Julius Caesar

Shakespeare may have written Julius Caesar to be the first of his plays to take the stage at his acting company’s new Globe theater in 1599. At this important point in his career as a playwright, Shakespeare turned to a key event in Roman history.

Many people in the Renaissance were passionately interested in the story of Caesar’s death at the hands of his friends and fellow politicians. There was much debate about who were the villains and who were the heroes. According to the fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante, Brutus and Cassius, the foremost of the conspirators who killed Caesar, were traitors who deserved an eternity in hell. But, in the view of Shakespeare’s contemporary Sir Philip Sidney, Caesar was a rebel threatening Rome, and Brutus was the wisest of senators.

Shakespeare’s dramatization of Caesar’s assassination and its aftermath has kept this debate alive among generations of readers and playgoers. Is Brutus the true hero of this tragedy in his principled opposition to Caesar’s ambition to become king of Rome? Or is Caesar the tragic hero, the greatest military and civic leader of his era, struck down by lesser men misled by jealousy and false idealism?

By continuing to address these questions, our civilization engages not only in the enjoyment of a great play but also in an examination of the ways it chooses to govern itself, whether through the rule of the one (Caesarism, monarchy) or the rule of the many (republicanism).

A traveler’s account confirms that Julius Caesar was performed in 1599. The play’s first known publication was in 1623 in the First Folio. Among Shakespeare’s sources for the play was North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives.

King John

        Like most of Shakespeare’s history plays, King Johnpresents a struggle for the crown of England. In this play, however, the struggle is located much further back in English history than is usual in Shakespeare’s plays, and, perhaps for this reason, it is waged with a strikingly cold-blooded brutality.

Most of the contestants for the throne are the descendants of King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. The couple’s eldest son, King Richard I or Richard Coeur de Lion, has already been killed before the play begins. The Duke of Austria, presented in the play as Richard's killer, enters wearing as a trophy the lion's skin taken from his victim. The play explains that Richard Coeur de Lion came by the skin and by his name when he ripped out the heart of a lion sent to attack him.

Richard’s royal kin who compete to occupy the throne he vacated possess none of Coeur de Lion’s legendary heroism; but John, the late Richard’s younger brother, who holds the English crown when the play opens, lacks none of Richard’s savagery. John’s opponent is a boy, Arthur, the son of another of John’s elder brothers now deceased. Arthur’s cause has been taken up by the King of France and by the fierce-looking Austria, but nonetheless the boy falls into King John’s hands among the spoils of victory that King John enjoys when he defeats France and Austria on the battlefield. No sooner has King John captured Arthur than he plots to torture his nephew and thereby put the boy’s life at risk. But Arthur’s capture fails to secure the throne for King John. Instead, it merely provides the opportunity for Louis, the Dauphin of France, to lay claim to King John’s crown—a claim supported by King John’s outraged nobles, whom Louis schemes to reward for their assistance with a savage treachery to match King John’s against Arthur.

While there are no royal heroes in King John, the play finds its hero in the Bastard, Sir Richard Plantagenet, an illegitimate son of Richard Coeur de Lion, who is identified as the Bastard’s father in the first place by the Bastard’s remarkable physical resemblance to him. By avenging his father through beheading the Duke of Austria in battle, the Bastard adds a chapter to his father’s legendary career.

Certainly the Bastard has an appetite for warfare and is impatient with any cessation of hostilities: “Cry havoc, kings!” he exclaims. “Back to the stainèd field, / You equal potents, fiery-kindled spirits. / Then let confusion of one part confirm / The other’s peace. Till then, blows, blood, and death!” His bloodlust aside, the Bastard is given many attractive features—a trenchant irony that he directs against all kinds of pretension, and a strict conscience that threatens to drive him from his allegiance to King John once the Bastard learns of the plot against Arthur.

Scholarly research suggests that Shakespeare wrote King John in 1594–96. It was published in the 1623 First Folio. As in many of his history plays, Shakespeare drew on information from Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles. In this case, he may also have used a contemporary play, The Troublesome Reign of John King of England (1591).

King Lear

So great is the suffering depicted in Shakespeare's King Learthat one has trouble finding the words to write about it. It is a play that relentlessly challenges its readers and theater audiences with the magnitude, intensity, and sheer duration of the pain that it represents. While other tragedies, including many of Shakespeare's, depict their characters experiencing a measure of joy and satisfaction before the onset of their misery, King Lear offers us no such relief. From beginning to end, all of its figures suffer, and all attempt various strategies to escape their suffering—some hardening their hearts, others engaging in orgies of violence, many devoting themselves to alleviating the suffering of others, Lear himself raging against his own pain until his sanity cracks. In this play only death seems to provide escape from "the rack of this tough world."

What, then, keeps bringing us back to King Lear? There is, of course, the power of the language. Once one has absorbed this play, one can articulate one's own suffering; one can put language to one's horror in the face of human cruelty and poverty; one has words to express the depths of grief that follow on extreme loss. But the fact that King Lear is almost equally powerful when translated (for example, into Japanese), converted to film, and set in lands far different from ancient Britain, makes it likely that it is the story told inLear that, in large part, draws us to the play.

Within Lear are stories of two families, each caught up in a struggle between greed and cruelty, on the one hand, and support and consolation on the other. Each family is centered in an aging father, one an imperious near-tyrant, the other a gullible sensualist, each of whom sees his children through a distorted lens and, turning against the child who truly loves him, unleashes in his other child (or, in Lear's case, children) enormous greed, lust, and ambition.

This double story draws us because it tells us about families—about fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, sisters and their husbands and lovers, brothers natural and unnatural. In this play, ordinary jealousies, demands for love, sibling rivalries, desire for money and power, petty cruelties are all taken to the extreme; we can see ourselves and our small vices magnified to gigantic proportions. Also in this play we can see the end of our lives, with old age portrayed in all its vulnerability, helplessness, pride, and, finally, perhaps, wisdom.

Lear had envisioned a world in which old men would continue to be respected even after giving away their money and their power, a world in which everyone would behave as Kent does, continuing to admire and obey because of the authority that inheres in Lear himself. Lear learns that once time and age have weakened one, without money and power one is almost helpless against the ravages of greed and power-hunger—but his final speech to Cordelia suggests that he also learns that, finally, greed and power-hunger do not really matter. Lear moves out of the world of the young and the middle-aged and into an old-age world of letting go. This play's special understanding of old age explains in part why this most devastating of Shakespeare's tragedies is also perhaps his most moving.

Scholars believe Shakespeare wrote King Lear in 1605 or 1606. It was performed at court in 1606, and published in 1608 as a quarto, and in 1623 in the Folio, the two texts differing from each other by hundreds of lines. Shakespeare’s many sources for this work include an earlier play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and The Mirror for Magistrates

Love's Labor's Lost

The story told in Shakespeare's early comedy Love's Labor’s Lost seems, at first glance, to offer little outside of easy laughter. Four young men (one of them, admittedly, a king) decide to withdraw from the world for three years. They take an oath that, most importantly, forbids them to have anything to do with women in that space of time. Warned by Berowne, the most skeptical of the lords, that the oath will inevitably be broken, the King of Navarre is immediately put in an impossible situation: the Princess of France and her attending ladies are on their way to Navarre on an embassy. Fighting to keep his oath, the King lodges the Princess outside the gates of his court, but that ungracious strategy fails to head off the inevitable, as all four men fall immediately in love with the French ladies, abandoning their oaths and setting out to win the ladies' hands.

The laughter triggered by this simple story—usually at the expense of the misguided young men—is augmented by subplots involving a braggart soldier, a clever page, illiterate servants, a parson, a schoolmaster, and a constable so dull that he is named Dull. Letters and poems are misdelivered, confessions are overheard, entertainments are presented, and language is played with (and misused) by the ignorant and learned alike. This is a play that entertains and amuses.

At a deeper level, though, Love's Labor’s Lost also teases the mind. It seems to begin with the premise that women either are to be feared and avoided as seductresses who tempt young men away from heroic endeavor, or are instead to be worshiped as goddesses who are men's sole guide to wisdom. The play soon makes it clear, however, that while this split vision of woman is what the men in the play accept, the reality of male-female relations is something other.

Our first major clue that the men's view of women is not to be trusted comes at the end of Act 3 (which, in this play, with its strange and misleading act divisions, is actually quite early in the action). Berowne confesses to himself (and the audience) that he has fallen in love with Rosaline. He is angry with himself—he who has so scoffed at love, now to be marching in love's army!—but his self-contempt gives him little excuse for the things he says about Rosaline.

He has barely met her: in the previous scene he has had to ask her name. Yet he now accuses her of being the "worst" of the four women, a "wanton" who "will do the deed / Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard." This bitter attack on Rosaline as a wild sexual creature is preceded by a more general comment on "woman"—"like a German clock, . . . ever out of frame," "never going aright, being a watch, / But being watched that it may still go right." This is the same speaker who will shortly describe Rosaline as "the sun that maketh all things shine" and praise women's eyes as "the books, the arts, the academes / That show, contain, and nourish all the world."

Because we see Rosaline for ourselves, we see that both poles of Berowne's responses to her are incredible exaggerations. She is neither whore nor goddess. But Berowne's attitude toward her is of a piece with male views and expectations of women throughout the play. Lodged in the fields as potential seductresses, the women quickly become the focus of a military-style campaign of seduction themselves—"Advance your standards, and upon them, lords. / Pell-mell, down with them."

The men will argue that, under the power of the ladies' eyes, they have been transformed and that their courtship, though seeming "ridiculous," has expressed genuine love; the women will answer that the men's gestures have been taken as "pleasant jest," "as bombast and as lining to the time," as "a merriment." The women seem quite bewildered by the men's belief that the women should, because the men want them, immediately give themselves in marriage.

Much of the action of Love's Labor’s Lost turns on the discrepancy between, on the one hand, what the men think about the women and, on the other, how the women see themselves (and see the men). That women are not identical to men’s images of them is a common theme in Shakespeare's plays. In Love's Labor’s Lost it receives one of its most pressing examinations. Thus, while the play amuses, it also gives us much to ponder.

Most scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote Love’s Labor’s Lost in 1594–95. The play was published in quarto form in 1598; an earlier printed version probably existed, though it has not survived. Shakespeare’s sources for this play have been difficult to establish with certainty.

Macbeth

In 1603, at about the middle of Shakespeare’s career as a playwright, a new monarch ascended the throne of England. He was James VI of Scotland, who then also became James I of England.

Immediately, Shakespeare’s London was alive with an interest in things Scottish. Many Scots followed their king to London and attended the theaters there. Shakespeare’s company, which became the King’s Men under James’s patronage, now sometimes staged their plays for the new monarch’s entertainment, just as they had for Queen Elizabeth before him. It was probably within this context that Shakespeare turned to Raphael Holinshed’s history of Scotland for material for a tragedy.

In Scottish history of the eleventh century, Shakespeare found a spectacle of violence—the slaughter of whole armies and of innocent families, the assassination of kings, the ambush of nobles by murderers, the brutal execution of rebels. He also came upon stories of witches and wizards providing advice to traitors. Such accounts could feed the new Scottish King James’s belief in a connection between treason and witchcraft. James had already himself executed women as witches. Shakespeare’s Macbeth supplied its audience with a sensational view of witches and supernatural apparitions and equally sensational accounts of bloody battles in which, for example, a rebel was “unseamed . . . from the nave [navel] to th’ chops [jaws].”

It is possible, then, that in writing Macbeth Shakespeare was mainly intent upon appealing to the new interests in London brought about by James’s kingship. What he created, though, is a play that has fascinated generations of readers and audiences that care little about Scottish history.

In its depiction of a man who murders his king and kinsman in order to gain the crown, only to lose all that humans seem to need in order to be happy—sleep, nourishment, friends, love—Macbeth teases us with huge questions. Why do people do evil knowing that it is evil? Does Macbeth represent someone who murders because fate tempts him? Because his wife pushes him into it? Because he is overly ambitious? Having killed Duncan, why does Macbeth fall apart, unable to sleep, seeing ghosts, putting spies in everyone’s home, killing his friends and innocent women and children? Why does the success of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth—prophesied by the witches, promising the couple power and riches and “peace to all their nights and days to come”—turn so quickly to ashes, destroying the Macbeths’ relationship, their world, and, finally, both of them?

In earlier centuries, Macbeth’s story was seen as a powerful study of a heroic individual who commits an evil act and pays an enormous price as his conscience—and the natural forces for good in the universe—destroy him. More recently, his story has been applied to nations that overreach themselves, his speeches of despair quoted to show that Shakespeare shared late-twentieth-century feelings of alienation. Today, the line between Macbeth’s evil and the supposed good of those who oppose him is being blurred, new attitudes about witches and witchcraft are being expressed, new questions raised about the ways that maleness and femaleness are portrayed in the play. As with so many of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth speaks to each generation with a new voice.

Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in about 1606 or 1607. It was published in the First Folio in 1623.

Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure is a play rooted deeply in early seventeenth-century culture; at the same time, it retains a powerful hold on the imaginations of modern readers. In an attempt to suggest why Measure for Measure continues to be among the most passionately discussed of Shakespeare's plays, we might think about the ways that the seventeenth-century issues it dramatizes relate to present-day concerns.

The play features a duke who is so anxious about the decline in the moral quality of his subjects' lives that he temporarily removes himself from the government of his city-state and deputizes a member of his administration, Angelo, to enforce existing laws more rigorously. Angelo, who has never before had the opportunity to exercise such power over others and who thus has never had to withstand the temptation to misuse it, experiences no qualms of conscience as he holds all in the city to the same idealized standard of moral behavior that he thinks he himself exemplifies. The man he chooses as his first victim is Claudio, who has impregnated Juliet before they have solemnized their marriage. For this crime, Angelo condemns Claudio to death.

At Claudio's request, Isabella, Claudio's sister, approaches Angelo to plead for her brother's life. Every bit as idealistic as Angelo, Isabella is in the process of entering the convent of the Order of Poor Clares, where she will vow lifelong obedience, poverty, and chastity. Her eloquence in addressing Angelo arouses in him the desire to possess her, a desire so strange to him that he immediately gives in to it and, renouncing integrity and morality, attempts to extort sex from her in return for her brother's life.

Isabella, denied any opportunity to expose Angelo's corruption, is nonetheless resolute in her spiritual commitment to preserve her chastity, no matter the consequences. Meanwhile, the duke has disguised himself as a friar so as to discover the true nature of his subjects. After eavesdropping on Isabella's revelation to her brother about Angelo's attempted extortion, the duke (in his friar's disguise) offers to ally himself with Isabella against Angelo.

In view of the overriding importance of religion and the spiritual life in early seventeenth-century England, and in view of the control exerted over both religion and morality by the State in this era when Parliament actually debated the death penalty for premarital sex, it is easy to see how Measure for Measure might capture its audience's interest. In today's culture, however, in which religion exerts an influence on the lives of only a part of the population, it would seem unlikely that Measure for Measure could engage audiences in anything like the same way it once did. Yet there are now other issues that have attached themselves to the play.

One such issue is the division of opinion about the role of government in shaping the morality of citizens. For those who regard such governmental action as intrusive, the duke may seem intolerably meddlesome in his interference in the lives of his people; for those who want government to act in the defense of conventional morality, the duke may be understood as properly exerting himself to impose standards of moral behavior on his people. Another issue that has become attached to the play is sexual harassment of women by men, with Angelo and Isabella's encounter presenting itself as a powerfully dramatic representation of this ongoing problem. Yet another current issue, the right of a woman to control her own body, has arisen for modern readers from the scenes in which Isabella is forced to choose between her virginity and her brother's life. Modern responses to Measure for Measure indicate how a play that is formed in a past culture can be transformed in its reception by present culture into a spectacle of continuing fascination.

Shakespeare is believed to have written Measure for Measurein 1604; it was performed at court that December. The play was first published in the First Folio in 1623. His principal source for Measure for Measure was another play, George Whetstone’s two-part Promos and Cassandra.

The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice, like most of Shakespeare's comedies, is about love and marriage. But the path to marriage in this play is unusually hazardous. The characters compare it to the epic voyage undertaken by Jason and the Argonauts to win the Golden Fleece. In this play, Portia, the fabulously wealthy heiress of Belmont, is herself the Golden Fleece, according to her would-be husband, Bassanio. To win her hand in marriage, he must put his future at risk in an attempt to choose correctly among three caskets or chests of gold, silver, and lead. If he chooses rightly, he wins, in marriage, the beautiful, intelligent, and supremely resourceful Portia and her great wealth. If he chooses wrongly, he must forever abandon Portia and may never propose marriage to any other woman. He would therefore die without legal heirs.

The test of the caskets, prescribed in the will of Portia's dead father, is not the only obstacle to Bassanio and Portia's happiness. There also stands against them a magnificent villain, the moneylender Shylock. In creating this character, Shakespeare seems to have shared in a widespread and, from our point of view, despicable prejudice against Jews. In Shakespeare's England there had been no Jews for a long time, except an occasional visitor, and so there was no direct experience to counteract the prejudice. Shylock would have been regarded as a villain simply because he was a Jew.

Yet Shakespeare was led by his art of language to put onstage a character who gave such powerful expression to the alienation he felt because of the hatred around him that, in many productions of the play and in the opinions of many famous actors, Shylock emerges the hero of The Merchant of Venice. In fashioning in Shylock a character whose function is to frustrate the satisfaction that we are invited to desire for the play's lovers, Shakespeare has, for many people, brought forth a character who rivals the lovers in the power he exerts over us.

Over the centuries Portia too has also deeply engaged audiences. In her role as the daughter bound by her father's will, one who sees herself as helpless in the face of the casket test and whose anxieties and joys we are encouraged to share, Portia is, for readers and playgoers alike, one of Shakespeare's most appealing heroines. But it is in her role as Balthazar the young lawyer that Portia is most remembered. The speech in which she urges Shylock to show the kind of mercy that "droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven," that "is enthronèd in the hearts of kings" and "is an attribute to God Himself," is one of Shakespeare's most famous and most loved passages. For readers and audiences today, the pleasure that should accompany her saving of Antonio is clouded by what seems to us her cruel treatment of Shylock—but the role of Portia remains one that every Shakespearean actress yearns to play.

Partly because of a probable reference within the play to the capture of a real Spanish ship, Shakespeare is believed to have written The Merchant of Venice in 1596–97. It was published in 1600 as a quarto. Shakespeare drew on several contemporary works as sources for the play, but chiefly on a story from Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's Il Pecorone (The Dunce).