Julius Caesar and The Prince

Julius Caesar and The Prince is a paired HSC text set: Shakespeare's Roman tragedy of assassination and civil war, first performed around 1599, studied alongside Machiavelli's 1513 treatise of political advice. The pairing is set for HSC English Advanced Module A: Textual Conversations, where the play tests the treatise's precepts against consequence.

The Prince (written 1513) is Machiavelli's short treatise of political advice, written after the Florentine republic he had served for fourteen years fell and he was dismissed, imprisoned and tortured. Breaking with the tradition that taught rulers to be virtuous, it advises the prince to study "the real truth of the matter" rather than "the imagination of it", to "know how to do wrong", and to be feared rather than loved. Its cold pragmatism is the reflex of a republican who has watched idealism lose.

Julius Caesar (first performed around 1599) dramatises the assassination of Caesar by a conspiracy of republicans and the civil war that follows. Writing for an England ruled by an ageing, childless Elizabeth, with the succession uncertain, Shakespeare could not stage a contemporary regicide, but he could stage a Roman one, and use the safe distance of history to ask whether killing a would-be tyrant saves a republic or destroys it. Cassius, the conspiracy's Machiavellian engine, manipulates the idealist Brutus into the plot; the conspirators strike in the Senate; and Mark Antony's funeral oration turns the crowd, unleashing the war that destroys the men who killed to prevent it.

Studied together as a textual conversation, the relationship is a precept meeting its proof. Machiavelli asserts; Shakespeare stages, and the staging tests the assertion against consequence. The treatise can declare that it is safer to be feared than loved and move on in a sentence; the play must give that maxim a man, a motive and an ending.

The play inherits Machiavelli's political world almost exactly: a state where power is contested by force and craft, where fortune turns in a day, and where the winners win by Machiavellian means. Antony is the only figure to embody the treatise's most famous emblem, that "it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves": all fox in the forum, opening with the praeteritio "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" and curdling the refrain "For Brutus is an honourable man ... And Brutus is an honourable man" from tribute to accusation, and, alone over Caesar's body, all lion - "Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war".

Caesar is the precept's negative proof. Machiavelli demands "a mind ready to turn itself accordingly as the winds and variations of fortune force it", and Caesar fatally mistakes constancy for strength, boasting "I am constant as the northern star" moments before the daggers fall. The self-mythologising illeism of "Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!" turns the wound into the fall of an institution, not just a man.

Brutus is the man the treatise warns against, the idealist who governs by how men ought to behave. Machiavelli predicts his fate precisely - "he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation" - and every principled choice Brutus makes, from "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more" to sparing Antony and letting him speak, is a tactical disaster. Yet the play gives him its moral centre and its final praise, "This was the noblest Roman of them all", a judgement the treatise's logic of results cannot produce.

The sharpest swerve is formal. Machiavelli asserts in a single controlling voice that a deceiver "will always find someone who will allow himself to be deceived"; Shakespeare makes us the crowd, swinging from "Let him be Caesar" to "We'll burn the house of Brutus" within a single scene, so the precept is not reported but demonstrated on our own responses. The play stages Machiavelli's world with complete conviction and then declines to sign his conclusion.