“Sed tamen quando semel Vel cadere praestat, quam metu longo premi.”
“. . . . . . . et si j’aime bien mieux Mourir tout en un coup, qu’estre tousjours paoureux.”
“Il vault bien mieux mourir Asseure de tout poinct, qu’incessamment perir. Faulsement par la peur.”
In Garnier’s “Cornelie” (Kyd’s trans.) we read:
“The fear of evil doth afflict us more Than the evil itself, though it be neer so sore.”
Pp. 39–40. Also pages 79, 80, 82, 83 and 94, in which this same idea finds expression.
This is not the case in Muretus or Grévin, nor is it found in Plutarch.
True, the conspirators have suspected that the portents and the auspices might persuade him, and Trebonius has prepared for this. But how was Caesar to know?
“Shakespeare, A Critical Study of his Mind and Art,” by Edward Dowden, Harper & Bros., 1903, pp. 253–54.
Pescetti wrote his tragedy with the evident intention of flattering the Duke of Ferrara, yet never was fulfillment further from promise. “Cesare” could hardly have furnished agreeable reading to a prince, who, lauded on one page as the greatest descendant of the mightiest Julius, finds throughout the succeeding pages this same ancestor denounced as an odious tyrant, and displayed in action as a weak, vacillating braggart. Nor would his appreciation of Pescetti’s efforts have been increased by a consideration of the treatment accorded Brutus. Far from presenting the assassin of Caesar in a manner which might have been regarded as acceptable to the Duke, the Italian dramatist considers him throughout with the highest favor and never wearies of his praises.
Pescetti’s dedication renders it rather difficult to account satisfactorily for his Brutus. Possibly he harbored liberal sympathies of which he found it hard to rid himself; possibly he was here too greatly under Plutarch’s influence; perhaps he was simply following in the footsteps of Muretus and Grévin. Plutarch certainly wrote the life “con amore,” and both Pescetti and Shakespeare continue the idealization of the character begun by the biographer. To both dramatists, as to Muretus and Grévin, Brutus was the “last of the Romans,” in whom the old regime found its final and noblest champion. Under the circumstances it is difficult to seize upon any phase of the character peculiar alone to Shakespeare and Pescetti. Both went to the same, or nearly the same source for their material; both followed their source faithfully. Yet it is this very similarity in the conception of the character which is especially significant for our purpose, for Shakespeare could have found in the Italian dramatist nothing to weaken, but much to confirm the favorable impression he gathered from the varied pages of Plutarch.