payment page
Summary
Act 1, Scenes 10–12
Act 1, Scene 10
During the first unscripted first practice of Julius Caesar at the Dellecher theater, Richard loses his temper when Alexander and James repeatedly ask Gwendolyn to feed them lines. Richard’s outburst causes yet another rehearsal break, as he is ordered to calm himself while the others look over their lines. The group agrees that Richard’s behavior was obnoxious.
Act 1, Scene 11
Oliver uses a line from the comedy As You Like It to describe the speedy passage of October. During Gwendolyn’s class, Oliver is unable to articulate his particular talent. James insists that he is the most generous actor of all of them, helping his peers shine onstage. In Frederick’s class, the group compares Macbeth and Julius Caesar, debating the plays’ differences and how to define the tragic hero. Richard thinks Caesar is a tragic hero, in part because the play is named for him, while the rest of the class argues for Brutus, because he fights for the greater good of Rome. The conversation is simultaneously academic and personal, ending with Richard and James spitting insults, their rivalry increasingly hostile.
Act 1, Scene 12
It’s Halloween, and the group prepares for their Macbeth scenes. When Oliver arrives at the designated spot, he learns James is Macbeth, and they both realize one reason that Richard has been so unpleasant. They proceed to the lake where the witches—Filippa, Wren, and Meredith—emerge from the water. Their performance draws on the young women’s sexuality. After James finishes, he douses Oliver with copious amounts of fake blood, transforming him into Banquo’s bloody ghost. They are all surprised when Richard, offstage, bellows some of the witches’ lines.
Afterward, the group, without Richard, celebrates their success. Meredith begs Wren to conciliate a sulking Richard. After several hours of partying, they begin rounds of chicken fight in the lake. Filippa and Alexander are undefeated and taunting the others. Meredith accepts their challenge and, as Richard won’t participate, she asks Oliver to partner with her, knowing James would refuse. He finds it hard to concentrate, given how beautiful Meredith is, but the two manage to unseat the reigning champions. When Wren and James agree to “fight” Meredith and Oliver, Richard intervenes, demanding the game stop and that James not touch Wren. They argue and Richard attacks James, holding his face underwater in the lake. The others rush to James’s aid. Meredith tells Richard to leave. The section ends with Oliver and James sitting on the beach.
Analysis
Shakespearean tragedy is violent and its violence spills into the lives of the acting students in various ways. Most obviously, this occurs in combat class, where they learn to create the illusion of fighting without causing one another harm. To do so requires care and precision, trust and intimacy, because the actors must move in concert to create the desired effect. When, in Act 1, Scene 9, Oliver reacts wrongly to James’s movements, it joins other early indications that their relationship may be more than the good friendship is seems to be. Oliver feels as if he actually was hit by James, although, their contact was glancing rather than direct, suggesting yet another way that one might experience violence. The chicken fights in the lake, in Act 1, Scene 12, begin as innocent fun, but slip and morph into the opposite, another instance of “combat” gone amok. As tensions between Richard and James mount, and culminate in Act 1, Scene 12, the overlap between stage and life is more sharply drawn. The two are cast as friends-turned-enemies in Julius Caesar where Richard is Caesar and James is Brutus. Their onstage opposition reveals rifts, previously hidden, in their friendship as well. As they debate who is the tragic hero, friendly rivalry becomes open hostility. When a drunk Richard holds James’s head under water following the once-friendly game of chicken, their hostility is exposed as naked aggression.
The thematic concerns of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar further complicate the group’s experiences, particularly with violence. The play was first performed in 1599 and was written between the history plays of the 1590s and mature tragedies of the 1600s. It thus occupies a key place in the evolution of Shakespeare’s thinking. In the play, Shakespeare carefully explores what justifies political violence. As with many other thinkers, Shakespeare is curious about what might make the violent overthrow of a tyrant appropriate and aims to understand the relationship between personal loyalty and responsibility to the community. As Richard becomes more like Caesar, the group is increasingly drawn to ask what to do with a friend who has become a dominating tyrant, a question that is exacerbated by his assault on James. Richard’s transformation into the character he plays on stage also reveals the danger of Dellecher’s theory of acting.
Where Richard has the tyrant’s greed, demanding attention and acting out when he is denied it, Oliver’s generosity as an actor and a person is carefully developed across this section. One of the key projects of the novel is to watch Oliver mature from a person who doubts his abilities and value to one able to accept responsibility for those around him. The novel raises but does not fully explore the question of whether he is right to accept this responsibility, but the issue is introduced subtly through the kind of roles he is assigned. Oliver is often the sidekick: Banquo to James’s Macbeth, Casca to James’s Brutus. In these parts, his role is secondary, and he is often sacrificed. The gallons of stage blood that James pours on Oliver lends a comic tone to this feature of their dynamic, but the prospect of Oliver’s sacrifice hangs over the novel nonetheless.
