julius caesar written by william shakespeare

The audience is not particularly sympathetic to the murdered Caesar, as he is hardly alive on stage long enough to seem a fully developed character. Julius Caesaris the most cerebral of these tragedies. Julius Caesar and Romeo and Julietare among the first of his great tragedies written from 1599 to 1608. This time of political transition also marked a shift in Shakespeare’s writing. (Auspiciously future Lord Protectorate Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599.) It must have seemed likely that Elizabeth’s own removal from the throne, the end of her “Golden Age,” could have similar dictatorial backsliding consequences on a nation that was already beginning to feel the stirrings of a republican revolution that would come forty years later. It was only two years after the deaths of Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, and Mark Antony, that Octavian, Caesar’s grand nephew, was crowned as the first emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus. History had proved that though Brutus and the other conspirators believed that Caesar’s death would save the republic from tyrannical leadership, it had the reverse affect. To Shakespeare such a war may have been reminiscent of the strife caused by Caesar’s unexpected assassination.

Many feared a return to civil war after her death. Yet all of England knew that she had continually refused to name an heir to her throne. She was very popular with her people, who even established a religious cult devoted to her. Though she was growing weak in body, her power, especially after the glorious defeat of the Spanish Armada, had never been greater. After all, by that year Queen Elizabeth I had been on the throne forty-one years. It may have been Shakespeare’s own worries about the future of his own country that prompted him to tackle Julius Caesar for his next play in 1599. And it was probably this source, translated from Greek to French and French to English in 1579 by Thomas North, which fell into the hands of the ‘upstart crow’ playwright William Shakespeare. Of his examination Plutarch said, “It is not histories I am writing, but lives and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue of vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die” Plutarch ( Life of Alexander/Life of Julius Caesar, Parallel Lives, ). It was about 100 years after the death of the first Roman dictator Julius Caesar that the great historian Plutarch (46–120 CE) wrote a biography.

Julius caesar written by william shakespeare