ENGL 251
Term Paper for 6/26/2000
It’s
a seemingly normal day, a bright Spring morning in the greatest city in the
greatest nation on earth, a nation celebrating in triumph after a recent war.
The leader of this vast empire, the great Julius Caesar, arrives at the Roman
Senate house to the cheers of his people, surrounded by his council of
advisors. A man’s request for leniency on behalf of his banished brother is
denied, then suddenly the emperor is set upon by the council, these eight men
sworn and bound to serve and counsel him but who now wield bladed weapons of
death against the tyrant. Finally, in the last, ultimate gesture of betrayal,
one Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s closest friend and confidant, plunges his dagger into
Caesar’s heart. The fallen leader stares into the eyes of his friend whom he
loved most of all, and with his last dying breath, in shock, hurt and
disbelief, utters the words that echo throughout the Roman Empire and
throughout history: “Et tu, Brute?”
Fast-forward
nearly two millennia to another great city in another great nation, one which
had also recently vanquished its foe in a so-called “war to end all wars.” Now,
though, the optimism of a city, a nation and its great national pastime,
baseball, has suddenly been shaken by the revelation of an unthinkable scandal.
Outside a Chicago courthouse, reporters surround one of the greatest
ballplayers who ever lived to ask him why he did it; why he and seven of his
teammates took money from gamblers to “throw” the 1919 World Series. Amidst the
questions and answers, denials and accusations, a little boy gazes up into the
face of his favorite player, his hero, his idol, the great “Shoeless Joe”
Jackson, and as the other voices fall silent, the child dolefully expresses his
own innocent sense of disbelief and heart-rending betrayal, in a phrase that
has become part of American legend: “Say
it ain’t so, Joe!”
What could these two disparate events, taking place thousands of years apart on opposite sides of the world and in entirely different contexts, possibly have in common? Both of these individuals, the assassinated Roman emperor and the jilted young Chicago White Sox fan, feel at these moments a keen sense of personal betrayal, and come to the sobering realization that these men whom they had admired, respected and trusted, are not what they had seemed to be, indeed that the world as they know it is not what it had seemed to be, and their words are uttered in disbelief that such seemingly fine men could commit such foul deeds. Caesar loses his life, and the little boy loses his faith in Jackson, in baseball, and in heroes in general.
Each of these famous
scenes and legendary phrases occurs in a drama based on real events: William
Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century play The
Tragedy of Julius Caesar, and John Sayles’ 1988 film, Eight Men Out, respectively. Though the texts and the events they
dramatize seem at first glance to be as diverse and they could possibly be,
when examined closely they reveal startling similarities, not only in terms of
the stories themselves as a whole, but in the themes they explore, individual
characters and scenes, even specific lines of dialogue. [NOTE: The content of Eight Men Out is presented here as a literary drama in its own right, irrespective of
the actual historical events surrounding the Black Sox scandal, the actual
lives and characteristics of the individuals involved, the particular actors
who portray them in the film, or the original book by Eliot Asinof.]
Some of the similarities between the two stories are almost too obvious, made even more remarkable by the fact that they are almost certainly accidental and coincidental, especially considering the historical accuracy of Sayles’ film. Each story presents its audience with a criminal conspiracy undertaken by eight men, all with a common social/professional bond, against a single tyrannical figure who holds direct, absolute authority over them but who also needs their services in some way. The conspiracy in each case is initiated by two of the men, who then seek to recruit the others to their cause, with particular emphasis on one man whom they feel they absolutely must have in the fold if the conspiracy is to succeed. That man resists the idea initially but is later persuaded, and becomes the linchpin of the crime, which the conspirators feel is being committed for a noble and just cause. The conspiracy succeeds in committing the crime, but it also leads the conspirators to punishment and suffering beyond their expectations and comes close to destroying the institution that they sought to protect.
Julius Caesar is built on the traditional, standard five-act plot structure of Shakespearean tragedy. We see rising action in Act I, where the characters and conflicts are introduced, and Act II, where they are further developed and given complications, until the climactic scene at the start of Act III, where an event takes place that causes the story to take a sudden and irreversible turn for the worse, setting in motion the now-inevitable, tragic conclusion. The falling action in Act IV thus leads to the downfall, punishment, suffering, and/or death of the tragic hero in Act V. Caesar is unusual in that the tragic hero is not the title character; although Caesar was killed because of his ambition, vanity and demagoguery, his death constitutes the climax rather than the resolution of the story. The tragic hero is instead Brutus, his tragic flaw being the fact that he is an honorable man, the only one among the conspirators, and has thus defied his own nature by going along with the plot.
The introduction of the characters and their feelings about Caesar in Act I are closely paralleled by the beginning of Eight Men Out, where we see the 1919 Chicago White Sox clinch the American League pennant against the St. Louis Browns. Just as the emperor Caesar celebrates his return on the feast of Lupercal, even though his people suffer under his iron-fisted rule (“Who else would soar above the view of men / And keep us all in servile fearfulness” [Flavius, I.i.79-80] [NOTE: The line numbers herein refer to the Folger Shakespeare Library edition of Julius Caesar, Washington Square Press, 1992]), the wealthy, penny-pinching owner of the White Sox, one Charles Comiskey, espouses the virtues of his ballclub to a group of reporters, while simultaneously sending the underpaid players flat champagne and having an office flunky tell them, “This is your bonus” for winning the pennant. In Act II, the conspiracy is formed and plans are made; Caesar’s conspirators resolve to kill, but not slaughter Caesar, and to leave Mark Antony, a potential rival, alive, while the White Sox agree to “dump a few games,” but not necessarily the entire series (there is confusion among the players as to just which games, or how many, they have agreed to “throw,” not to mention how much money they will receive, and when). Act III gives us the actual assassination of Caesar and its accompanying oratory by Brutus and Antony, and the 1919 World Series, all eight games in the best-of-nine won by the Cincinnati Reds five games to three. In Act IV, questions are asked, suspicions and accusations voiced, as Brutus and the other conspirators prepare for war and the ballplayers, now branded forever with the infamous “Black Sox” sobriquet, prepare for trial. That war and that trial take place in Act V, and while Brutus and his fellow conspirators all meet their death through a combination of acts, circumstances, and miscalculations, the eight Black Sox players, though acquitted by the court, are banned from baseball for life by commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, for either throwing the games, agreeing to throw the games, or simply knowing about the fix and telling no one about it.
Such are the consequences, perhaps, of attacking a dictator. Each of these tyrants, Caesar and Comiskey, possesses an air of superiority about him that some find mesmerizing, others wholly offensive. Caesar, for his part, generally refers to himself in the third person and dismisses the warning of the Soothsayer: “Beware the ides of March.” [I.ii.21 and 27] Though he refuses the crown of king when Antony offers it to him (three times, no less), he clearly sees himself as superior to ordinary men: “Know: Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause / Will he be satisfied.” [III.i.52-53] In denying the appeal of Metellus Cimber to pardon his brother Publius, Caesar states, “I could be well moved, if I were as you” [III.i.64], and asserts that he is “constant as the Northern Star, / Of whose true fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.” [III.i.66-68] Clearly, he cannot be convinced to change his mind, least of all by whom he considers to be lesser (ordinary) men. Aside from the aforementioned champagne incident, the miserly Comiskey refuses to grant a $10,000 bonus to righthander Eddie Cicotte, which the pitcher was promised if he won thirty games in 1919; Comiskey had Cicotte benched in August after his twenty-ninth win. Though the aging knuckleballer duly points out this fact to his employer, the jowly Comiskey replies curtly, “Twenty-nine is not thirty, Eddie. You will get only the money you deserve.” So it seems that Comiskey, too, cannot be swayed, even though he, like Caesar, holds the lives and livelihoods of men in his hands, subject to his whims. (In perhaps the most delicious irony of all, Comiskey’s nickname among the press and his fellow baseball owners was “The Old Roman.”)
Cicotte is the counterpart of Brutus, the one man the conspirators need to make their plans become reality. Cassius and Casca, who initiate the idea of killing Caesar, know that from the beginning; Cassius speaks of “Him [Brutus] and his worth and our great need of him” [I.iii.166] after convincing Casca to join in. Brutus, for his part, initially rejects the idea of the conspiracy, but is convinced at the start of Act II by an anonymous letter the conspirators send him, entreating him to “Awake, and see thyself!” [II.i.48] He resolves to, essentially, do it for Rome; he sees a higher purpose to Cassius’ idea. They need him because he is Caesar’s closest friend and most trusted advisor; without him, they cannot get close to Caesar. The Black Sox need Cicotte because he is the team’s number-one starting pitcher, the player with the most control over what happens in a game. “Eddie’s the key,” says gambler Bill Burns, echoing Cassius, “we don’t get Eddie, we forget about it.” When Cicotte is first approached by Cassius’ counterpart, first baseman Chick Gandil, who tells him, “If you got hurt, Commie [Comiskey] wouldn’t even pay your train fare back to Chicago,” he rejects the notion as well; that is, until Comiskey rebuffs him and his $10,000 bonus. He immediately seeks out Gandil and demands the money up front, in cash, before the first game. Though he differs from Brutus in that he acts out of fiscal revenge rather than any high-minded moral obligation, Cicotte could be described as, like Brutus, the only honorable conspirator, as on the field he pitches horribly and commits blatant errors, but off the field he shows great thoughtfulness, even remorse, about the actions of himself and his teammates, and consequences that may go with them.
If Cassius’ counterpart is Gandil, as the first Roman to suggest overthrowing Caesar and the first White Sox player to entertain the notion of throwing the series, respectively, then Casca, who was the first to join Cassius, has his own counterpart in Gandil’s pal, shortstop Swede Risberg. Casca is the first of the conspirators to stab Caesar; Risberg is the first Sox player to make a blatant fielding error and draw the suspicion of sportswriters Ring Lardner and Hugh Fullerton, who circle his name on their scorecards. These pairs of men represent the “ringleaders” of the conspiracy in each respective drama, in the sense that they are the ones who initiate and organize it and recruit the others to join them. In Caesar, Brutus ultimately becomes the de facto leader, just as Cicotte makes the most significant contribution to the Sox’ loss of the Series (he dumps Games One and Four before throwing a four-hit shutout in Game Seven), and his participation is what entices most of the other conspirators, including fellow starting pitcher Lefty Williams (“If you’ve got Eddie, you’ve got me too.”), outfielders Hap Felsch (“If Eddie ain’t in, I ain’t in.”) and Jackson, to join, though it is still up to Gandil and Risberg to hold meetings and act as go-betweens with the gamblers who orchestrate the fix.
Although Caesar himself dies in the aforementioned climactic Act III, scene i, he returns as a ghost at the close of Act IV to warn Brutus of his own impending doom. Omens, foreboding visions and events that signal things to come, play a significant part in each of these dramas. In Act I scene iii of Julius Caesar, Casca describes to Cassius a “tempest dropping fire” [I.iii.10] and numerous other marvels, including a slave with his hand on fire, a lion in the middle of the city, and an owl in midday. “For I believe they are portentous things / Unto the climate that they point upon.” [Casca, I.iii.31-32.] More omens are mentioned in Act II, scene ii, by Caesar’s wife Calphurnia, who tells the emperor what the watch saw: “A lioness hath whelpèd in the streets, / And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead.” [II.ii.17-18] She goes on to describe fiery warriors battling in the sky, blood drizzling on the Capitol, neighing horses, the groans of dying men and shrieks of ghosts. No ghosts appear in Eight Men Out, but the World Series odds, which had heavily favoured Chicago, suddenly even out before the first game. Cicotte hits the first Reds batter with a pitch in Game One at Cincinnati to signal the gamblers that the fix is on. During Game 2, a stuffed White Sox effigy is dropped onto the field from a biplane, landing right by the Chicago dugout, where manager Kid Gleason quips, “Ask it if it can pitch.” Later, another effigy is burned by Cincinnati fans outside the Sox’ hotel. Add that to the Sox’ inexplicable, uncharacteristic fielding and baserunning blunders, along with the dreadful pitching of Cicotte and Williams, and it becomes increasingly clear to Lardner and Fullerton that something is wrong with the Series.
As mentioned, the conspirators in Caesar undertook their crime because they felt their reasons were noble and just; they did it, essentially, to protect the people from the possibility of being exploited by Caesar were he to become king. The Black Sox felt justified as well, though their motivation was anger over past exploitation rather than fear of future exploitation. Though the Sox’ motives may also seem somewhat more selfish than those of the Caesar conspirators, since they are really in it for the money and personal revenge against Comiskey without regard for their fans, the general public trust, or the integrity of the game of baseball, the claim of Brutus, Cassius, et. al. that they are “doing it for Rome” is a hollow one. Their ploy is a thinly-disguised grasp for power, as evidenced by their eventual war against Mark Antony, whom Brutus had convinced the others to spare: “For he can do no more than Caesar’s arm / When Caesar’s head is off.” [II.i.195-196] That war, and the eventual death of the conspirators, constitutes the consequences of and punishment for their crime and threatens to bring the Roman Empire to its knees, just as the Black Sox scandal rocked an entire nation and nearly destroyed Major League Baseball, not to mention broke the heart of every little boy in America. The players could not have envisioned such a punishment for their crime; all of them, including third baseman Buck Weaver, who protested his innocence from the time the scandal broke until the day he died, and Jackson, “The Greatest Natural Hitter Who Ever Lived,” remain banned from the game and its Hall of Fame to this day.
It is possible that the remarkable relationship between these two disparate works is little more than an inventive coincidence. However, these literary dramatizations of real-life events reinforce the ideas that history often makes the most compelling literature, but more than that, that classical literary themes transcend both modern life and modern popular entertainment.
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