Oct 6, 2008

Shakespeare A to Z | Julius Caesar

Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar was written at the midpoint of the playwright’s career. After his heroic celebration of England in Henry V, Shakespeare turned to the most famous crisis of Roman history: the assassination of Julius Caesar, the ruler of Rome, in 44 B.C. Closer to conventional tragic form than any of the English history plays that preceded it, Julius Caesar examines the theme of regicide* without actually having a king as part of the drama. Shakespeare accomplished this by adapting his Roman setting to the patterns of ideas he had been exploring in...