Julius Caesar • 2013 - Chicago Shakespeare Theater

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Shakespeare’s First Folio took five “compositors” two and onehalf
years to print. The compositors manually set each individual
letter of type by first memorizing the text line by line. There
was no editor overseeing the printing, and the compositors frequently
altered punctuation and spelling. Errors caught in printing
would be corrected, but due to the prohibitively high cost
of paper, earlier copies remained intact. Of the 1,200 copies
of the First Folio that were printed, approximately 230 survive
today, each slightly different. Chicago’s Newberry Library contains
an original First Folio in its rich collections.
Chicago Shakespeare Theater utilizes the First Folio as the
basis for its playscripts. Its punctuation gives clues to actors
about what words to emphasize and about what ideas are important.
In Shakespeare’s own theater company, with only a
few days to rehearse each new play, these built-in clues were
essential. Today they still help actors make the language easier
to break apart—even though you’re hearing language that’s
400 years “younger” than ours.
A key to understanding Shakespeare’s language is to appreciate
the attitude toward speech accepted by him and his contemporaries.
Speech was traditionally and piously regarded
as God’s final and consummate gift to man. Speech was thus
to Elizabethans a source of enormous power for good or ill…
Hence the struggle to excel in eloquent utterance.
—DaviD BevinGTon, 1980
Julius Caesar • 2013
TEACHER
RESOURCE
CENTER
Teachers, looking for new ideas? Check out our
Teacher Resource Center, located on the Theater’s
fourth level. In addition to its primary focus on teaching
Shakespeare in performance, the collection includes
a number of biographies, history books, scholarly criticism,
periodicals and books for young readers about
Shakespeare’s life and times. The collection also includes
reference materials and dictionaries that specifically
target Shakespeare’s language.
Call the Education Department at 312 595 5678
to schedule a visit—on your own or with your
colleagues
SHAKESPEARE’S
ENGLAND
Elizabeth I ruled England for
forty-five years from 1558
to 1603 in a time of relative
prosperity and peace. “Few monarchs,”
says Shakespearean scholar David
Bevington, “have ever influenced an
age so pervasively and left their stamp on it so permanently.” The
daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth
was regarded by many Catholics as an illegitimate child—
and an illegitimate monarch. The politics of religion constantly
threatened Elizabeth’s reign, even though it was one of the most
secure that England had known for hundreds of years.
Elizabeth had no heir, and throughout her reign the politics
of succession posed a real threat to the nation’s peace—and
provided a recurrent subject of Shakespeare’s plays. While
Shakespeare was writing Julius Caesar, the Earl of Essex, one
of the Queen’s favorite courtiers, rebelled against her government.
Shakespeare’s portrayal of the forced abdication of a
king in Richard II was censored in performance during Elizabeth’s
reign.
Elizabethan England was a smaller, more isolated country than it
had been previously or would be subsequently. It had withdrawn
from its extensive empire on the Continent, and its explorations
of the New World had barely begun. There was a period of internal
economic development as Elizabeth ignored the counsel
of her advisors and kept out of war until the attempted invasion
by Spain and the Great Armada in 1588. England’s economy
was still based in agriculture, and its farmers were poor and
embittered by strife with rich landowners who “enclosed” what
was once the farmers’ cropland for pastures. Uprisings and food
riots were commonplace in the rural area surrounding Stratfordupon-Avon,
where Shakespeare grew up.
London, then the largest city of Europe, was a city of contrasts:
the richest and the poorest of England lived there, side by side.
While many bettered themselves in a developing urban economy,
unemployment was a serious problem. It was a time of
change and social mobility. For the first time in English history,
a rising middle class aspired to the wealth and status of the
aristocracy.
Under Elizabeth, England returned to Protestantism. But in
her masterful style of accommodation and compromise, she
incorporated an essentially traditional and Catholic doctrine
into an Episcopal form of church government that was ruled by
the Crown and England’s clergy rather than by Rome’s Pope.