SOURCE: “Portia's Wound, Calphurnia's Dream: Reading Character in Julius Caesar,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 471-88.

In the following essay, Marshall discusses Portia's self-wounding and Calphurnia's dream of Caesar's death as they represent the linguistic instability of character in Julius Caesar.

“If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.”¹

Roland Barthes sardonically described the Mankiewicz film of Julius Caesar as portraying “a universe without duplicity, where Romans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead.”² The film's use of hair fringes to signify Roman identity and its use of sweat to signify thought were to Barthes examples of “degraded spectacle,” for according to his professed “ethic of signs,” “it is both reprehensible and deceitful to confuse the sign with what is signified” (p. 28). Barthes approves those signs which are “openly intellectual...