faculty and supreme intellectual capacity. To the former we owe his marvellous works; to the latter his equally marvellous fund of knowledge.

Shakespeare's Productive Period may be said to have lasted about twenty years—in other words, from circa 1591-circa 1611, and falls naturally into four great epochs or divisions. These are:

CHRONOLOGY OF THE PLAYS.

I. THE EPOCH OF HIS EARLY WORK, 1591-1593.

When his touch was still to some extent uncertain, and his art was still susceptible to influence from such powerful writers as Marlowe and Lyly.

II. THE EPOCH OF HIS MATURING ART THE PERIOD of the

JULIUS CÆSA

III. THE EPOCH OF HIS MATURE ART-THE PERIOD OF TH GREAT PROBLEM PLAYS, 1602-1609.

Antony and Cleopatra, 1608.
Coriolanus, 1609.

Intermediate Epoch of the Sonnets, 1608-1609.

IV. THE EPOCH OF REPOSEFUL CONTEMPLATION, 1610-1611

The Winter's Tale, 1611.

Plays completed by Others after his Retirement.
Henry VIII., 1612.
Cardenio, 1611.
Two Noble Kinsmen, 1612.

Such is a sketch of the development of Shakespeare's genius as furnished to us by the internal evidence of the works themselves. Let us now proceed to the examination of that play to which our study is more especially to be devoted in this volume.

The Play.

Date of Composition.-The text of Julius Cæsar has come down to us in a singularly perfect state. From this fact some critics argue that the play may have been printed from the author's original MS. Be this as it may, no direct or positive external evidence exists to assist us in arriving at any definite conclusion as to the date when it was written. We must therefore

fall back on negative and indirect evidence. There is no reference in any contemporary records to its having been produced on the stage, and it is not mentioned by Meres in Palladis Tamia as amongst the works of Shakespeare. The presumption is, therefore, that it must have been written subsequent to September 7, 1598, when that sketch of English literature, painting and music, bearing the name "F. Meres" was entered at Stationers' Hall. On the other hand, Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, or the Life and Death of Sir John Oldcastle, published in 1601, contains certain lines wherein the references to Antony's funeral oration are too specific to be applicable to any other play :—

"The many headed multitude were drawn
By Brutus' speech that Cæsar was ambitious:
When eloquent Mark Antonie had shown

His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious?"

Now the "orations" of Brutus and Antony, though mentioned, do not appear in Plutarch; they are among the few instances in which Shakespeare departs from his authorities. The inference accordingly is unavoidable that Julius Cæsar was already a popular piece when Weever's Mirror of Martyrs was written. Upon this evidence alone we might date the play as having been written late in 1599 or early in 1600. Herford, following Halliwell, is inclined to place it as late as 1601, arguing that Ben Jonson's Sejanus was the response of the latter to the audacious attempt of the man of "little Latin and less Greek to poach on what the rare Ben " may have considered his special classical preserves. We shall not be much in error, therefore,

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THE TRAGEDY C

if, in view of all this evidence, we regard the drama as havi been written between the close of the year 1599 and the ear months of 1601-a period of only some fifteen months.

Sources whence the Materials for the Plot wer drawn. The story of the "Death of Cæsar" had been popular one among the predecessors and older contemporaries Shakespeare. A piece named the Fall of Casar, and dealin with the facts of the life both of Cæsar and Pompey, was per Another, entitled Casa formed at Whitehall in 1562. Interfectus, the work of a Dr. P. Eedes, was represented at Oxfor in 1582. In his School of Abuse, moreover, Gosson indirectly refers to a Casar and Pompey having been popular in his day (1579), while there is still more definite mention made of plays on Julius Cæsar in Henslowe's Diary, 1594, Mirror of Policie, 1598, and Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612), while Polonius undoubtedly refers to the great popularity of the subject when he says: "I did enact Julius Cæsar-: I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me" (Hamlet, III. ii. 94). As late as 1604, probably before the intelligence of Shakespeare's mighty achievement had crossed the Border, Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Stirling, produced his tragedy of Julius Casar at Edinburgh. There are curious points of resemblance between some of the speeches of Brutus and of Cæsar in the dramas of Shakespeare and Alexander, but these similarities may possibly result from both writers having gone to the same source was the monumental work for their materials. This "source of Plutarch, viz., his Parallel Lives of Illustrious Greeks and Romans, and more particularly those of Cæsar, Brutus, and Antony, as translated by Bishop Amyot from Greek into French, and retranslated from French into English by Sir Thomas North. A new edition had appeared in 1595, and was probably the one used by Shakespeare, as there are certain expressions employed by our dramatist which are absent from the first edition of 1579.

Although in some details Shakespeare followed Plutarch with a closeness that was almost slavish, as for example in the speech of Portia to Brutus, in the dialogue between Cæsar and Decius Brutus, and in the speech of Lucilius to Antony concerning Brutus, yet he embellished and idealised all he borrowed.

Almost all the incidents found in Plutarch are retained in the drama, while of those scenes which are distinctively Shakespeare's, the principal are, the great speeches of Brutus and Antony to the populace, the monologue of Brutus in the Second Act, and the superb quarrel scene in Act IV., where the dramatist condenses into the limits of one interview the sayings and doings of two entire days. Another point of difference between the "Lives" and the drama, is that the assassination takes place in the Capitol and not in the Curia. It was of course in the Senate House and not in the Capitol that Pompey's statue stood, erected in his honour for having beautified that part of the city with a theatre and sundry fine porticoes.

If Shakespeare was largely indebted to Plutarch for his facts and the suggestion of ideas, the matchless style and forceful expression are all the poet's own.

The Scene of Action.-The scene where the action of the play is represented as transpiring, is first at Rome (Acts I., II., III. and IV. Sc. i.); then at Sardis (Act IV. Sc. ii. and iii.); finally at Philippi (Act V.). Rome, at the time of the fall of the Republic, was a seething cauldron of political unrest. The ancient social cleavage between patrician and plebeian had slowly but surely disappeared. Julius Cæsar, on the plains of Pharsalia, shattered the last remnant of belief in the doctrine, dear to the Roman aristocrats from the days of Coriolanus, that a palladium was cast by some protecting divinity over the patrician order, safeguarding it from all possible attack by the plebs. In Pompey the last martyr to the cause of Republican oligarchism had perished on the sands of Egypt, and a new order of things was coming into existence. Julius Cæsar, despite all his unparalleled versatility and supreme genius, was in many respects only a political Opportunist of a very high order. He could be all things to all men, if so be he advanced his own interests. To the upholders of the ancient régime, to men who were true Republicans, not Opportunists masquerading as such, Cæsar's policy of humouring all the social elements to gain his own ends must have been invincibly repugnant. The old doctrine, "Each one for the Whole," by faithful adherence to which Rome had overcome all her rivals, and according to which the lives and