Julius Caesar • 2013 - Chicago Shakespeare Theater

1900s
continued
2000s
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY
Between this Brutus and this Antony a plain issue is set. It is righteousness matched against efficiency
and showing itself clearly impotent in the unequal contest...They stand for spiritual forces, and
in the spiritual order the triumph of efficiency over righteousness is tragic stuff.
—e.k. ChamBers, sCholar, 1906
[The mob represents] the hoodlum element you find in any big city after a war, a mob that is without
the stuff that makes them intelligently alive, a lynching mob, the kind of mob that gives you a Hitler
or a Mussolini.
—orson Welles, proDuCer, 1937
[Brutus is] the classical picture of the eternal, impotent, ineffectual, fumbling liberal...He’s dead right
all the time and dead at the final curtain...He’s the bourgeois intellectual, who, under a modern dictatorship
would be the first to be put up against a wall and shot.
—orson Welles, proDuCer, 1937
Shakespeare seems to me to be playing on his audience’s varied and divided views of Caesar,
encouraging and discouraging in turn each man’s preconceptions...on our view of Caesar depends,
very largely, our judgement of the justifiability of the conspiracy...For though, as it seems to me,
Shakespeare makes abundantly clear the folly and the catastrophic consequences of the murder, he
does not, I think, make clear its moral indefensibility.
—ernesT sChanzer, auThor, 1963
The motivations of both Brutus and Cassius are truly republican, with the difference that, according
to the formula of the time, the one hated tyranny, and the other, tyrants. Brutus believed in legitimacy,
in the traditional Roman order. Cassius could not endure having to accept a master. Both positions
reflect elements in the republican character; the one represents the principles, the other, the passions
which must be combined for a republican regime to endure.
—allan Bloom, philosopher, 1964
Octavius merely inherits the name of Caesar…Octavius is no hero…It is Antony, in all his decadence,
who is the last hero…The heart has gone out of the world, and the unheroic subject will take
over from the citizen.
—allan Bloom, philosopher, 1964
The Brutus of the play is neither purely the noble hero nor a blundering and unworldly idealist lead
by trickery. It is essential to the design of the play that he possess those qualities which the other
conspirators lack, and which they need to make the assassination an actuality; but it is equally necessary
that this mind be divided, that he be a bad judge of character, that he have a capacity for
self-deception, and that his end be one filled with both tragic disillusion and unshaken conviction in
his own rightness.
—norman sanDers, poliTiCian, 1967
Caesar in life had constantly insisted on his own name: ’For always I am Caesar.’ In death he surrenders
his name and borrows one from Brutus. It is the play’s sharpest image of the interdependence
of its characters, who find not just the meaning of their actions, but their very identities, in the eyes
of others.
—alexanDer leGGaTT, sCholar, 1988
Caesar and Brutus, men of extraordinary abilities and debilitating weaknesses, are more like one
another than either would care to admit.
—DaviD BevinGTon, liTerary sCholar, 1994
Brutus might be considered a cobbler or butcher, when his intention to make a holy sacrifice of
Caesar turns into the butchery Antony perceives it to be, and as the city of Rome is delivered over to
anarchy following the assassination, instead of regaining its liberty.
—aThanasios Boulukos, auThor, 2004
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