The actor playing Polonius (probably John Hemings) is almost certainly referring to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s recent Julius Caesar and his own role as Caesar. In reminding Hamlet of his assassination, we are reminded that Richard Burbage, playing Hamlet, had almost certainly played Brutus. In Hamlet, then, “Brutus” reenacts his murder of “Caesar,” only behind an arras instead of in the Capitol. The expectation that audiences would be familiar with the recent play is an early indication of the extraordinary popularity of Julius Caesar, a popularity that rarely diminished over the centuries.

Julius Caesar was first performed at the Globe, and may even have opened the company’s new home. The Swiss scholar and writer Thomas Platter provides a rare eyewitness account of a Globe performance, though it is the closing jig that commands his attention:

In the strewn roof-house [I] saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius with at least fifteen characters very well acted. At the end of the comedy they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance.1

Evidence of court performances in 1613, 1637, and 1638 suggests ongoing popularity through the reigns of James I and Charles I. It was the relationship between Brutus and Cassius, particularly the “quarrel scene” of Act 4 Scene 3, that appears to have captured the public’s imagination:

So have I seen, when Caesar would appear,

And on the Stage at half-sword parley were

Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience,

Were ravish’d, with what wonder they went thence.2

The play’s later production history is characterized by strikingly varied political appropriations, both inciting and warning against revolution. This inherent adaptability allowed Caesar to flourish in an unusually intact form: the text published “As it is now ACTED/AT THE/Theatre Royal”3 around 1684 closely followed the Folio with the exception of some reassigning of speeches. Most notably, Casca replaced Murellus in the opening scene, strengthening the prominence of this perennially popular character.

The play was assigned to Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company following the reopening of the theaters after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. The earliest cast list shows Charles Hart as Brutus, Michael Mohun as Cassius, and Edward Kynaston, formerly celebrated for his female roles, as Antony. This was probably the cast that performed before royalty in 1676. By the 1680s, Thomas Betterton was playing Brutus at Drury Lane, a role he continued in until 1707. Betterton’s role-making performance was described as of “unruffled Temper … his steady Look alone supply’d that Terror which he disdain’d an Intemperance in his Voice should rise to.”4

By 1707, the play was at the Queen’s Theatre, subtitled “With The Death of Brutus And Cassius.” Betterton was succeeded by Barton Booth, playing opposite Robert Wilks’s Antony. The popularity of Caesar, however, transcended individual playhouses or actors. Politically, its “message” of liberty and personal justice cast Brutus as patriot, as acknowledged by a 1707 prologue spoken by “The Ghost of Shakespear”:

Then I brought mighty Julius on the stage,

Then Britain heard my godlike Roman’s rage,

And came in crowds, with rapture came, to see,

The world from its proud tyrant freed by me.

Rome he enslav’d, for which he died once there;

But for his introducing slav’ry here,

Ten times I sacrifice him ev’ry year.5

Caesar was understood as a tyrannous villain while Brutus was a hero of righteous action, and it was his conflicts—both internal and with Cassius—that increasingly generated interest. In 1710, the “quarrel scene” was even performed as a stand-alone piece at Greenwich.6

The adaptation by John Dryden and William Davenant published in 1719 touched the play “comparatively lightly,” cutting those sections “which would tend to lower the heroic tone of the leading characters,”7 and Brutus in particular benefited from added lines that cast his dying moments as a patriotic suicide: “Thus Brutus always strikes for Liberty.”8

Covent Garden dominated the play during the 1740s and ’50s, with Lacey Ryan a consistent Cassius playing alongside James Quin and Thomas Sheridan, among others, as Brutus. These illustrious names, however, couldn’t prevent a sudden decline in the play’s fortunes. The play limped on in increasingly infrequent performances until 1780. In 1770, meanwhile, the play crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia, where an advertisement promised “the noble struggles for liberty by that renowned patriot, Marcus Brutus.”9 Brutus, understandably, became a revolutionary hero in young America.

Following a thirty-year absence from the London stage, John Philip Kemble’s lavish 1812 production at Covent Garden remade the play as a spectacular with grand processions and displays. Caesar lent itself to the age’s penchant for historical re-creation, and Kemble’s production renewed interest in the play for the nineteenth-century pictorial stage. In 1823, Henry Kemble played Brutus in The Death of Caesar; or, the Battle of Philippi, which retained the main events of the play but relatively little of Shakespeare’s text. The next significant productions were those of William Charles Macready at Covent Garden (1838–39) and Drury Lane (1843), which utilized over a hundred extras “to lend complementary interest to the major movement of any given scene.”10 Macready believed the assassination of Caesar should be the true focal point of the play and used his enormous cast to make the murder truly public, beginning a process that subsequently allowed Antony to whip them into a terrifying simulation of mass rioting.

Samuel Phelps was Macready’s Cassius, contrasting fieriness with Brutus’ stoic calm, the classic dynamic of the pair. Phelps later directed several revivals in a similar vein at Sadler’s Wells between 1846 and 1862. In 1868, meanwhile, Caesar was one of the earliest Shakespeare plays adapted for the Japanese stage in a Kabuki-style production “which served as a protest play against the bureaucratic ‘law and order’ government.”11 The international recognizability of its story and the potential for political appropriation allowed the play to cross cultural and linguistic borders.

Classic tragedy was dominated in late nineteenth-century America by the partnership of Lawrence Barrett and Edwin Booth. Booth’s Caesar of 1871–72 in New York was his climactic achievement, both in its strong ensemble cast and its spectacular scenic set pieces, including a ritual cremation for Brutus. “Booth presented Brutus as the philosophical man rather than the warrior,”12 following historical record rather than the American stage convention of a passionate figure, for which he received criticism. Barrett, by contrast, was the age’s defining Cassius: in the 1875 revival

he presented Cassius with such subtlety of thought, such power of intellectual passion, such vigorous and sonorous eloquence, and such force of identification and spontaneity as could not, and did not, fail to command the warmest admiration and sympathy.13

In 1889 Osmond Tearle played Brutus in Stratford-upon-Avon, reviews of his performance articulating what was by now expected of the character. His performance was described as

almost pre-Raphaelite in its attention to even the smallest detail … [he] brought out with rare skill the various phases of the character, the attributes of authority, suspicion, craft, superstitious fear, being blent with dignity, a beautiful speciousness, consummate worldly tact, pusillanimity, and that histrionic faculty of being “all things to all men.”14

The same critic accounted for weak performances in the female roles by suggesting that “in Julius Caesar there is no great part in which an actress can particularly distinguish herself.”15 Only in the later twentieth century would the roles of Portia and Calpurnia become more celebrated.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1898 production at Her Majesty’s was a triumph. The souvenir program explained:

At Her Majesty’s it is not the historic band of conspirators that strikes the key note of the play. It is not even the mighty figure of Caesar treacherously brought low.