Julius Caesar : the Making of a Diptych

Abstract

When Shakespeare came to write Julius Caesar he had found a great deal in Plutarch which he had not learnt from Holinshed, not only about Roman ways and mores but about the minds of men engaged in great public affairs, and, not least, about the insights to be gained by comparing vigorous personalities activated by different ideals and philosophies but performing similar or related parts on the stage of the world. It was after studying Plutarch’s Parallel Lives that he juxtaposed Brutus and Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, Brutus and Antony, and Portia and Calphurnia in a play which itself is a two-part working-out of both a personal and a political antithesis.