It’s a story of tragedy, and it just seems like everything goes wrong. The story within this book was rather brief and simple. It’s a play, and was written to be dramatic. Looking at this like it’s a novel doesn’t really work, of course. Julius Caesar, one of William Shakespeare’s plays featuring a historical figure, was an interesting look at the death of Caesar at the hands of his friend Marcus Brutus. This edition returns the original form of the play to circulation and thereby reopens the avenues of interpretation that were originally offered by Julius Caesar.

The editorial tradition of removing these complications has the effect of modifying and distorting the play. Not only is it amenable to such appropriation by virtue of its political themes but also because of its essential enigmatic nature. Julius Caesar is a profoundly political play easily made to reflect the political dilemmas of the society in which it is produced. This new edition presents the play in the form in which it appeared in the First Folio, restoring, for example, the Folio’s punctuation and lineation and revealing through these rhetorical emphases and nuances of characterization lost by later editorial regularization. The editorial resolution of ambiguities has closed off certain routes of interpretation, directions that the original text offers its readers and performers. There is ample evidence of thematic ambiguity in the play, an ambiguity which the play’s editorial and theatrical history has sought to smooth over. Julius Caesar is also a particularly clean text with few obvious errors and comparatively few points where conjectural readings are called for. The Folio text is thus the only authoritative text of the play and has been the basis of all later editions. The Tragedie of Julius Caesar dates from around 1599, and was first published by Heminge and Condell as the sixth play in the Tragedies section of their First Folio of 1623.

The tragedy of julius caesar book