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“... extreme sophistication of a play which has no kind, but can hold and move its audience entirely. Julius Caesar, coldly clear-cut and sonorous, reddens its black and white Roman world with the fountain of blood at its secret centre. And then there is Hamlet. Hamlet is too large to include in a list: it crowned and summarised everything Shakespeare wrote ...”

“... histories that coalesced over a decade into a six-volume History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 that sold in vast quantities. He took uncomplicated pleasure in his fame and commercial success, and by the time of his death in 1776 at the age of 65 he prided himself on being ‘not only independent, but ...”

“... or James Tyrone. His one shot at Shakespeare was as Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), where he amazed many doubters and impressed John Gielgud (his Cassius), by handling the verse as easily as he had muttered and snarled in Streetcar and The Wild One. But he did make movies, like Désirée, Teahouse of the August ...”

“... be comfortable. Yet it was this very political content which assisted Shakespeare’s apotheosis. Julius Caesar was adapted so as to legitimise tyrannicide and by implication the events of 1688. And in the 1730s, the opponents of Walpole campaigned (successfully) for a monument to the Bard in Westminster Abbey as a way of advertising their superior ...”

“... Abbey statue of Shakespeare, even contributing a prologue for the benefit performance of Julius Caesar that the countess organised in 1738. When the family gave up their holdings in Barbados, however, is less clear, and the sale of their interest in Carolina is unlikely to have been an exercise in disinvestment motivated by abolitionism. The 4th ...”

“... in obscurity. A few quotations roughly suggest the stages by which this development occurred. In Julius Caesar, one of the first Globe plays as well as a play with deep political interests, Brutus has to decide whether to join the conspiracy against Caesar. So here is a man thinking about something we take to be ...”

“... they are early and relatively unimportant (although Henry V was probably written only just before Julius Caesar). Kermode suggests that the prison scene at the end of Richard II marks a stage in the emergence of characters who think in verse, and shows ‘signs of a language formidably changing to meet greater challenges’, and that in Henry IV ...”

“... many conservative texts by foregrounding, rather than eliding, the debates. Paulin concedes that Julius Caesar may reveal a ‘closet republicanism’. These two plays alone show that there was a far more sophisticated awareness of republican institutions in Renaissance England than many critics, and historians, have conceded. Ben Jonson’s Roman ...”

“... of effort’, there were strings of leading questions ‘something like this’: Q. Did not Julius Caesar invade Britain? A. He did. Q. Was it not in the year 55 BC? A. It was. Q. Was he later assassinated in Rome? A. He was. Q. Did not his friend Brutus take a part in assassinating him? A. He did. It sounds crazy, yet rings a ...”

“... in England and Wales would be tested on one of three Shakespeare plays – Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later it emerged that all that most pupils will face is a test based on extracts of verse and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr Patten, who has no powers to control ...”

“... certain symptomatic patterns and outcomes. Shakespeare and his audiences were familiar with agues. Julius Caesar greets one of the plotters with the assurance that he was ‘ne’re so much your enemy/As that ague which hath made you lean’, and Caliban, shaking and shivering, is thought to be ‘some monster of the isle with four legs, who hath got, as ...”

“... philosophers, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, the Amazons Camilla and Penthesilia, Aeneas, Julius Caesar, the sultan Saladin, and others renowned for their wisdom or courage. Virgil himself, consigned to the same realm, explains that together ‘sanza speme vivemo in disio’ – ‘we live in desire without hope.’Virgil’s​ damnation has ...”

“... Great), Kant, Catherine (the Great), Plato, Alexander (the Great), Aristotle, Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Constantine, ‘the Anarchs old’ – before describing ‘how and by what paths I have been brought/To this dread pass’.One spring morning, Rousseau found himself ‘asleep/Under a mountain’ beside a ‘gentle rivulet’ when a ...”

“... like St Paul, Joan of Arc and Van Gogh, may or may not have had epilepsy, and some of whom, like Julius Caesar, Dostoevsky and Harriet Tubman, almost certainly did. He also keeps vigil over his brother, determined ‘to discover what it was that marked him with epilepsy’ – how he had been changed by the condition and what it was that made him ...”

“... detail takes the place of the speculatively personal. If 1599 – when Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like It, as well as beginning Hamlet – was ‘the most decisive year of his career, one in which he redefined himself and his theatre’, that transformation could be understood only in relation to the year’s turbulent ...”