In a play meant to portray historical events, Caesar appearing to Brutus as a ghost shortly before his death originally felt like a bizarre and unnecessary inclusion. Why would Shakespeare bother to suddenly add a supernatural element to this narrative and make the audience question the validity of what they’re being presented with, especially to only have him say a few lines on his return? But when I reflected on the text, I realized it really isn’t out of place within the story. There’s a few examples of mystical happenings before this and they all seem to work as signs and signals for impending doom. Of course, we have to discuss the original “Beware the Ides of March” prophecy that foretells the death of Caesar as a fantastical element. While we could easily brush that off (as Caesar does) as an unimportant blathering, Act 1 Scene 3 also contains brief insights into bizarre, unexplainable occurrences within Rome that seem to be foreboding signs:

“Against the Capitol I met a lion,

Who glazed upon me and went surly by

Without annoying me. And there were drawn

Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women

Transformed with their fear, who swore they saw

Men all in fire walk up and down the street.

And yesterday the bird of the night did sit

Even at noonday upon the marketplace.”

While these events don’t occur directly on stage or within the text, they still create an ominous feeling and begin to blur the lines of what is possible within the world Shakespeare presents. It opens the audience up to the idea that there’s a more spiritual layer to the narrative, some level of mysticality to Rome. We begin to believe that there’s greater forces at work here and wonder what their purpose is. These unexplained events paired with the gruesome prophecy end up both culminating in the murder of Julius Caesar, which affirms our theory that they were in fact all symbolizing some future tragedy. Everything happened in order to show that fate had a large part to play in the events that occured within the Senate and were perhaps unavoidable.

And when Caesar’s ghost appears later on, this theme of everything being fated returns. His apparition serves the purpose of prophecy, foretelling that Brutus will soon die at Philippi and join him in the afterlife. And it’s a really interesting way to pair the supernatural with the action of the play by allowing for a callback to the Soothsayer’s original prophecy. By calling Caesar back from the dead, Shakespeare shows the inescapability of fate within his story. Just as Caesar could not escape from his destiny, so must Brutus face the reality of what will happen to him. The supernatural seems to intersect periodically with this work at times just before important events as a way to foretell them and it’s a really interesting narrative choice that I would love to explore more.