She Doth Bestride the Narrow World Like a Colossus
A Review of Trinity Repertory’s Gender-Swapped Julius Caesar
Why, man, she doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under her huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
(Julius Caesar I.2.226–229)
In a recent, gender-swapped performance at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island, Julius Caesar was played by Anne Scurria, long-time Trinity Rep stalwart. Throughout they play, “he” was changed to “she,” while the name and plot remained the same.
When I arrived at the theater on the icy, spitting fall day, I settled into my seat excited and expectant. Despite a tenure in the University of Michigan Rude Mechanicals, a student-run Shakespearian theater troop (including my most memorable appearance as the drunken porter in a production of Macbeth), I had never read or seen Julius Caesar. At best, I could have quoted you the infamous “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech from the end of act three.
In particular, I had no idea what this production had in store. As the lights dimmed, a string quartet perched atop stark and minimalistic scaffolding sent an eerie, piercing wail out over the attentive rows. Abruptly, the five o’clock news started streaming, projected on either side of the stage: “Breaking News! Julius Caesar has returned to Rome from her most recent conquest!” The modern flair was quickly evident, as was the fact — a surprise to me — that Julius Caesar was being played by a woman.
As Scurria glided out in front of the quartet, commanding a view of the stage below, I felt unexpected and embarrassing tears prick my eyes. Wow, I thought, here is an older actress getting the chance to play the role of a lifetime.
By the middle of the second act, my delight had shriveled. I realized that Shakespeare’s play was misnamed. It should have been called Brutus — it is, in fact, that character’s tragedy we follow from curtain rise to fall.
It turns out I’m not the first to think so. Nietzsche famously lauded the bard:
“I could not say anything more beautiful in praise of Shakespeare as a human being than this: he believed in Brutus and did not cast one speck of suspicion on this type of virtue. It is to him that he devoted his best tragedy — it is still called by the wrong name.”
In fact, Julius Caesar makes very few appearances in the play and is dead by the middle of the third act. Most of the drama takes place between Brutus, Cassius, and various other (mostly male) interlopers. Director Tyler Dobrowsky decided to keep all characters aside from Caesar male, with the exception of Cicero, who did not appear at all in this performance (Cicero, a small role, was being played by long-time and beloved Trinity Rep actress Barbara Meek, who very sadly passed away mid-production).
As the play went on the oddities grew. The role of Caesar’s wife Calpurnia had morphed into that of a husband, with an accompanying name change (to Calpurnius) in order to, in the words of the director, “make him more masculine.” But following that reasoning, why keep the name Julius Caesar? The gender-swapping was jarringly inconsistent. The effect was that, throughout the play, there was a cohort of disgruntled, murderous male politicians all talking animatedly, at length, and with great vitriol about a female character who rarely appeared and even more rarely spoke on her own behalf.
By the time we arrived at dawn on the Ides of March (midway through Act Three), I felt like I had been watching a Fox News roundtable on Hillary Clinton for the past hour. This similarity was not lost on Dobrowsky. In his director’s notes in the playbill, he mentions that people might be tempted to compare Scurria-playing-Caesar to Hillary Clinton. This was not exactly his intention, he claims, but it wasn’t exactly not his intention either.
One of the interesting things about the play Julius Caesar, from a historical perspective, is how much Shakespeare makes of the tyrant versus people narrative. We see this dichotomy set up at the end of the first scene in act three, once Caesar has been assassinated and the senators are dealing with the aftermath:
Cinna: Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.
Cassius: Some to the common pulpits, and cry out
‘Liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement!’
Brutus: People and senators, be not affrighted;
Fly not; stand stiff: ambition’s debt is paid.
(III.1.1288–93)
Caesar is the tyrant who has overstepped his bounds, falling victim to the classic fault of hubris, while Brutus and Cassius, tyrant slayers, are the noble figure heads of the Roman Republic. They represent liberty, freedom, and enfranchisement — very nearly, it seems, democracy.
In reality, the historical Julius Caesar was a populist politician, appealing to republican Rome’s 99%. He set himself up (artificially) in opposition to the elitist, entrenched, career politicians (although he was very much one himself). His rise to power was really the act of one elite man gaining primacy over a group of other elite men. He was punished not because he threatened some proto-republican democracy, but because he threatened the system of plutocratic oligarchy that the 1% had so carefully constructed to their liking. Brutus’ words give the lie: “ambition’s debt is paid.”
Shakespeare doesn’t really explore this paradox. His hoi polloi are a mob, swayed rapidly by the grandstanding of the latest demagogue. In his eulogy for the dead Caesar, Antony wins over the crowd by divulging that the deceased has left seventy-five drachmas to every Roman citizen; further he “hath left you all his walks, his private arbours and new-planted orchards, on this side of the Tiber; he hath left them you, and to your heirs for ever, common pleasures, to walk abroad, and recreate yourselves” (III.2.1792–96). The crowd goes wild.
Shakespeare, of course, was writing in a quite different political context than that of Rome in 44 BCE. His really was a time of tyrants and people. His England had just lived through periods of great political upheaval, including the murderous reign of Henry the VIII and the relative calm of Elizabeth I’s monarchy. He wrote many of his political plays under the absolutist tyranny of James I.
So what happens when you put a woman into the role of the “bad” tyrannical politician, especially when all the other “good” politicians are male? The Providence Journal ran a review of the play that explained:
“Casting Scurria as Caesar is, of course, a nod to the politics of today, with a couple of women running for president and a woman as Rhode Island’s top pol. True, it’s about the sin of ambition, but also about an outsider taking over and her followers turning on her. And turn they do, slathering their forearms with the blood of the slain Caesar.”
Sometimes the word “couple” is used to refer to more than two things — in colloquial usage it can represent anywhere between two and five. In this case, however, there are actually precisely two women running for President of the United States — Republican candidate Carly Fiorina and Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. Two out of a field of almost two dozen, and either would be our country’s first-ever female President. And Rhode Island’s female governor, Gina Raimondo, is the state’s first female governor.
In this context, the second sentence of the Providence Journal quote seems ill considered. Who are the outsiders that are taking over? Female politicians? Should their fate really be that of Julius (Julia) Caesar?
But Scurria had the opposite intent in taking on the role. In an interview with Rhode Island National Public Radio, she explains, “I never thought that I would get the opportunity to play Julius Caesar.” She goes on, “It feels really wonderful, especially for the young women who are going to be coming to see this show, to be able to play a role that is something that maybe someone will aspire to. I mean hopefully at some point we’ll have a woman president in this country.”
I’m glad Scurria had a positive experience with the production and the role. I only wish that she had been given the opportunity for something even meatier — Cassius or even Brutus himself. And I don’t think the problems with putting a woman in the role of Caesar — and only in the role of Caesar — were lost on her. At the end of the interview, she observes, “I think it will be quite an experience for the audience to see a woman being stabbed thirty-three times than a man being stabbed thirty-three times.” Indeed it was — the term “torture porn” comes to mind.
Scurria was an excellent and compelling Caesar — steely, stubborn, commanding. If anything, her effectiveness in the role only highlighted the issues with making the villain of the piece a woman and leaving all the heroes male.
Is there another way to bring more women into Shakespeare? Particularly into the rich, complex roles written for middle-aged men?
Three years ago, at London’s Donmar Warehouse, director Phyllida Lloyd conceived of an all-female Julius Caesar set in a women’s prison. Her aim, she explained to the Guardian, was to rectify the historical gender imbalance of the theater: “I said I would like to direct something that makes the women in the audience at least 50% represented on the stage. Then I took a breath and thought: ‘Fifty per cent? It’s time to make reparation for all the imbalances I have contributed to.’” The women of the cast delighted in the thick gristle of the roles. As Jenny Jules put it, “It’s really fantastic to just be given the chance to chomp on somebody like Cassius.”
The production was spectacular, causing a “hoo-ha” and inciting the rhetorical fury of male theater critics, though eliciting an overwhelmingly positive response. The play moved to New York City’s St. Ann’s Warehouse for the following season.
Loyd is currently directing an all-female production of Henry IV (with much of the same cast from her Julius Caesar) again at St. Ann’s Warehouse (in its new location at the former Tobacco Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park), another transfer from the Donmar Warehouse. In his New York Times review, Ben Brantley praised the performance of Shakespearian veteran Harriet Walter in the eponymous role: “Ms. Walter, a truly noble Brutus in the Donmar “Julius Caesar,” was born to play Henry IV, and thank God she was given the chance. Careworn, eternally wary, hard-schooled in creating the illusion of omnipotence, this Henry would command in any production.” He calls the play a “multilayered act of liberation” — “Prisoners are allowed to roam the wide fields of Shakespeare’s imagination [the play, again, has the conceit of being set in a woman’s prison]; fine actresses are given the chance to play meaty roles that have been denied them; and we get to climb out of the straitjackets of our traditional perceptions of a venerated play.”
Both of Lloyd’s all-female productions work because they are set within all-female power structures. The violence, the power struggles, and the political maneuvering do not have the same misogynistic tones as a split-gendered cast — particularly in situations where the genders are reassigned along such clearly marked lines of good and evil.
My challenge to directors is to think of other ways, beyond those so successfully deployed by Lloyd, to incorporate more women on the Shakespearean stage. One woman among many men creates, perhaps, more problems than it solves. We start to wonder if her gender has anything to do with her vilification.
I have been pondering the ways that things might have been done differently in the Trinity Rep production. Making Brutus a woman would have conveyed a substantially different message. Or, even better, keep Julius Caesar female, but make Marc Antony female as well. How interesting would it have been to hear the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech — that timeless epitome of sarcasm and irony ("Brutus says Caesar was ambitious and Brutus is an honorable man!”)— delivered by a woman on behalf of another woman who has just been murdered by two dozen of the nation’s leading politicians?
Tara Mulder received her PhD in Classics from Brown University in 2015. She is a visiting assistant professor at Wheaton College in Norton, MA and the managing editor of Eidolon. View more of her work here.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
Production of Lloyd’s all-female Henry IV at St. Ann’s Warehouse has been extended through December 13.
Check out clips of the all-female Julius Caesar here.
There are many upcoming productions of Julius Caesar throughout the country:
Staunton, VA: American Shakespeare Center, September 2 2015–June 11, 2016
Olney, MD (and other locations on tour): National Players touring company, now- May 2016
Merced, CA: Merced Shakespearefest, January 2016
Queens, NY: Titan Theatre Company, March 25–April 10, 2016
Minneapolis, MN: Classical Actors Ensemble, April 8–May 1, 2016
Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, April 8–May 7, 2016
Winona, MN: Great River Shakespeare Festival, Winona, June 22–July 31, 2016
Baltimore, MD: The Baltimore Shakespeare Factory, July 29-August 21, 2016
Cedar City, UT: Utah Shakespeare Festival, July 29–October 22, 2016
