Shakespeare may have written Julius Caesar as the first of his plays to be performed at the Globe, in 1599. For it, he turned to a key event in Roman Caesar’s death at the hands of friends and fellow politicians. Renaissance writers disagreed over the assassination, seeing Brutus, a leading conspirator, as either hero or villain. Shakespeare’s play keeps this debate alive.
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Julius Caesar is a key link between Shakespeare's histories and his tragedies. Unlike the Caesar drawn by Plutarch in a source text, Shakespeare's Caesar is surprisingly modern: vulnerable and imperfect, a powerful man who does not always know himself. The open-ended structure of the play insists that revealing events will continue after the play ends, making the significance of the history we have just witnessed impossible to determine in the play itself. John D. Cox's introduction discusses issues of genre, characterization, and rhetoric, while also providing a detailed history of criticism of the play. Appendices provide excerpts from important related works by Lucretius, Plutarch, and Montaigne.
John D. Cox is DuMez Professor of English at Hope College, Holland, Michigan, and has published widely on Shakespeare and other Renaissance drama.
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