The popularity of Julius Caesar

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar seems to have been extremely popular. It was the play that the Swiss tourist Thomas Platter crossed the Thames to see in September 1599, reporting it acted "very prettily in the house with the thatched roof". Nearly forty years later, the poet Leonard Digges recalled the hit made by Shakespeare's Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius:

So have I seen, when Cesar would appeare,
And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were,
Brutus and Cassius; oh how the Audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went hence ....

It's striking to think that Shakespeare's audiences might have found the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius before the battle of Philippi 'ravishing'. What particularly might they relish in it? Perhaps the complexity of these "honourable men", whose high principles and touching friendship combine with pettiness and irascibility?

Another draw would simply have been the title character, Julius Caesar. As well as a key figure from Roman history, whose writings were standard fare for Elizabethan grammar schools (one of which Shakespeare attended), he also featured in the popular culture of the period. In Richard III, one of the doomed little princes asks about the ancient story that Julius Caesar built the Tower of London. A stranger story about JC from medieval legend was that he was the father of the fairy king Oberon by the Morgana, the fairy half-sister of King Arthur!

Shakespeare may also have drawn on the widespread tradition of performing the downfall of Julius Caesar (there were a number of contemporary plays on which he might possibly have drawn, and it was a favorite subject for university students to dramatize). Although Shakespeare definitely used historical sources for his play which located the assassination in Pompey's Theatre, he may have bowed to another old popular tradition that located his murder in the Capitol. In Hamlet, Polonius recalled the time when he "did enact Julius Caesar" (probably as a student) and "was killed in the Capitol". As David Daniell, editor of the Arden Julius Caesar, notes, "Elizabethans wrongly understood ‘the Capitol’ as the citadel of ancient Rome, where the Senate met".

(For more information on the kinds of dramas, histories, and legends on which Shakespeare might have drawn for JC, as well as his other Roman plays, see volume V of Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. You can download this in its entirety -- as well as the other seven volumes of Bullough and other neat stuff -- from playShakespeare.com

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