ABSTRACT
Important reasons for the popularity of Julius Caesar are the scope it provides for spectacle, its rhetorical high-spots such as Mark Antony’s funeral oration in act 3, scene 2, and the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius in act 4. Nonetheless, Julius Caesar is also acknowledged to be a play with substantial theatrical drawbacks. These drawbacks include the absence of significant female roles, a crowd that must be neither too active nor too passive, a titular hero who dies before the play is half over, two (or perhaps three) other roles of great interest competing for attention, and two final acts that threaten to dwindle into anti-climax. In terms of both character and structure, therefore, Julius Caesar is found wanting. In what follows I will examine two perceived deficiencies from among this list, the dwindling of acts 4 and 5 and the lack of a clearly determined central figure, and some of the ways in which productions from the long history of Julius Caesar on stage have attempted to deal with them.
