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house. The nobles, rival playwrights, short-hand writers, and the young dandies sat or sprawled on the stage, a continual bother to the players. There was no scenery and the women's parts were assumed by boys. The stage was probably hung with some kind of tapestry or cloth, blue for a comedy, black for a tragedy; a rude sign indicated where the scene was laid. There was a raised platform at the back of the stage which served as a cave, a room, a family vault, etc. Above it, on pillars, may have been a balcony which served for the walls of a besieged town, Juliet's balcony, or any such thing. The marvel is that Elizabethan auditors could obtain any illusion from such simple means; yet there are some to-day who would cheerfully go back to these methods if only actors could give something of the needed inspiration to their work. Nevertheless, one cannot help suspecting that Shakspere, the stage-manager, would have taken uncontrolled delight, as Richard Wagner did, in all the mechanical appliances of the modern stage.

Even in Elizabeth's day Puritanism was beginning to show itself, and the theatre was looked upon as loose and immoral. In consequence, the playhouses were banished to a remote and thinly populated district across the river, where they attracted both within and without a crowd of disreputable followers. The wonder is that, writing for such an audience, the dramatists kept their work to so high a standard as they did. And yet that Shakspere pleased these people is surely much in their favour.

II. PUBLICATION AND DATE OF "JULIUS CÆSAR"

It was not until 1623, seven years after his death, that any effort was made to publish a collected edition of Shakspere's works. Except for the poems "Venus and

'See Brandes, page 104.

Adonis" and "Lucrece," there is no evidence that he ever prepared for the press any of the productions of his pen. Many of the quarto editions of separate plays printed during his lifetime were pirated and set up from imperfect and (apparently) shorthand copies taken in the theatre during the performance of the plays; yet Shakspere seems to have been indifferent. Some biographers reason that the theatre was distasteful to him, and that he cared for it but as a means to establish the fortunes of his family; others maintain that he considered his poems literature, and his dramas mere business commodities. Such views overlook the art of the plays; the highest creative art can never be wholly commercial, though great artists sometimes make fortunes.

It is to two of Shakspere's fellow-actors-Heminge and Condell that we owe the publication of the 1623 folio Shakspere; these obscure men, therefore, brought absolutely the most priceless gift to English letters. It was their aim "so to have publish'd them, as where (before) you were abus'd with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed [i.e., published] them —even those are now offered to your view cur'd and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them." This explains the differences between the folio copy and the earlier quarto editions.

In the folio appeared twenty plays never, so far as we know, printed before; one of these was "Julius Cæsar." The text throughout the book, shows plentiful lack of editing; many passages are so corrupt as to exhaust modern ingenuity to fathom and restore. "Julius Cæsar," however, has suffered less than most other plays in the volume, and though editors have fussed here and there, the text to-day stands in all essentials about as it is found in the original print.

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Heminge and Condell grouped the plays, without regard to the order of their production, under the heads of "Julius Cæsar Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. stands among the tragedies, before "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "King Lear," and "Othello," about where it belongs. chronologically. Two of the most stupendous tragedies, "Coriolanus" and "Timon of Athens," precede it; after those Titanic upheavals of Shakspere's genius, "Julius Cæsar," with its note of calm melancholy and its measured verse, has the slightest suggestion of anti-climax. Fortunately, however, the plays are seldom read in that order.

From internal and external evidence it is supposed that "Julius Cæsar" was produced somewhere between 1601 and 1603. In language, it has several points of resemblance to "Hamlet," which must have been played, even if in crude, early form, before it was entered in 1602 on the Stationers' Company's Register. Brandes, from the likeness of the chief characters of the two plays in motive and action, assumes that "Julius Cæsar " was written just before "Hamlet." Brutus and Hamlet are both thrust into action from a life of contemplation: Brutus is an idealist; Hamlet, a scholar and dreamer. Both are

unfit. for the work they are called upon to do, and both, in the end, bungle it badly; Hamlet from procrastination and uncertainty, Brutus from mistaken judgment. The study of the idealist thrown into the world of action must have appealed to Shakspere's imagination, and those critics do not seem far afield who consider Brutus the sketch from which Hamlet was built up.

III. SOURCE OF THE PLOT

THOUGH there were several earlier plays on the subject of Julius Cæsar, Shakspere seems to have used none of

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them in the preparation of his tragedy. The materials for the play all lie embedded in North's translation of Plutarch, published in 1579, and based, not on the Greek original, but on Amyot's French translation. From the lives of Cæsar, Brutus, and Antony in this volume, Shakspere built up the splendid drama of political intrigue in ancient Rome. We know that he always used whatever in the sources of his plots seemed worthy of preservation, but often that was little more than a bare outline. Here, on the contrary, the student of Shakspere, on reading the North Plutarch, is almost shocked, at first, to see how many touches in the play that seemed to him peculiarly Shakesperian are adapted almost without change from the "Lives."

Can any lines seem more in the master's spirit than those noble words of Brutus:

"Countrymen,

My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.

I shall have glory by this losing day
More than Octavius and Mark Antony
By this vile conquest shall attain unto."

Yet in his North's Plutarch Shakspere read:

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'It rejoiceth my heart that not one of my friends hath failed me at my need. For as for me, I think myself happier than they that have overcome, considering that I leave a perpetual fame of virtue and honesty, the which our enemies the conquerors shall never attain unto by force or money," etc.

So, too, the scene between Cassius and Brutus, a little before, is reproduced largely from North, Cassius' question, "What are you then determined to do?" being changed but from the second person singular of the original, and Brutus' answer being largely found in the answer in North, beginning, "I trust (I know not how) a certain

rule of philosophy by the which I did greatly blame and reprove Cato for killing himself, as being no lawful or godly act, touching the gods," etc.

Sometimes it is only a hint Shakspere requires. Thus North's "For it was said that Antonius spake it openly divers times that he thought that of all them that had slain Cæsar, there was none but Brutus only that was moved to do it, as thinking the act commendable of itself; but that all the other conspirators did conspire his death. for some private malice or envy that they otherwise did bear against him," becomes Shakspere's justly famous

"All the conspirators, save only he,

Did that they did in envy of great Cæsar;

He only, in a general honest thought

And common good to all, made one of them," etc.

Of course the best instance of this in the play is the celebrated oration of Antony. So far as we know, that great piece of rhetoric grew from these words in North's Plutarch: "Afterwards, when Cæsar's body was brought into the market-place, Antonius making his funeral oration in praise of the dead, according to the ancient custom of Rome, and perceiving that his words moved the common people to compassion, he framed his eloquence to make their hearts yearn the more; and taking Cæsar's gown all bloody in his hand, he laid it open to the sight of them all, showing what a number of cuts and holes it had upon it. Therewithal the people fell presently into such a rage and mutiny For some of them cried out : 'Kill the murtherers'; others plucked up forms, tables and stalls about the market place," etc.

And it is not only ideas; sometimes it is words he thus freely borrows. The latter part of the last extract gives the source of the Shaksperian "Pluck down benches. Pluck down forms, windows, anything," just as North's

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