Julius Caesar • 2013 - Chicago Shakespeare Theater

A PLAY COMES TO LIFE
A Look Back at Julius Caesar
in Performance
Whether his dramas should be taken as plays or as literature
has been disputed. But surely they should be taken as both.
Acted, or seen on the stage, they disclose things hidden to the
reader. Read, they reveal what no actor or theater can convey.
—harolD C. GoDDarD, 1951
Julius Caesar has always proved something of a
problem. The title character is rarely on stage and
dies in Act 3. Neither Brutus nor Antony is clearly
the hero of the piece, although Brutus’s decision to join
the conspiracy does take center stage in the first two acts
of the play. It’s never truly clear to whom the story most
“belongs.” Over the years critics have theorized a multitude
of reasons why Shakespeare would choose to so
construct his play, and a multitude of actors and directors
have worked together to stage it, idiosyncrasies and
all. The lure of its story, however, remains strong—despite
its inherent challenges, and from its first performance 400
years ago to the present, Julius Caesar has proved one
of Shakespeare’s most popular plays with generations of
audiences.
The performance history of Shakespeare’s plays has involved
cutting, adaptation and rewriting. Julius Caesar, in common
with the rest of Shakespeare’s dramas, is rarely performed
in its entirety, despite it being one of the playwright’s shorter
pieces. Scholars of Renaissance Theater hypothesize that in
Shakespeare’s day, his and other playwright’s scripts were
fluid, unstable documents, changing from performance to
performance, and frequently cut. Cast lists from seventeenthcentury
productions do show the full complement of characters,
but over the following two centuries, the lines of lesser
characters were frequently cut or redistributed to enhance
the roles of Casca and the other conspirators—presumably
to attract a company’s principal players to those otherwise
thankless roles. Cutting the text and redistributing the lines
also meant that fewer actors were required to mount a production,
and costs could be kept down. Flavius’s and Marullus’s
lines in Act 1, scene 1, for instance, were often given to
Casca and Decius.
The role of Cinna the Poet was first cut in 1719 and did not
reappear in most productions until the twentieth century—a
decision which may have been based as much in the politics
and morality of the time as the financial expediency! In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the play was modified for
the sake of propriety. Shakespeare’s pagan Romans behaved
A PLAY COMES TO LIFE
themselves like God-fearing Englishmen (and women); Portia,
for example, was then portrayed decorously wounded her arm,
not her thigh as Shakespeare prescribed—and references to
nightgowns were carefully excised. Cuts were also made to
remove language and ideas inconsistent with “heroic” tragedy.
Brutus’s death scene was frequently lengthened (for heroic effect)
and the proscription scene, in which the triumvirate plans
the slaughter of hundreds of “conspirators,” was almost invariably
cut to protect Antony’s “noble” image. Julius Caesar did,
however, manage to avoid the dubious fate of some other of
Shakespeare’s tragedies, when subsequent writers changed
the story to make it more “appropriate.” (King Lear, for example,
in an adaptation that held the stage for nearly two centuries,
was rewritten to end happily.)
It was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
that the performance of Shakespeare’s texts in full, without extensive
rewrites, interpolations or excisions came into vogue.
Over time, as audience perceptions of patriotism, monarchism
and honor have evolved, so have performers’ interpretations of
Caesar’s characters. The text has been altered frequently to
reflect changing attitudes.
Although Julius Caesar wasn’t published until 1623 when two
actors from Shakespeare’s company published the First Folio
of his collected works, it is believed to have been written and
first performed in 1599. The play was immediately popular;
Shakespeare’s contemporaries often alluded to Julius Caesar
in their own works, a sure sign that audiences were well acquainted
with the play. Caesar and other noble ancients were
often the subjects of books and plays in Renaissance England,
where the return to the classics was at the forefront of
the intellectual movement. Shakespeare’s Caesar was staged
From leFT: kevin GuDahl as BruTus anD sCoTT parkinson as Cassius
in CsT’s 2003 proDuCTion oF Julius Caesar,
DireCTeD By BarBara Gaines.
photo by Liz Lauren
www chicagoshakespeare com 33