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Renaissance Caesars and the poetics of ambiguity: Dramatic representations of Julius Caesar in the English Renaissance
Abstract
The conceptions of Julius Caesar in the English Renaissance were complex and contradictory, and the four surviving plays about Caesar from the period--the anonymous Caesar's Revenge (c. 1595), Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599), George Chapman's Caesar and Pompey (c. 1604), and Sir William Alexander's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1607)--negotiate these conceptions in distinct ways. The views of Caesar current in the Renaissance were diverse in both their sources and content. The medieval tradition glorified Caesar, but classical sources were mixed in their assessments. Caesar was lauded for his virtues and the authoritarian stability he brought to Rome, but was also condemned for his vices and his subversion of the Republic. In the Renaissance, therefore, Caesar was an ambiguous figure who was regarded as both an ambitious usurper and as a legitimate monarch. Renaissance drama imposed didactic lessons on historical subject matter, and, thus, Caesar's Revenge illustrates how ambition and revenge cause civil discord. Caesar and Pompey espouses Stoic independence, and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar both condemns ambition and counsels Stoic transcendence of the vagaries of Fortune. The three plays, however, cannot simplify Caesar and the events of his life to fully complement their didactic aims because of two primary factors. First, the plays were composed within disciplinary paradigms that promote ambiguity. These paradigms--historiographical in Caesar's Revenge, philosophical in Caesar and Pompey, and rhetorical in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar--resist reductive, didactic appropriations of Caesar by acknowledging opposing viewpoints and perspectives. Secondly, the multiple and conflicting conceptions of Caesar in the Renaissance defied simplification. The number of accounts of Caesar and their contradictory nature produced an intertextual web of references and interpretations that undermined unequivocal portrayals of Caesar. Shakespeare avoided these difficulties by focusing Julius Caesar on ambiguity itself. His play demonstrates the manner in which assessments and judgments of character are the product of the perceiver's perspective and how identity is thus shaped to appeal to the perceived judgments of those perceivers. These insights are applicable to the operations, specific to the Renaissance, of the other three plays, and to the means of interpretation today.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature|Theater|European history
Recommended Citation
Yu, Jeffrey J, "Renaissance Caesars and the poetics of ambiguity: Dramatic representations of Julius Caesar in the English Renaissance" (1995). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9541171.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9541171