Julius Caesar (play)

• 1. Introduction

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  Julius Caesar, the play William Shakespeare wrote and first staged in 1599, begins with a paradox: it is named after a man who is not its hero. Caesar dominates the stage from the first scene, yet the drama belongs almost entirely to Brutus, the senator who loves him and kills him anyway. That tension between personal loyalty and civic duty is what the play is really about. How does a principled man convince himself to murder his friend? And once he does, what does the act cost him? Those questions drive every scene from the feast of Lupercal to the battlefield at Philippi.

• 2. The Conspiracy's Engine

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  Cassius is the one who sets the plot in motion. He approaches Brutus before the ides of March, probing his hesitation and feeding it with forged letters that appear to come from ordinary Roman citizens. Brutus reads those letters and, after prolonged moral debate, decides that Caesar alive poses a graver danger than Caesar killed. His reasoning is prospective, not retrospective: he fears what Caesar might do if ever crowned, not what Caesar has done already.

  The conspirators meet the night before the assassination and resolve to act at the Senate. Their plan includes a decoy petition on behalf of Metellus Cimber's banished brother, a request designed to draw Caesar close. Casca strikes first, and Brutus last. Caesar's final words, the Latin phrase "Et tu, Brute?" followed by "Then fall, Caesar!", were not invented by Shakespeare for this play. The phrase appears in earlier Elizabethan works and had become a conventional expression by 1599.

  Critic Joseph W. Houppert argues that Brutus is the driving force of the play and therefore its tragic hero. Brutus consistently acts on passion rather than evidence. He is manipulated by Cassius, he underestimates Antony, and he makes every significant political mistake that brings the republic down. Scholar Myron Taylor notes that Brutus himself finally acknowledges this failure in Act V when he says, "Caesar, now be still: I killed not thee with half so good a will." The conspirators, to show the crowd they acted for Rome's sake, do not flee the scene. That decision hands Antony the stage.

• 3. The Power of Rhetoric

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  Antony's funeral oration is one of the most studied examples of political speech in all of literature. Brutus speaks first, in a rational and measured tone, and the crowd is temporarily won over. Antony follows, beginning with the line "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!" and proceeds to dismantle Brutus's argument through calculated emotional manipulation.

  Antony reminds the crowd that Caesar had sympathy for the poor. He recalls that Caesar refused the crown at the Lupercal not once but three times, turning Brutus's central charge of ambition back on itself. He reveals Caesar's will, in which every Roman citizen would receive 75 drachmas. He displays Caesar's bloodied body to draw tears. Antony even declares, while inflaming the crowd, that he does not intend to inflame them. The contrast between Brutus's appeal to reason and Antony's appeal to feeling is the play's central lesson about how public opinion is moved.

  The mob does not distinguish well in the riot that follows. A poet named Cinna is mistaken for the conspirator Lucius Cinna and killed in the street for his bad verses. That detail is not comic relief. It shows what happens when rhetoric destabilizes a city: the wrong people die.

• 4. Shakespeare's Deviations from History

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  Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives was Shakespeare's primary source, but he bent the historical record wherever the stage required it. He moves Caesar's triumph over Pompey to the same day as the feast of Lupercalia, even though historically those events were separated by six months.

  Shakespeare also compresses the aftermath of the assassination into a single day. In reality, the murder happened on the 15th of March, the will was published on the 18th, the funeral took place on the 20th, and Octavius did not arrive until May. The two Battles of Philippi, which were separated by a twenty-day interval, are combined into a continuous engagement. And Shakespeare moves the location of the assassination to Capitoline Hill, when historically it took place in the Curia of Pompey.

  Caesar's last words receive their own divergence. Plutarch and Suetonius both recorded that Caesar said nothing before dying, with Plutarch adding that Caesar pulled his toga over his head when he saw Brutus. Suetonius does preserve an alternative report that Caesar said the Latin phrase "ista quidem vis est," meaning "this is violence." The play also plants anachronisms throughout: characters mention doublets, an item of Elizabethan clothing that did not exist in ancient Rome, and a clock is heard to strike, prompting Brutus to say "Count the clock."

• 5. Elizabethan Context

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  The play arrived at a politically charged moment in England. Scholar Maria Wyke has written that Julius Caesar reflects the anxiety of a nation uncertain about its own future. Elizabeth I had refused to name a successor, raising the prospect of the kind of civil war the play depicts. An audience watching Caesar assassinated and Rome descend into chaos would have recognized that anxiety without needing it spelled out.

  The play was among the first staged at the Globe Theatre, and its place in that inaugural season was not accidental. Thomas Platter the Younger, a Swiss traveler, recorded in his diary that he saw a tragedy about Caesar at a Bankside theatre on the 21st of September 1599. The play does not appear in a list of Shakespeare's works compiled by Francis Meres in 1598, which places its composition neatly in between. Scholars have also noted vocabulary similarities to Hamlet and metrical similarities to Henry V and As You Like It, reinforcing the 1599 date.

  The First Folio of 1623 contains the only authoritative text of the play, and its quality is notably high. Scholars believe it was set from a theatrical prompt-book, meaning the text reflects how the play was actually performed. That original title in the First Folio was The Tragedie of Ivlivs Caesar.

• 6. Performance and Political Adaptation

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  On the 25th of November 1864, three brothers appeared together on stage for the only time. Junius Jr., Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth performed Julius Caesar at the Winter Garden Theater in New York City as a benefit production intended to fund a statue of Shakespeare in Central Park, which still stands there. John Wilkes played Antony. Less than six months later, he shot Abraham Lincoln.

  Orson Welles staged his Mercury Theatre production in November 1937 in costumes that deliberately evoked Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, drawing a direct line between Caesar and Benito Mussolini. The killing of Cinna the Poet, played by Norman Lloyd, reportedly stopped the show. Time magazine gave the production a rave review. The run totaled 157 performances before a second company took it on a five-month national tour.

  In May 1916, a single performance in the natural bowl of Beachwood Canyon, Hollywood drew an audience of 40,000 and starred Tyrone Power Sr. and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. The student bodies of Hollywood and Fairfax High Schools played opposing armies. The performance marked the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death.

  In 2017, Shakespeare in the Park staged the play with Caesar bearing the likeness of then-president Donald Trump. Corporate sponsors Bank of America and Delta Air Lines withdrew their funding. Right-wing protesters interrupted performances and threatened actors and theater employees. The Public Theater responded that the play's point is the opposite of what the protesters claimed, a position supported by Shakespeare scholars Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Holland.

• 7. Afterlife in Culture

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  The play embedded itself in Western culture almost immediately. Shakespeare included a meta-reference in Hamlet, where Polonius mentions playing Caesar at university and being killed by Brutus, a likely nod to the fact that Richard Burbage probably played both Brutus and Hamlet in the original productions.

  The line spoken by Cassius in Act I, "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves," gave its name to the J.M. Barrie play Dear Brutus and to John Green's best-selling novel The Fault in Our Stars. Edward R. Murrow quoted the same line in his 1954 See It Now broadcast on Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the moment was recreated in the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck.

  Agatha Christie titled a novel after the Brutus line "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." The same passage closes the final episode of Star Trek: Picard, read aloud by Jean-Luc Picard. Mark Antony's observation "the evil that men do lives after them" supplied the name of an Iron Maiden song, a 1984 political film, and a novel in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.

  In 1851, the German composer Robert Schumann wrote a concert overture directly inspired by the play. Adaptations have arrived in Bengali film, Italian prison drama, Canadian television sketch comedy, and Broadway. Denzel Washington played Brutus in 2005 in the first Broadway production in over fifty years. Despite universally negative reviews, the production sold out entirely on the strength of his popularity alone.