Politics, rhetoric and will-power in Julius Caesar

Abstract

All of Shakespeare’s history-plays and most of his tragedies deal with political problems, yet his critics, until quite recent times, have refused to take his politics seriously. I am particularly irritated by those who assume that in Julius Caesar the political implications are obvious, and are exactly the same as the politics in Shakespeare’s other works. The dramatist, we have read often enough, supported the ‘Elizabethan settlement’, a strong central government that promises the best chance of political order in unsettled times, and would have seen Julius Caesar as a regal figure, the Roman equivalent of Queen Elizabeth. To assassinate Queen Elizabeth would be manifestly wicked, we are told, in the eyes of all right-thinking Englishmen, therefore the murder of Julius Caesar is wicked, therefore all the political and moral questions raised by the play admit of straightforward solutions. Brutus and Cassius should not have done it; Rome needed Caesar, as England needed Elizabeth — is that really what Shakespeare thinks in this penetratingly political play?