The crux of Julius Caesar is a political issue that was as urgent in Shakespeare's Elizabethan England as it was in Caesar's day. It revolves around the question of whether the killing of a king is justifiable as a means of ending (or preventing) the tyranny of dictatorship and the loss of freedom. Brutus strikes Caesar down is the name of liberty, fearing that absolute power and Caesar's view of himself as more than a mere mortal will enslave Rome to the will of a single man. This was a problem with which the educated members of Shakespeare's society grappled, with those...
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