The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1599. It is one of several plays written by Shakespeare based on true events from Roman history, which also include Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra.
Although the play is named Julius Caesar, Brutus speaks more than four times as many lines as the title character; and the central psychological drama of the play focuses on Brutus' struggle between the conflicting demands of honor, patriotism, and friendship.

Why ‘Julius Caesar’ Speaks to Politics Today. With or Without

Trump

William Sturdivant, left, as Brutus, with Sid Solomon, in a 2012 production of “Julius Caesar” by the Acting Company with the Guthrie Theater. Credit Heidi Bohnenkamp

Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” has always been about more than killing Julius Caesar.

On the eve of World War II, Orson Welles staged a landmark anti-Fascist production with a Mussolini-like Caesar. The Royal Shakespeare Company recently set the play in Africa, powerfully evoking the continent’s dictators and civil wars. Five years ago, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis staged a production featuring the assassination of an Obama-esque Caesar by a group of right-wing conspirators.

But it’s the Public Theater in New York that finds itself in the middle of a pitched controversy, for its new staging of the play at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Oskar Eustis, the director, chose to make his Caesar decidedly Trumpian, giving him a shock of hair, an overlong red tie and a wife with a recognizably Slovenian accent. As all Caesars are, he’s killed in the middle of the play — bloodily — by Brutus and his band of co-conspirators.

[Outrage over a Shakespearan depiction of President Trump.]

That killing has driven Delta Air Lines and Bank of America to pull all or part of their sponsorship of the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park program, and thrust the theater into a maelstrom of criticism from President Trump’s supporters.

“Julius Caesar,” with assassination at its core, is politically fraught, and subject to multiple interpretations. The play was written during a tense moment when Elizabethan England seethed with political plots. In Catherine the Great’s Russia, copies of the play were removed from bookstores. Over the years, totalitarian regimes have banned or bowdlerized it. And audiences and scholars have long debated the play’s meaning, and the extent to which Shakespeare was sympathizing with the conspirators or condemning them.

“One thing about Shakespeare’s plays that makes them so alive is that they are extremely labile,” said Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar. “They go in a lot of different directions, and ‘Julius Caesar’ is a strong, extreme case of this.”

Arthur Anderson as Lucius, left, and Orson Welles as Brutus in the Mercury Theater production of “Julius Caesar,” with a Mussolini figure as the emperor. Credit Lucas & Pritchard Studio

Not that the play, in which the increasingly powerful Caesar is killed in the name of saving the republic, is pro-assassination. On this, most Shakespeare scholars agree.

“I think the general drift of it is: Be careful, you might get what you want,” Mr. Greenblatt said, noting the chaos and bloodshed the assassination unleashes. “The very thing that you think you’re doing to protect the republic can lead to the end of the republic.”

Leaders have been fascinated by the work. George Washington saw a production of the drama in 1790. Nelson Mandela annotated a copy when he was imprisoned on Robben Island for fighting apartheid in South Africa.

And the play became a staple of American public school reading lists, in part because it allowed teachers to discuss republicanism, said Brett Gamboa, an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth.

But like any work, the play, and the history it is based on, can be interpreted in different ways, and it has at times inspired violence. John Wilkes Booth acted in a production of “Julius Caesar” in New York City not long before he killed Lincoln, and complained after the assassination that he was being hunted “for doing what Brutus was honored for.” And Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of a failed attempt on Hitler’s life, reportedly kept a marked-up copy of “Julius Caesar” on his desk.

Stanley Wells, a prominent British Shakespeare scholar, said that Shakespeare seemed to anticipate the play’s long afterlife when he has Cassius, one of the conspirators, exclaim to Bru

“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare once wrote.
In recent weeks, that Shakespearean adage has been particularly resonant, with the New York Public Theater’s production of “Julius Caesar” attracting worldwide scrutiny because of the staged likeness between Caesar and President Trump.
Extolling the play as a masterpiece about power and political violence, director Oskar Eustis persuasively defended his interpretation as a warning about “what happens when you try to preserve democracy by nondemocratic means.”
Others, however, questioned whether this production was in good taste – and denounced it for encouraging violence against President Trump, particularly the scene in which Caesar is stabbed to death. Due to the backlash, Delta Airlines and Bank of America withdrew their corporate sponsorship.
In some ways, the contention – even rancor – of these debates about the Public Theater production would have delighted, and perhaps bemused, Shakespeare. They articulate the richness and urgency of our own democratic struggles – similar to the rich political complexity reflected in Shakespeare’s text itself.

Caesar in Shakespeare’s times

As Shakespeare wrote the play, he drew on Roman history, a popular topic in 16th-century England. But he was also commenting on the political conflicts of the era. The power struggles depicted in “Julius Caesar” mirrored ongoing concerns in England with legitimacy, tyranny and potential threats of rebellion and deposition against Queen Elizabeth I, who did not have an heir. These anxieties were also exacerbated by historical memories of the Wars of the Roses, a series of civil conflicts that took place between 1455 and 1487.
Shakespeare’s Rome is a place of brutal struggles between democratic ideals and human ambition. The assassination of Caesar is one of the most important events in Roman history, and Shakespeare had inherited over 1,600 years of ambiguity, with little consensus over whether Caesar’s killing was justified. He incorporated these debates into his play, offering his viewers multiple perspectives on the characters. Caesar is either a heroic, benevolent ruler or tyrant; Brutus is either a patriot or assassin.
Shakespeare’s Caesar is clearly a leader and politician with power – including some vanity and propensity to flattery – but also with wide popular appeal. When he returns triumphant from wars, the conspirators fear he will become a tyrant, a “Colossus” whereby the “wide walls” of Republican Rome “encompass’d but one man.”
Yet he seems to love and trust his fellow Romans, warmly inviting Brutus and other conspirators to share wine. And we also learn he bequeaths to his people, on his death, his personal possessions: To every Roman citizen he gives “seventy-five drachmas” and “all his walks, His private arbours and new-planted orchards” for public use.
Shakespeare also gives Brutus, the leader of the assassination plot, a refined conscience throughout the play. It’s evident in the many discussions Brutus has with his fellow conspirators, and it’s summed up when he describes his motivation for killing Caesar: “If then [any] friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, then my answer: Not that I loved Caesar less but that I loved Rome more.”
“Julius Caesar” offers a complicated, even poignant vision at the end. It ends in civil war and the defeat of the conspirators, following their internal dissensions and accusations of betrayal. Brutus commits suicide, but Mark Antony and Octavius, Julius Caesar’s grandnephew, victorious at the end, acknowledge Brutus’s nobility and wish to bury him with honor. Toward the close of Shakespeare’s next Roman play, “Antony and Cleopatra,” we see Octavius Caesar emerge as the singular ruler of Rome. Importantly, then, the Republican, democratic ideal is defeated, both in the play and in the Western world (until the American Revolution).

A deeply democratic offering

Overall, this picture of a divided Rome – a mix of power politics, of stoic ideals giving way to ego – should give pause to modern audiences. From the shifting perspectives on competing ambitions we learn that all rigid value judgments of “good” and “evil” politicians can be relative – and problematic – in our contingent world.

Various interpretations and performances of ‘Julius Caesar’ are constantly in production, like the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version of the play. Photo by Helen Maybanks © RSC, 2017

Yet, the ideals of democracy – in Rome and in our own times – have to be constantly guarded against demagogues, who also may be idealists, of all political stripes. Productions of “Julius Caesar” have typically evoked topical political analogies. Even seemingly traditional, period productions, such as the current Royal Shakespeare Company’s version in Britain, resonate with topical relevance, enabling the audience to deduce connections to today’s political climate.
It may be true – as some have suggested – that the analogy between Julius Caesar and Donald Trump is a bit forced. Regardless, the production is, as one reviewer put it, “a deeply democratic offering, befitting both the Public and the public – and the times.”
As a researcher and teacher of Renaissance drama, I’ve studied Shakespeare’s role as a cultural icon across different societies, cultures and eras. It seems that no matter where (and when) his works are being performed, they provide us with a complex, poetic language for imagining and interpreting the intractable world in which we live.

During politically contentious times, it’s befitting that we turn more – rather then less – to Shakespeare.

All too Human

Monday 12 March 2018