Julius Caesar

Rome, 44 BCE. Julius Caesar has just defeated the sons of his rival Pompey and returned to the city in triumph. The play opens with two tribunes, Flavius and Marullus, scolding the holiday crowd for cheering Caesar where they once cheered Pompey. They strip the festive decorations from the public statues. Within hours they will be silenced for it.

At the festival of the Lupercal, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the ides of March. Caesar dismisses him. Antony, on Caesar’s instructions, offers Caesar a crown three times in front of the crowd; Caesar refuses each time, and the crowd’s applause grows louder at each refusal. Watching from the side, Cassius works on Brutus — Caesar’s closest friend, the most respected man in Rome — pressing him to consider what Caesar’s rise will cost the republic. Brutus is troubled but does not commit. That night, in a thunderstorm full of omens, Cassius recruits Casca; he plans to slip forged letters into Brutus’s house, written in different hands as if from ordinary citizens, all urging him to act.

Brutus, alone in his orchard at night, reads the forged letters and persuades himself: not because Caesar is a tyrant now, but because he might become one. The conspirators come to him in the dark, hooded; he joins them and, almost immediately, takes over the plan. Cassius wants to kill Antony as well; Brutus refuses — they will be sacrificers, not butchers. The night runs late. Brutus’s wife Portia begs him to tell her what is wrong; in another house across Rome, Caesar’s wife Calpurnia begs Caesar to stay home, having dreamt his statue running with blood. Caesar agrees — until the conspirator Decius reinterprets the dream as a sign of Caesar’s nourishing power, and shames him into going.

At the Capitol, the conspirators surround Caesar on a pretext and stab him to death. Caesar’s last word, on seeing Brutus among the killers, is Et tu, Brute? The conspirators bathe their hands in his blood and march into the Forum. Antony, kept alive at Brutus’s insistence, asks permission to speak at the funeral. Brutus speaks first — cool, brief, abstract: he killed Caesar because he loved Rome more. Antony speaks second. With Caesar’s body in front of him and the crowd already half-turned, he reads the will, displays the wounds, and delivers one of the most ruthless rhetorical performances in English: by the end the crowd is hunting the conspirators through the streets. (In a small horrifying coda, they catch a poet named Cinna and tear him to pieces for sharing a name with one of the killers.)

The play’s second half is the war that follows. Antony, Octavius (Caesar’s heir), and Lepidus form a triumvirate and proscribe their enemies; in a chilling scene, they trade away their own kin’s lives. Brutus and Cassius, encamped in Asia Minor, quarrel bitterly about money and tactics, then reconcile; in the same night Brutus learns Portia has killed herself in Rome, and the ghost of Caesar appears to him in his tent, promising to see him at Philippi. The two armies meet there. Through a series of battlefield mistakes and crossed messages, Cassius believes Brutus has been defeated and orders his slave to kill him; Brutus, finding the body, knows the day is lost and runs onto his own sword held by a friend. Antony, standing over Brutus’s corpse, eulogizes him as the noblest Roman of them all. Octavius gives the order for an honourable burial. The play ends; the empire begins.

Written around 1599, Julius Caesar sits at a hinge in Shakespeare’s career: just after the cycle of English history plays that ran from Richard II through Henry V, just before the great tragedies (Hamlet follows within about eighteen months). Formally it is a Roman history play; inwardly it is already moving toward the soliloquy-driven psychology of the tragedies. The Swiss tourist Thomas Platter saw a performance at the new Globe Theatre on 21 September 1599 — one of the few firsthand accounts we have of a Shakespeare premiere — and remarked that the play of the first emperor Julius Caesar had been very prettily acted, with about fifteen people; afterwards two of them, dressed as men and as women, danced together.

The source is Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, in Sir Thomas North’s English translation of 1579 — a book Shakespeare evidently read closely. Plutarch wrote paired biographies (Lives, c. 100 CE); Shakespeare braids together three of them — Caesar, Brutus, and Antony — and dramatizes the events of 44 BCE through 42 BCE as a continuous action. Many of the play’s most famous lines are very close to North’s prose: the storm’s prodigies, Caesar’s seizure at the Lupercal, the quarrel scene at Sardis, even Antony’s eulogy of Brutus — Plutarch is the source for all of it. Shakespeare’s contribution is selection, compression, and the verse.

The political moment matters. Elizabeth I was sixty-six in 1599, had no heir, and would not name a successor; the question of what happens to a state when one person’s body holds the office was a live one in London. Plays about the assassination of rulers were censorable matter. Julius Caesar goes at the question obliquely, through Rome rather than England: is it ever right to kill a ruler before the rule becomes tyranny? The play declines to answer. Brutus is the noblest character in it; he is also wrong about almost every tactical decision he makes; the assassination produces civil war and ends the republic he tried to save. The Romans of the play remember a much older Brutus — the Lucius Junius Brutus who expelled the last king of Rome in 509 BCE — and our Brutus is descended from him by name and by burden. The cost of being his ancestor’s namesake is the play’s most quiet tragedy.

Latin school education is everywhere in the play’s imagined audience. An Elizabethan grammar-school boy learned Latin by reciting Cicero and Caesar; he knew the assassination by reputation before any teacher told him. Shakespeare can therefore lean on the audience’s prior knowledge — Caesar will be killed; the date is March 15 — and use the play to ask not what happens but how it feels to be there.

Rhetoric and persuasion. The play is one long rhetorical contest. Cassius persuades Brutus; Decius persuades Caesar; Brutus persuades the crowd; Antony un-persuades them. Almost every turn in the action happens because someone says something out loud and someone else changes their mind. The funeral oration scene (3.2) is the play’s most famous set piece for a reason: Antony shows what a single speech, properly built, can do to an audience. The play is acutely aware that politics is mostly language — and that the gap between a true argument and a winning one is wider than people would like to believe.

Republic and one man. The political question is whether Rome is a republic, governed by law and the senate, or a monarchy, governed by a single will. Caesar has not yet made himself king when the conspiracy forms; Brutus kills him for what he might do, not what he has done. The play does not endorse the killing — the war that follows is worse than the rule that prompted it — but it does not dismiss the conspirators’ fear either. The question is the play’s most permanent inheritance from Plutarch: at what point is preventive violence justified, and what does it cost the people who decide they are entitled to it.

Honour and self-justification. The word honour recurs more often in Julius Caesar than in any other Shakespeare play. Cassius uses it to recruit Brutus; Brutus uses it to settle his conscience; Antony, in the funeral oration, uses the line Brutus is an honourable man as a refrain that, by the seventh repetition, has turned into accusation. The play is a study of how a person of real principle can do something disastrous and never quite see it; Brutus is allowed his nobility and is not let off it.

Stoicism and feeling. Brutus is a stoic; he reads his Greek and is composed in public when his wife has just killed herself. Cassius is the warmer, more passionate man: hungry, sceptical, easily wounded. Their friendship is the play’s most psychologically detailed relationship, and the quarrel scene at Sardis (4.3) is the moment Shakespeare lets the two temperaments collide and recover. Both men end as suicides — the Roman exit, the only one available to a defeated republican.

Omens, signs, and reading. The play is full of warnings: the soothsayer’s ides of March; the storm and prodigies of 1.3; Calpurnia’s dream; the augurs’ finding of a heart-less beast; the bird flights that turn against Cassius at Philippi. Almost every omen is correctly given and incorrectly read. The play’s most consistent point about prophecy is that the gods are not stingy with information; people are bad at receiving it.

Public and private. The play splits cleanly between public scenes (the street, the Capitol, the Forum, the battlefield) and private ones (Brutus’s orchard, Caesar’s house, Brutus’s tent). The most affecting moments are the private ones: Portia kneeling to her husband to be told the secret; Brutus reading by candlelight when the page falls asleep; the ghost in the tent. Caesar belongs almost entirely to the public side — the play is interested in him as the figure on which the public eye is fixed, less in him as a private interior.

Julius Caesar is the Shakespeare play with the highest density of quotations that have escaped into ordinary English. Beware the ides of March; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars; Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; the most unkindest cut of all; cry ‘havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war; Et tu, Brute? — all of these have left the play, often without their speakers. Antony’s funeral oration is taught in rhetoric classes around the world as the textbook example of how a speech turns a crowd; Cassius’s ‘not in our stars’ is the epigraph of half a hundred books on free will.

It is also one of the rare plays in the canon to take a contested political assassination seriously and refuse to take a side. Brutus is principled; Antony is opportunistic; Caesar is vain and great; Cassius is jealous and right. The play declines to give the audience a verdict. That refusal — produced in the same theatre, in the same season, by the same company that gave its audience clean villains in Richard III only a few years earlier — is what makes Julius Caesar feel modern: politics presented without a hero.

For first-time Shakespeare readers, the play is often the most accessible of the tragedies. The verse is direct, the political stakes are immediate, the central question (was the assassination right?) is one anyone can argue about, and there is no ghost or witch or magical island to negotiate around: the play is set in a recognisable city, on recognisable days, among people who behave in recognisably political ways. It has been used in classrooms for four centuries because the difficulty of the play is the difficulty of the politics, not of the language.

Critically, Julius Caesar has been read as a republican tract, a warning against political assassination, a study of charisma, a drama about the failure of rationalism in politics, and a meditation on the gap between principle and outcome. Modern productions have set it in the American senate, in interwar Europe, in the boardroom, and in the present-day White House; the casting of Caesar tends to register, like a thermometer, whichever ruler the production wants to test. The play is durable because the case it makes is unfinished: the conspirators’ argument is real, and so is the cost of acting on it.