Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online

The play limped on in increasingly infrequent performances until 1780. In 1770, meanwhile, the play crossed the Atlantic to Philadelphia, where an advertisement promised “the noble struggles for liberty by that renowned patriot, Marcus Brutus.” 9 Brutus, understandably, became a revolutionary hero in young America.
    Following a thirty-year absence from the London stage, John Philip Kemble’s lavish 1812 production at Covent Garden remade the play as a spectacular with grand processions and displays.
Caesar
lent itself to the age’s penchant for historical re-creation, and Kemble’s production renewed interest in the play for the nineteenth-century pictorial stage. In 1823, Henry Kemble played Brutus in
The Death of Caesar; or, the Battle of Philippi
, which retained the main events of the play but relatively little of Shakespeare’s text. The next significant productions were those of William Charles Macready at Covent Garden (1838–39) and Drury Lane (1843), which utilized over a hundred extras “to lend complementary interest to the major movement of any given scene.” 10 Macready believed the assassination of Caesar should be the true focal point of the play and used his enormous cast to make the murder truly public, beginning a process that subsequently allowed Antony to whip them into a terrifying simulation of mass rioting.
    Samuel Phelps was Macready’s Cassius, contrasting fieriness with Brutus’ stoic calm, the classic dynamic of the pair. Phelps later directed several revivals in a similar vein at Sadler’s Wells between 1846 and 1862. In 1868, meanwhile,
Caesar
was one of the earliest Shakespeare plays adapted for the Japanese stage in a Kabuki-style production “which served as a protest play against the bureaucratic ‘law and order’ government.” 11 The international recognizability of its story and the potential for political appropriation allowed the play to cross cultural and linguistic borders.
    Classic tragedy was dominated in late nineteenth-century America by the partnership of Lawrence Barrett and Edwin Booth.Booth’s
Caesar
of 1871–72 in New York was his climactic achievement, both in its strong ensemble cast and its spectacular scenic set pieces, including a ritual cremation for Brutus. “Booth presented Brutus as the philosophical man rather than the warrior,” 12 following historical record rather than the American stage convention of a passionate figure, for which he received criticism. Barrett, by contrast, was the age’s defining Cassius: in the 1875 revival
    he presented Cassius with such subtlety of thought, such power of intellectual passion, such vigorous and sonorous eloquence, and such force of identification and spontaneity as could not, and did not, fail to command the warmest admiration and sympathy. 13
    In 1889 Osmond Tearle played Brutus in Stratford-upon-Avon, reviews of his performance articulating what was by now expected of the character. His performance was described as
    almost pre-Raphaelite in its attention to even the smallest detail … [he] brought out with rare skill the various phases of the character, the attributes of authority, suspicion, craft, superstitious fear, being blent with dignity, a beautiful speciousness, consummate worldly tact, pusillanimity, and that histrionic faculty of being “all things to all men.” 14
    The same critic accounted for weak performances in the female roles by suggesting that “in Julius Caesar there is no great part in which an actress can particularly distinguish herself.” 15 Only in the later twentieth century would the roles of Portia and Calpurnia become more celebrated.
    Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1898 production at Her Majesty’s was a triumph. The souvenir program explained:
    At Her Majesty’s it is not the historic band of conspirators that strikes the key note of the play. It is not even the mighty figure of Caesar treacherously brought low. It is the feverish, pulsing life of the imperial city.