Julius Caesar (play)
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is a
tragedy by
William Shakespeare probably written in
1599. It portrays the
conspiracy against the
Roman dictator,
Julius Caesar, his assassination and its aftermath. It is one of several Shakespeare plays that are based on true events from
history.
Unlike the other titular characters in Shakespeare's plays (e.g.
Hamlet,
Henry V), Caesar is not the central character in the action of the play, appearing in only three scenes and dying at the beginning of the third Act. The central
protagonist of the play is
Brutus and the central psychological drama is his struggle between the conflicting demands of
honour,
patriotism, and
friendship.
The play is notable for being the first of Shakespeare's five great tragedies (the others being
Hamlet,
Othello,
King Lear and
Macbeth).
Most Shakespeare critics and historians agree that the play reflected the general anxiety of
England due to worries over succession of leadership. At the time of its creation and first performance,
Queen Elizabeth, a strong ruler, was elderly and had refused to name a successor, leading to worries that a
civil war similar to that of Rome's might break out after her death.
Marcus Brutus is Caesar's close friend whose ancestors were famed for driving the tyrannical
Tarquin kings from Rome (described in Shakespeare's earlier
The Rape of Lucrece). Brutus allows himself to be cajoled into joining a group of conspiring
senators because of a growing suspicionâ€"implanted by
Gaius Cassiusâ€"that Caesar intends to turn republican Rome into a
monarchy under his own rule. Traditional readings of the play maintain that Cassius and the other conspirators are motivated largely by
envy and
ambition whereas Brutus is motived by the demands of
honour and
patriotism; other commentators, such as
Isaac Asimov, suggest that the text shows Brutus is no less moved by envy and flattery.
[Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, vols I and II (1970), ISBN 0-517-26825-6, 1970]. One of the central strengths of the play is that it resists categorising its characters as either simple heroes or villains.
The early scenes deal mainly with Brutus's arguments with Cassius and his struggle with his own
conscience. The growing tide of public support soon turns Brutus against Caesar. A soothsayer warns Caesar to "beware the
Ides of March", which he ignores, culminating in his assassination at the
Capitol by the conspirators on that very day.
Caesar's assassination is perhaps the most famous part of the play. After ignoring the soothsayer as well as his wife's own premonitions, Caesar is caught at the senate at the mercy of the conspirators. After a few words exchanged, Casca stabs Caesar in the back of his neck, and the others follow in stabbing him; Brutus last. Caesar famously says at this point,
Et tu, Bruté?, which translates to "And you, Brutus?", i.e. "You too, Brutus?". Shakespeare has him add "Then fall, Caesar" to this, strongly suggesting that Caesar did not want to survive such treachery. The conspirators make clear that they did this act for Rome, not for their own purposes.
After Caesar's death, however, another character appears on the foreground, in the form of Caesar's devotee,
Mark Antony, who, by a rousing speech over the corpseâ€"the much-quoted
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears...â€"deftly turns
public opinion against the assassins by speaking to the more personal side of his position, rather than the public and rational tactic Brutus uses in his speeches. Antony rouses the mob to drive them from
Rome.
The beginning of Act Four is marked by the quarrel scene, where Brutus attacks Cassius for soiling the noble act of
regicide by accepting bribes ("Did not great Julius bleed for justice' sake? / What villain touch'd his body, that did stab, / And not for justice?", IV.iii). The two are reconciled, but as they prepare for war with Mark Antony and Caesar's great-nephew,
Octavian (Shakespeare's spelling: Octavius), Caesar's ghost appears to Brutus with a warning of defeat ("thou shalt see me at Philippi", IV.iii). Events go badly for the conspirators during the battle; both Brutus and Cassius choose to commit suicide rather than to be captured. The play ends with a tribute to Brutus, who has remained "the noblest Roman of them all" (V.v) and hints at the friction between Mark Antony and Octavian which will characterise another of Shakespeare's Roman plays,
Antony and Cleopatra.Julius Caesar was first published in the
First Folio in
1623. The Folio text is notable for its quality and consistency, generally leading scholars to believe that it was prepared from a theatrical promptbook. The play's source was
Sir Thomas North's translation of
Plutarch's
Life of Brutus and
Life of Caesar.
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Julius Caesar*
Octavius Caesar,
Marcus Antonius,
M. Aemilius Lepidus, Triumvirs after the death of Julius Caesar
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Cicero, Publius, Popilius Lena, Senators
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Marcus Brutus,
Cassius,
Casca,
Trebonius,
Ligarius,
Decius Brutus,
Metellus Cimber, Cinna, Conspirators against Julius Caesar
*Flavius and Marullus, Tribunes
*Artemidorus, a Sophist of Cnidos
*A Soothsayer
*Cinna, a poet
*Another poet
*Lucilius, Titinius,
Messala, Young Cato, Volumnius, Friends to Brutus and Cassius
*Varro, Clitus, Claudius, Strato, Lucius, Dardanius, Servants to Brutus
*Pindarus, Servant to Cassius
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Calpurnia, wife to Caesar
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Portia, wife to Brutus
See also Shakespeare on screen (Julius Caesar)*
Julius Caesar 1950, starring
Harold Tasker as Julius Caesar
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Julius Caesar 1953, starring
Marlon Brando as Antony
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Julius Caesar 1970, starring
Charlton Heston as Antony
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Blackadder the Third (the play Julius Caesar is a play watched by Blackadder and the Prince Regent), 1985
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1599: A
Swiss traveller in
London,
Thomas Platter, recorded seeing a performance of a play about Julius Caesar on
September 21,
1599 - this was probably the original production of Shakespeare's play. He also described the actors dancing a
jig at the end of the play, a convention of the
Elizabethan theatre.
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1926: By far the most elaborate performance of the play was staged as a benefit for the
Actors' Fund of America at the
Hollywood Bowl. Caesar arrived for the
Lupercal in a chariot drawn by four white horses. The stage was the size of a city block and dominated by a central tower eighty feet in height. The event was mainly aimed at
work-creation for
unemployed actors: three hundred
gladiators appeared in an arena scene not featured in Shakespeare's play; a similar number of girls danced as Caesar's captives; a total of three thousand soldiers took part in the battle sequences.
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1937:
Orson Welles' famous production at the
Mercury Theatre drew fervoured comment as the director dressed his protagonists in uniforms reminiscent of those common at the time in
Fascist Italy and
Nazi Germany, as well as drawing a specific analogy between Caesar and
Mussolini. Opinions vary on the artistic value of the resulting production: some see Welles' mercilessly pared-down script (the running time was around 90 minutes without an interval, several characters were eliminated, dialogue was moved around and borrowed from other plays, and the final two acts were reduced to a single scene) as a radical and innovative way of cutting away the unnecessary elements of Shakespeare's tale; others thought Welles' version was a mangled and lobotomised version of Shakespeare's tragedy which lacked the psychological depth of the original. Most agreed that the production owed more to Welles than it did to Shakespeare. However, Welles's innovations have been echoed in many subsequent modern productions, which have seen parallels between Caesar's fall and the downfalls of various governments in the twentieth century.
The
Canadian comedy duo
Wayne and Shuster parodied
Julius Caesar in their
1958 sketch
Rinse the Blood off My Toga. Flavius Maximus, Private Roman I, is hired by Brutus to investigate the death of Caesar. The police procedural combines Shakespeare,
Dragnet, and vaudeville jokes and was first broadcast on the
Ed Sullivan Show.
http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca/multimedia/video/rinse_the_blood.cfm*
Assassinations in fiction.
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All Julius Caesar Provides a summary of the play; and background on Shakespeare and Julius Caesar including historical background on Julius Caesar and a character analysis of Caesar.
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Search and analyze Julius Caesar on-line or in a downloadable eBook.*
Julius Caesar - searchable, indexed e-text
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Julius Caesar - Full text play by William Shakespeare.
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The Tragedie of Julius Caesar - HTML version of this title.
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Julius Caesar - plain vanilla text from
Project Gutenberg*
Julius Caesar - by The Tech
