There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures. (Julius Caesar 4.3.224-30)
Brutus speaks these lines to Cassius just before the two go into their losing battle against Marc Antony, again showing us that Shakespeare seldom missed the irony in the placement of his characters’ dialogue. When we read early modern drama, and especially when we read Shakespeare, it behooves us to pay attention to what is happening just before, and just after, any given lines or spoken, or the events in any scene take place. An essential element of playwriting is placement, just as it is in music, painting, dance, or any of the other arts. In some ways placement may be as meticulously and even mathematically deliberate as rhyme, meter, or other cadence variations in characters’ speech.
The metaphor of being afloat at sea is also especially pointed whenever it appears, and not just in terms of the familiar idea of ‘life as voyage’. In Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene, Phaedria tells Guyon (the knight of Temperance):
Who fares on sea, may not commaund his way, /Ne wind and weather at his pleasure call:/ The sea is wide and easie for to stray; /The wind unstable, and doth never stay. * (The Faerie Queene II.vi.23)
By virtue of his native temperance, Guyon is better equipped to resist Phaedria’s subsequent plea for him to rest in her beguiling safe haven, but the sea voyage remains a quest into the unknown. In our cultural understanding and in the innumerable literary works that reflect it, the sea around us describes the constant uncertainty of our lives, and it underscores the inherent isolation of so much of our human experience. The figure on the tiny boat appears in the midst of ever changing changelessness of waves. That figure, or even a relatively small shipboard company, remain ultimately alone on the ocean’s vast and unpredictable landscape.
The sea’s capriciousness, reflecting life’s capriciousness, retains a reciprocal intimacy with the our isolation, with each reinforcing the other. Brutus and Cassius, having embarked on their course (by murdering Julius Caesar), seem, in many ways, like a reflection of the same kind of confusion and isolation that the narrator experiences in the short story”Six Years After” by Katherine Mansfield. In the story, a mother who has lost her son to war struggles to make sense of what has become a stiflingly bewildering world. The story’s final lines reiterate the literal setting of the story, and the metaphorical setting of the narrator’s life:
” I can’t bear it! ” She sits up breathing the words and tosses the dark rug away. It is colder than ever, and now the dusk is falling, falling like ash upon the pallid water.
And the little steamer, growing determined, throbbed on, pressed on, as if at the end of the journey there waited . . .**
War has not only violently truncated the growth of her past into a present, but it also taints the present, as “dusk is falling, falling like ash”. Comfort is a dark illusory rug to be tossed away when it is colder than ever, even six years after her profound loss. The end of the journey into growing darkness remains unseen and unknowable.
Brutus notes that he and Cassius are already “afloat” on the “full sea”. The tide that leads on to fortune has been transformed in their present circumstance into a “current”. Already established, the flow already in motion no longer suggests the changeable lunar nature of a tide. Brutus and Cassius do not take the flow “at the flood” as much as they now “must take the current when it serves”. Circumstances have already altered, and the initial idea of “flood” cannot perhaps be further assured.
In fact, Brutus and Cassius have already lost their fortunes, having abandoned them by choosing a course that justifies murder by subtle (and ultimately meaningless) distinctions:
Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius.
We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar;
And in the spirit of men there is no blood:
O, that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar! But, alas,
Caesar must bleed for it! And, gentle friends,
Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. (Julius Caesar 2.1.179-87)
Death does not mince or dice, but ever takes a whole piece. When Brutus chooses to “stand up against the spirit of Caesar”, he little suspects that Caesar’s spirit will return to “stand up” against him later in the play. His choice in the second act only resolves in act 4. In both, however, as in that moment where Caesar’s ghost confronts him, Brutus, albeit surrounded by others, still stands alone.
Philip Edwards suggests that “Images of the sea, of storm, and of voyagine in fact maintain a powerful underlying presence in Macbeth, having to do (as in Othello) with the issue of control over one’s life.*** Indeed, these images throughout most of literature have to do with our lack of relative control, in most cases. Edwards highlights Mabeth’s line to the witches about how “yeasty waves/ Confound and swallow navigation up” (Macbeth,4.1.54-5) as our own deliberation may be consumed by circumstance or hazard.
In the Faerie Queene, Guyon’s temperance ultimately proves a little more reliable, especially for avoiding Phaedria’s temptations, but his journey too is filled with difficulties. At the other end of the spectrum, Mansfield’s narrator reflects a whole existence transformed or grimly translated by her son’s death, and she faces a future where the time, the season, and the surroundings have ceased to make any real difference.
In the end, what we cannot avoid is “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”, ripening and rotting, the ghosts of our Caesars become just that, even as we ourselves become the ghosts that we are always in the process of becoming:
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (James Joyce The Dead)
Our quick, bright moments matter most. Bird in a tree. Laundry flapping on a line. Sound of children at play down the lane. So much to take in. So much not to miss. How green, how fast, how soft, how tall, the gorgeous jazz or chocolate cake. Curve of an apple. Harmony. Summer bees.
For all of us live, ultimately at sea, no matter if we never see it. We live beneath the wings of owl and albatross, under the harbingers of everything–a crashing, sometimes crushing crescendo of human experience. Listening for the drone of planes, the sound of traffic, the wind or waves, ticking of the clock. Paris or New York, or dusty long gone afternoons in our childhood town, it matters not how far away in miles or years. If you listen, you might hear them now, as you might hear or see wherever you want to be and go. I hope that you can.
At some point, we all find ourselves leaving work late, closing down the place, driving home after everyone is long asleep, or walking alone down the darkened road. Another part of human experience, alone on a sometimes turbulent sea.
*Spenser, Edmund. Faerie Queene. Ed. J. C. Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909. Reprinted 1972.
**Katherine Mansfield’s story “Six Years After” appears in most collections of her stories and is also available on the New Zealand digital archive: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ManDove-t1-body1-d10.html
***Edwards, Philip. Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997. p. 117.