language of Plutarch’s Caesar: not always the master of events, but provided always with resources to meet them; versatile, witty, competent, expeditious, sagacious, clement. Plutarch has framed an enduring literary portrait of the man. How much now of this Caesar appears in Shakespeare? Let us examine afresh his role. The noise and chatter of a holiday is hushed by Caesar’s voice commanding the performance of a trivial piece of superstition, which in Caesar’s mouth is Shakespeare’s invention . . . . Many of our impressions of Caesar we gain through the eyes of his enemies: of the Tribunes, whose sympathies are with the neglected memory of Pompey; of Cassius, the sarcastic victim of personal pique, who finds Caesar no more than a man, no conqueror over physical fatigue and disease; of Casca, who whimsically comments on Caesar’s melodramatic demagoguery. Meanwhile a word from Caesar himself. He distrusts, not fears – his name is not liable to fear – Cassius’s meager, reflective asceticism. Then the sudden relapse from his lofty arrogance: ‘Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf.’ The indifference to fear is consistent with Plutarch, the pomposity and the human infirmity are Shakespeare’s. [. . .]
, but I thought of the above in respect to Che Guevara as well. I recently watched the movie Motorcycle Diaries which is based on his own diaries and his friend's, Alberto Granada, book Traveling with Che Guevara: The Making of a Revolutionary. Before Che finished his medical school, him and Granada took a trip across Latin America on a motorcycle. It was during this trip that Che saw and understood injustice, and overcame a lot of his fears about his own mortality, to later become the man he became, and after his death, a legend. He gave up what could have been an easy, good life as a middle class doctor in Argentina, to fight for truth and justice because of the compassion he felt for the suffering humanity.
