SOURCE: Knights, L. C. “Personality and Politics in Julius Caesar.” In ‘Hamlet’ and Other Shakespearean Essays, pp. 82-101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

In the following essay, Knights analyzes how Shakespeare contrasted public and private life in Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599, and the play was first performed in the new theatre, the Globe, which Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, had recently had built on the Bankside. Shakespeare, of course, got the material for his play from Plutarch's Lives of Caesar and Brutus. But, just as in gathering material for the English historical plays from Holinshed, he selected only what he needed as an artist dealing with the universal stuff of human nature, so here his purpose is not simply to reconstruct the historical situation in Rome in the year 44 b.c. The historical material is of interest only for what Shakespeare makes of it. That...