Julius Caesar | Criticism

  • Overviews

    In the first excerpt, Lawrence Danson examines Julius Caesar in-depth, looking closely at the linguistic strategies and how they contribute to the play's tragic progression. Danson addresses the question of whether Caesar or Brutus is the tragic hero, and looks at Marc Antony's funeral speech. In the second selection, Robert Knoll presents a comprehensive overview of Julius Caesar, arguing that the play lends itself remarkably well to the five-act dramatic structure, with each of the major characters occupying a significant place in one of the five acts.

  • Roman Politics

    In the first excerpt, Alice Shalvi delves into the question of whether Shakespeare condemns or condones Caesar's assassination. Brents Stirling, in the second excerpt, examines the extent to which Shakespeare relied upon his source material in his presentation of the Roman populace. In the third excerpt, Whitaker discusses the political and moral implications of Shakespeare's characterization of Brutus and Caesar. Finally, in the last excerpt, John Dover Wilson maintains that the sole theme of Julius Caesar is the conflict between liberty and tyranny.

  • Public and Private Values

    In this excerpt, Maynard Mack discusses the public and private values of Brutus and Caesar in terms of what he views as the primary theme of the play: "the always ambiguous impact between man and history." The private Brutus, the critic asserts, is a gentle, sensitive, and studious man who loves Caesar and deplores violence, while the public figure is a noble idealist who participates in the conspiracy because he believes he must act on behalf of the state.

  • Ritual

    In this excerpt, Stirling discusses the significance of ritual and ceremony to the thematic design of Julius Caesar. Nearly every scene prior to Caesar's murder, Stirling asserts, features a ceremony, which is then followed by a counter-ritual mocking it.

  • Imagery and Language

    Maurice Charney, in the first excerpt, provides a detailed analysis of the principal image patterns in Julius Caesar—the storm and its supernatural elements, blood, and fire—and demonstrates how each set of images connotes two contradictory meanings that contribute to the thematic ambiguity of the play. In the second excerpt, Gayle Greene examines the use of rhetoric and persuasive language in four crucial passages of Julius Caesar.

  • Julius Caesar

    In this excerpt, Ernest Shanzer suggests that Shakespeare intentionally presented an enigmatic, or contradictory, portrait of Caesar to satisfy the different views of him held by Elizabethan audiences. Noting that our view of Caesar depends to a large extent on our estimate of the justifiability of the assassination, Schanzer asserts that although Shakespeare points up the futility of the murder through his emphasis on Caesar's spirit in the last two acts of the play, he offers no conclusive judgment of the morality of the conspiracy.

  • Brutus

    In the first excerpt, T.S. Dorsch argues that critics have generally viewed Brutus as a more admirable person than Shakespeare intended him to be. While acknowledging Brutus's honor and virtue, Dorsch contends that he is arrogant, self-righteous, and opinionated.

  • Cassius

    In this excerpt, M.W. MacCallum focuses on Cassius's intellectual preoccupations, self-sufficiency, championship of liberty and equality, and rejection of the supernatural, contending that the character's behavior is guided by his belief in the philosophy of Epicureanism. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who asserted that pleasure was the highest good in life.

  • Mark Antony

    Harley Granville-Barker maintains that on the surface Antony appears to be a "good sort," initially supporting the conspirators after they have assassinated Caesar; but underneath he is really an instinctive politician, the critic declares, who demonstrates his opportunism by manipulating the crowd to avenge Caesar's death.