I

HAKESPEARE'S play of Julius Caesar was not printed in his lifetime. It was published for the first time in the First Folio of 1623, where it occupies the sixth place in the third and last section of "Tragedies." In the contents or preliminary catalogue of the First Folio the piece is entitled The Life and Death of Julius Caesar. The text itself bears the heading The Tragedie of Ivlivs Cæsar.

The play is printed with great accuracy. Textual ambiguities are few, and the editors of the First Folio may fairly be credited with enjoying access either to Shakespeare's own manuscript or to a careful copy of it.

There is no external evidence to disclose the date of the piece's composition or first production. Oft-quoted pas

sages from two contemporary poems of well-ascertained date are commonly treated as reminiscences of Shakespeare's tragedy, and as proofs that the production of Julius Caesar immediately preceded their composition. But on examination this testimony is seen to deserve small reliance.

A poetaster named John Weever, in a poem called The Mirror for Martyrs, which was first published in 1601, wrote these lines:

"The many-headed multitude were drawne

By Brutus' speech, that Caesar was ambitious:
When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne

His virtues, who but Brutus then was vicious?"

Weever is credited with echoing here a familiar phrase from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. But another conclusion is possible. Unlike Shakespeare, Plutarch handles, very briefly and with comparative tameness, the contradictory effects of Brutus's and Antony's oratory, on "the fickle and unconstant multitude," after Caesar's murder. Yet Plutarch by no means ignores the striking episode. He makes Brutus first address the populace in the Capitol in order "to win the favour of the people and to justify that they had done." Then, "very honourably attended," the leader of the conspirators is presented as speaking from the rostrum in the Forum, where the crowd "for the reverence they bare unto Brutus kept silence to hear what he would say. Subsequently, in Plutarch as in Shakespeare, Brutus gives place to Antony who harangues the mob from the same platform. Antony, according to his Greek biographer,

by skilfully "amplifying of matters, did greatly move [his hearers'] hearts and affections unto pity and compassion," with such effect that the people of Rome riotously abjured Brutus and his party. Plutarch imputes to Caesar the ambitious pursuit of the kingly crown with little less emphasis than Shakespeare. Weever's slender reference to the theme might, on a very modest estimate of his inventiveness, well echo Plutarch to the exclusion of Shakespeare. At any rate Weever's lines are an unsubstantial foundation on which to build a theory that he was echoing Shakespeare's inspiring oratory at Caesar's funeral.

Even less can be said for the like suggestion that a passage in a poem by Drayton, which was penned in 1603 within two years of the appearance of Weever's lines, attests Drayton's acquaintance at that date with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Drayton, in 1596, brought out his Mortimeriados, a long epic long epic eulogy of Roger Mortimer, the champion of the barons against Edward II. In 1603 he republished the poem under the title The Barrons Wars, with revisions and additions. In the expanded description of the hero's character the poet described Mortimer (for the first time in 1603)

as one

"In whome in peace th' elements all lay

So mixt, as none could soueraignty impute

That 't seemed, when Heaven his modell first began,
In him it showd perfection in a man."

It is suggested that Drayton adapted these lines from the elegy on Brutus in Julius Caesar (V, v, 73–76).