Jan 3, 2010

Julius Caesar | Modern Connections

One of the major issues Julius Caesar deals with is the overthrow of a ruler. In this play, Shakespeare raises the question of whether this is ever justified and if so, under what circumstances. At the time Shakespeare was writing, a commonly held view on this topic was that the overthrow of any ruler—good or bad—was morally wrong. This view is prevalent in Dante's The Inferno (a part of a longer work completed between 1308 and 1321). In the poem, Dante (an Italian poet) put Brutus and Cassius in the lowest level of Hell as punishment for their rebellion. This concept...