Julius Caesar is a stage play in the form of a tragedy performed in 1599. It is the first Shakespeare play performed in the Globe Theater in London, England centering on the death of Julius Caesar and the downfall of one of his killers, Marcus Brutus. Because the drama recounts actual historical events, it may also be referred to as a history play.
Elizabeth I had been monarch over England since 1559 but was in her mid-60s in 1599, and speculation was rife regarding a successor. She had no heir, and there was considerable worry that her death might lead to warfare such as had consumed the houses of Lancaster and York in the 15th century. Julius Caesar is a play exploring the chaos that results when a monarch dies without obvious successors. When she died in 1603, the Scottish House of Stuart took the throne with James I (James VI of Scotland) ruling.
One of the primary concerns of Julius Caesar, the play by William Shakespeare, is the controversy over the absolute authority of a ruler and that this same concern was an important issue in Elizabethan England, especially given the close interweaving of religion and politics in that society. Puritan reformers, like the Roman tribunes, felt that power should reside with the people, not with the crown, while religious conservatives up-held the belief that the monarchy is the reservoir of power. Caesar challenged the absolute authority of the crown, and at the same time threatened the power of the aristocracy by creating turmoil in that class.
Scholars from all over the world agree that, when William Shakespeare sat down to pen his epic English history plays and his stirring dramas of ancient Greece and Rome, he had several significant source volumes open beside him.
Many critics agree that Shakespeare’s sole literary source for Julius Caesar was Plutarch’s Lives of the Greeks and Romans, which Sir Thomas North translated in 1579 from a French version by Jacques Amyot. The French version was a translation of a Latin version of Plutarch’s original Greek version. It was the lives of men, not abstract political principles, that interested Plutarch. As a result, of all Shakespeare’s sources, the Lives is the most dramatic. Plutarch provides not only the outline for a plot but many of the smaller details that give life to the play: the attempted warning by Artemidorus, the distress of Portia, and the murder of the poet Cinna.
Shakespeare may also have borrowed ideas from Dante’s Divine Comedy (in which Brutus and Cassius occupy the lowest circle of hell) and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (in which “The Monk’s Tale” presents Caesar as a victim rather than a villain).
There is also known to have been a Latin play on the same theme performed at Oxford in 1582, from which the line from Caesar the Brutus, “Et tu, Brute” may have been taken. It is not surprising that over the centuries many writers have commented that the play Julius Caesar seems as much Brutus’ as Caesar’s, since Shakespeare used Plutarch’s Life of Brutus and Life of Mark Antony as well as the Life of Caesar.
The play owes more to Plutarch’s Life of Brutus than to the Lives of Caesar and Mark Antony combined, since Brutus figures prominently throughout the play. Shakespeare followed North’s text closely; some of his lines are taken almost word for word from North, but no biblical references, some the biblical references in Julius Caesar may have been suggested to Shakespeare by certain phrases and expressions in North’s translation. There are several perplexing passages in the play that resemble both North and Scripture so closely that it is difficult to determine whether the resemblance to Scripture is accidental or whether Shakespeare consciously used Scripture to augment what he found in North. Some of the resemblances are verbal; others involve parallel situations or ideas. Both Scripture and North are quoted alongside Shakespeare’s lines in these instances so that the reader can judge for himself whether Shakespeare’s passage is based on North or on Scripture, or whether Shakespeare combined the two sources.
As for historical background, William Shakespeare would have had access to such handbooks as Lodowick Lloyd’s The Consent of Time written in 1590 and William Reynold’s A Chronicle of All the Noble Emperors of the Romans from Julius Caesar created in 1571. While the Tudor reign brought stability to an England torn by the Wars of the Roses, the English still worried about a return of civil war, and so Caesar was a character of great interest to them, as they saw in him a strong leader who could impose order in a chaotic world.
The number of other sources from which William Shakespeare may have borrowed is legion. These include translations of Appian, Tacitus, Ovid, and Suetonius; such well-known Renaissance works as Marlowe’s translation of Lucan, Kyd’s translation of Cornelia, Elyot’s Gouernour, and the Mirrour for Magistrates; Latin works by Florus, Virgil, and Cicero. There are parallels between Shakespeare’s play and Orlando Pescetti’s Italian play Cesare, which was written in 1594. Shakespeare probably looked at Plutarch’s Lives of Cicero and Cato. And he was no doubt influenced by the drama of his play: the university plays on the life of Caesar; the Roman plays performed at court by child actors; the plays with Roman themes that came from the court circle centering around Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke.
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