Julius Caesar's Analogue Clock and the Accents of History

In an extensive account of the various Royalist and Parliamentarian deployments of Julius Caesar from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century, Michael Dobson has observed that the play’s adaptability has been instrumental in Shakespeare’s canonization. ¹ On 28 April 1738, the committee appointed to erect Shakespeare’s monument in Westminster Abbey inaugurated its project by commissioning a performance of Julius Caesar at Drury Lane. In Noel Porter’s explicitly Whiggish, pro-Brutus prologue to this performance, Shakespeare enjoys the coronation denied Caesar:

While Brutus bleeds for liberty and Rome,

Let Britons crowd to deck his Poet’s tomb.

To future times recorded let it stand,

This head was lawrel’d by the public hand. ²