Julius Caesar (play)
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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 the first of his Roman plays, based on true events from Roman history.
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.
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.
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[edit] Date
Allusions in three contemporaneous works support a date of 1599 for Julius Caesar.[1]
1) Ben Jonson's play Every Man Out of His Humour (acted 1599, published 1600) paraphrases Shakespeare's line "O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts" (Julius Caesar, III,ii,104) as "reason long since is fled to animals" in III,i. Jonson's play also includes "Et tu, Brute" in V,iv.
2) The anonymous play The Wisdom of Dr. Dodipoll (published in 1600) gives its own paraphrase, "Then reason's fled to animals, I see."
3) A passage in John Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, published in 1601, makes clear reference to the speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. John Weever stated that he'd written his poem two years earlier, which (presumably) fixes the date as 1599.
[edit] Performance History
Thomas Patter, a Swiss traveller, saw a tragedy about Julius Caesar at a Bankside theatre on September 21, 1599. This was most likely Shakespeare's play. There is no immediately obvious alternative candidate. (While the story of Julius Caesar was dramatized repeatedly in the Elizabethan/Jacobean period, none of the other plays known is as good a match with Patter's description as Shakespeare's play.)[2]
After the theatres re-opened at the start of the Restoration era, the play was revived by Thomas Killigrew's King's Company in 1672. Charles Hart initially played Brutus, as did Thomas Betterton in later productions. Julius Caesar was one of the very few Shakespearean plays that were not adapted during the Restoration period or the eighteenth century.[3]
[edit] Text of the play
Julius Caesar was first published in the First Folio in 1623, that text being the sole authority for the play. The Folio text is notable for its quality and consistency; scholars judge it to have been set into type from a theatrical promptbook. The play's source was Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Life of Brutus and Life of Caesar. [citation needed]
[edit] The plot
Marcus Brutus is Caesar's close friend; his ancestors were famed for driving the tyrannical King Tarquin 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 suspicion—implanted by Gaius Cassius—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 motivated 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.[4] 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 (This public support was actually faked. Cassius wrote letters in different handwritings over the next month and hid them in different places for Brutus to find in order to get Brutus to join the conspiracy). A soothsayer warns Caesar to "beware the Ides of March," which he ignores, culminating in his assassination at the Capitol by the conspirators that 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 is last. At this point, Caesar utters the famous line "Et tu, Brute?" ("And you, Brutus?", i.e. "You too, Brutus?"). Shakespeare has him add, "Then fall, Caesar," 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, Mark Antony, with a subtle and eloquent speech over Caesar's corpse—the much-quoted Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears...—deftly turns public opinion against the assassins by manipulating the emotions of the common people, in contrast to rational tone of Brutus's speech. Antony rouses the mob to drive the conspirators 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,19-21). 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,283). 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,68) and hints at the friction between Mark Antony and Octavian which will characterise another of Shakespeare's Roman plays, Antony and Cleopatra.
[edit] Dramatis Personae
- Julius Caesar
- Octavius Caesar, Marcus Antonius, M. Aemilius Lepidus, Triumvirs after the death of Julius Caesar
- Cicero, Publius, Popilius Lena, Senators
- Marcus Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Trebonius, Ligarius, Decius Brutus, Metellus Cimber, Cinna, Conspirators against Julius Caesar
- Flavius and Murellus, 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
- Calpurnia, wife to Caesar
- Portia, wife to Brutus
[edit] Movie versions
- Julius Caesar 1950, starring Harold Tasker as Julius Caesar
- Julius Caesar 1953, starring Marlon Brando as Antony
- Julius Caesar 1970, starring Charlton Heston as Antony
- Blackadder the Third (the play Julius Caesar is a play watched by Blackadder and the Prince Regent), 1985
[edit] Notable stage productions
- 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 creating work 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.
- 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 production was most noted for its portrayal of the slaughter of Cinna (Norman Lloyd).
[edit] Parodies
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. [1]
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- 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.
- Julius Caesar - searchable, indexed e-text
- Julius Caesar - Full text play by William Shakespeare.
- Julius Caesar - plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg
- Julius Caesar - by The Tech
[edit] Notes
- ^ F. E. Halliday, Shakespeare Companion, pp. 159, 260, 524, 533.
- ^ Richard Edes's Latin play Caesar Interfectus (1582?) would not qualify. The Admiral's Men had an anonymous Caesar and Pompey in their repertory in 1594–5, and another play, Caesar's Fall, or the Two Shapes, written by Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, Anthony Munday, and John Webster, in 1601-2, too late for Patter's reference. Neither play has survived. The anonymous Caesar's Revenge dates to 1606, while George Chapman's Caesar and Pompey dates from ca. 1613. E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 2, p. 179; Vol. 3, pp. 259, 309; Vol. 4, p. 4.
- ^ Halliday, p. 261.
- ^ Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, Vols. I and II (1970), ISBN 0-517-26825-6, 1970
[edit] References
- Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
- Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Balyimore, Penguin, 1964.
