Shakespeare · Tragedies

Julius Caesar

1599

Roman tragedy — from Plutarch's Lives in Sir Thomas North's translation

Rome, 44 BC. A conspiracy of senators, led by Cassius and joined reluctantly by the idealistic Brutus, assassinates the dictator in the Capitol on the ides of March. Brutus lets Mark Antony speak at the funeral, and Antony's oration turns the mob against the conspirators; civil war follows, and the conspirators die at Philippi. Probably the first play performed at the new Globe, it is the shortest of the Roman plays and the one schoolchildren know best, with the title character dead by the middle of Act 3.

How to spot them

▸Rome in 44 BC; a soothsayer in the crowd at the feast of Lupercal
▸A conspiracy of senators, daggers in the Capitol, and hands washed in blood
▸Rival funeral orations in the Forum, one in prose and one in verse
▸The title character is killed halfway through and has fewer than 200 lines
▸The armies meet at Philippi, and both conspirators die on their own swords

Scenes, characters & lines

'Beware the ides of March'

The soothsayer's warning, ignored: 'He is a dreamer; let us leave him'

'Et tu, Brute?'

Three words that are not in Plutarch, and may have been a stage catchphrase already

'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears'

Mark Antony's funeral oration, turning the crowd with the repeated 'honourable men'

'Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous'

A judgement of character that proves exactly right

'Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war'

Antony alone over the body

'This was the noblest Roman of them all'

Antony's epitaph on Brutus at Philippi

Calpurnia dreams of a statue running with blood, and begs her husband to stay at home

Decius Brutus reinterprets the dream to lure him to the Capitol

A ghost appears to Brutus at Sardis and says only 'thou shalt see me at Philippi'

The play's one supernatural visitation

Key ideas

The play refuses to settle whether the assassins are tyrannicides or murderers, giving the best rhetoric to the winner
Casca's report that 'it was Greek to me' gave English a phrase; so did 'the dogs of war' and 'the ides of March'

Quick-fire facts

•The source is Plutarch's Parallel Lives — the lives of Caesar, Brutus and Antony — in Sir Thomas North's translation of 1579, often followed almost word for word
•The Swiss traveller Thomas Platter saw it at a playhouse on Bankside on 21 September 1599, probably the newly built Globe
•The title role has only around 150 lines and dies in Act 3 Scene 1; Brutus has by far the largest part
•The play contains a famous anachronism: a clock strikes three in Act 2, more than a thousand years before mechanical clocks
•Orson Welles's 1937 Mercury Theatre production, subtitled 'Death of a Dictator', dressed the conspirators as anti-fascists and the dictator as Mussolini
•Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1953 film starred Marlon Brando as Antony, John Gielgud as Cassius and James Mason as Brutus
•The text survives only in the First Folio of 1623, and is unusually clean, suggesting it was set from a theatrical promptbook
•Brutus's wife is Portia, daughter of Cato, who is said to have killed herself by swallowing fire

Drill it — 10 cards

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Sources

Folger Shakespeare Library — Julius Caesar
David Daniell (ed.) — Julius Caesar (The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series)