The first half of Julius Caesar offers the image of a grand seduction: it tells how Brutus the philosopher is tempted into playing the assassin and how the man of experience, Caesar, is talked into suppressing his intelligence of danger. Words like ‘honourable’ and ‘noble’, the official praise language of Rome, as Cassius ironically affirms at 1.2.297–300, are shown to be empty categories and to point in the direction of slaughter. By the time that Brutus plans to run through the market armed with a bloody sword and shouting ‘freedom’, Shakespeare has taught us to look out for the immeasurable gap between word and substance in the talk of educated men. We might well pause to ask ourselves a question after all this: how does Shakespeare manage to salvage these men for us in spite of what we know about them, how does he make us care what happens after Caesar's death?

Some people might find the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius at 4.3 undignified, or in order to make sense of it seek to work out which of them was in the right. As a critic, I could join in this game and remind you that there were some very unpleasant stories told about Brutus himself and money, stories about starving his Salaminian debtors to death. But as readers, or as Shakespeare's attentive audience, we may have learned to feel reservations about copying the self-justifying and recriminatory style of Rome. Let's observe instead that a different sense of that quarrel can be made if we hear the angry voices of men as the voices of boys, or even as the voices of children; that would not seem inappropriate, for they are tense with the passions of the playground:

In many cultures, not only in the culture of Europe, it is insulting to say that a grown man is like a child. As we have seen, the Romans in this play don't like to remember that they were ever helpless themselves. Instead they have created a fantasy of who they are, a fantasy of masculinity that this play has exposed.