Julius Caesar’s tragedy is so closely bound up with that of his friend-turned-assassin Brutus that perhaps William Shakespeare should have titled this play Caesar and Brutus. His 1599 play’s title, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, draws the reader's or playgoer's focus to one of history’s truly seminal moments: Caesar’s assassination on March 15 (“the Ides of March”) in the year 44 B.C. Yet for all the title’s focus on Caesar alone, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is very much a twinned tragedy, with not one but two tragic heroes following the Aristotelian cycle of hubris (fatal character flaw), hamartia (fatal decision), and anagnorisis (the hero's after-the-fall recognition of their place in the cosmos). And it is a play that gains further resonance from considering the English historical context within which Shakespeare lived and wrote. The juxtaposition that Shakespeare brings forward in this historical play, which resembles a tragedy in textual tonality and structure, is the double-edged facets, the private and the public, that coexist in Julius Caesar, the quintessential dictator.

Tyrwhitt, Thomas. "Observations and Conjectures upon Some Passages by Shakespeare." Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, eds. Plays of William Shakespeare. 10 vols. London: Bathurst, Strahan et al., 1778. It was good. Not my favorite or really my thing, but I enjoyed it better than Macbeth. Listening to it while reading it helped, but all the assignments I had to do and still have yet to finish, and the daunting essay I have to write next week do not. It's about who I think is the most tragical hero, Brutus or Caeser. Quite frankly I think it's neither, so I suppose I just have to lie my way through the essay. Blayney, Peter. The First Folio of Shakespeare. Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1991.In many cases, moreover, signaling shared pentameters by means of indention provides an important clue to the function of an independent short line or lines—a clue that would be lost if all short lines were printed as equal. In the example just cited, it would be more difficult for readers or actors to discern the pattern of deferential attention in two independent short lines as metrically distinct without the indention of three short lines that precede them. In another case, mentioned in the commentary, the distinction between two parts of a pentameter and an independent short line helps to clarify characterization. In the Folio's version of the conspirators' dispute about whether or not to include Cicero, Cassius raises the question, and Casca and Cinna urge that Cicero be included, but Brutus demurs: For one thing, signaling the shared pentameter as a single metrical line distinguishes it for readers and actors from the independent short line. In the passage quoted above, five of the eight lines are short in the Folio, but only two ( TLN 90 and 93) are independent short lines (i.e., they cannot be combined with another partial line to form a pentameter). Chambers noted that Shakespeare tended to increase the number of short lines as his writing matured, so that A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, has five, whereas King Lear has 191, and Julius Caesar, written in mid-career, has 108 (Wright, 294-95). The pattern is not invariable ( Cymbeline and The Tempest have fewer short lines than Julius Caesar), but it is nonetheless an important stylistic marker. Moreover, the metrical pattern is much harder for the reader and actor (who must speak the lines with an awareness of their verse pattern) to detect, if independent short lines are not distinguished typographically from shared pentameters. From that point, it is a short journey toward yet another Roman civil war – Brutus and Cassius lead one side; Antony, the future emperor Octavian, and Lepidus lead the other. In a classic Shakespearean pattern, violence with a target leads to untargeted violence in which innocents die. The conspirators are divided by their own differences, and their side lurches toward defeat. Brutus can declare that “There is a tide in the affairs of men/Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune”; but it is clear enough that the tides of fortune have turned against Brutus’ and Cassius’ side – even before the ghost of Caesar appears to Brutus, identifies himself as “Thy evil spirit, Brutus”, and assures Brutus that “thou shalt see me at Philippi.” Apart from this kind of editorial indention, the metrics of this passage are not self-evident. Pronouncing "Calphurnia" in three syllables, rather than four, is required in TLN 95 ("To touch Calphurnia: for our Elders say"), but the made-up pentameter has a feminine ending and two strong syllables in the divided third foot ("hó, Cáe"), and the passage still has two short lines ( TLN 90 and 93). These are stylistically parallel, in that both are spoken by subordinates to Caesar, and both express attentive deference. Still, one could argue that two short lines justify others, so retaining the lineation of the Folio is preferable to following Steevens' innovation. And once Brutus has taken his own life, it is left to Antony, his erstwhile adversary, to speak generously of Brutus in death: “This was the noblest Roman of them all…/His life was gentle, and the elements/So mixed in him that nature might stand up/And say to all the world, ‘This was a man.’”

When the poor of the city suffered, Caesar wept with pity for them. Hardly the actions of an ambitious man, who should be harder-hearted than this! But Brutus says Caesar was ambitious, and Brutus is honourable, so … it must be true … right? Note how Antony continues to sow the seeds of doubt in the crowd’s mind. Jowett, John. "Ligature Shortage and Speech-prefix Variation in Julius Caesar." The Library, 6th ser., 6 (1985), 244-53. In a parallel case, the spelling of "whether" as "where" three times in the control text is handled consistently here by using "whe'er" (one syllable, and therefore barely distinct from "where" in pronunciation). When Flavius says, "See where their basest mettle be not moved" ( TLN 69), he seems to mean "whether," because he uses the subjunctive mode, but he could also mean "where," implying that the plebeians are in fact not moved. (Whether they are moved or not is a matter of interpreting their behavior as they move away—sullenly, perhaps?—in response to the tribunes' rebuke.) "Where" is used again with the subjunctive in TLN 2587 and 2635, and in both of these cases "whether" (indicated here by "whe'er" for the sake of scansion) seems the preferable reading. Punctuation was not regularized in the late sixteenth century, and Hinman demonstrated that punctuation in the Folio was often produced by the compositors who set the type, so a modern editor has considerable latitude in creating a text that assists modern readers with punctuation that they expect. "Considerable latitude" is far from "complete latitude," however. Punctuation can affect meaning, as linguists and grammarians well know, and editors have to choose which meaning is preferable. Daniell argues that the Folio's use of colons is in this category (Arden 3, 130-31), and his edition therefore retains colons that most modern editions (including this one) either delete or replace with some other punctuation. In 2009, The Arden Shakespeare launched a companion series, entitled "Arden Early Modern Drama". The series follows the formatting and scholarly style of The Arden Shakespeare third series, but shifts the focus onto less well-known English Renaissance playwrights, primarily the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods (although the plays Everyman and Mankind hail from the reign of King Henry VII).Virtually all the members of Shakespeare’s audience, whether educated or not, would know that Julius Caesar was a famous Roman general and politician who was assassinated. Accordingly, the play abounds with situational irony from its very beginnings, when a soothsayer tells Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March.” Caesar dismisses the soothsayer’s warnings – “He is a dreamer. Peace; let us leave him” – and 400 years’ worth of audiences have been shaking their heads ever since, as they witness Caesar’s refusal to listen to the soothsayer’s warnings. I’m not going to talk about the disaster at the battle of Philippi. I think that might have been where the term Caesar salad came into common usage. Marc Antony and Octavius join forces and break the will of your men. We are all ready, way past ready, for you to fall on your own sword. In fact, I would have happily given you a firm Caligae to the arse if you needed a little extra encouragement. The word "holiday" appears three times in the first scene of the Folio ( TLN 6, 3 6-7, and 5 6), and the second two times it is spelled "Holyday." The spelling may be significant, since the first scene seems to recall Elizabethan tensions over iconoclasm, saints' days, and monarchical succession, as several critics have pointed out (Wilson; Arden 3, 19; Shapiro, 103, 127-35, 138-70, 173). Still "holy day" was spelled with many variations, including "holiday" as early as 1395 ( OED), so modernizing does not distort the control text, while confusions caused by the original spelling are precisely what modernizing aims to avoid.

The general editors for this series were Richard Proudfoot; Ann Thompson of King's College London; David Scott Kastan of Yale University; and H. R. Woudhuysen of the University of Oxford. The third series of The Arden Shakespeare began to be edited during the 1980s, with publication starting in the 1995 and concluding in 2020. The batch of plays that launched the series was especially notable for the edition by Jonathan Bate of Titus Andronicus, which played a major role in rehabilitating the critical reputation of Shakespeare's earliest tragedy.Cox, John D. and David Scott Kastan, eds. A New History of Early English Drama. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. The conspirators lay hands upon Caesar in front of the Capitol, begging pardon for an exiled Roman nobleman. Caesar refuses their pleas, speaking of himself in the third person (as is his wont): “Know: Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause/Will he be satisfied.” On that note, the assassins draw their weapons. Shakespeare’s dying Caesar looks to Brutus and says, “Et tu, Brutè? [You, too, Brutus?] – Then fall Caesar!” In fact, Shakespeare’s education in Stratford-upon-Avon involved Latin translations of Greek texts. What Caesar actually said was, “καὶ σὺ, τέκνον;” – "Kai su, teknon?" or “Even you, my son?” in Greek, the language of court and diplomacy and educated people. No matter. It is still one of the most moving death scenes in literature. Anne bore him Susanna Shakespeare, and twins Hamnet Shakespeare and Judith Shakespeare. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company, later known as the King's Men. Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Stage Plots, Actors' Parts, Prompt Books, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1931.