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What You’ll Love about… Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Along with Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar is often taught to middle-schoolers, which is kind of baffling. A play as cynical as this one, which shows how easy it is to manipulate the common people, how easy it is to assassinate a political leader, and how dangerous clever people can be wouldn’t be on my list to teach to children, but I suppose it’s a good cautionary tale about how the world has a way of chewing up and spitting out people who act on principle.
The play can also spark some interesting ethical conversations about whether it is ever right to murder someone, but most of us will never have to face that dilemma. Still, a play with a gory assassination scene followed by protracted internecine strife and the deaths of the only virtuous characters can be a serious bummer.
As with a lot of Shakespeare’s other plays, the title is really a misdirect, because this is obviously the tragedy of Brutus and his wife Portia and not Julius Caesar. By the time Shakespeare writes this play, everybody knows that Caesar is going to be assassinated, and even though the play tries to add some suspense by presenting some ominous supernatural events leading up to Caesar’s death in the Senate-House (historically the Theatre of Pompey, which was being used temporarily while a new Curia was being constructed), the fact that Caesar…
