Julius Caesar by Shakespeare

Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies, 2018

Scene: Reviews of Early Modern Drama

A co-authored review of the Greater Victoria Shakespeare Festival's 2019 production of Julius Caesar.

2023

"Julius Caesar" is a historical tragedy written by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1599. The play is set in ancient Rome and explores the events leading up to the assassination of Julius Caesar and its aftermath. It delves into themes of power, ambition, loyalty, and betrayal, and is known for its memorable characters and powerful speeches. The play begins with Caesar returning to Rome after a successful military campaign. However, his popularity and growing power threaten the Roman Republic, leading a group of conspirators, including Brutus and Cassius, to plot his assassination. Despite warnings from a soothsayer and his wife, Caesar ignores the signs of danger and is ultimately stabbed to death by the conspirators in the Senate.

“A Sea-Change into Something Rich and Strange”: Shakespeare Studies in Contemporary Ukraine. , 2020

The article deals with revealing the nature of the interaction of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar with the political situation of those times (in particular, with Count Essex’s uprising) and finding out the specifics of correlation of Shakespeare’s motives, images, concepts (power, betrayal, monarchy, republic) with the power discourse. The political atmosphere in England 1590–1603 is outlined. The main mechanisms for the implementation of dialogical relations between the theatrical practice of that time and politics are analyzed through the prism of political implications in Julius Caesar. Special attention is given to the verbalization of politically coloured concepts in the text of Julius Caesar that enable tracing the correlation of the playwright’s position with social moods. Keywords: Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Essex, Elizabeth, power discourse, politics.

International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Review, 2016

Throughout history, man has continued to search for meaning in life, trying to comprehend both his world and himself better. Consequently, the human mind has consistently expressed itself in various forms in order to articulate nature more correctly. This stylistic study of Julius Caesar investigates the text from the framework of the reader-response theory and how, besides the text’s ‘constraints’ and reader’s ‘inadequacies’ of the second language user, a fuller interpretation of the text is achievable through a study of its graph logical, syntactic, phonological, and pragmatic features .

2003

What’s the “problem” with Julius Caesar? Shakespeare’s play has drama, eloquence, rhetorical power, thrilling history, and brilliant character portrayals. It is a director’s and actor’s dream, with four extremely well-delineated male roles: Caesar, Brutus, Antony and Cassius. As well as all this reads on the page, in a live performance directors are confronted with four characters competing for the role of protagonist. Where there are few problems with having characters like Henry IV, Prince Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff all in one play — each a powerful archetype — having four military men with large egos, all desiring to possess or dispose power is a very different thing altogether. This paper discusses various theories of where the hero, if any, might be, in Julius Caesar, and relates how a 1967 production in San Francisco resolved the balance in favor of Marc Antony as an amoral key protagonist.

2017

Well-known as a brilliant general and politician, Julius Caesar also played a fundamental role in the formation of the Latin literary language and remains a central figure in the history of Latin literature. With twenty-three chapters written by renowned scholars, this Companion provides an accessible introduction to Caesar as an intellectual along with a scholarly assessment of his multiple literary accomplishments and new insights into their literary value. The Commentarii and Caesar’s lost works are presented in their historical and literary context. The various chapters explore their main features, the connection between literature, state religion and politics, Caesar’s debt to previous Greek and Latin authors, and his legacy within and outside of Latin literature. The innovative volume will be of great value to all students and scholars of Latin literature and to those seeking a more rounded portrait of the achievements of Julius Caesar.