Julius Caesar: Third Series (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)

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A sourcebook of documents regarding what we know about the historical figure Cleopatra. She was very closely tied to Caesar, so if you’ve ever wanted to learn more about her and what the historical sources say about her look no further (actually, please look further–more research is always better!) comparing Caesar to Trump is unfair?? Caesar cared about poor people how is that comparable to our current president In March 2015, Bloomsbury Academic named Peter Holland of the University of Notre Dame, Zachary Lesser of the University of Pennsylvania, and Tiffany Stern of the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute as general editors of The Arden Shakespeare fourth series. [17] Arden Early Modern Drama [ edit ] 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. DECIUS: Okay, I'll just tell the guys that you're a pussy who lets his wife tell him what to do. They'll understand.

Although the play is named Julius Caesar, Brutus speaks more than four times as many lines as the title character; and the central psychological drama of the play focuses on Brutus' struggle between the conflicting demands of honor, patriotism, and friendship. ... 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. He apparently retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later on day of Saint George, his 52nd birthday. Few records of private life of Shakespeare survive with considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether he wrote all attributed literature.CAESAR'S GHOST: Uh...that's it? Not even an "eek?" Fine, whatever. I'm going to see you a second time, by the way. BOOGEDY! 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. This is also just one of the best-written plays I've ever read. I love how Shakespeare varies his meter for every character. Okay, example time: Brutus ends at least half his statements with weak endings rather than in typical Iambic Pentameter. Cool, right? Maybe it's not if you don't know what any of that meant. Nevermind. But my nerd ass loves it. Also, so much rhetoric. That assembly scene changed me as a person. You could write a freaking term paper on that scene and still not fully analyze the whole thing

effort to solve the problem was to posit a tertium quid—a fair manuscript copy of the author's work that was still something less than a prompt book. The strongest defender of this possibility was Fredson Bowers, who maintained it with special attention to Julius Caesar in particular. The manuscript for the play, he proposed, "was a clean scribal transcript of Shakespeare's own working papers, partly marked by the book-keeper with a view to the later inscription from it of the official prompt-book and then preserved in the theatre as a substitute file copy for the working papers" ("Copy," 23-24). To support his argument, Bowers affirmed Brents Stirling's attempt to explain what J. Resch in 1882 had first proposed to be a textual crux in Brutus's quarrel with Cassius, namely, the double announcement of Portia's death. Stirling pointed out that speech prefixes for Cassius in this section of the play suddenly change from " Cassi." in TLN 2114 and become " Cas." (except for a single " Cass." at TLN 2159) to 2173, where " Cassi." resumes. Bowers agreed with Stirling that this evidence pointed to revision: the second announcement (made by Messala in TLN 2175-91) is what Shakespeare originally wrote, and the first announcement (made by Brutus himself in private to Cassius [ TLN 2108-60]) had later been "plumped in without attention to context" (Bowers, 24). Editors had agreed with Resch for some time, based on their view of Brutus's character (Cambridge 1, 179-80; Arden 2, xxiv-xxv, 106-107n.), but Stirling offered bibliographical evidence for revision in the group of altered speech prefixes for Cassius, and he reinforced his argument with reference to another such passage—with similarly altered speech prefixes for Cassius—which occurs in TLN 711-866. "The bibliographical logic is irresistible," Bowers urged (26), in favor of revision in both cases, and the revision amounts to "hard bibliographical evidence" (29) that the copy for Julius Caesar was not foul papers. On the other hand, omitted stage directions and some confusion about entrances prove that the copy was not a prompt book. The evidence therefore "would seem to point with some degree of certainty to a hypothesis that Shakespeare's working papers had been transcribed in intermediate form for the preliminary survey of the company, a discussion of its staging, and perhaps the copying of its parts, even for use during early rehearsals," before the prompt book was inscribed (31). Bowers even ventured the opinion that the manuscript from which the Folio compositors worked "was not in Shakespeare's hand" (32). In other words, he thought he could identify, on the basis of the printed play, not only the manuscript copy that lay behind it but also the manuscript copy that lay behind that. Shakespeare, on his 1610 ao3 account: lmao let's write a crossover of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth except... Roman auCaesar presents a problem to the hypothesis of foul papers and prompt-book copy. On one hand several features make it look authorial. Some of its stage directions are descriptive, for example, rather than theatrical, as Greg pointed out: " Enter . . . certaine Commoners" ( TLN 2), " Enter Brutus in his Orchard" (615), " Enter Iulius Caesar in his Night-gowne" (984) (Greg, Editorial, 143-44). Moreover, some entrances and several exits ( TLN 681, 701, 1540, 2153, 2230, 2301, 2532, 2565, 2603) are omitted, and stage directions for music are sometimes missing where the action and dialogue would seem to indicate that music should be heard ( TLN 84-86, 100, 277). The occasional spelling of Latin names as if they were Italian would appear to be authorial ("Antonio,""Octavio,""Claudio,""Flavio,"), perhaps because Shakespeare had recently written plays set in modern Italy, using Italian names. Possibly, as Arthur Humphreys speculates, had Shakespeare "given the matter thought he would have altered them" (Oxford 1, 74), but David Daniell points out that "Antonio" is consistently Caesar's usage, as if it were intended to be friendly or familiar (Arden 3, 125). Shakespeare always preferred the anglicized "Antony" (or "Anthony") to the Latin "Antonius," so it is not clear that he would necessarily have "corrected" the Italian forms. The point is that neither recent editor doubts that the spellings are Shakespeare's, whether or not they were mistakes, and these seeming misspellings therefore suggest that the copy used by the compositors had not been tidied up by a scribe whose job was to clarify stage directions or make the author's Latin regular. These lines have haunted audiences and readers for centuries, since The Bard first presented the play, believed to be in 1599, when Shakespeare would have been 35. Bringing to life scenes from Roman history, this tragedy, more than presenting a biography of the leader, instead forms a study in loyalty, honor, patriotism and friendship. But "Alas," protesters outside, "Thou hast misconstrued everything." The knives are metaphors. We're talking about the dangers of tyranny here. The central question of the play is, were the conspirators right to remove Caesar? And Shakespeare, who, let's not forget, was paid by kings to play for kings, isn't exactly antiauthoritarian. You should not expect him to endorse kingslaying, and he doesn't. Dramatic Documents from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Stage Plots, Actors' Parts, Prompt Books, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1931. Beyond all that, though, this is just one of the most narratively strong plays I've ever read. This is my favorite kind of tragedy. Every single character has sensical motivations!! There's no villain!! There's no fate as the villain!! Every bad thing that happens is the result of a character decision. I just really love this play narratively.

Bowers, Fredson. "The Copy for Shakespeare's Julius Caesar." South Atlantic Bulletin 43. 4 (1978), 28-36. Let’s look at what Caesar did: he took many enemies prisoner and brought them here to Rome, and these captives’ ransoms, when paid, helped to make Rome rich. Does this seem ‘ambitious’ behaviour to you? the other hand, in comparison to many other plays in the Folio, Julius Caesar is remarkably free of errors and does not therefore seem to have been set from "foul papers." Shakespeare's most influential nineteenth-century editors describe it as "more correctly printed than any other play" in the Folio (Cambridge, 7.xii). Speech prefixes are quite regular, and stage directions are adequate, though sometimes sketchy, as noted above. A speech prefix missing in TLN 2610 is indicative. The lines are clearly not a continuation of Cato's speech, and an indentation equivalent to that for a speech prefix suggests that a compositor mistakenly omitted " Luc." (Lucillius) at this point and inserted it two lines later. Plutarch makes clear that Lucillius deliberately impersonated Brutus (858), confirming that TLN 2610-11 should be assigned to Lucillius as well, as they are in the modernized text. But if this error originated in the printing house, as seems likely, rather than in the compositor's copy, the error is of no assistance in settling the debate about what manuscript the compositor used—foul papers or prompt book.Caesar skips off to the Senate, confident in the knowledge that he's in a Shakespeare play, where dreams don't predict anything and main characters never get offed* 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.’” I really do love this play but I was also in it, with an Overly Large Yet Worth It Role, and at this point I have no energy to have thoughts on it, we'll talk about why I love this show and then we'll end with the long list of terrible memes lines are, in fact, unusually plentiful in the Folio version of Julius Caesar, and while some of them have been convincingly emended, many would appear to be intentional. The first example in the Folio ( TLN 38-39) is clearly a compositor's choice to prevent a "turn-under" or "turn-over," that is, a fragmentary typographical line inserted above or below the metrical line in question (as in TLN 490), because the line was too long to fit across the column. Instead, the compositor printed two parallel rhetorical questions on successive lines: "Wherefore reioyce? / What Conquest brings he home?" Together these two questions make up a perfect metrical line, as Nicholas Rowe first recognized in 1709, and virtually every editor after him has printed the two questions as a single line. (For other examples, see the collation.) Later in the same speech, however, Murellus has another short line, "Be gone" ( TLN 59), and still another in his next speech, "May we do so?" ( TLN 74). Both of these short lines are preceded and followed by metrically perfect lines, so they cannot be assimilated into the surrounding verse. Rather, they appear to be intentional staccato variations in the meter to emphasize Murellus's authoritarian manner—his peremptory way with the plebians and his simultaneous uncertainty about disrobing Caesar's images. Most of the metrically inexplicable short lines in Julius Caesar can be explained in a fashion such as this (Arden 3, 131-35), and while the explanation is far from hard bibliographical proof of the author's hand behind the printed text, it is satisfying enough for a poetic drama. Editorial Procedures Observe the clever pun on Brutus’ name in ‘brutish beasts’: Antony stops short of calling Brutus a beast, but it’s clear enough that he thinks the crowd has been manipulated with violent thugs and everyone has lost their ability to think rationally about Caesar. The mob spirit has been fomented and everyone has made Caesar, even in death, the target of their hatred.

And how does one read Julius Caesar nowadays, here in the United States of America – or Civitates Foederatae Americae, as the Romans would have called it? After all, we are one of those “states unborn”, with “accents yet unknown”, that Cassius speaks of after the assassination. As with the Roman Republic that ended not long after the murder of Caesar, the U.S.A. is a republic whose people are proud of having retained a republican form of government for a period of centuries. General Editor's Preface by Una Ellis-Fermor, dated 1951, as printed in Macbeth, Arden Shakespeare, 2nd Series 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. Wilson, John Dover, ed. Julius Caesar. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1949. Vol 15. The Works of Shakespeare. 39 vols. 1921-66.Sicherman, Carol Marks. "Short Lines and Interpretation: The Case of Julius Caesar." Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984), 180-95. Julius Caesar (100 B.C.-44 B.C.), Roman general and statesman is the namesake for July. Before 44 B.C, July was called Quintilis (5th month, Originally there were 10 months in a year then the Roman calendar changed to 12 making Quintilis the 7th month but it kept its name–until it was changed in 44BC). However, the Roman Senate decided to honor Julius Caesar after his death by renaming Quintilis, his birth month, to Julius, eventually becoming July. Establishing Shakespeare's Text: Notes on Short Lines and the Problem of Verse Division." Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980), 74-130. When Elizabeth Tudor succeeded to the English throne, she did so through the established, peaceful process - not through conspiracy, and not by spilling the blood of her predecessors. Once she had become Queen of England, she ruled for 45 years with wisdom and justice, ushering in what is still known as England’s “Golden Age” – and she did so while surviving four assassination plots and three assassination attempts. Shakespeare’s English audience would no doubt have seen the assassination plotters of Julius Caesar as a group of self-deluded fools, arrogantly moving their country toward anarchy and tyranny. The third series is also notable for publishing single-volume editions of certain plays that traditionally form part of the so-called Shakespeare Apocrypha, but for which there is considered good evidence of Shakespeare having at least been co-author. Three apocryphal plays were published in this manner.