Commentary

• Shakespeare’s Politics

  - Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa, Shakespeare’s Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1965)
  Summary from the Publisher: Taking the classical view that the political shapes man’s consciousness, Allan Bloom considers Shakespeare as a profoundly political Renaissance dramatist. He aims to recover Shakespeare’s ideas and beliefs and to make… More

• The Morality of the Pagan Hero: Julius Caesar

  - Allan Bloom, “The Morality of the Pagan Hero: Julius Caesar,” in Shakespeare’s Politics, 75–112
  Excerpt: Julius Caesar is the story of a man who became a god. Beyond his merely human achievements — the destruction of the Republic and the establishment of a universal monarchy — he was worshiped as a divinity, as were many of those who… More

• Julius Caesar

  - Michael Platt, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 185–257
  Excerpt: Regimes are founded, destroyed, or perpetuated during extreme times, time which command almost universal attention. Revolutions are like bonfires; no one can avoid staring at them and, still, no one likes to find himself in their fiery center. The… More

• The End of the Ancient Republic: Essays on Julius Caesar

  - Jan H. Blits, The End of the Ancient Republic: Essays on Julius Caesar (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993)
  From a review by Patrick Coby, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 46, Issue 1: The End of the Ancient Republic  by Jan Blits is a slim volume of four essays on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Although written independently of one another, and in some… More

• Julius Caesar

  - David Lowenthal, “Julius Caesar” in Shakespeare and the Good Life, 109-41.
  A provocative claim that Julius Caesar orchestrated his own assassination.

• Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World

  - Paul A. Cantor, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)
  Summary from the Publisher: Paul A. Cantor first probed Shakespeare’s Roman plays—Coriolanus, Julius Caeser, and Antony and Cleopatra—in his landmark Shakespeare’s Rome (1976). With Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy, he now argues that these plays form an… More

• Rome and the Spirit of Caesar

  - Jan H. Blits, Rome and the Spirit of Caesar: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015)
  Summary from the Publisher: Rome and the Spirit of Caesar, providing a fresh interpretation of Julius Caesar, is a thorough examination of Shakespeare’s presentation of the final throes of republican Rome’s political decay and demise and the rise of… More