Caesar, Julius | Arthur Humphreys (essay date 1984)
Arthur Humphreys (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: In an introduction to Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Humphreys, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. 1-83.
[In the following excerpt, Humphreys offers a detailed overview of the play's background, discussing its place in the Shakespearean canon, the sources used by Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's treatment of Roman values.]
The Play's Date and Place in the Shakespeare Canon
In the autumn of 1599 a Swiss doctor from Basle, Thomas Platter, saw what in all likelihood was Julius Caesar played by the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the newly-built Globe Theatre, finished in the late summer of that year and, as Dover Wilson observes in the New Cambridge edition of the play, conspicuous as its bright yellow thatch rose above the dark older roofs of Bank-side. In his travel notes Platter recorded (in German):
On the 21st of September, after...
[The entire page is 18111 words long]
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