Okay, let's start then. Thanks for coming back to listen to this lecture on Julius Caesar.

So, Julia Caesar comes from a period of extraordinary output by Shakespeare at the very end of the 16th century.

As James Shapiro has discussed brilliantly in his book 1599 a year in the life of Shakespeare,

between the autumn of 1598 and the end of 1599, you can pretty confidently date,

much ado about nothing, as you like it, Henry V, probably initial work on Hamlet as well as

Julius Caesar. And that's quite interesting grouping. We tend to always think about

Julia Caesar in terms of its Roman themes and alongside other Roman plays, Corridanus Antony and Cleopatra,

with which obviously shares some narrative connections, and maybe Titus Antoinicus.

There are lectures on these plays already.

What I'm going to try and suggest in this lecture is some of the ways in which Julius Caesar might fit in that 1599 cluster rather than in that already pretty well-known kind of Romanitas

sort of narrative which fits it with other Roman plays.

Okay, so the play itself.

Julia Caesar tells us about the assassination by Cassius and Brutus of the Roman leader Julius Caesar.

Caesar is killed in the capital, right in the middle of the play.

Rival orations over his body persuade the people of Rome to interpret this not as a road to their freedom,

but as an act of violent treachery. The assassins are driven from Rome, they're ultimately defeated in a battle with the forces of Mark Anthony and Octavia Caesar.

Now it's quite hard to give a more elaborate summary since the question of what all this means and how to interpret it

is in fact the whole business of the play.

So I've tried to avoid the question of judgment,

but it's clearly something which was always hanging over

the assassination of Caesar.

It was a classic classroom exercise in the 16th century grammar school, one that I'm sure Shakespeare did,

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