Julius Caesar

An Introduction

Directions: You will be reading excerpts for the Riverside Shakespeare’s Introduction of Julius Caesar and answering questions.

Excerpted from the Riverside Shakespeare and used for educational purposes only.

Text / Questions
Julius Casesar was probably one of the first of Shakespeare’s plays to be presented at the Globe Theatre after the Lord Chamberlain’s Men transferred their activities to the South Bank of the Thames (pronounced Tims) in 1599. There are clear signs of its popularity then, and it has remained a favorite with scholars and audiences. The relative simplicity of its language, and the skill with which it renders a clash of ideals in terms of plausibly Roman characters, partly account for its success, and there are people who, knowing little of the rest of Shakespeare, remember the dignity of Portia and recall with warm affection the quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius. / 1.  Which of the following words would be the best antonym for “quarrel.”
A.  Peaceful
B.  Fury
C.  Fighting
D.  Trouble
During the present century Julius Caesar, like most of the rest of the canon, has yielded some new insights for critics. It is true that certain topics, for example Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch in the play, have been so thoroughly studied in the past that the modern investigator might be thought to have no hope for doing much more than refine the received opinion. Yet there are problems – first adumbrated by Coleridge – upon which a good deal of modern criticism tends to pause. Briefly, these are political, and concern the interpretation of Shakespeare’s motives in presenting the events before and after Caesar’s death (including even the theory that he intended to be ambiguous). It has long been common place that Brutus is a kind of sketch for Hamlet; but now it is almost equally commonplace that Shakespeare, who had just finished a long series of political studies in English history, could hardly have brought to his play about the great crisis of Roman history and institutions a mind void of political interests. / 2.  Brutus was probably an early sketch, or attempt by Shakespeare to create a character like ______later:
A.  King Lear
B.  Othello
C.  Hamlet
D.  Henry IV
One consequence of this trend is that Julius Caesar, so lucid at first reading, has recently, and more than once, been called one of the most difficult of Shakespeare’s plays to assess and interpret.
There is no contemporary quarto of Julius Caesar, and the play was first printed in the Folio of 1623. The Folio text is exceptionally clean, and was probably set up for a scribal transcript of the playhouse prompt-book. The shortness of the play (except for Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens – itself a special case – only Macbeth among the tragedies is shorter) has sometimes led scholars to seek evidence of abridgement, though with small success. There is, however, some reason to think that Shakespeare revised the play. Act IV scene II stands imputes to Brutus an almost incredible lie; he tells Messala that he has not had the news of Portia’s death, although he had himself informed Cassius of it only forty lines earlier. Shakespeare almost certainly meant one or the other passage to be cancelled. It has also been suggested that Act II scene I was revised, and that Shakespeare had originally intended to write a scene which would have been set on the first rather than the Ides of March; but that he abandoned this plan, and instead used parts of the proposed material in Act II scene I. / 3.  Evidence provided that shows that Shakespeare may have planned to revise Julius Caesar appears when:
A.  Messala informs Brutus of the death of Portia
B.  Brutus tells Messala he had not heard of Portia’s death but Brutus informed Cassius earlier in the play
C.  Portia was most definitely not dead at all in the play.
D.  Portia is not a character in the play
There have been a good many plays about Caesar before Shakespeare’s. Latin, French, and English analogues are known, and have occasionally been held to have affected Shakespeare’s play. Among them are Pescetti’s Cesare of 1594, and the earlier Senecan works of Muret (1553) and Grevin (1561)…The anonymous Caesar’s Revenge, which has lately been called a source second in importance only to Plutarch, and which converts the “evil spirit” of Plutarch into Caesar’s ghost, was published in 1607; it may have been acted, academically, some years earlier, but there is no strong indication of Shakespeare’s having read it –indeed, had Sir William Alexander’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1607) been published a few years earlier; a much better case could be made out for Shakespeare’s interest in it. / 4.  There were many plays about Julius Caesar before Shakespeare’s. All of the following except ______, were written before Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
A.  Cesare
B.  Caesar’s Revenge
C.  Hamlet
D.  Tragedy of Julius Caesar
…Julius Caesar is a finely made, extremely self-conscious play. One gets that feeling also from the deliberately restricted range of the verse: a sense of control, of dramatic poetry used as a means to indicate and at the same time to play down, the largeness of the Roman attitudes. It has often been related to the contemporary play of Revenge, a form which Shakespeare was shortly to exploit fully in Hamlet. This relation exists; but on the broadest view, the revenger is history, conceived as God-ordained. Its victim Brutus, clearly seen in the perspective of time, was deserving of punishment only because, for all of his knowledge, he did not know enough. None of them did, and that may account for the deliberately hollow tone of some of the things they say. / 5.  According to the article, the play is a play about Revenge, but the ultimate revenger is:
A.  Brutus
B.  History
C.  Cassius
D.  Messala