Cinnas of memory

The two poets of Julius Caesar, joint starting-points for this article, are something of a paradox in the history of Shakespearian reception. Cinna, carried off to be dismembered in Act 3, and the unnamed character thrown out by Brutus in Act 4, have in the last 50 years attracted multiple and extended critical discussions, including four articles devoted entirely to them. And yet, in the play, both exist to be silenced: most of their time on stage is spent in getting off it; they are easily cut from performance, and usually have been. Acting texts of the play from the late seventeenth century to the early eighteenth tend to pick them for exclusion; they are also absent from some early translations. The Duke of Buckingham, rewriting and dividing Shakespeare’s tragedy some time before 1720, omits both of them, one from each of his two plays. Both characters were reintroduced on stage by the Meinigen Court Company, which performed in London in the 1880s, but this did not catch on; even when Orson Welles changed Cinna’s fortunes, making his death a climax of the famous 1937 production, the second poet remained out. Neither appears in either of the two big-budget films of the play. They seem to exist in a rarefied state: more on the page than on the stage. This state is reflected in the way that critics choose to write about them. They are seen to provide pleasing allegories for the poet in society, for the modern critic and sometimes for Shakespeare himself. Thomas Pughe, in an essay devoted to them, ‘indulges in the speculation’ that both poets might originally have been played by Shakespeare: ‘The point would probably not have been lost on the audience.’ To Pughe, the poets ‘represent the element of imagination and intuition’ suppressed, to everyone’s detriment, by the main characters. Alan Sinfield takes a more sardonic line; in a well-known essay, he proposes taking the whole play as ‘Cinna’s dream’– ‘the anxious fantasy of the Shakespearian intellectual, despised by the military-industrial complex and scapegoated by the people’. Bringing this figure still closer to home, he adds: ‘he would look like Shakespeare’.