The play has been read as an unambiguous condemnation of the assassination and the conspirators and a glorification of Caesar. In their explicit interpretation of the assassination, Brutus and Cassius engage in the kind of unequivocal reading that past critics have imposed on the play as a whole. Subsequent events prove them wrong, as Rome's populace will not glorify the conspiratorsĪs liberators but will, after Antony's funeral oration, drive them from Rome as traitorous assassins. The final irony of the passage lies in the obviously mistaken gloss Brutus and Cassius impose on the assassination. 3 Furthermore, Cassius refers to multiple performances, and later stagings of Julius Caesar up to the present multiply the potential references for a twenty-first-century reader or audience. 2 Moreover, the allusion, like the other metadramatic references in the play, has been thought to refer to the popularity of Roman subjects in general on Elizabethan stages. The reference to a play, however, is not necessarily to Shakespeare's work but can refer to other dramatizations of the same subject matter.

Shakespeare, in fact, may have been especially concerned with the nature of his craft when composing the play since Julius Caesar is thought to be the first play performed at the new Globe Theatre in 1599. There is the obvious self-referentiality of the actors, who emphasize the disjunction between the place and time of the historical event they are portraying and its dramatic re-enactment. The irony of this passage operates on several levels. In states unborn, and accents yet unknown!īrutus: How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport, Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, immediately after the assassination, Brutus and Cassius make the following metadramatic allusion:

Julius caesar quotes of justification