Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T09:31:38.534Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Wayne A. Rebhorn
Wayne A. Rebhorn*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

"The purpose of playing… is to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" (Hamlet, 3.2.20-24).

In his hagiographic treatment of the life of Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville presents the last events in his hero's existence as constituting a particularly exemplary "tragedy"; he celebrates Sidney's generosity towards a common soldier in need of water, his endurance in suffering pain, and his careful "fashioning" of his soul to meet death when the end appeared inevitable.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 75 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I owe several individuals a debt of gratitude for their help with this essay: Louis Montrose, for commenting thoughtfully on an earlier version of it; Brian Levack, for aiding me with historical materials; and Frank Whigham, who offered many helpful suggestions and did careful readings of several versions of the essay. My greatest debt is owed to Eric Mallin, who generously supplied me with a bibliography of material on Essex and Elizabethan politics when I was in an early stage of my work on this essay and whose splendid chapter on Essex, emulation, and Troilus and Cressida in his 1987 Stanford University dissertation prompted me to begin thinking about Julius Caesar in similar terms.

References

Auffret, Jean M. “ f Julius Caesar.” Cahiers Elisabe'- thains 5 (1963) : 66-92.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. “Apologie … Concerning the Late Earle of Essex.” In The Letters and the Life, ed. Spedding, James. Vol. 3: 141-56. London, 1868.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. The Essays, ed. Pitcher, John. Harmondsworth, 1985.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. The Letters and the Life, ed. Spedding, James. Vol. 1. London, 1868.Google Scholar
Bacon, Francis. Works, ed. Spedding, James, Ellis, Robert L., and Heath, Douglas D.. Vol. 2. London, 1862.Google Scholar
Baker, Herschel, ed. The Later Renaissance in England: Nondramatic Verse and Prose, 1600-1660. Boston, 1975.Google Scholar
Birch, Thomas. Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. Vol. 1. London, 1754.Google Scholar
Blits, Jan H. “Manliness and Friendship in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (1981):155-67.Google Scholar
Braden, Gordon. Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege. New Haven, 1985.Google Scholar
Bruyn, Lucy de. Mob-Rule and Riots: The Present Mirrored in the Past. London, 1981.Google Scholar
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, 1969.Google Scholar
Cantor, Paul A. Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire. Ithaca, NY, 1976.Google Scholar
Cecil, William. “Certain Precepts for the Well Ordering of a Man's Life.” In Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Francis Osborne, ed. Louis B. Wright. Ithaca, NY, 1962.Google Scholar
Chamberlain, John. The Letters, ed. McClure, Norman Egbert. Vol. 1. Philadelphia, 1939.Google Scholar
Cornwallis, Sir William. Essayes, ed. Allen, Don Cameron. Baltimore, 1946.Google Scholar
Cressy, David. “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England.“ Literature and History 3 (1976):29–44.Google Scholar
Devereux, Walter B. Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex. Vols. 1 and 2. London, 1853.Google Scholar
Dove, John Roland, and Gamble, Peter. ” ‘Lovers in Peace,’ Brutus and Cassius: A Re-Examination.” English Studies 60 (1979):543-54.10.1080/00138387908597997Google Scholar
Esler, Anthony. The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation. Durham, NC, 1966.Google Scholar
Foakes, R. A. “An Approach to Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954):259-70.10.2307/2866331Google Scholar
Gerenday, Lynn de. “Play. Ritualization, and Ambivalence in Julius Caesar.” Literature and Psychology 24 (1974):24–33.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan. James I and the Politics of Literature. Baltimore, 1983.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Selffashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, 1980.Google Scholar
Greene, Gayle. “ ‘The Power of Speech to Stir Men's Blood': The Language of Tragedy in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.” Renaissance Drama, n. s. 11 (1980):67–93.Google Scholar
Greene, Thomas M. The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven, 1982.Google Scholar
Greville, Sir Fulke. Life of Sir Philip Sidney, intro. Smith, Nowell. Oxford, 1907.Google Scholar
Hartsock, Mildred E. “The Complexity of Julius Caesar.” PMLA 81 (1966):56–62.10.2307/461308Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY, 1981.Google Scholar
Kayser, John R., and Lettieri, Ronald J.. ” ‘The Last of All the Romans': Shakespeare's Commentary on Classical Republicanism.” Clio 19 (1979-80):197–227.Google Scholar
Kearney, Colbert. “The Nature of an Insurrection: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.“ Studies 63 (1974):141-52.Google Scholar
Knight, G. Wilson; The Imperial Theme: Further Interpretations of Shakespeare's Tragedies Including the Roman Plays. London, 1931.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Ruth M. “The Elements Were So Mix'd … .“PMLA 88 (1973):240-45.Google Scholar
McCoy, Richard. “ ‘A dangerous image': the Earl of Essex and Elizabethan Chivalry. ” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983):313-29.Google Scholar
Miola, Robert S. Shakespeare's Rome. Cambridge, 1983.Google Scholar
Montrose, Louis, “ ‘Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture.” Representations 1 (1983):61–94.10.2307/2928384Google Scholar
Naunton, Sir Robert. Fragmenta Regalia, Or, Observations on the Late Queen Elizabeth, Her Times, andFavourites, ed. Arber, Edward. London, 1870.Google Scholar
Peterson, Douglas. “ ‘Wisdom Consumed in Confidence': An Examination of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare Quarterly 16 (1965):19–28.10.2307/2867730Google Scholar
Phillips, James E. The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays. New York, 1940.10.7312/phil94208Google Scholar
Prior, Moody E. “The Search for a Hero in Julius Caesar.” Renaissance Drama, n. s., 2 (1966):81–101.10.1086/rd.2.41917039Google Scholar
Rabkin, Norman. Shakespeare and the Common Understanding. New York, 1967.Google Scholar
Ribner, Irving. “Political Issues injulius Caesar. “Journal of English and Germanic Philology 56 (1957): 10–22.Google Scholar
Rice, Julian C. “Julius Caesar and the Judgment of the Senses.” Studies in English Literature 13 (1973):238-56.10.2307/449737Google Scholar
Rosen, William, and Rosen, Barbara. “Julius Caesar. ‘The Specialty of Rule.’ “ In Twentieth Century Interpretations of Julius Caesar, ed. Dean, Leonard, 109-15. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968.Google Scholar
Sacharoff, Mark. “Suicide and Brutus’ Philosophy in Julius Caesar.” Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1972):115-22.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works, ed. Bevington, David. Glenview, IL, 1980. Google Scholar
Smith, Gordon Ross. “Brutus, Virtue and Will.” Shakespeare Quarterly 10 (1959): 367-79.Google Scholar
Smith, Lacey Baldwin. Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia. Princeton, NJ, 1986.Google Scholar
Spencer, T. J. B. “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans.” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957):27–38.Google Scholar
Spencer, T. J. B.. Shakespeare: The Roman Plays. London, 1963.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. Minor Poems, ed. de Selincourt, Ernest. Oxford, 1910.Google Scholar
Spriet, Pierre. “Amour et politique: le discours de l'autre dans Julius Caesar.” In Coriolan: Theatre, ed. Debax, Jean-Paul and Peyré, Yves ser. B, 5, 227-39. Toulouse, 1984.Google Scholar
Stewart, J. I. M. Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined. London, 1949.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 1558-1641. Abridged ed. London, 1967.Google Scholar
Vawter, Marvin L. “ ‘After Their Fashion': Cicero and Brutus in Julius Caesar.“ Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976):205-19.Google Scholar
Vawter, Marvin L. ‘Division ‘tween Our Souls': Shakespeare's Stoic Brutus.” Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974):173-95.Google Scholar
Velz, John W. “Undular Structure in Julius Caesar.” Modern Language Review 66 (1971):21–30.Google Scholar
Whigham, Frank. Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley, 1984.Google Scholar
Whitaker, Virgil K. The Mirror Up to Nature: The Technique of Shakespeare's Tragedies. San Marino, CA, 1965.Google Scholar
Williams, Neville. All the Queen's Men: Elizabeth I and Her Courtiers. London, 1972.Google Scholar
Wilson, Thomas. The State of England Anno Dom. 1600, ed. Fisher, F. J.. Camden Miscellany, vol. 16. London, 1936.Google Scholar
Yoder, R. A, “History and the Histories in Julius Caesar.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973):309-27.10.2307/2868355Google Scholar