Likely the most influential writer in
all of English literature and certainly the most important playwright
of the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in
the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. The son
of a successful middle-class glove-maker, Shakespeare attended grammar
school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582,
he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children
with her. Around 1590,
he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and
playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and Shakespeare
eventually became the most popular playwright in England and part
owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth
I (ruled 1558–1603)
and James I (ruled 1603–1625);
he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, King James paid Shakespeare’s
theater company the greatest possible compliment by endowing its
members with the status of king’s players. Wealthy and renowned,
Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in 1616 at
the age of fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, such luminaries
as Ben Jonson hailed him as the apogee of Renaissance theater.
Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various
editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century
his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was
well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works
led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth
of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s
personal history shrouded in mystery. Some scholars have concluded
from this lack and from Shakespeare’s modest education that his
plays were actually written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the
Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates. The evidence
for this claim, however, is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and few
take the theory very seriously.
In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must
be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets
that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A
number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category
of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.
Julius Caesar takes place in ancient
Rome in 44 b.c., when
Rome was the center of an empire stretching from Britain to North
Africa and from Persia to Spain. Yet even as the empire grew stronger,
so, too, did the force of the dangers threatening its existence:
Rome suffered from constant infighting between ambitious military
leaders and the far weaker senators to whom they supposedly owed
allegiance. The empire also suffered from a sharp division between
citizens, who were represented in the senate, and the increasingly underrepresented
plebeian masses. A succession of men aspired to become the absolute
ruler of Rome, but only Julius Caesar seemed likely to achieve this
status. Those citizens who favored more democratic rule feared that
Caesar’s power would lead to the enslavement of Roman citizens by
one of their own. Therefore, a group of conspirators came together
and assassinated Caesar. The assassination, however, failed to put
an end to the power struggles dividing the empire, and civil war
erupted shortly thereafter. The plot of Shakespeare’s play includes
the events leading up to the assassination of Caesar as well as
much of the subsequent war, in which the deaths of the leading conspirators
constituted a sort of revenge for the assassination.
Shakespeare’s contemporaries, well versed in ancient Greek
and Roman history, would very likely have detected parallels between Julius
Caesar’s portrayal of the shift from republican to imperial Rome
and the Elizabethan era’s trend toward consolidated monarchal power.
In 1599, when the
play was first performed, Queen Elizabeth I had sat on the throne
for nearly forty years, enlarging her power at the expense of the
aristocracy and the House of Commons. As she was then sixty-six
years old, her reign seemed likely to end soon, yet she lacked any
heirs (as did Julius Caesar). Many feared that her death would plunge
England into the kind of chaos that had plagued England during the
fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses. In an age when censorship would
have limited direct commentary on these worries, Shakespeare could
nevertheless use the story of Caesar to comment on the political
situation of his day.
As his chief source in writing Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
probably used Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of
the Noble Greeks and Romans, written in the first century a.d. Plutarch,
who believed that history was propelled by the achievements of great
men, saw the role of the biographer as inseparable from the role
of the historian. Shakespeare followed Plutarch’s lead by emphasizing
how the actions of the leaders of Roman society, rather than class
conflicts or larger political movements, determined history. However,
while Shakespeare does focus on these key political figures, he
does not ignore that their power rests, to some degree, on the fickle
favor of the populace.
Contemporary accounts tell us that Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s shortest
play, was first performed in 1599.
It was probably the first play performed in the Globe Theater, the
playhouse that was erected around that time in order to accommodate
Shakespeare’s increasingly successful theater company. However,
the first authoritative text of the play did not appear until the 1623 First
Folio edition. The elaborate stage directions suggest that this
text was derived from the company’s promptbook rather than Shakespeare’s
manuscript.
