The Hour is Unknown: Julius Caesar, et cetera

Abstract

There is a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that I have found funny-both amusing and peculiar, that is-for a long time now. Julius Caesar was the first Shakespeare play I read at school, so the humor I found in it was one that appealed to a certain teenage cynicism. The line appears in a passage in which Shakespeare chooses very deliberately to depart from his source in North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Romans, giving us a line that, as Hamlet might have put it, puzzles the will. In the so-called Orchard scene, having been given a paper that has been found by his servant, Brutus begins to read it aloud: Brutus, thou sleep’st. Awake and see thyself! Shall Rome, et cetera. Speak, strike, redress! (2.1.4–5)1 Brutus continues, suggesting that he must piece out what this “et cetera” means. However, there is an ambiguity perhaps in his phrasing: “Thus must I piece it out.” This could be a musing (“so, now I have to work out what this means”). But it seems more likely that the “Thus” is more emphatic (“it has to mean this”), since Brutus tells us he has already received several other letters that said more or less the same thing. The meaning of et cetera in this instance is already known.