Julius Caesar • 2013 - Chicago Shakespeare Theater

1900s
continued
2000s
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY
[Julius Caesar] has often been related to the contemporary play of Revenge, a form which Shakespeare
was shortly to exploit fully in Hamlet. This relation exists; but on the broadest view, the revenger
is history, conceived as God-ordained. Its victim Brutus, clearly seen in the perspective of time,
was deserving of punishment only because, for all his knowledge, he did not know enough. None
of them did, and that may account for the deliberately hollow tone of some of the things they say.
—Frank kermoDe, liTerary CriTiC, 1974
Julius Caesar is a complex and ambiguous play, which does not concern itself principally with political
theory, but rather with the strange blindness of the rational mind—in politics and elsewhere— to
the great irrational powers which flow through life and control it.
—marJorie B. GarBer, sCholar, 197
Shakespeare dramatizes this idea of history by constantly keeping his spectators aware of history as
a phenomenon while they watch his play…[Julius Caesar] takes history itself as subject by dramatizing
it as an active force. Unlike most history plays, by Shakespeare or others, Julius Caesar is actually
a play about history.
—Thomas F. van laan, sCholar, 1978
The central doctrine of Stoicism was that nothing mattered except virtue, that it was possible to detect
in the world a divine purpose, guiding all things to their perfection, that it was man’s duty to try
to identify himself with this purpose, and to train towards any possibility, whether public or private, of
helping others to become virtuous.
—J.B. leishman, sCholar, 1979
In Julius Caesar, the art of persuasion has come to permeate life so completely that people find
themselves using it not only to influence others but to deceive themselves. This is true, above all, of
Brutus….His real verbal ingenuity declares itself only when he is suing the techniques of oratory to
blind himself and (occasionally) his friends.
—anne BarTon, sCholar, 1982
…part of the peculiar beauty of human excellence just is its vulnerability. The tenderness of a plant is
not the dazzling hardness of a gem. …Human excellence is seen…in the Greek poetic tradition as
something whose very nature it is to be in need, a growing thing in the world that could not be made
invulnerable and keep its own peculiar fineness.
—marTha C. nussBaum, philosopher, 1986
The tragedies characteristically show a struggle between the ambition to transcend the merely human
and a recognition of the losses entailed by this ambition.
—marTha C. nussBaum, philosopher, 1986
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
—riCharD m. nixon, presiDenT oF The uniTeD sTaTes, 1988
We see these Romans posing for each other and for themselves, and we sense the effort it demands.
Even Cassius’s view of himself as a tempter involves a certain posturing. Is there anything but performance
here? Do these people have private lives, private relationships, or are they on show all the
time?
—alexanDer leGGaTT, sCholar, 1988
All the security around the American president is just to make sure the man who shoots him gets
caught.
—norman mailer, novelisT, 1990
Caesar’s cloak, the diverting gesture so effectively exploited by Antony, had abolished all thought
of the justice of Brutus’s and Cassius’s cause. Diversion, in the context of civil war, was indeed a
spectacular and deadly weapon of persuasion.
—marGareT m. mCGoWan, hisTorian, 2004
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