When and for Whom the Play Was Written
William Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599, for the acting company of which he was a shareholder, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who had just opened the Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames, in London. A Swiss traveler, Thomas Platter, noted in his diary that he saw a tragedy of Julius Caesar in a London theatre on 21 September that year, the oldest record of the play on stage. The audience was mixed, with apprentices and tradesmen standing before the stage and wealthier people in the galleries. The play speaks to everyone: in Act I, Scene 1, the tribunes rebuke craftsmen who today throw flowers in Caesar's path and who once acclaimed Pompey, the general he defeated, a crowd that swaps its hero from one day to the next. Shakespeare also mixes ancient Rome with his own London without ceremony: in Act II, Scene 1, a clock strikes three, and mechanical clocks did not exist in Rome.
England and the Fear of Tyranny
Queen Elizabeth I had reigned since 1558, was old, had no children, and named no heir; she died in 1603. In 1570, the pope had declared the queen excommunicated and deposed, and some Catholics conspired against her life. The Church of England, in turn, had parishes read a homily against rebellion, which taught subjects to obey even a bad ruler. That is why the play's central question, whether it is legitimate to kill someone who is not yet a tyrant but may become one, was dangerous and timely. It is the question of Brutus's soliloquy in Act II, Scene 1, where he calls Caesar a serpent's egg that must be killed in the shell. The play does not answer with a sermon: it shows the murder, the civil war it provokes, and the death of the conspirators, and leaves the audience to judge.
Where the Story Came From
Shakespeare took the facts from Plutarch's Lives, which he read in English, in the version by Thomas North published in 1579 from a French version. The real events spread over two years: Caesar was killed on 15 March 44 B.C., the Second Triumvirate of Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus was formed at the end of 43 B.C., and Cicero died in the proscriptions of that year. The play gathers everything into a few scenes: in Act IV, Scene 1, the three already draw the list of the condemned in a single conversation. The battle of Philippi, in 42 B.C., was in fact two combats about three weeks apart, and the play fuses them into a single day, in Act V.
There is also a change of place. The Senate of that day met in a hall attached to the theatre of Pompey, and not on the Capitoline hill. The play keeps the statue of Pompey, at whose feet Caesar falls, but moves the scene to the Capitol, the symbolic center of Rome, in Act III, Scene 1. The plot gains the image of a crime in the heart of the city.
How the Play Was Published and Received
Julius Caesar was printed only in 1623, in the First Folio, the volume of collected plays that two of Shakespeare's colleagues published seven years after his death. No earlier edition in small format exists, and so the text read today comes from this single ancient source, without the variants that divide the editors of Hamlet. The play is one of the author's shortest tragedies.
The verdict on Brutus had come from far off and had been opposed. Around 1310, Dante placed Brutus and Cassius at the bottom of Hell, in the mouths of Lucifer, beside Judas, as traitors to their benefactor. Shakespeare, almost three hundred years later, has Antony say of Brutus's body, in Act V, Scene 5, that he was the noblest of the Romans. The play shows both sides and does not resolve the tension: the man who acts for an ideal destroys what he wanted to save.