SOURCE: Charney, Maurice. Introduction to Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare, edited by Maurice Charney, pp. ix-xvii. New York: Applause, 1996.

[In the following essay, Charney offers an overview of Julius Caesar. The critic examines the way in which Shakespeare compressed historical events, the relation of the play to Shakespeare's English history plays, and the play's treatment of the conflict between public and private life, particularly the way this conflict affects Brutus.]

The historical events on which Julius Caesar is based cover a period of about three years, from October, 45 b.c., to October, 42 b.c. But Shakespeare compressed and transposed what he found in Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), so that one has the impression that everything takes place in a few days. The play begins with Caesar's triumph, celebrated in October, 45 b.c., for his defeat of Pompey's sons in Spain; this event is combined with the Feast of Lupercal on February 15, 44 b.c. (Act I, scene i). The next sequence (I.ii-III.iii) represents a continuous piece of action, starting with the winning of Brutus to the conspiracy, continuing with the murder of Caesar, and culminating in Antony's funeral oration (with a grotesque aftermath in the death of Cinna the Poet). All of this takes place on the ides of March (March 15, 44 b.c.) and on the day just before it. The complicated happenings of Acts IV and V are telescoped into a few significant scenes that follow one another swiftly. The proscription of the enemies of the Triumvirate (IV.i) occurred in November, 43 b.c., Brutus met Cassius at Sardis early in 42 b.c. and quarreled with him there (IV.ii and iii), and the two battles of Philippi fought in October of the same year are made into a single battle (V.i-v). Shakespeare endows the disparate historical events with a feeling of dramatic and temporal inevitability, and he also convinces us of his fidelity to an authentic vision of ancient Rome.

Julius Caesar can be dated with some assurance in 1599, that critical moment between Henry V and Hamlet when Shakespeare was at the very mid-point of his career. After the heroic and epic celebration of England in Henry V, Shakespeare turned to the best-known crisis of Roman history, and he produced in Julius Caesar a play closer to tragedy than any of the English history plays that preceded it. There are obvious differences between English and Roman history, although it is possible that the events surrounding Caesar's assassination were more familiar to the audience than those of the remote English past (the period of King John, for example). One of the advantages of looking at Julius Caesar from the perspective of the English history plays is that we are likely to find in both many continuities in political, moral, and social assumptions.

This is of special importance on the issue of republicanism. Nothing in Shakespeare's earlier plays suggests that he would find the cause of the conspirators attractive. On the contrary, Brutus and Cassius would seem to be linked with Jack Cade, Northumberland, Worcester, and Scroop as rebels against lawfully constituted authority. Shakespeare was no simple-minded exponent of the Tudor pieties about the divine right of kings, but he did hate the bloodshed and human grief associated with political upheaval. Revolution is associated with a vision of political chaos. The revolutionary cause of Brutus and Cassius has no natural appeal for Shakespeare. To this argument we may add the strongly monarchic sentiments of the English history plays and, in fact, of all Shakespeare's royal plays, even those with weak or evil kings.

Julius Caesar is unique among Shakespeare's works in giving the impression of regicide without actually having a king in it. Its subject is the structure of Roman politics at the near-accession of Caesar, but Shakespeare has adapted his Roman setting to the pattern of ideas in the English history plays, which are in turn a reflection of the realities of Elizabethan England. The presence of the Roman mob in Julius Caesar keeps us aware of the public character of the play, since the mob is the final arbiter of political power. The Roman mob is indistinguishable from the English mob of the history plays: they are unwashed, have stinking breaths and greasy caps, are vociferous, violent, capricious, fickle, and, above all, easily moved by any strong appeal to their emotions.

There is an emphasis on public life in Julius Caesar, with its appropriate duties, ceremonies, and style of speech, but one always has the sense of a contrast, implied or stated, between the public figure and the private person. Caesar “in his nightgown” (or dressing gown) conversing with his wife Calphurnia or inviting the conspirators—ironically, his “Good friends”—to “go in and taste some wine with me” (II.ii.126) is a very different character from the sardonic demigod of the Senate House putting down Metellus Cimber. And Antony's confidential and personal manner with the mob in his funeral oration proves to be only a calculated public show from which Antony himself stands aloof: “Mischief, thou art afoot, / Take thou what course thou wilt” (III.ii.254-5). This is a chilling anticlimax to the passions of the oration. After the brief but savage interlude of Cinna the Poet (III.iii), we see Antony again with his fellow triumvirs calmly pricking down the names of those who are to die, a bit of horsetrading with the lives of near relatives. Here is politics as naked power, all pretense of human concerns dropped, and the swiftness and lack of sentiment of Act IV, scene i, match the preceding scene of Cinna's absurd murder. Both scenes display the same shocking impersonality and viciousness of the political forces unleashed by Antony's oration.

In Brutus, the public-private conflict begins to develop its potentialities for tragedy. As he admits to Cassius (giving Cassius a wedge to split his resistance), he is “with himself at war” (I.ii.46). This is the generic condition of the tragic protagonist. As he tells Cassius in the quarrel scene, he is “armed so strong in honesty” that all threats, doubts, hesitations, second thoughts, and self-questionings pass by him “as the idle wind” (IV.iii.67-8). This is not literally what he says to Cassius, but one feels sympathetic to Cassius' exasperation with Brutus' four-square, priggish, and overbearing “honesty,” the bloody honorableness that Antony exposes so cuttingly in his oration. Brutus' inner conflict ends very abruptly in Act II, scene i, and public determinations replace any private doubts, although there is an air of foredoomed sadness that hangs over Brutus in Acts IV and V. His quarrel with Cassius seems to indicate that the conspiracy has gone sour, its sense of selflessness and dedication swallowed up by talk of money—“so much trash as may be graspèd thus” (IV.iii.26)—and Brutus is beginning to feel his isolation from the other conspirators.

We may say, then, that the tragedy of Brutus lies in the sacrifice of his private self to public and abstract commitments. We cannot argue away the human predicament stated so simply and with such fallible logic in Brutus' soliloquy about Caesar:

It must be by his death; and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general: he would be crowned.

(II.ii.10-12)

“Personal” and “general”: this is the basis of Brutus' tragic choice. We know that he will choose the general, public good over any merely personal considerations, in the same generous or overweening spirit in which Caesar tells Artemidorus, “What touches us ourself shall be last served” (III.i.8). Yet I think Shakespeare wants us to grasp that the sacrifice of the personal, human cause to the general, political one always has tragic implications.

Brutus is primarily a sympathetic figure, yet there are many touches to indicate that, unlike the many tragic characters whom he foreshadows (especially Hamlet), he has very limited self-awareness. His garden soliloquy contemplating the death of Caesar is so full of logical flaws that one can only believe that these are intended to characterize Brutus' way of thinking, and Cassius' little plot to win Brutus depends strongly on flattery for its success. Cassius is an anomalous figure in these early scenes, very close to the conventional villain. His soliloquy at the end of Act I, scene ii, has many similarities to those of Iago and Edmund, and we are repelled by his smug gloating over how easy a mark Brutus is.

We are repelled by it because we are convinced that it is true. Brutus is represented as the only innocent idealist among the shrewd and rancorous conspirators; as Antony sums it up in his set speech at the end:

He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.

(V.v.71-2)

We are not surprised, therefore, that Brutus should make the three tactical errors that Plutarch notes: he spares Antony's life, he allows Antony to speak a funeral oration for Caesar, and he risks all by engaging the enemy at Philippi. We think the better of Brutus for all these decisions, but we are clearly meant to understand that Cassius would have done otherwise. “That spare Cassius” has the true conspiratorial temperament.

Brutus is sincerely disturbed by the human implications of the conspiracy. “Let's be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius” (II.i.166), he says, as if he needed to remind Cassius of the true purpose of the conspiracy, as he does later in the quarrel scene (IV.iii). There is much self-indulgence and wish-fulfillment in Brutus' desire to kill Caesar without having “dirty hands.” The murder teaches Brutus something about the real nature of killing, and in the exhilaration of the moment he is soon directing his compatriots in an elaborate blood bath:

                                                                                Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood
Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords.

(III.i.106-8)

“Up to the elbows” seems at first to be hyperbole, but the action indicates that the conspirators are actually “Signed in thy spoil, and crimsoned in thy lethe” (III.i.207), as Antony tells us. He begins his soliloquy by asking Caesar's pardon “That I am meek and gentle with these butchers” (III.i.256). “Butchers” is the direct opposite of “sacrificers,” but Brutus himself seems to have abandoned his first notion that the murder could be a clean, priestly sacrifice. If we need further proof of the tragic misdirection of Brutus, we need only listen to the cry of the Third Plebeian after Brutus' oration in the marketplace: “Let him be Caesar” (III.ii.46). This casual identification signifies the utter futility of all that Brutus and the conspirators have done.

As in the case of Richard II, Shakespeare is intent on controlling the audience's feelings toward Caesar, so that his own outrageous hubris, or insolence on the largest scale, seems to bring his fate upon him; but once the deed is done, the process is reversed and the insolent king becomes the sacrificial or tragic victim. Caesar's murder is brilliantly set in a context of insufferable pretension, in which he dares publicly to assert his superiority over all other mortal men. “I could be well moved, if I were as you” (III.i.58)—how full of scorn is that condescending gesture, but once Caesar is safely dead he becomes “the ruins of the noblest man / That ever livèd in the tide of times” (III.i.257-8). His physical infirmities, amplified from Plutarch, are forgotten, and in death he is such a potent and hieratic force that he is spoken of as the provider of precious relics.

If history is moral and didactic, as the Elizabethans believed, it could also be a teacher of dark and even paradoxical lessons. We may support the notion that Julius Caesar is Shakespeare's most difficult history play by a look at its remarkably ambivalent symbolism. Does the perturbation in nature represented by the storm and its portents serve as a warning of Caesar's tyranny or as an indication of the growing evil of conspiracy in the Roman state? Cassius and Calphurnia read the signs in directly opposite ways, and we are left to draw our own conclusions. Is the bloodletting by the conspirators a way of curing the body politic of its disease of Caesarism, or is it simply the mark of a hideous and brutal murder that must be avenged by more blood? Is the conspiracy a purifying fire that will burn away the “rubbish,” “trash,” and “offal” of Rome (I.iii.110-11) and make all new, or is it an uncontrollable and diabolic blaze that indiscriminately destroys everything in its path? Our inability to answer these questions with any conviction makes Julius Caesar a “problem play.”

Although there are many historical errors in Julius Caesar, especially anachronisms, Shakespeare did manage to create a convincing sense of ancient Rome. We are made to feel, chiefly through Brutus, that there is a set of characteristically Roman moral qualities: high-mindedness, self-control, the ability to rise above one's material circumstances, fortitude in the face of adversity, moral dedication, constancy of purpose, and a rigorous concern with personal honor. All these are virtues popularly associated with Stoicism in the Renaissance, and even though the Stoics opposed suicide, the willingness to kill oneself rather than live a base life as a captive seems to be a proof of the very resolution and nobility of mind which they admired.

Roman virtue is most admirably and convincingly presented in the domestic scene between Brutus and Portia, as the high-principled daughter of Cato the Utican insists on her prerogatives as Brutus' wife. She has already “made strong proof” of her “constancy,” or moral stamina, by giving herself “a voluntary wound / Here, in the thigh” (II.i.299-301)—and the gesture implies a wonderful candor between husband and wife. Brutus, of course, rises to the occasion. His answer to Portia's complaint that she is his “harlot, not his wife” (II.i.287) is in the simple, melodious, and serious style that characterizes this play:

You are my true and honourable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.

(II.i.288-90)

There are no memorable imaginative flourishes here (or anywhere else in Julius Caesar), yet what could be more perfect in tone and feeling for this context? “Ruddy” is a homely word, and the image of Brutus' blood “visiting” his “sad heart”—in Elizabethan English, “sad” is at once sorrowful and grave—carries through the domestic connotations. When Brutus says finally, “O ye gods! / Render me worthy of this noble wife” (II.i.302-3), we are assured that Portia's “bosom shall partake / The secrets of my heart” (305-6).

The first revelation of Portia's death is placed just at the point where the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius is beginning to wear itself out. Brutus, hinting at darker sorrows than those that have been expressed, says that he is “sick of many griefs” (IV.iii.142), for which Cassius advises him to be philosophical and rise above “accidental evils” (144). Then comes the sudden explosion of Brutus' inner grief: “No man bears sorrow better. Portia is dead” (145). Cassius is stunned—“Ha! Portia?” (146)—and Brutus reiterates with a dirgelike echo: “She is dead” (147). With perfect dramatic tact, Shakespeare has eliminated all empty moralizing from his passage and left the shocking news to carry its own emotional stress, although he does promote the effect of surprise by the prolonged caesura after “better.”

These lines seem to vindicate the simple, limited, and tightly controlled Roman style of this play. It is a style that tends to be very literal, without any figures of speech or rhetorical adornments to support its purposes; yet it is often capable of charging the lines with dramatic intensity and conviction. Whatever its imaginative limitations, the Roman style expresses admirably the simple and strong verities of Roman virtue.

Shakespeare's play is based very closely on Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, first published in 1579 and reissued in 1595. It seems likely that Shakespeare used the edition of 1595, although the differences between these two editions are minor. Like most Elizabethan translators, North did not go directly to the Greek text of Plutarch, but used the excellent French translation by Jacques Amyot published in 1559. North was no scholar of either Greek or French, but what his version lacks in accuracy it makes up for in vigorous and vivid style. It has the pungency of characterization and liveliness of incidental detail that would make it very attractive to a dramatist looking for material. Shakespeare is sometimes quite close to the phrasing of North; in fact, there are places where he is simply versifying North's prose. Much more significant, however, are Shakespeare's departures from North, where he invents freely or transposes details from a different context.

Shakespeare made direct use of three of Plutarch's “Lives” for his play: Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus, and Marcus Antonius. “The Life of Marcus Brutus” was the most important for Shakespeare's purposes, partly because it has so many hints of what was to be Shakespeare's typical tragic protagonist and partly because it is so well written. Shakespeare may also have used details from other “Lives” of Plutarch, such as those of Dion, Cicero, Cato the Younger, and Pompey.

Critics have tended to neglect the comparisons between Grecians and Romans that follow each set of parallel lives. Plutarch's method is to pair a noble Grecian with a noble Roman and then to cap the biographies with a brief comparison of the two in which the superiority of Greek or Roman qualities is debated—and usually decided in favor of the old-fashioned Greek virtues. Thus Brutus is set against Dion, Antony against Demetrius, and, in a comparison that has not survived, Caesar is matched with Alexander the Great. Plutarch shows a wonderful ability in these pairs to make pithy generalizations about character.

It is well to keep in mind that the events surrounding the assassination of Caesar were very well known in Shakespeare's time, so that just about any Elizabethan book may contain some allusion to Caesar or Brutus. North's Plutarch is unquestionably Shakespeare's direct source for Julius Caesar, but Shakespeare must have picked up a good deal of information from other sources, including the standard encyclopedias and reference works of the period.

On September 21, 1599, Thomas Platter, a Swiss physician and gentleman traveler, saw a play in London that was almost certainly Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. He made this entry in his notebook:

After lunch on September 21, around two o'clock, I traveled with my party across the water and saw, in the house with the straw-thatched roof, the tragedy of the first emperor, Julius Caesar, skillfully acted by about fifteen persons. At the end of the play, according to their custom, they danced—two in men's costumes and two in women's—most elegantly and admirably with each other.

Since the Globe theater was built in 1599 and opened in the fall, it seems likely that Julius Caesar was one of the first plays to be presented there. Besides helping to establish this date, Platter's account gives us some interesting theatrical details: the playhouse was located across the Thames from “the City” of London; “about fifteen persons” could double the thirty-nine or more distinct roles in Julius Caesar; and the tragedy was concluded with an elaborate jig.

We can easily understand the play's attractiveness for a foreign visitor and his party. If the number of references to it are a guide to its audience appeal, Julius Caesar seems to have been very popular and successful in its own time. It was one of the plays performed at the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine in the winter of 1612-13—it is called Caesars Tragedye in a court record—and it was played before the King and Queen on January 31, 1637, at St. James, and on November 13, 1638, at the Cockpit.

Julius Caesar maintained its popularity from the Restoration to about the last quarter of the eighteenth century, being produced at least once in almost every year. Its restrained, “classical” style undoubtedly suited the temper of this period; it was never thought necessary to adapt Julius Caesar for a more refined age, as so many other plays of Shakespeare were mercilessly altered and rewritten in order to rescue them from their own barbarism. The text of the play, however, was not left without some improvements. One may get a good idea of the Julius Caesar most eighteenth-century audiences saw from the acting version printed by John Bell in 1773. To a speech of Brutus taken out of its context and placed at his exit, the editor, Francis Gentleman, has this characteristic note: “Here the transposed lines come in advantageously for the actor's going off.” Still, these additions, transpositions, doublings of roles, and deletions are very minor when compared with the drastic adaptation of other Shakespearean plays in the same period.

In the early eighteenth century, Julius Caesar was a staple of the repertory of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, with Barton Booth notable as Brutus and Robert Wilks as Antony. In the theater in Lincoln's Inn Fields, James Quin was rivaling Booth for his presentation of Brutus, and he played the part many times until 1750. During David Garrick's regime, Julius Caesar was never presented at Drury Lane, although he once contemplated acting Cassius. From 1780 to 1812 there are no recorded performances of the play; it seems to have fallen into a decline after a long period of great popularity. It was revived by John Philip Kemble at Covent Garden in 1812 and in each subsequent year to 1817. This production attempted to recreate the splendor of ancient Rome.

Julius Caesar was not a great favorite of the nineteenth-century theater, perhaps for the very reasons that had made it so appealing to neoclassical sensibilities of the Restoration and the eighteenth century. Some memorable renditions of the play were C. M. Young's Brutus, William Charles Macready's Brutus and Cassius, and Samuel Phelps's Brutus and Cassius. Although Macready played Brutus more frequently, he confessed to “a peculiar pleasure” in the role of Cassius “as one among Shakespeare's most perfect specimens of idiosyncrasy.” The Royal Theatre of Saxe-Meiningen, on a visit to London, presented Julius Caesar at Drury Lane in 1881 with spectacular mob scenes. The review in the Telegraph spoke of “those forests of hands and arms, those staccato shouts, that brilliancy of emphasis, the whirl and rout and maddened frenzy of an excited mob.”

The most successful nineteenth-century revival of Julius Caesar was that of Herbert Beerbohm Tree in 1898 at His Majesty's Theatre, where the play was shown for a hundred nights to enthusiastic audiences. this production was designed and supervised by the painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who attempted to picture ancient Rome in all its architectural magnificence. This is not exactly Shakespearean, but one can understand why this splendid production was revived in 1899, in each year from 1905 to 1911, and in 1913. Tree himself played Antony, and he so arranged the play in three acts that he had each of the tableau curtains entirely to himself, thus giving the impression that Antony was the leading part.

For various reasons, perhaps chiefly political, Julius Caesar was a more popular play in nineteenth-century America than it was in England. It could have been seen in New York in fifty-one different years in the nineteenth century, and in the period 1835-55 it was revived fifteen times in Philadelphia. Its first production was in Charleston in 1774. Among outstanding actors, Edwin Booth was pre-eminent as Brutus and Laurence Barrett as Cassius; Charles Kean and W. C. Macready also performed in New York. In a memorable performance at the Winter Garden on November 25, 1864, the three Booth brothers acted together in a tercentenary benefit to raise money for a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park. Junius Brutus Booth played Cassius, Edwin Booth played Brutus, and John Wilkes Booth played Antony.

In the twentieth century, Julius Caesar has been frequently revived, with most of the leading Shakespearean actors doing a stint as Antony, Brutus, or Cassius. The Mercury Theatre production of Orson Welles, in New York in 1937, put a bold, modern-dress emphasis on the theme of fascism, as did the production at the Embassy Theatre in London in 1939. This inescapable political implication may now seem a barrier to modern directors looking for a fresh interpretation of the play. In 1953 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer made an impressive movie of Julius Caesar directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, with Marlon Brando as Antony, John Gielgud as Cassius, and James Mason as Brutus. Despite the astonishing variety of accents (including Edmond O'Brien's Casca as a Chicago-style gangster) the movie showed insight into the emotional effects of the tragedy.