Ant.

"Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold Our Caesar's vesture wounded? Look you here. Here is himself, marr'd, as you see, with traitors."

Julius Cæsar. Act 3, Scene 2.

PREFACE

By ISRAEL GOLLANCZ, M.A.

THE FIRST EDITION

Julius Cæsar was first published in the Folio of 1623. It was printed with exceptional care, and its text is so accurate, that (as the Cambridge editors rightly observe) it may perhaps have been printed from the original manuscript of the author. In this respect it contrasts strongly with the play preceding it in the Folio, the tragedy of Timon of Athens. It would seem that the printing of Julius Cæsar was proceeded with before the Editors had procured the copy for Timon.

The play is mentioned in the Stationers' Registers, under date of November 8, 1623, as one of sixteen plays not previously entered to other men.

THE SOURCE OF THE PLOT

Shakespeare derived his materials for Julius Cæsar from Sir Thomas North's famous translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, and more especially from the Lives of Cæsar, Brutus, and Antony. In this play, as in the case of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, it is impossible to over-estimate Shakespeare's debt to North's monumental version of the work which has been described as "most sovereign in its dominion over the minds of great men in all ages." In Julius Cæsar, as in the other Roman plays, the dramatist has often borrowed

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North's very expressions, while "of the incident there is almost nothing which he does not owe to Plutarch." Nevertheless, a comparison of the play with its original reveals the poet's transforming power; he has thrown "a rich mantle of poetry over all, which is not wholly his

own.

99 2

The literary history of North's book is briefly summarized on its title-page:-"The Lives of the Noble Grecians, compared together by that grave learned philosopher and historiographer PLUTARKE OF CHERONIA, translated out of Greek into French by JAMES AMYOт, Abbot of Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, one of the King's Privy Council, and great Amner of France, and now out of French into English by THOMAS NORTH. 1579." 3

Specially noteworthy is Shakespeare's compression of the action, for the purposes of dramatic representation, e. g. (i) Cæsar's triumph is made coincident with the Lupercalia (historically it was celebrated six months be1 One example will suffice to show the correspondence of the verse and prose:

"I dare assure thee that no enemy

Shall ever take alive the noble Brutus:

The gods defend him from so great a shame!
When you do find him, or alive or dead,

He will be found like Brutus, like himself."

(V. iv. 21-25.

Cp. "I dare assure thee, that no enemy hath taken or shall take Marcus Brutus alive, and I beseech God keep him from that fortune: for wheresoever he be found, alive or dead, he will be found like himself" (North's Life of Brutus).

2 Vide Trench's Lectures on Plutarch (pp. 64-66).

3 The best modern edition is in Mr. Nutt's "Tudor Translations”; Vol. I. contains an excellent introductory study by Mr. Wyndham. Prof. Skeat's Shakespeare's Plutarch (Macmillan) is a valuable and handy book for students.

It is impossible to say which edition of North's Plutarch was used by Shakespeare: new editions appeared in 1595, 1603, and 1612. As far as Julius Cæsar is concerned the choice is limited to the first and second editions. The Greenock 1612 edition, with the initials W. S. and with some suggestive notes in the Life of Julius Cæsar, was certainly not used for the present play.