fined himself to the assassination of the Dictator. Sixteen years later Jacques Grévin, then a pupil at the college of Beauvais, wrote for presentation by his fellowcollegians a tragedy on the same topic, not in Latin, but in rhyming French verse. Grévin's play, like Muret's, is cast in the Senecan mould, with choruses of Caesar's soldiers, and long narratives in monologue, but he enlarged Muret's scope by borrowing hints from Plutarch's lives of Brutus and Mark Antony in addition to the life of Caesar. Grévin had much dramatic feeling. Calpurnia's fears and her appeal to Caesar to absent himself from the Senate on the fateful Ides of March are clothed by him in vivid language. The emotional and choleric temperament of Cassius is forcibly contrasted with the equable tenor of Brutus's disposition, and Grévin's last act presents with spirit the harangues of Brutus and Antony to the fickle mob. Grévin's tragedy acquired a wide reputation and inaugurated many traditions in the dramatic treatment of Caesar's death, which Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously developed.

Simultaneously, tragic writers of the French Renaissance, whose names enjoyed a more enduring fame than Grévin's, wrought out of Plutarch's Lives plays dealing with other incidents in the same period of Roman history. Jodelle produced in 1552 his tragedy of Cleopatra, which is often reckoned the parent of modern French tragedy. A little later, while Shakespeare was approaching manhood, an even more famous French dramatist, Robert Garnier, not only essayed anew the stirring topic of Antony and Cleopatra in the piece called Marc Antoine, but he adapted to the stage, in a tragedy called

Porcie, Plutarch's moving study of Brutus's brave wife Portia, while in a third tragedy called Cornélie (the widow of Pompey) Garnier invested with a genuinely dramatic significance such characters as Julius Caesar, Cicero, Mark Antony, Decimus Brutus, and Cassius. Cassius' speech glows throughout Garnier's drama of Cornélie with revolutionary ardour. Garnier's experiments in Roman tragedy are the more noteworthy in that two of them,- Marc Antoine and Cornélie - were both rendered into English, — the first by Sir Philip Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke (1594), and the second by Thomas Kyd (1595), - well before Shakespeare ventured into the Roman field.

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Meanwhile at home in England, for the best part of the half-century which preceded Julius Caesar, the English stage had offered a home to Caesar and his friends and foes. The Roman hero has some shadowy claim, indeed, to have dignified the very birth of English tragedy. According to the contemporary diarist, Henry Machyn, a play called "Julius Caesar" was acted at Queen Elizabeth's court in February, 1562, a month after the production there of Gorboduc, the primordial English tragedy. But of this incident no full knowledge is accessible.

It would appear that, when Caesar first figured in English tragedy, it was in the capacity not of Dictator, but of rival and ultimate conqueror of Pompey, his early friend and ally. The sour censor of theatres, Stephen Gosson, reports that a play concerning Caesar and Pompey attracted the favour of the playgoer about 1579, in the childhood of the first theatre which was erected in

London. Fifteen years later, when the theatres of the English capital had been organised on a secure basis, the enterprising manager, Philip Henslowe, produced a second effort on the same theme, with a sequel called simply "Caesar," of which the precise subject is unrecorded. None of these early Elizabethan experiments in Roman tragedy are extant. But the Pompeian fable maintained its hold on the London stage through Shakespeare's career, and has left later memorials in print. A third English play, "Caesar and Pompey," which was produced by students of Trinity College, Oxford, in 1607, survives in a published book, and subsequently George Chapman devoted his tragic genius to a new version of the topic, which may be found among his extant works. Shakespeare's brief references in his tragedy of Julius Caesar to Caesar's triumph over Pompey assume, on the part of the audience, some familiarity with Pompey's story. Its frequent adaptation to stage purposes in preceding years explains the easy allusiveness.

Meanwhile workers for the Elizabethan as for the contemporary French stage anticipated Shakespeare in dramatising the final catastrophe of Caesar's great career. There was a lost Latin piece called Caesar Interfectus by Richard Edes whom the critic Francis Meres credited with tragic gifts. It was produced by students at Oxford in 1582 during Shakespeare's boyhood. Very early in the seventeenth century, in May, 1602, the manager Henslowe, returning once again to Caesarian topics, commissioned four Elizabethans of fertile dramatic genius, Anthony Munday, Michael Drayton, John Webster, and Thomas Middleton, to write a tragedy to

be called Caesar's Fall. Fate has withheld from us the text of these two experiments in Roman drama. But possibly Shakespeare had the earlier of them in mind when he made Polonius in Hamlet recall his rendering "at the University," of the part of Julius Caesar and his mimic murder by Brutus in the Capitol.

The dramatic stream of Caesarism was not easily checked. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, despite its artistic superiority to anything that went before or after it, is by no means the final word of the Elizabethan or Jacobean drama on the tragic theme. William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, a poetic dramatist who shared Shakespeare's predilection for Plutarchan topics, produced in 1604, quite independently of Shakespeare, a stiff Senecan play of "Julius Caesar" in English rhyme, which covered once more the ancient story of the conspiracy and its immediate issue in the flight of the conspirators. There is evidence too that the assassination was through the early years of the seventeenth century a favourite topic for travelling puppet-shows, competing for the applause of the humblest pleasure-seeker with the Fall of Nineveh and the Destruction of Jerusalem. Of this wide dissemination through the dramatic hierarchy of Caesar's tragic story Shakespeare gives a plain reminiscence in the speeches of Brutus and Cassius over his bleeding corpse (III, i, 111–114):

"CASSIUS.

How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted o'er

In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

BRUTUS. How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport!"

IV

Too much of the work of Shakespeare's predecessors in Roman tragedy is lost to make it possible to define with absolute certainty its relation to his own. But while is it clear that Shakespeare was acquainted with the luxuriant Caesarian drama of older date, we may well doubt whether he owed to it aught beyond the impulse to handle the topic, a primary conception of its dramatic capacities, and a determination to challenge the rewards of its theatrical popularity. It is supererogatory to look elsewhere than in North's translation of Plutarch's Lives for the clues which Shakespeare followed. Only in the merest trifles is there sign that he studied other

sources.

From one of the lost Caesarian plays, Shakespeare may possibly have borrowed the hero's dying cry, "Et tu, Brute," which has no kind of classical authority.1 But the phrase appears as a colloquial tag in an extant English historical play (The True Tragedie of the Duke of Yorke, 1595), of earlier year than Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and it may have caught the dramatist's eye there. Plutarch failed to suggest that moving touch.

The Greek biographer too is not responsible for Shakespeare's oft-repeated error of placing the scene of Caesar's assassination in the Capitol. According to Plutarch and all classical historians, that episode passed in a hall which adjoined Pompey's theatre and was 1 See infra, III, i, 77, and note.