Brutus hasn’t told her about the planned assassination and does his best to calm her nerves. When they’ve left Brutus’s wife reveals her extreme anxiety that something terrible is about to happen. The conspirators turn up at Brutus’s house and they finalise their plans. The night before the planned assassination is wild and stormy, with various characters observing or hearing of ominous portents and signs. As Cassius says to himself (and the audience) after Brutus has left him.ĬASSIUS: Well, Brutus, thou art noble yet, I see, Cassius is depicted as a wily and slippery friend-cum-tempter who convinces Brutus to join a conspiracy to murder Caesar. Brutus is a noble upstanding ally and friend of Caesar, but he fears that Caesar will become king and so overthrow the republic which he loves. The play opens with Rome preparing for Caesar’s triumphal entrance accompanied by his best friend and deputy, Mark Antony. The first half of the play depicts the conspiracy leading up to his assassination, the second half depicts the main consequences. The figure the play is named after, Julius Caesar, actually dies half way through the play. The three lives he drew from are those of:Īs you can see, whereas the assassination only takes up the last tenth of Caesar’s life, and the period from the assassination to the Battle of Philippi only takes up ten of Antony’s 87 chapters, the assassination and aftermath constitute almost all of Plutarch’s life of Brutus which may, at a very basic level, explain why Brutus emerges as the hero’ of Shakespeare’s play. The plot is based entirely on three of Plutarch’s biographies of eminent Romans, which Shakespeare found in Sir Thomas North’s translations into English of The Lives of the Most Noble Greeks and Romans, first published in 1579. Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, was first produced, in all probability, in 1599.
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