Julius Caesar by William ShakespeareMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Definitely a play of two halves, the second of which doesn't match the dramatic interest of the first. Basically everything after Mark Anthony's rhetorical showstopper with Caesar's body is quite dull. I find Brutus and Cassius's long quarrel scene odd and their subsequent deaths bathetic. Shakespeare does a good job balancing the different viewpoints, although I suspect that the conspirators' cries of liberty and enfranchisement would appear more suspect to an Elizabethan audience than they do now. Caesar's murder is essentially a regicide that unleashes a civil war, and eventually results in Octavian as emperor anyway, so while Brutus may have been high-minded he was certainly (and quite literally) misguided. The influence of rhetoric on politics is ultimately what the play is about – the tribunes chiding the mechanicals at the start, then Cassius drawing out Brutus as the figurehead for the conspiracy, and climaxing with Mark Antony's playing the mob like a fiddle. The latter half loses that thread a bit, which is why this reputedly balanced play feels lopsided to me.
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