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Julius Caesar was the first Shakespeare play that I read. It's still one of my favorites. Along with some of the most stirring speeches ever written, it presents what might be the first attempt in English literature to really recreate the world of ancient Rome. In today's video, we'll explore the historical accuracy of Shakespeare's best-known Roman play, and consider how the greatest English playwright used antiquity. William Shakespeare grew up in a culture saturated with Latin. As a boy, he likely attended a grammar school in his native Stratford, where he would have learned little but Latin.
The curriculum concentrated on a small canon of authors, above all, Cicero, Virgil, and Terence, which Shakespeare and his classmates were expected to parse and translate. Shakespeare's formal training in the classics ended when he left school around the age of 14. He continued to read widely, at least occasionally in Latin, throughout his adult life. He may have had more than the small Latin and less Greek that Ben Johnson credited him with. His education, however, was entirely typical for his time.
He probably knew neither more nor less about the Romans than many of his middle-class English contemporaries. What he did with that knowledge, however, was extraordinary. Julius Caesar, premiered in 1599, was the second of Shakespeare's four Roman plays. The others were Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. It was the first of his Roman plays to be based on a historical event. The period surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar is the best documented in antiquity, and Shakespeare had no shortage of sources.
He likely read, either in Latin or in French translation, Suetonius's Life of Caesar. By far his most important source, however, was Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch. Plutarch's Parallel Lives include 46 biographies, 23 Greek, 23 Roman, paired to emphasize the moral characters of their subjects. Since Plutarch's purpose was to showcase virtue and vice, he filled his lives with anecdotes and telling details. Though often a source of frustration for modern historians, this made Plutarch an ideal source for Shakespeare, who drew
on the lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony when writing his play. Sometimes, as in his account of Caesar's assassination, Shakespeare followed Plutarch closely. As in all his plays, however, he transfigured his source material. Many elements of Shakespeare's tragedy appear nowhere in Plutarch. Most glaringly, Shakespeare introduced a number of anachronisms. Some of these, like references to striking clocks and pulpits, were likely incidental or accidental. Others may have been introduced to make ancient Rome more familiar to Shakespeare's audience. In the first scene of Act 1, for example, the plebians wear
Elizabethan-style wool caps. To compress the action and heighten the drama, Shakespeare combined events that took place months apart. The opening of the play combines Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey, held in October 45 BC, with the festival of Lupercalia in February 44 BC. The Ides of March, March 15th, is made the following day. Shakespeare also took liberties with characters. He virtually invented the conspirator Casca. He transformed Cicero into a detached observer. And he fused scattered hints from
Suetonius and Plutarch to create his portraits of Caesar and Brutus. Caesar dies in the play's third act and speaks only a fifth of the lines allotted to Brutus. Both before and after his assassination, however, he dominates the action. Shakespeare presents him as a man in decline. His health is failing. Relentlessly self-centered, he refers to himself, as he does in his commentaries, in the third person. Ultimately, however, Shakespeare's Caesar is a sympathetic character. Although his bravado is sometimes slightly ridiculous.
"Danger," he says, "knows full well that Caesar is more dangerous than he." His courage, encapsulated by one of the play's most famous lines, is real. "Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once." And despite what the conspirators claim, he is not a tyrant and shows no signs of becoming one. "I am," he says, "constant as the northern star." And Shakespeare, one senses, wants us to believe him. Brutus, the true main character of the tragedy, is more complex.
The other conspirators regard him as a virtual embodiment of the republic. Once he joins the plot against Caesar, he is immediately acknowledged as its leader. He always insists on principle. "No oaths," he says, "are needed to bind honest men together." His speeches are, or seem, balanced and earnest. Brutus claims to have no personal cause to spurn at Caesar, but he fears Caesar's absolute power. He would be crowned. How that might change his nature, that's the question.
Brutus encourages himself to think Caesar as a serpent's egg, which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous. He urges the conspirators to kill him boldly, but not wrathfully. Carve him as a dish fit for the gods. At the moment of assassination, however, Brutus loses his high-mindedness. Shockingly, he tells the other conspirators, "Stoop, Romans, stoop, and let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood." But he recovers his composure sufficiently to deliver a dispassionate funeral oration for the slain dictator, in which he claims to have acted not because he loved Caesar less, but because he loved Rome more. In the later acts of the play, the inflexibility of Brutus's character is on display. On hearing of his wife's death, he proclaims, self-consciously, that no man
bears sorrow better, and refuses to permit himself any display of emotion. But he knows, it becomes increasingly clear, that he was wrong to kill Caesar. He never escapes the slain dictator's ghost. And, as he ends his own life, he implores, "Caesar, now be still. I killed not thee with half so good a will. In the sense that they follow Suetonius and Plutarch closely, Shakespeare's portrayals of Caesar and Brutus correspond fairly closely to history. They were shaped, however, by the context in which he wrote.
The story of Caesar's assassination was well known to his audience and topical at the time of the play's first performance in 1599, when concerns about the Earl of Essex, soon to rebel against Queen Elizabeth, were widespread. Perhaps for this reason, the political message of the tragedy is strikingly ambiguous. In Shakespeare's time, an era of monarchy, it was customary to admire Caesar. The great fault attributed to him was pride, not tyranny. Yet Shakespeare is not obviously a partisan of either Brutus or Caesar.
He makes no decisive statement about whether Caesar was a great leader or a tyrant. Nor is there any clear political moral beyond the truism that more bloodshed always follows assassination. What Shakespeare added to his sources, beyond political ambiguity and dramatic urgency, was, above all, timeless language. Mark Antony's famous "Friends, Romans, countrymen" eulogy, for example, appears in no classical text. Plutarch says only that Antony praised Caesar and displayed his bloodied toga.
Inventions like these have ensured the play's enduring popularity. "How many ages hence," wonders Cassius, just after the assassination, "shall this lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown?" To keep up with the high demand, I've added a few more places to this November's Pompeii, Naples, and Capri trip. Follow the link below to claim your spot before they're gone. You can visit the Toldstone Trips page to check for other upcoming tours. Another batch of podcast episodes has been uploaded to the Toldstone Footnotes channel. And my exploration of the archaeological sites of Greece continues on Scenic Routes of the Past.
Both of these, along with the Toldstone Patreon, home to my ongoing Roman Review series, are linked in the description. Thanks for watching.
