The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar
Shakespeare's most classical tragedy, as well as one of his most polished, was seen by a Swiss visitor, Thomas Platter, on 21 September 1599: since Julius Caesar is not mentioned among Shakespeare's works by Meres the previous year, draws incidentally on two works published in 1599 (Samuel Daniel's Musophilus and Sir John Davies's Nosce teipsum), and is itself alluded to in a third (Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour), this is likely to have been an early performance. In vocabulary the play has links with Shakespeare's next tragedy, Hamlet, while in metre it is closest to Henry V and As You Like It: it was probably composed between the two latter plays, during 1599.

Text

The play's only authoritative text is that provided by the First Folio (1623), for the most part an unusually good one, apparently prepared from a promptbook. It may record some alterations to the play made long after its...

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