Stratford’s Shakespeare Festival Balances it out
I just returned from seeing Julius Caesar at the Festival Theater in Stratford, Ontario, on September 12th. The cast was gender-balanced and watching women, including women of color, portray Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony, Octavius, Cassius and others was thrilling—especially since after a few minutes we didn’t even notice. The genders disappeared into the characters. Here are the notes the Director, Scott Wentworth, included in the program explaining his casting decisions which he entitled:
The View From the Ladder
“Lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,” says Brutus, as he ponders the impending assassination of Julius Caesar. As Brutus describes it, we’re all trying to climb that ladder envying those above us and disdaining those below.
It’s a very masculine view of the world: one in which everything is a competition, an encounter of wills. And I think that’s what western civilization—from ancient Roman times to today—has done with the public discourse: we’ve framed it in purely masculine terms as a drama of winners and losers.
In politics, aggressiveness, competitiveness and constancy are valued above all else. To be a politician and to have doubts, to change your mind, is seen as a sign of weakness Such feminine attributes as cooperation and care for the future, and the idea of strength through sharing, are still regarded with suspicion in public life. Hillary Clinton, with her trademark pantsuits, essentially had to dress as a man to run for President.
But the ladder is just an image, one way of looking at the world. It’s not how things necessarily are. I believe that in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare—whose own queen had to rule on masculine principles—is calling into question the whole nature of what we now call patriarchy.
This is Shakespeare’s most male-populated play after Timon of Athens. It has only two female roles—Brutus’s wife, Portia, and Caesar’s wife, Calpurnia—and they are mirrors of each other. In both cases they are bearers of truth, yet they either can’t trust that truth or lack agency to promote it. The men, by contrast are constantly in error—and the consequences are disastrous. Their ladder leads to chaos.
Shakespeare isn’t pitting one gender against the other here: it’s the fetishization of a masculine system of values he’s critiquing, not maleness per se. Nor does he let individual women off the hook. Portia is just as much a product of the patriarchy as any male character in the play. She doesn’t listen to her inner goodness because her culture hasn’t encouraged her to do so. In her world, honour dictates that men who fail, as Brutus ultimately does, kill themselves. Portia, too, commits suicide—in a hideous way that literally destroys her voice, her ability to speak the truth. These are not the signs of a healthy culture.
I have cast this production with an equal mix of men and women, while retaining the overwhelmingly male genders of the characters. I hope that by bringing female voices and female energies into the male-driven world that Shakespeare depicts, we can unlock the metaphorical life of this play and let ourselves be reminded that there’s far more to the world than can be seen from a ladder.