Julius Caesar (Shakespeare Made Easy)

1.Helpful background information that puts each play in its historical perspective.

2.Discussion questions that teachers can use to spark student class participation, and which students can use as springboards for their own themes and term papers.

3.Fact quizzes, sample examinations, and other features that improve student comprehension of what each play is about.

Book Description
John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary.

In historical actuality, Caesar's murder was in some ways the pivot around which Rome transformed from a republic into an empire, and the play, which Shakespeare bases faithfully on Plutarch's histories, is ultimately about the political struggle that drives this transformation. The main conspirator against Caesar, and the one to deal him the final blow, is Brutus, who foresees nothing but tyranny if Caesar is made a king. There is something atavistic about his attitude, for he is descended from the family that was instrumental in turning the kingdom of Rome into a republic five centuries earlier.

The scenes leading up to Caesar's murder build with forceful tension. We see Brutus discussing with his co-conspirator Cassius the dangers of Caesar's ascension and Cassius's sympathetic response, the conspirators meeting at night to plan their attack on Caesar in the Capitol, Caesar's disregard of a soothsayer's prophecies of doom, and then the bloody climax, even after which the drama loses not a bit of momentum: Brutus appeals to the people (the Plebeians) that the assassination of Caesar, whom they loved and did not at all consider a potential tyrant, was only for their own good; while Mark Antony, one of Caesar's triumvirate and an eloquent orator, cajoles the people with demagogic irony into suspecting the murder happened for no reason other than malice.

Shakespeare fashions Caesar and Brutus more or less as two sides of the same denarius. Caesar is physically frail and deaf in one ear, but that doesn't preclude his triumphant success as a general and a military strategist. He is also pompous and fatuously vain -- there is nothing he fears more than to appear cowardly to his peers. Brutus is cut out of the same stock of hubris, but his motivations are purely altruistic. He loves Rome -- as a republic -- and will do anything to save it from a dictator, even kill a man he considers a friend and attempt to ally himself with foreign nations to wage a civil war against the armies of the now-empowered Roman triumvirate. Shakespeare brings all of this to light in a humanistic portrait of one of the most fascinating figures from history and his idealistic destroyer.


summaries excellent; easy to follow and study afterwards   January 23, 1999
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

i definitely recommend this book. i am a sophomore in high school, and i usually despise reading shakespearean works, but this book spells out everything for you and has review questions in the back to help you study. A++


Extremely helpful!   January 9, 2001
Dean E. Robertson (Wooster, OH USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I like Shakespeare, but find his language hard to decipher at times. Standard texts have footnotes to help you to understand how he uses certain words, but after looking up a few dozen of these, I find myself starting to lose the thread of the story line. The "Shakespeare Made Easy" approach has been a godsend for me. Now, whenever I run into a difficult passage, I can glance over to the other side of the book and read the same passage in plain English. A light bulb blinks on, and I say, "Aha! That's what this means!" Unfamiliar words are instantly translated for me as I see them in the context of a passage which I now understand fully. I've read Julius Caesar three or four times previously, but never so fluidly and with such enjoyment and understanding as I just did with the help of the "Shakespeare Made Easy" book.