Caesar, Julius | E. A. J. Honigmann (essay date 1989)
E. A. J. Honigmann (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Politics, Rhetoric, and Will-Power in Julius Caesar," in Myriad-Minded Shakespeare: Essays Chiefly on the Tragedies and Problem Comedies, Macmillan Press, 1989, pp. 21-42.
[In the essay that follows, Honigmann contrasts Shakespeare's use of rhetoric in Julius Caesar and in other plays.]
All of Shakespeare's history-plays and most of his tragedies deal with political problems, yet his critics, until quite recent times, have refused to take his politics seriously. I am particularly irritated by those who assume that in Julius Caesar the political implications are obvious, and are exactly the same as the politics in Shakespeare's other works. The dramatist, we have read often enough, supported the 'Elizabethan settlement', a strong central government that promises the best chance of political order in unsettled times, and would have seen Julius Caesar as a regal figure, the...
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