The Play. Date of Composition.-The text of Julius Cæsar has come down to us in a singularly perfect state. From this fact some critics argue that the play may have been printed from the author's original MS. Be this as it may, no direct or positive external evidence exists to assist us in arriving at any definite conclusion as to the date when it was written. We must therefore fall back on negative and indirect evidence. There is no reference in any contemporary records to its having been produced on the stage, and it is not mentioned by Meres in Palladis Tamia as amongst the works of Shakespeare. The presumption is, therefore, that it must have been written subsequent to September 7, 1598, when that sketch of English literature, painting and music, bearing the name "F. Meres" was entered at Stationers' Hall. On the other hand, Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, or the Life and Death of Sir John Oldcastle, published in 1601, contains certain lines wherein the references to Antony's funeral oration are too specific to be applicable to any other play :— "The many headed multitude were drawn His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious?" Now the "orations" of Brutus and Antony, though mentioned, do not appear in Plutarch; they are among the few instances in which Shakespeare departs from his authorities. The inference accordingly is unavoidable that Julius Cæsar was already a popular piece when Weever's Mirror of Martyrs was written. Upon this evidence alone we might date the play as having been written late in 1599 or carly in 1600. Herford, following Halliwell, is inclined to place it as late as 1601, arguing that Ben Jonson's Sejanus was the response of the latter to the audacious attempt of the man of " little Latin and less Greek to poach on what the rare Ben" may have considered his special classical preserves. We shall not be much in error, therefore, 66 if, in view of all this evidence, we regard the drama as having been written between the close of the year 1599 and the early months of 1601-a period of only some fifteen months. Sources whence the Materials for the Plot were drawn. The story of the "Death of Cæsar had been a popular one among the predecessors and older contemporaries of Shakespeare. A piece named the Fall of Casar, and dealing with the facts of the life both of Cæsar and Pompey, was performed at Whitehall in 1562. Another, entitled Casar Interfectus, the work of a Dr. P. Eedes, was represented at Oxford in 1582. In his School of Abuse, moreover, Gosson indirectly refers to a Cæsar and Pompey having been popular in his day (1579), while there is still more definite mention made of plays on Julius Cæsar in Henslowe's Diary, 1594, Mirror of Policie, 1598, and Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612), while Polonius undoubtedly refers to the great popularity of the subject when he says: "I did enact Julius Cæsar-: I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me (Hamlet, III. ii. 94). As late as 1604, probably before the intelligence of Shakespeare's mighty achievement had crossed the Border, Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling, produced his tragedy of Julius Cæsar at Edinburgh. There are curious points of resemblance between some of the speeches of Brutus and of Cæsar in the dramas of Shakespeare and Alexander, but these similarities may possibly result from both writers having gone to the same source for their materials. This "source was the monumental work of Plutarch, viz., his Parallel Lives of Illustrious Greeks and Romans, and more particularly those of Cæsar, Brutus, and Antony, as translated by Bishop Amyot from Greek into French, and retranslated from French into English by Sir Thomas North. A new edition had appeared in 1595, and was probably the one used by Shakespeare, as there are certain expressions employed by our dramatist which are absent from the first edition of 1579. Although in some details Shakespeare followed Plutarch with a closeness that was almost slavish, as for example in the speech of Portia to Brutus, in the dialogue between Cæsar and Decius Brutus, and in the speech of Lucilius to Antony concerning Brutus, yet he embellished and idealised all he borrowed. Almost all the incidents found in Plutarch are retained in the drama, while of those scenes which are distinctively Shakespeare's, the principal are, the great speeches of Brutus and Antony to the populace, the monologue of Brutus in the Second Act, and the superb quarrel scene in Act IV., where the dramatist condenses into the limits of one interview the sayings and doings of two entire days. Another point of difference between the "Lives" and the drama, is that the assassination takes place in the Capitol and not in the Curia. It was of course in the Senate House and not in the Capitol that Pompey's statue stood, erected in his honour for having beautified that part of the city with a theatre and sundry fine porticoes. If Shakespeare was largely indebted to Plutarch for his facts and the suggestion of ideas, the matchless style and forceful expression are all the poet's own. The Scene of Action.-The scene where the action of the play is represented as transpiring, is first at Rome (Acts I., II., III. and IV. Sc. i.); then at Sardis (Act IV. Sc. ii. and iii.); finally at Philippi (Act V.). Rome, at the time of the fall of the Republic, was a seething cauldron of political unrest. The ancient social cleavage between patrician and plebeian had slowly but surely disappeared. Julius Cæsar, on the plains of Pharsalia, shattered the last remnant of belief in the doctrine, dear to the Roman aristocrats from the days of Coriolanus, that a palladium was cast by some protecting divinity over the patrician order, safeguarding it from all possible attack by the plebs. In Pompey the last martyr to the cause of Republican oligarchism had perished on the sands of Egypt, and a new order of things was coming into existence. Julius Cæsar, despite all his unparalleled versatility and supreme genius, was in many respects only a political Opportunist of a very high order. He could be all things to all men, if so be he advanced his own interests. To the upholders of the ancient régime, to men who were true Republicans, not Opportunists masquerading as such, Cæsar's policy of humouring all the social elements to gain his own ends must have been invincibly repugnant. The old doctrine, "Each one for the Whole," by faithful adherence to which Rome had overcome all her rivals, and according to which the lives and interests of individual men were esteemed of secondary moment in comparison with the welfare of the Whole, was being deliberately superseded by Cæsar in favour of that other maxim, which is the essence of Cæsarism, "The Whole for One." There is little ground for surprise, then, that "the divine Julius should have met his death. The wonder is he escaped so long. To men of the type of Brutus, drastic remedies were deemed requisite to meet desperate needs, and had the lives of half the Senate been demanded as the price of the preservation of their much-loved Republic, these men would not have shrunk from paying it or perishing in the attempt. Shakespeare, therefore, with fine artistic instinct, strikes the first note of warning in the opening scene of the play, where Flavius and Marullus rebuke the rabble for their fickleness in forgetting Pompey for Cæsar ; and every scene thereafter lays stronger stress on the Republican detestation of Cæsar's too apparent absolutism. Rome, then, is the real scene of the play all through. Even when the action is proceeding at Sardis and Philippi, we feel that it is the impalpable and impersonal, but none the less omnipotent spirit of "Cæsarism," present in Rome, that is pulling the political strings and riveting the fetters. freedom. on Duration of the Action.-The historic period embraced by the action of the drama covers a space of about three years, viz., from October B.C. 45 (Cæsar's triumph) to October (?) B.C. 42, when the battle of Philippi was fought. The stage action represents the occurrences of six days, with considerable intervals between them. The following table will be of service in tracing the time occupied by the development of the plot : Day I.-Act I. Sc. i. and ii., with an interval of one month following. Day III.-Acts II. and III., followed by an indefinite interval. Day IV.-Act IV. Sc. i., with indefinite interval following. The action is exceedingly swift in its evolution. The rapidity wherewith, after the murder of Cæsar, the day of reckoning is seen approaching, conveys the impression of some relentless Até, having constituted itself the avenger of Cæsar, hurrying on the day of doom by making the victims themselves its auxiliaries in accelerating their own destruction. Analysis of the Play. While the drama as a whole must be admitted to be one of Shakespeare's greatest, outside the circle of the unapproachable quartette, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and Othello, on the other hand, we must not lose sight of the fact that it manifests grave faults in construction, and in point of rounded completeness of dramatic interest cannot be held to compare with Antony and Cleopatra, or even with Coriolanus. The catastrophe is. already seen to be pending when we learn that "Brutus and Cassius are rid like madmen through the gates of Rome" (Act III. Sc. ii. 273). Yet if the plot, as a whole, cannot be unreservedly commended, the skill wherewith the dramatist has compressed several distinct threads of incident into one main strand (as for example in the quarrel scene) is worthy of the highest praise. Let the student peruse the scene in question, and then let him betake himself to Plutarch and read over the references to the interview and the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, to the interruption by Phaonius, the poet of the play, to the second interview of the two Generals on the following day, when Cassius reproaches Brutus for having condemned Lucius Pella, and finally to the reception of the news of the death of Portia, and he will obtain a better idea than can be given by any text-book, of the unerring artistic skill with which Shakespeare condensed all these incidents into the limits of one marvellous scene. In a word, the dramatist's art in dealing with great masses of details, and sifting the essential from the accessorial, was never more triumphantly manifested than in this play. Internally, the drama is instinct with throbbing human interest from start to finish. Though we may be conscious of grave faults in construction, and of anachronistic blemishes in the play, such as Cæsar asking "What is't o'clock?" or Casca meeting lions "against the Capitol," or Lucius describing the conspirators to Brutus as having "their hats plucked about their ears, and half their faces buried in their cloaks," and so forth, such blemishes indeed as the scholarly Jonson would never have permitted to find a place in Cataline or Sejanus, yet |