SOURCE: "Julius Caesar," in Tragic Alphabet: Shakespeare's Drama of Language, Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 50-67.

In the following excerpt, Danson asserts that the murders and suicides touched off by and including the assassination of Caesar are in fact "meaningless " nonrituals and that the play does not achieve its tragic, ritualized status until the death of Brutus.

In Julius Caesar we find, more starkly and simply than in Hamlet, those problems of communication and expression, those confusions linguistic and ritualistic, which mark the world of the tragedies. The play opens with the sort of apparently expository scene in which Shakespeare actually gives us the major action of the play in miniature. Flavius and Marullus, the tribunes, can barely understand the punning language of the commoners; had they the wit, they might exclaim with Hamlet, "Equivocation will undo us." It is ostensibly broad daylight in Rome, but the situation is...