…Beware the Ides of March…
 

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…Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous…
 

 

 

 

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…Not that I lov’d Caesar less, but that I lov’d Rome more….
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears…
 

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​...If you have tears, prepare to shed them now…
 

   And so it goes. I could have expanded several of these lines on for pages and still not quoted everything quotable from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Here is the clearest evidence, too, of The Bard’s contribution to his plays. Julius Caesar was a popular subject. Very popular versions of the play were produced in 1562 and 1582, and Bill stuck as near as he could to the story as written in Plutarch’s Lives—often merely translating the text into verse. But what verse! The difference between Shakespeare and the rest is seen in the lines above and many others like them. Those great lines are what his version had and the others did not, simple as that.
   Julius Caesar is a play of great poetry and innumerable quotable lines, but it isn’t very good as a play. It has the problem of being in two very different halves. The first half, up to Big Julie’s murder, is all dark corners and shadowy conspiracies, tight and claustrophobic, but once Marc Antony sets out on his mission of revenge, the whole thing opens out onto the battlefield and all the tension is completely lost, the evil whispering voices are now barking orders, the malevolent shadows now scattered by fire and sunlight.
   I’ve seen a number of versions, both on stage and in movies, and none of them works. The contrast is just too great. And there is also the fact that a couple of the prominent conspirators seem to get forgotten in the second half. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, since it was after all the circumstances of history that made the play so difficult to do. I’ll compromise and say that in my humble opinion, both halves are great plays.

Shakespeare Scoreboard:
Original plays 2. (MacBeth) (Henry IV Part One)
Plays ripped off from contemporaries 4. (Merchant from Marlowe’s Jew of Malta) (Hamlet from Kyd and Aeschylus)(Antony and Cleopatra—everywhere)(Julius Caesar—same place)