Historical Context
Written in
1599, Julius Caesar tells the story of an extremely powerful general who
substantially increased the size of Rome’s territorial possessions yet was
assassinated because he wanted to rule Rome by himself. In his death, he left no
children and although he named his grand nephew Octavius as his heir, there was
no clear successor, and a devastating civil war ensued. Likewise, Queen
Elizabeth was an extremely effective monarch who brought England to its golden
age of prosperity. By 1599, however, Elizabeth was sixty-six and she had no
children to succeed her. Since she hadn’t named an heir and her reign was
clearly coming to an end very soon, England worried whether her passing would be
followed by chaotic civil war – the same kind that brought turmoil to Rome
more than sixteen hundred years before. 1599 was also the year that the Globe
Theater was built by Shakespeare’s successful theater company. It is believed
that Julius Caesar was the first play performed in the Globe, which is
somehow appropriate because the ambition to rule the world is central to this
play.
Shakespeare
takes certain liberties with his historical sources – the lives of Caesar and
Brutus in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans – in order
to condense the events of several years into seemingly just a few weeks.
Historically, Caesar’s triumphal ceremony over Pompey occurs months before his
assassination in March, and Brutus and Cassius wait in Rome for a year after
Caesar’s funeral before amassing their armies to fight Antony and Octavius on
the plains of Philippi. In Shakespeare’s play, however, Caesar marches into
Rome in triumph on the Lupercalia, which is in February, and he is assassinated
in the middle of March. Also, Brutus and Cassius are driven out of Rome
immediately after Antony’s stirring speech at Caesar’s funeral. In addition
to increasing the dramatic intensity of the action, Shakespeare suggests that
the decisions the characters make – Caesar ignoring the warning of the
soothsayer or Brutus allowing Antony to speak at Caesar’s funeral – have
huge and immediate consequences.
