Killing him seemed like a good idea at the time….
Part historical drama, part anatomy of a political seduction (which the Earl of Oxford knew about first-hand), Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar presents the noble Brutus fearing a return of the Roman Republic to a tyrannical monarchy. He agrees to an assassination plot against the heroic Julius Caesar. After the butchery — with Brutus deluded into thinking the people will cheer the snazzy motto, “Enfranchisement!” — Caesar’s friend Mark Antony whips the fickle crowd into a crazed mob, joins forces with Caesar’s successor Octavius, and hunts down the two main conspirators: Brutus and Cassius. Seeing no way out, each of these assassins kills himself, and (by the way) they end up being two of the three guys Dante places in the mouths of Satan for all eternity. Point taken?
Why this play is such a standard in high school curricula is initially baffling but probably explicable:
- It’s Shakespeare, of course, and it also includes (“covers”) what are deemed key matters in classical history, so one can sanctimoniously insist that two birds are killed with one stone that’s good for you; eat it and shut up.
- Like Macbeth, another high school favorite, the reductive moral can be propagandized: rebels against political authorities never prosper. So no pranks against the Assistant Principal.
- And beware of peer pressure, you little Romans! Look what happened to Brutus. Julius Caesar is “a sort of manual on the art of knowing what your soul is telling you to do, or not to do, of finding out what you think in contrast with what you think you think” (Goddard, I 312).
- Also, “Julius Caesar is one of the few Shakespeare plays that contains no sex, not a single bawdy quibble” (Garber 409). [Oh. Looks like we just lost viewers.] So Russell Cohen’s mother won’t be calling the Spackenkill school board to get this Shakespeare dropped from the curriculum, at least for that easy reason (although it’s still taking time away from little Russell’s vastly more important trigonometry study).
Shakespeare’s main source is Sir Thomas North’s 1579 translation of the idiosyncratic and anecdotal Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, specifically the accounts of historical events of 45 bce and onwards (although Oxford could easily have accessed an untranslated volume). Cicero’s Philippics also seems to be a source. Both these works were purchased by the 19-year-old Edward de Vere (Farina 185). De Republica Anglorum by Thomas Smith (the very young de Vere’s tutor) and The Histories of Trogus Pompeius by Arthur Golding (de Vere’s uncle who dedicated the work to him) are other identified sources (Farina 185).
The style of the play for the most part is one of “Roman simplicity and directness” (Wells 191) and it shows the “vanity of human ambition” (Wells 193). More compelling though, and more subtly than the simplistic peer-pressure moral, and although Shakespeare may have been “obliged” to name the play after “its highest-ranking personage” (Bloom 104), the play really focuses on Brutus and the conflict between what he believes is public good vs. his personal feelings (Goddard, I 309). Shakespeare shows the phenomenon of arguing oneself into doing something one instinctively knows is wrong — the factors involved and the aftermath.
“To Shakespeare’s original audiences, a play about ancient Rome or ancient Troy was not an escapist document about a faraway world, but something very like the opposite: a powerful lesson in modern — that is to say, current, sixteenth-century — ethics and statecraft” (Garber 410). E.T. Clark makes a case for the play having been first shown before the Queen at Windsor on January 6th, 1582/83 (Clark 529f) and our text being a redaction of what was originally two plays — something like “Caesar’s Tragedy” and “Caesar’s Revenge” (Clark 530), two of Oxford’s court entertainments combined by various of Oxford’s secretaries paid by Henslowe in 1602. Maybe the assassination of Caesar allegorized the attempted assassination of the Prince of Orange (Clark 531; Ogburn and Ogburn 468-469), who had been subjected to the jealousy of the nobles around him but also had been offered the crown of the Netherlands several times and had refused it. Or, it allegorizes the murder in December 1588 of Henri, Duke of Guise, who had been the leading Catholic contender for the French throne (Anderson 239). Partisans had drawn up four pages of comparisons between Guise and Julius Caesar (Anderson 240), and, as in the play, odd signs were reported to have occurred in association with the assassination (Anderson 239). The play may have been “reworked” in the 1590s (Anderson 240).
Also topical in 1582 was Pope Gregory’s rectifying of the “Julian” calendar, which had not been adjusted since Julius Caesar (Ogburn and Ogburn 469). “At both times there was a comet which, to the superstitious, carried portents of disaster” (Clark 532). Unlike most of Europe, England would not adopt the new calendar for many many decades. Until then, the time would remain out of joint.
Most pertinent, perhaps, is Oxford’s involvement in Catholicism with the Howard/Arundel group and his blowing the lid off their drifting towards an assassination plot against Queen Elizabeth. The play exposes the tactics used to seduce one into such a conspiracy. Oxford’s name appeared on a 1571 list in the Vatican archives of noblemen potentially sympathetic to the Ridolfi plot and on a later document indicating “that great interest was taken in Oxford’s actions” (Pearson 105). Additionally, I discovered a 1579 document in Florence showing continued interest on the Continent in dissension among Elizabethan courtiers: specifically the Oxford/Sidney falling out.
Julius Caesar, Act by Act
Julius Caesar Intro
Further Resources
Filmography
Julius Caesar. Starring Charlton Heston. Avon Productions, Inc., 1950. This film was independently produced in the Chicago area with a budget of less than $15,000. Here’s the entire film.
Julius Caesar. Dir. Joseph Mankiewicz. Starring James Mason, John Gielgud, Marlon Brando. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1953. Nominated for five Academy Awards. Here is Antony’s eulogy.
Julius Caesar. Starring John Gielgud, Charlton Heston, Jason Robards, Diana Rigg, and the Man from Uncle. Republic Entertainment Inc., 1970. Here’s the entire film.
Julius Caesar. This made-for-TV movie features Jeremy Sisto as Julius Caesar, Richard Harris as Caesar’s ally Gaius Cassius Longinus, and Christopher Walken as Marcus Brutus. 2003.
William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Theatre Classics, 2014. An impressive low-budget outdoor production of the entire play here.
The Show must go Online: Julius Caesar. A Zoom production streamed live July 29, 2020.
Best Editions
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Pearson Education Inc., 2009. 1051-1090.
Furness, Horace Howard, ed. The tragedie of Ivlivs Caesar. A New Variorum Edition. Vol. 17. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1913.
Weller, Philip, ed. Julius Caesar. Shakespeare Navigators. This online full text version has line numbering and annotations.
Other Valuable Oxfordian Perspectives
Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. 3rd ed. by Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 529-533.
Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 184-188. Rpt. as “Introductory Oxfordian Readings: De Vere as Shakespeare: Julius Caesar” in The Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook: A Workbook for Educators and Students. Ed. Roger Stritmatter. Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, 2002. 281–289.
Gilvary, Kevin. “The Life and Death of Julius Caesar.” Dating Shakespeare’s Play’s. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 356-367.
Gontar, David P. “Unreading Julius Caesar.” In Hamlet Made Simple and Other Essays. Nashville: New English Review Press, 2013. 139-160.
Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality. 2nd ed. McLean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1992.
Ogburn, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. This Star of England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Pub., 1952. 468-479.
Prechter, Robert Jr. “More Evidence that Julius Caesar Dates to 1583.” Shakespeare Matters 12.1 (Winter 2013): 24–25.
Sexton, Mildred B. (Pidge). A Lovers Complaint and Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter 44.1 (Spring 2008): 16.
And Other General Resources
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare. NY: Gramercy Books, 1970. 253-316.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.NY: Riverhead Books, 1998. 104-120.
Carey, Gary, ed. Cliffs Notes on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Lincoln, NE: Cliffs Notes, Inc., 1999.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. NY: Pantheon Books, 2004. 409-436.
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 307-330.
Smidt, Kristian. Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Tragedies. London: The Macmillian Press, Ltd., 1993. 45-59. Smidt finds numerous time discrepancies suggesting significant revision, compression, and rearrangement of scenes.
Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare: A Life in Drama. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995. 191-198.
Shakespeare Authorship Organizations
The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Browse, get hooked, become a member.
The De Vere Society. Our Oxfordian friends and collaborators across the large body of water.
The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. We consider all possible authors behind the “Shakespeare” name.
The Shakespeare Foundation. You say you want a revolution.