Julius Caesar

Probably written in 1599, Julius Caesar was the earliest of Shakespeare's three Roman history plays. Like Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, Julius Caesar is a dramatization of actual events, Shakespeare drawing upon the ancient Roman historian Plutarch's Lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Mark Antony as the primary source of the play's plot and characters. The play is tightly structured. It establishes the dramatic problem of alarm at Julius Caesar's ambition to become "king" (or dictator) in …

…battlefield at Philippi. Brutus realizes that all is lost. He asks several of his remaining loyal soldiers to kill him. One of them, Strato, agrees to hold a sword while Brutus runs himself through. Antony, Octavius and their forces arrive on the scene and see the corpse of Brutus. Antony praises the virtues of Brutus, while Octavius agrees to bury his former foe "with all respects and rites of burial" (V,v, l.77). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**