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

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To celebrate William Shakespeare on his birthday in April, I'll be studying three of the Bard's plays which I've not yet seen. My Shakespeare plan is to locate a staging of the play, listening to and watching it on my Macbook while I follow along to as much as of the original text as is incorporated in the production. Later, I read the entire play in the modern English version. A good friend I've had since high school recommended this system to me and I think this has been a very good system for delighting the mind in Shakespeare. This month, I plan to dive into three of Shakespeare's political dramas.

Is maybe Shakespeare implying that the popular man, the leader, is but a “Hollow Man”, a stuffed creature, whose public image serves to disguise his true personality? What is there to hide about mankind that can’t stand the glance of common citizens? Where is his true spirit left to wander about?Mark Antony brings his ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech, a masterly piece of oratory, to a rousing end with an appeal to personal emotion, claiming that seeing Rome so corrupted by hatred and blinded by unreason has broken his heart. He concludes, however, with a final line that offers a glimmer of hope, implying that if Rome would only recover itself, he would be all right again. Anne bore him Susanna Shakespeare, and twins Hamnet Shakespeare and Judith Shakespeare. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company, later known as the King's Men.

I haven't started reading this, but I did have to do some research on Ceaser and here is a fun fact: comparing Caesar to Trump is unfair?? Caesar cared about poor people how is that comparable to our current president CASSIUS: Good, he's dead. Now to hold a huge funeral and let his best friend deliver the eulogy to the large, violence-prone mob.In Part 3, Professor Dobson offers close-readings of some of the play’s most important speeches, including Brutus’s deliberation over Caesar’s assassination and the rival speeches given by Brutus and Antony to “Friends, Romans, countrymen” at Caesar’s funeral — speeches that display the potential power of rhetoric. Act one, Scene 2. CASSIUS: Men at some time are masters of their fates: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. Brutus and Caesar: what should be that 'Caesar'? Why should that name be sounded more than yours? 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! The Folio prints three short lines in succession, and scansion shows that two of them can be linked as a single pentameter, leaving the third as an independent short line. But which two should be linked? On the grounds of scansion alone, Cassius' short line can be assigned to fill out the partial pentameter of either Brutus or Casca. Bowers noted that Shakespeare tends to associate independent short lines with the end of speeches, rather than the beginning, and Bowers therefore advocated that in a case like this one, the short line be assigned to Brutus, rather than to Casca ("Establishing," 82-3), and Sicherman noted that implied pauses following a true short line often provide clues to characterization. Both critics support the conclusion, then, that in this case, the short line should be regarded as the metrical conclusion of Brutus' speech, and Casca's half line should be regarded as the metrical beginning of Cassius' partial pentameter. Cassius takes his lead from Brutus, in other words, and Casca takes his from Cassius, but Cassius pauses briefly before assenting, and the pause is signaled in Brutus' half line. If all the lines are printed as short, as in the Folio, this distinction is lost, whereas indention helps to clarify it.

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. Antony reminds the Romans that at the festival of Lupercalia (held in mid-February, around the same time as our modern Valentine’s Day; so just a month before Caesar was assassinated), he publicly presented Julius Caesar with a crown, but Caesar refused it three times (remember, he was ‘just’ a general, a military leader: not an emperor). Again, Antony appeals to the crowd: does this seem like the action of an ambitious man?

For one thing, signaling the shared pentameter as a single metrical line distinguishes it for readers and actors from the independent short line. In the passage quoted above, five of the eight lines are short in the Folio, but only two ( TLN 90 and 93) are independent short lines (i.e., they cannot be combined with another partial line to form a pentameter). Chambers noted that Shakespeare tended to increase the number of short lines as his writing matured, so that A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, has five, whereas King Lear has 191, and Julius Caesar, written in mid-career, has 108 (Wright, 294-95). The pattern is not invariable ( Cymbeline and The Tempest have fewer short lines than Julius Caesar), but it is nonetheless an important stylistic marker. Moreover, the metrical pattern is much harder for the reader and actor (who must speak the lines with an awareness of their verse pattern) to detect, if independent short lines are not distinguished typographically from shared pentameters. no picture-taking was allowed so these are media images - you'll have to take my word for it that I was there The first editions in this series were published by Routledge, before moving to Thomson. They then moved to Cengage Learning. In December 2008, the series returned to Methuen, becoming part of Methuen Drama, its original publisher. From February 2013, the titles appeared under the Bloomsbury imprint. [10] People widely regard William Shakespeare (baptized 26 April 1564) as the greatest writer in the language and the pre-eminent dramatist of the world. They often call him simply the national "bard of Avon." Surviving writings consist of 38 dramas, two long narratives, and several other books. People translate them into every major living language and performed them most often. Bowers, Fredson. "The Copy for Shakespeare's Julius Caesar." South Atlantic Bulletin 43. 4 (1978), 28-36.

Julius Caesar’s tragedy is so closely bound up with that of his friend-turned-assassin Brutus that perhaps William Shakespeare should have titled this play Caesar and Brutus. His 1599 play’s title, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, draws the reader's or playgoer's focus to one of history’s truly seminal moments: Caesar’s assassination on March 15 (“the Ides of March”) in the year 44 B.C. Yet for all the title’s focus on Caesar alone, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is very much a twinned tragedy, with not one but two tragic heroes following the Aristotelian cycle of hubris (fatal character flaw), hamartia (fatal decision), and anagnorisis (the hero's after-the-fall recognition of their place in the cosmos). And it is a play that gains further resonance from considering the English historical context within which Shakespeare lived and wrote. Arden Shakespeare has also published a Complete Works of Shakespeare, which reprints editions from the second and third series but without the explanatory notes. Clark, William George and William Aldis Wright, eds. Julius Caesar. Works of William Shakespeare. 9 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1863-66. For a modern interpretation of the fall of Caesar and the fall of Rome, look no further than Mean Girls. This cinematic classic sees Regina George as a dictator-like queen bee in suburban Chicago high school and her inevitable fall from power at the hands of betrayal from her friends. Et tu, Brute indeed.The general editors for this series are Suzanne Gossett of Loyola University Chicago; John Jowett of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham; and Gordon McMullan of King's College London. Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen, eds. The Royal Shakespeare Company Shakespeare. New York: Modern Library, 2007.