Shakespeare squeezed weeks of Roman history into a single day
In Julius Caesar, the assassination, the funeral speeches, the reading of the will and Octavius's arrival all happen on one day. In real life they spread from 15 March to May. Shakespeare compressed, moved and invented freely, even handing Caesar a famous dying line that the ancient historians never recorded.
The play was probably written and first staged in 1599. A Swiss visitor, Thomas Platter the Younger, noted a performance in his diary that September, while Francis Meres left it off his 1598 list of Shakespeare's plays. It was among the first productions at the Globe, but the only authoritative text is the one printed in the First Folio of 1623, which scholars think was set from a theatre prompt-book. Shakespeare's main source was Thomas North's 1579 English translation of Plutarch's Lives.
The departures from history are deliberate. Caesar's triumph over Pompey's sons is moved to the Lupercalia festival on 15 February, six months after it really happened. The killing takes place on the Capitoline Hill rather than in the Curia of Pompey. Historically the will was published on 18 March and the funeral held on 20 March, and the two Battles of Philippi, 20 days apart, become one. Elizabethan details creep in too: Caesar wears a doublet, and Brutus hears a clock strike.
Et tu, Brute? is the most famous invention, though not Shakespeare's alone. Plutarch and Suetonius both said Caesar died silent, Plutarch adding that he drew his toga over his head on seeing Brutus, and the Latin phrase had already become conventional in earlier Elizabethan writing. The contrast between Brutus's reasoned speech and Mark Antony's emotional oration, which opens with a call to friends, Romans and countrymen, turns the crowd and drives the second half.
Despite the title, critics often treat Brutus as the tragic hero, a man torn between friendship and the republic and steered by Cassius into mistakes. The play landed at an anxious moment: Elizabeth I refused to name a successor, and the classicist Maria Wyke has argued that fear of a Roman-style civil war after her death gave the drama extra force for its first audiences.
Source: Julius Caesar (play)
