To what degree should political power be concentrated in a single leader? Is the democratic process strong enough to withstand a potential tyrant or are there times when direct action on the street is the only possible course of action? Can we trust politicians to serve the people rather than their own interests? In addressing such questions, the play remains alive and full of troubling force in the twenty-first century.

Shakespeare is always interested in how words are confounded by deeds, how political and philosophical positions collapse under the pressure of action and circumstance. In the end, Julius Caesar is a play about decision making and conscience as much as it is an exploration of politics and of Roman value systems.

Shakespeare must have had the heavy folio of North’s Englished Plutarch open on his desk as he wrote. Read the “Life of Marcus Brutus” therein and you see the raw materials on which the dramatist’s imagination set to work:

Now Brutus (who knew very well that for his sake all the noblest, valiantest, and most courageous men of Rome did venture their lives) weighing with himself the greatness of the danger, when he was out of his house he did so frame and fashion his countenance and looks that no man could discern he had anything to trouble his mind. But when night came that he was in his own house, then he was clean changed. For, either care did wake him against his will when he would have slept, or else oftentimes of himself he fell into such deep thoughts of this enterprise, casting in his mind all the dangers that might happen, that his wife, lying by him, found that there was some marvellous great matter that troubled his mind, not being wont to be in that taking, and that he could not well determine with himself.

The glory of the theater is that it can bring the interior character to life. In Act 1, we see the public face of an apparently untroubled Brutus, but at the beginning of Act 2 Shakespeare conjures up the atmosphere of night, takes Brutus from his bed and places him alone on the bare boards of the Globe. The art of soliloquy then allows us to enter into that troubled mind, to weigh the greatness of the danger, to share the deep thoughts of the enterprise:

It must be by his death: and for my part,

I know no personal cause to spurn at him

But for the general. He would be crowned:

How that might change his nature, there’s the question.

There’s the question. Anton Chekhov, perhaps the greatest dramatist since Shakespeare, said that the business of the dramatist is not to provide solutions but to pose problems in the correct way. Julius Caesar doesn’t give us easy answers about the relationship of public duty to private will. Shakespeare was content to dramatize the problem and leave the rest to his audience.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. Julius Caesar, however, exists only in a Folio text that is exceptionally well printed, showing every sign that the copy from which the compositors were working was legible and clear. The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Julius Caesar, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus “Marcus BRUTUS, sometime friend of Caesar, then conspirator against him”).

Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which Julius Caesar is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the city”). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of Julius Caesar the action takes place in Rome apart from Brutus’ camp near Sardis and the final battle at Philippi.

Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues.