3

ACT II 42

ACT III 79

ACT IV 116

ACT V 144

INDEX

I. WORDS AND PHRASES 169

II. QUOTATIONS FROM PLUTARCH 173

INTRODUCTION

NOTE. In citations from Shakespeare's plays and nondramatic poems the
numbering has reference to the Globe edition, except in the case of this
play, where the reference is to this edition.

I. SOURCES

No event in the history of the world has made a more profound impression
upon the popular imagination than the assassination of Julius Caesar.
Apart from its overwhelming interest as a personal catastrophe, it was
regarded in the sixteenth century as a happening of the greatest
historical moment, fraught with significant public lessons for all time.
There is ample evidence that in England from the beginning of
Elizabeth's reign it was the subject of much literary and dramatic
treatment, and in making the murder of "the mightiest Julius" the climax
of a play, Shakespeare was true to that instinct which drew him for
material to themes of universal and eternal interest.

THE MAIN STORY

I. _North's Plutarch._ There is no possible doubt that in _Julius
Caesar_ Shakespeare derived the great body of his historical material
from _The Life of Julius Caesar_, _The Life of Marcus Brutus_, and _The
Life of Marcus Antonius_ in Sir Thomas North's translation of
Plutarch.[1] This work was first printed in 1579 in a massive folio
dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. A second edition appeared in 1595, and in
all probability this was the edition read by Shakespeare. The title-page
is reproduced in facsimile on page ix. This interesting title-page
gives in brief the literary history of North's translation, which was
made not directly from the original Greek of Plutarch, but from a French
version by Jacques Amyot, bishop of Auxerre.[2] In 1603 appeared a third
edition with additional _Lives_ and new matter on the title-page.[3]
There were subsequent editions in 1612,[4] 1631, 1656, and 1676. The
popularity of this work attested by these reprintings was thoroughly
deserved, for North's Plutarch is among the richest and freshest
monuments of Elizabethan prose literature, and, apart altogether from
the use made of it by Shakespeare, is in itself an invaluable repertory
of