s not indicated in any of Shakespeare's
historical sources. The fact that Weever states in his Dedication that
the _Mirror_ "some two years agoe was made fit for the print" has been
held by Mr. Percy Simpson[1] to indicate that the play was not brought
out later than 1599, a conclusion supported, he thinks, by a passage in
Ben Jonson's _Every Man out of His Humour_, produced in that year, where
Clove (III, i) says, "Then coming to the pretty animal, as _Reason long
since is fled to animals_, you know," which may be a sneering allusion
to Antony's "O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts" (III, ii,
104). The "_Et tu, Brute_" quotation in the same play has been used to
strengthen the argument. But the lines from the _Mirror of Martyrs_
quoted above may easily have been inserted by Weever into his poem in
consequence of the popularity of Shakespeare's play. This contemporary
popularity is well attested. Leonard Digges,[2] in his verses _Upon
Master William Shakespeare_ prefixed to the 1640 edition of
Shakespeare's Poems, thus compares it with that of Ben Jonson's Roman
plays:

So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare,
And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were
_Brutus_ and _Cassius_: oh how the Audience
Were ravish'd, with what new wonder they went thence,
When some new day they would not brooke a line
Of tedious (though well laboured) _Catiline_;
_Sejanus_ too was irkesome, they priz'de more
Honest _Iago_, or the jealous _Moore_.

[Footnote 1: In _Notes and Queries_, February, 1899.]

[Footnote 2: Leonard Digges also wrote verses "To the Memorie of the
deceased Authour Maister W. Shakespeare," prefixed to the First Folio.]

"Fustian" Clove's quotation may apply to references to the Pythagorean
doctrine of the transmigration of souls in Shakespeare's earlier plays
and other Elizabethan literature; and little can be based upon the "_Et
tu, Brute_" quotation, as Ben Jonson may have drawn it from the same
source as Shakespeare did.

On the other hand, Henslowe in his _Diary_ under May 22, 1602, notes
that he advanced five pounds "in earneste of a Boocke called _sesers
Falle_," which the dramatists Munday, Drayton, Webster, Middleton "and
the Rest" were composing for Lord Nottingham's Company. _Caesar's Fall_
was plainly intended to outshine Shakespeare's popular play, but, as
Professor Herford comments, "the lost play ... for the rival company
would have been a somewhat tardy counterblast to an ol