Julius Caesar (Vol. 63) - James C. Bulman (essay date 1985)
James C. Bulman (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: “Ironic Heroism in Julius Caesar: A Repudiation of the Past,” in Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 121-32.
[In the following essay, originally published in 1985, Bulman investigates Shakespeare's manipulation of heroic conventions in his depiction of Brutus, Antony, and Caesar.]
The idioms Shakespeare employed to delineate heroism in his early plays were too restrictive to allow him a personal signature. It is not by chance that these plays for years were thought to be the work, or at least to contain the work, of other dramatists: they fully partake of the conventions that were the stock-in-trade of stage heroism. But together they constitute only Shakespeare's apprenticeship to already-established writers. Within a few years, he was forging a mimesis more sophisticated than any that had yet...
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