‘Julius Caesar’ Is Relevant Today
Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” has always been about more than killing Caesar.
On the eve of World War II, Orson Welles staged a landmark anti-Fascist production with a Mussolini-like Caesar. The Royal Shakespeare Company recently set the play in Africa, evoking the continent’s dictators and civil wars. Five years ago, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, staged a production featuring the assassination of an Obama- esque Caesar by right-wing conspirators.
But it’s the Public Theater in New York that finds itself in the middle of a pitched controversy, for its new staging of the play in Central Park. Oskar Eustis, the director, chose to make his Caesar decidedly Trumpian, giving him a shock of blond hair, an overlong red tie and a wife with a recognizably Slovenian accent. As all Caesars are, he’s killed in the middle of the play by Brutus and his co- conspirators.
That killing has driven Delta Air Lines and Bank of America to pull all or part of their sponsorship of the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park program, and thrust the theater into a maelstrom of criticism from President Donald J. Trump’s supporters.
“Julius Caesar,” with assassination at its core, is politically fraught. It was written when Elizabethan England seethed with political plots.
Over the years, totalitarian regimes have banned it. And audiences and scholars have long debated the play’s meaning, and the extent to which Shakespeare was sympathizing with the conspirators or condemning them. In the play, the in- creasingly powerful Caesar is killed in the name of saving the republic.
“I think the general drift of it is: Be careful, you might get what you want,” said Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar, noting the chaos the assassination unleashes. “The very thing that you think you’re doing to protect the republic can lead to the end of the republic.”
Leaders have been fascinated by the work. George Washington saw a production of the drama in 1790. Nelson Mandela annotated a copy when he was imprisoned for fighting apartheid in South Africa.
And the play became a staple of American public school reading lists, in part because it allowed teachers to discuss republicanism, said Brett Gamboa, a professor of English at Dartmouth College.
But like any work, the play, and the history it is based on, can be interpreted in different ways. John Wilkes Booth acted in a production of “Julius Caesar” in New York before he killed Abraham Lincoln, and complained after the assassination that he was being hunted “for doing what Brutus was honored for.” And Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of a failed attempt on Hitler’s life, reportedly kept a copy of “Julius Caesar” on his desk.
Stanley Wells, a prominent British Shakespeare scholar, said that Shakespeare seemed to anticipate the play’s long afterlife when he has Cassius, one of the conspirators, exclaim to Brutus: “How many ages hence/Shall this our lofty scene be acted over/In states unborn and accents yet unknown!”
“Within the play itself,” Professor Wells said, “Shakespeare is looking forward to times when people will also see this historic event as relevant to their own times.”
Mr. Eustis includes the Cassius quote in his program note, in which he adds his own thoughts: “Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means. To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him.”
The production that Orson Welles staged in 1937, with the Mercury Theater, was a revelation. The critic Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times that “the grim march of military feet through the ominous shadows of the stage is the doom song heard round the world today.”
Professor Gamboa said that the production influenced other Caesars, portrayed as recognizable political figures.
“When everyone’s in white togas, there’s just not a lot of context there,” said Rob Melrose, who staged the 2012 Obama-inspired production.
Mr. Melrose said that the act of violence at the play’s center should always be appalling. “When Caesar is killed, it’s horrifying, it’s awful — whether it’s Obama or Trump,” he said. “Trump, Republicans and Democrats should all take heart that what this play says is that killing a political leader, no matter how righteous your views are, is a bad idea — a terrible idea.”
An assassination that echoes across the centuries.