The tribunes of Rome, Marullus and Flavius, break up a gathering of citizens who want to celebrate Julius Caesar's triumphant return from war. On his way to the arena, Caesar is stopped by a stranger who warns him that he should 'Beware the Ides [15th] of March.
Fellow senators, Caius Cassius and Marcus Brutus, are suspicious of Caesar's reactions to the power he holds in the Republic. They fear he will accept offers to become Emperor. He has been gaining a lot of power recently and people treat him like a god. Cassius, a successful general himself, is jealous of Caesar. Brutus has a more balanced view of the political position. The conspirator Casca enters and tells Brutus of a ceremony held by the plebeians. They offered Caesar a crown three times, and he refused it every time.
But the conspirators are still wary of his aspirations. Cassius, Casca, and their allies plant false documents to manipulate Brutus to join their cause to remove Caesar. After doing so, they visit Brutus at night in his home to persuade him of their views. There they plan Caesar's death.
Brutus is troubled but refuses to confide in his devoted wife, Portia. On 15 March, Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, urges him not to go to the Senate. She has had visionary dreams and fears the portents of the overnight storms. These innovations in Julius Caesar call for some sense of what scholars have made of the play's genre and date, the two questions with which the introduction begins.
A good deal of critical attention has also been paid to Plutarch's influence, which is evident principally in characterization and plot, the second topic of the introduction.
Shakespeare's poetic imagination is the third topic, especially as it manifests itself in the imagery and symbolism of Julius Caesar. Finally, the introduction turns to the implicit sense of Rome that comes through in Shakespeare's Roman plays, including Julius Caesar. The earliest text was published in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, now called the First Folio, in , seven years after the playwright's death.
In this collection the plays are separated into one of three genres—comedy, history, or tragedy—with Julius Caesar printed fifth among the tragedies. Moreover, the title page of the play itself in the First Folio identifies it as The Tragedy of Julius Caesar Hinman , and the same identification appears in the running title at the top of each page of the play Those who organized the First Folio, then, seem to have thought of Julius Caesar as a tragedy.
Though the difference may be nothing but an accident of printing, it nonetheless provides a useful basis for asking what kind of play Julius Caesar is. Is it a "history" "life and death" of powerful men in political contention, or is it a tragedy? If Shakespeare was in a phase of writing one of the dramatic genres exclusively or even predominantly when he likely wrote Julius Caesar , it might be a clue to the kind of play Julius Caesar is.
The play seems to have been performed for the first time in , because no references to it occur before that year. Confirming this inference is a striking record—an eyewitness account by a Swiss visitor to London, Thomas Platter:. Schanzer Julius Caesar may, in fact, have been the Chamberlain's Men's inaugural play in the new location Sohmer.
Some references in the play itself seem to echo works published in early , suggesting that Shakespeare likely composed it shortly before it was performed Taylor. Each of those three plays is one of the best examples of its dramatic genre among all of Shakespeare's plays, so was a year of exceptionally rich creativity for a playwright who is famous for his wide-ranging and diverse imagination.
He was just emerging from a period in which he wrote four English history plays that are the best of their genre by any playwright: Richard II , 1 and 2 Henry IV , and Henry V.
Hamlet was the first of four extraordinary tragedies, written between and , the other three being Othello , Lear , and Macbeth , yet during this "tragic" period Shakespeare also wrote three more comedies, Twelfth Night , All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure , and the first of his late comedies that recent criticism has identified as "romances": Pericles.
While Julius Caesar has much in common with both the histories and tragedies, as the text in the First Folio implicitly suggests, Shakespeare's familiarity and commercial success with history plays suggests that the new play may owe more to what immediately precedes it than to the tragedies that follow.
One of the hallmarks of the four great tragedies is that they focus intently on a principal character, for whom they are named. Though Julius Caesar is named for a great Roman hero, he appears in only three scenes 1. One of the hallmarks of the English history plays is that they focus consistently and almost exclusively on politics conceived as the effort of strong men to acquire or maintain political power Cox This is certainly true of Julius Caesar.
The title character is the most famously ambitious politician of ancient Rome, and he is opposed by another patrician, Brutus, who successfully leads the conspirators against Caesar. Brutus in turn is opposed by Antony, who first appears in Caesar's company 1. At the end of Julius Caesar , the future appears to belong to these three, but only one of them Octavius will eventually go on to vindicate Caesar by defeating the other two and becoming "sole sir o' th' world," in Cleopatra's phrase Antony and Cleopatra , 5.
In effect, Shakespeare seems to have turned directly from English history to Roman history and to have written a play whose characteristics were familiar to him from several years of thinking about how to turn history into drama. For one thing, the wavelike pattern of events that Velz refers to recedes into an unknown past as the action commences, and events similarly open into an unknown future as the play closes, as Shakespeare's history plays invariably do.
The tribunes disperse the plebeians who have gathered for Caesar's triumph in the play's opening scene, because the tribunes favor Pompey, whom Caesar has recently overthrown TLN 44 Yet the play offers no clarification about how the conflict between Pompey and Caesar originated; it is simply presented as a fact of Roman political life. As the play's action develops, Brutus opposes Caesar not because Brutus favors Pompey, as the tribunes do; rather, Brutus thinks Caesar poses a threat to the republic, which is Brutus's chief concern TLN This point helps to make the past even more opaque.
What motivated the rivalry between Pompey and Caesar in the first place? Did Pompey also oppose Caesar out of republican sympathies? Was Pompey also a threat to the republic? Though Brutus's conflict with Caesar originated in Rome, seat of the Roman republic, the play's concluding battle takes place far from Rome, in what is now Turkey, and no end to conflict is in sight.
To be sure, Octavius's last triumphant words seem to vindicate Caesar, because Antony and Octavius have successfully joined forces to defeat Caesar's enemies, and Antony has actually called Octavius "Caesar" shortly before TLN While Octavius at least acknowledges that Antony deserves a share of the "glory," he is very far from deferring to Antony, though Antony was the first to take on the conspirators after Caesar's assassination, and Antony is a generation older than Octavius.
The tension between two triumphant patricians therefore continues into an unknown future as the play ends, recalling the newly resolved competition between Pompey and Caesar and the budding tension between Brutus and Cassius as the play begins 1. Far from raising questions about the future, Hamlet concludes by firmly directing attention to the past.
Fortinbras has the last word in the later play, having just claimed "some rights of memory" in Denmark 5. Yet the play does not make us care or even wonder about Fortinbras's success. His character is undeveloped; he appears briefly just twice 4. To be sure, Hamlet involves a struggle for power, as Julius Caesar does, but the possession of power in the end is unimportant, overshadowed by the loss of the play's most intelligent, witty, sensitive, fascinating, and dominant character—Hamlet himself.
Hamlet's dying request is for Horatio "To tell my story," and his last words are, "The rest is silence" 5. Horatio's lament for Hamlet is more memorable and more important than Fortinbras's claim of right in Denmark, and Horatio's lines after Hamlet's death all direct attention to Hamlet's story, just as Hamlet had requested.
The only dramatizations of history that Shakespeare knew were regional productions of biblical history—Coventry's most important among them because of its relative longevity and its proximity to Stratford, Shakespeare's home town: the Coventry plays were performed until , the year Shakespeare turned sixteen.
Kastan points out that in these ambitious, sometimes days-long productions, history is interpreted as a discrete sequence of events in which God interacts providentially with humankind: the creation, the fall, Noah's flood, and similar events from the Hebrew Bible, culminating in the ministry, trial, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and the last judgment Kastan These plays' definitive revelation of divine action in history determines their episodic, non-linear quality and also their absolute beginning creation and ending doomsday.
Shakespeare's plays about secular history are, by contrast, open-ended, because their action is insistently continuous with events that precede and follow them in the endless continuum of secular time. What Shakespeare's history plays therefore reveal is not the hand of God but the shaping influence of human action in the perpetual contest for power.
Only one anachronistic allusion to the last judgment is made in Julius Caesar , when Trebonius exclaims, after Caesar's murder, that onlookers panicked, "as it were doomsday" TLN The simile explains the startled reaction to Caesar's assassination without defining the event's meaning, in contrast to the biblical doomsday, which reveals the meaning of human history as described in the book called Apocalypse or Revelation; only the ongoing succession of Roman events can provisionally reveal the meaning of Julius Caesar , and the play's open-ended structure insists that revealing events will continue after the play ends, making the significance of the piece of history we have just witnessed impossible to determine in itself.
Brutus turns out to be mistaken in this proposed strategy, as he nearly always is in conflicts with Cassius, but nothing challenges Brutus's generalization about time and human action, and it is the obverse of Richard II's lament that "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" Richard II , 5. Cassius dies on his birthday, as he points out, and the fatalistic way he describes the coincidence makes his life seem futile:.
Time is come round, And where I did begin, there shall I end. My life is run his compass. TLN He is afloat on a full sea, in Brutus's image, and they have lost their venture TLN But in this respect they are like all the other competitors in Julius Caesar , in that all are part of time's undular action, rising and falling with the endless tide of political history. Plutarch was a Greek who lived in the first century AD, at the height of the Roman Empire, and he reflected on the greatness of ancient Greece and Rome by writing brief biographies of several eminent noblemen from each of the two cultures in pairs—Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Demetrius of Macedonia and Antony, Dion the Platonist and Brutus, and so forth.
Plutarch's aim was to show implicitly that Greek civilization had been as great as Rome's currently was, to suggest that the Greek way of thinking and being was a model for Rome, to warn against present failures by providing examples from the past, and to tell his stories memorably and well.
His narrative brilliance and his keen observation of human thinking and behavior—especially of moral weakness—left a strong influence on Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus , as well as Julius Caesar.
Whereas Plutarch starts with Caesar's valiant young manhood as he does with Alexander , Shakespeare shows us Caesar only in his final days and mostly through the eyes of those who are his competitors for power in Rome. Cassius's account of his rescuing Caesar while they were swimming across the Tiber TLN may have been prompted by Plutarch's report that Caesar saved himself "with great hazard" by swimming across the harbor in Alexandria, while holding his most prized books out of the water with one hand Whereas Plutarch cites an instance of extraordinary physical courage and audacity, however, Shakespeare has Cassius impugn Caesar's endurance, and he fills out the portrait of Caesar's physical vulnerability with Cassius's claim that Caesar depended on Cassius when he contracted a fever in Spain TLN , that Caesar is hard of hearing TLN ; a detail not in Plutarch , and that he has the "falling sickness" or epilepsy TLN ; Plutarch , a disease that Elizabethans associated with deafness TLN n.
Shakespeare also invented Caesar's belief in his wife's barrenness TLN 95 , a detail that could as easily reflect Caesar's disability as his wife's, though Caesar characteristically fails to see the situation that way. The swimming episode is a good example.
In other words, Caesar has become so arrogant that he has conveniently forgotten what he owes to Cassius. Because Cassius himself is ambitious, and because he is trying in this speech to solicit Brutus's aid in the conspiracy, it is impossible to know how accurately he is reporting the event, or even if it happened at all, but his report of it nonetheless initiates a damning pattern in Shakespeare's portrait of Caesar.
On the morning of his assassination, Caesar patronizingly tells his wife, Calpurnia, that he his not afraid, in response to her expressed fear of wonders reported in the streets of Rome:. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come. In Shakespeare's version, however, Caesar has no sooner assured Calpurnia that death holds no fear for him than he demands of an entering servant what the augurers have said.
In other words, Caesar is more afraid of the future than his bold words suggest, and his fear is confirmed by his vacillation about going to the senate. Moreover, his declaration to Calpurnia that he is not afraid is complemented by three other similar declarations on Caesar's part that have no precedent in Plutarch TLN , , Repeatedly insisting on one's possession of a particular virtue in this case courage can be a clue to internal tension over that very virtue, as Shakespeare would famously suggest by means of Queen Gertrude in the next play he wrote: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks" Hamlet , 3.
Gertrude's perception that the player queen declares her fidelity to her husband too strongly is itself a hint of Gertrude's own struggle with her conscience regarding her unfaithfulness to old Hamlet. In Brutus's case, the issue is not fear but deep-seated agitation that continually disrupts his belief in his own stoic calm. Early in his conversation with Cassius, Brutus frankly acknowledges that he is "vexed" "with passions of some difference. Plutarch again provided the hint in saying that Brutus "framed his manners of life by the rules of virtue and study of philosophy, and having employed his wit, which was gentle and constant, in attempting of great things, methinks he was made and framed unto virtue" Plutarch also supplied the suggestion that Brutus did not so consistently practice the stoic virtue of controlling his inner turmoil as he wanted to and as he wished others to believe he did:.
But when night came that he was in his own house, then he was clean changed. For, either care did wake him against his will when he would have slept, or else oftentimes of himself he fell into such deep thoughts of this enterprise, casting in his mind all the dangers that might happen, that his wife lying by him, found that there was some marvelous great matter that troubled his mind.
Brutus's refusal to listen to his wife is one of many parallels that Shakespeare created between Brutus and Caesar in 2. The extent of his self-knowledge is the very topic raised by Cassius at their first meeting, when Brutus acknowledges being vexed with passion.
Cassius's inability to lead the conspiracy without Brutus undoubtedly makes Cassius the lesser man of the two, yet Cassius's ability to manipulate Brutus by means of Brutus's misplaced confidence in his own judgment is a devastating irony in their relationship, and especially in Brutus's character, when we first meet the two of them.
Brutus instantly rejects Cassius's urging that the conspirators take an oath together, insisting that honesty, virtue, and "th'insuppressive mettle of our spirits" make an oath ignoble TLN Brutus seems not to realize that his harangue against oath-taking is an insult to Cassius, and Cassius seems so anxious to retain Brutus's approval that he does not object.
Plutarch reports that the conspirators took no oath, but he says they were all agreed on the matter, reporting no conflict between Cassius and Brutus []. Let us be sacrificers but not butchers, Caius" TLN Allowing Antony to live is one of Brutus's most momentous political miscalculations, as subsequent events make clear, and his insistence that the assassination can somehow be a sacred act, when it is in fact a plain political murder, is typical of the disjunction between his stoic idealism and the reality that constantly agitates him, both externally and internally.
Plutarch reports the quarrel [], but Shakespeare's interpretation of it is entirely his own. Like his original, Shakespeare's Cassius is "choleric" and "hot stirring" Plutarch , , as Brutus is well aware.
When Brutus immediately counters Cassius's objection that Brutus has treated him dishonorably with an accusation that Cassius is dishonest TLN , Brutus therefore speaks either out of obtuse self-righteousness or with the design to make Cassius even angrier—or perhaps both. Beside himself with rage and frustration, Cassius draws his dagger and demands that Brutus use it against him, urging that Brutus might as well kill him in fact, since he is already killing him with his words.
Brutus replies by ordering Cassius to calm down and then reiterating the difference between them, as he sees it:. Be angry when you will, it shall have scope; Do what you will, dishonor shall be humor. Portia is dead" TLN Brutus has to know that this information, conveyed in this way, will make Cassius completely submissive out of concern for him, as in fact it does, and Brutus presses his advantage by urging that Cassius "Speak no more of her" TLN Julius Caesar Summary.
To stop Caesar from gaining too much power, Brutus and the conspirators kill him on the Ides of March. Mark Antony drives the conspirators out of Rome and fights them in a battle. Julius Caesar Themes. Theme is a pervasive idea presented in a literary piece. Depiction of Roman Politics. Private and Public Values of Brutus and Cassius and the relationship of human endeavor and history.
Julius Caesar is a tragedy, as it tells the story of an honorable hero who makes several critical errors of judgment by misreading people and events, leading to his own death and a bloody civil war that consumes his nation.
Julius Caesar can be considered both a good and bad leader. While dictator, Caesar continued to improve Rome by overhauling its tax system and improving the calendar.
In Julius Caesar, Brutus is a great example of a tragic hero. His tragic flaws are honor, poor judgement, and idealism Bedell.
0コメント