Fiction can advocate without endorsing

A play has the added benefit of exploring the emotional and physical aspects of a situation, not just the intellectual ones. And plays can explore issues from many points of view. Just because something happens in a play doesn’t mean that the playwright is advocating for it. When the title character in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is assassinated, some characters think it is a good idea, some characters think it is a bad idea. What did Shakespeare himself think? We will never know.

The assassination is a transgressive, bloody act. And in case the audience at this moment still thinks that Brutus’s line of thought was correct, Antony delivers a powerful expression of outrage and emotional trauma. Brutus and Antony then have funeral orations giving opposing points of view. Whomever you agree with, one thing is clear, things do not go well for the conspirators. Brutus and Cassius wind up dead, and Rome is pushed farther down the path of tyranny toward the next Caesar: Augustus.

It is hard to imagine a production of Julius Caesar advocating the idea of assassination as a political tool.

The Breitbart article that started the controversy is — I kid you not — a review by someone who talked to someone who saw the show. This second-order correspondent also thinks the play ends with the death of Caesar, as if they are killing the bad guy at the end of a superhero movie. In fact, the assassination takes place in the middle of the play, the rest of which deals with the terrible consequences of this action. Shakespeare built the outrage into the text. Mark Antony is so outraged — for himself, and on our behalf — that outrage suffuses the play’s entire second half. If you see a production, you get outraged with the play, not against it.

https://medium.com/@robmelrose/obama-trump-caesar-f81bf985ac67