SOURCE: "History As Nobility: In the Theater of Pompey," in Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature, Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 205-36.

In the excerpt below, Hampton contends that Shakespeare relies on rhetoric—more specifically, word play—to explore the untenable relationship between the patrician class and Caesar, the complex conflict between the patricians and the plebeians, and the easy effectiveness with which Antony manipulates the plebeians.

In England the submission of the aristocracy to royal authority proceeded more quickly than in France, where it was hampered by religious war. From the time of Henry VIII the domination of the aristocracy by the Crown was a central feature of English political life. The splendid masques and festivals of the courts of Elizabeth and James aimed to rewrite social relationships by a powerfully effective campaign of propaganda. By the time of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599)—thus even...