Julius Caesar: Third Series (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)

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The Folio prints three short lines in succession, and scansion shows that two of them can be linked as a single pentameter, leaving the third as an independent short line. But which two should be linked? On the grounds of scansion alone, Cassius' short line can be assigned to fill out the partial pentameter of either Brutus or Casca. Bowers noted that Shakespeare tends to associate independent short lines with the end of speeches, rather than the beginning, and Bowers therefore advocated that in a case like this one, the short line be assigned to Brutus, rather than to Casca ("Establishing," 82-3), and Sicherman noted that implied pauses following a true short line often provide clues to characterization. Both critics support the conclusion, then, that in this case, the short line should be regarded as the metrical conclusion of Brutus' speech, and Casca's half line should be regarded as the metrical beginning of Cassius' partial pentameter. Cassius takes his lead from Brutus, in other words, and Casca takes his from Cassius, but Cassius pauses briefly before assenting, and the pause is signaled in Brutus' half line. If all the lines are printed as short, as in the Folio, this distinction is lost, whereas indention helps to clarify it. Although he clearly is disproving what Brutus claimed of Caesar, Antony maintains that this isn’t his aim: he’s merely telling the truth based on what he knows of Caesar. Bate, Jonathan and Eric Rasmussen, eds. The Royal Shakespeare Company Shakespeare. New York: Modern Library, 2007. When the poor of the city suffered, Caesar wept with pity for them. Hardly the actions of an ambitious man, who should be harder-hearted than this! But Brutus says Caesar was ambitious, and Brutus is honourable, so … it must be true … right? Note how Antony continues to sow the seeds of doubt in the crowd’s mind. I’m not going to talk about the disaster at the battle of Philippi. I think that might have been where the term Caesar salad came into common usage. Marc Antony and Octavius join forces and break the will of your men. We are all ready, way past ready, for you to fall on your own sword. In fact, I would have happily given you a firm Caligae to the arse if you needed a little extra encouragement.

As the conspirators do Caesar’s bidding, bathing their hands and swords in Caesar’s blood, Cassius muses: “How many ages hence/Shall this our lofty scene be acted over/In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” Brutus agrees – “How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport”. Imagining themselves as the stars of a play, Brutus and Cassius have clearly lost all sense of balance and proportion – even if they are correct that Caesar’s death shall “be acted over” many times – including in cinema, with actors like Charlton Heston, James Mason, Marlon Brando, John Gielgud, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr, Jason Robards, Robert Vaughn, Richard Chamberlain, Diana Rigg, and Christopher Lee (who makes an impressive Artemidorus). Jonson, Ben. Ben Jonson. Eds. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52. For Brutus, there is only the cold comfort of recalling the loyalty of fallen allies, along with the expression of a hope that “I shall have glory by this losing day/More than Octavius and Mark Antony/By this vile conquest shall attain unto.” Running himself upon his own sword, Brutus dies with the words, “Caesar, now be still./I killed not thee with half so good a will.”And once Brutus has taken his own life, it is left to Antony, his erstwhile adversary, to speak generously of Brutus in death: “This was the noblest Roman of them all…/His life was gentle, and the elements/So mixed in him that nature might stand up/And say to all the world, ‘This was a man.’”

Resch, J. "Zu Shakespeares Julius Cäsar IV, 3, 143 ff." Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 67 (1882), 445-448. And how does one read Julius Caesar nowadays, here in the United States of America – or Civitates Foederatae Americae, as the Romans would have called it? After all, we are one of those “states unborn”, with “accents yet unknown”, that Cassius speaks of after the assassination. As with the Roman Republic that ended not long after the murder of Caesar, the U.S.A. is a republic whose people are proud of having retained a republican form of government for a period of centuries. Establishing Shakespeare's Text: Notes on Short Lines and the Problem of Verse Division." Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980), 74-130. DECIUS: Okay, I'll just tell the guys that you're a pussy who lets his wife tell him what to do. They'll understand.

The collision between high idealism and pragmatism, corruption and politics, reason and irrational expectations, and the recurrent theme of preordained fate versus free will sets the frame for the characters to unfold Shakespeare’s unyielding grasp of the ambiguity –or the twisted nature?- that defines human nature. The Arden Shakespeare is a long-running series of scholarly editions of the works of William Shakespeare. It presents fully edited modern-spelling editions of the plays and poems, with lengthy introductions and full commentaries. There have been three distinct series of The Arden Shakespeare over the past century, with the third series commencing in 1995 and concluding in January 2020. [1] Arden was the maiden name of Shakespeare's mother, Mary, but the primary reference of the enterprise's title is to the Forest of Arden, in which Shakespeare's As You Like It is set. [2] First Series [ edit ] there's also this weird Romeo-and-Juliet esque triple suicide? in which a character who has never shown up before is suddenly Cassius' best friend and then they kill themselves and lie dead next to each other over a misunderstanding? it's weird effort to solve the problem was to posit a tertium quid—a fair manuscript copy of the author's work that was still something less than a prompt book. The strongest defender of this possibility was Fredson Bowers, who maintained it with special attention to Julius Caesar in particular. The manuscript for the play, he proposed, "was a clean scribal transcript of Shakespeare's own working papers, partly marked by the book-keeper with a view to the later inscription from it of the official prompt-book and then preserved in the theatre as a substitute file copy for the working papers" ("Copy," 23-24). To support his argument, Bowers affirmed Brents Stirling's attempt to explain what J. Resch in 1882 had first proposed to be a textual crux in Brutus's quarrel with Cassius, namely, the double announcement of Portia's death. Stirling pointed out that speech prefixes for Cassius in this section of the play suddenly change from " Cassi." in TLN 2114 and become " Cas." (except for a single " Cass." at TLN 2159) to 2173, where " Cassi." resumes. Bowers agreed with Stirling that this evidence pointed to revision: the second announcement (made by Messala in TLN 2175-91) is what Shakespeare originally wrote, and the first announcement (made by Brutus himself in private to Cassius [ TLN 2108-60]) had later been "plumped in without attention to context" (Bowers, 24). Editors had agreed with Resch for some time, based on their view of Brutus's character (Cambridge 1, 179-80; Arden 2, xxiv-xxv, 106-107n.), but Stirling offered bibliographical evidence for revision in the group of altered speech prefixes for Cassius, and he reinforced his argument with reference to another such passage—with similarly altered speech prefixes for Cassius—which occurs in TLN 711-866. "The bibliographical logic is irresistible," Bowers urged (26), in favor of revision in both cases, and the revision amounts to "hard bibliographical evidence" (29) that the copy for Julius Caesar was not foul papers. On the other hand, omitted stage directions and some confusion about entrances prove that the copy was not a prompt book. The evidence therefore "would seem to point with some degree of certainty to a hypothesis that Shakespeare's working papers had been transcribed in intermediate form for the preliminary survey of the company, a discussion of its staging, and perhaps the copying of its parts, even for use during early rehearsals," before the prompt book was inscribed (31). Bowers even ventured the opinion that the manuscript from which the Folio compositors worked "was not in Shakespeare's hand" (32). In other words, he thought he could identify, on the basis of the printed play, not only the manuscript copy that lay behind it but also the manuscript copy that lay behind that.

For a modern interpretation of the fall of Caesar and the fall of Rome, look no further than Mean Girls. This cinematic classic sees Regina George as a dictator-like queen bee in suburban Chicago high school and her inevitable fall from power at the hands of betrayal from her friends. Et tu, Brute indeed. The third kind of short line appears immediately in the opening lines of the second scene of Julius Caesar ( TLN 87-94, here quoted in diplomatic transcription): The general editors for this series were Richard Proudfoot; Ann Thompson of King's College London; David Scott Kastan of Yale University; and H. R. Woudhuysen of the University of Oxford. CASSIUS: Good, he's dead. Now to hold a huge funeral and let his best friend deliver the eulogy to the large, violence-prone mob.Antony’s speech has been memorized and recited by hundreds of thousands over the centuries and still stands as a testament to subtle revenge and stubborn leadership. The Arden Shakespeare has also published a number of series of literary and historical criticism to accompany The Arden Shakespeare Third Series and Arden Early Modern Drama imprints. Arden Shakespeare has also published a Complete Works of Shakespeare, which reprints editions from the second and third series but without the explanatory notes. Punctuation was not regularized in the late sixteenth century, and Hinman demonstrated that punctuation in the Folio was often produced by the compositors who set the type, so a modern editor has considerable latitude in creating a text that assists modern readers with punctuation that they expect. "Considerable latitude" is far from "complete latitude," however. Punctuation can affect meaning, as linguists and grammarians well know, and editors have to choose which meaning is preferable. Daniell argues that the Folio's use of colons is in this category (Arden 3, 130-31), and his edition therefore retains colons that most modern editions (including this one) either delete or replace with some other punctuation.