ABSTRACT
The scene of Caesar's murder offers a complex example of the tight relationship between ritual and theater, a connection that has continued to interest playwrights and performance studies scholars. As the conspirators "wash" their hands in Caesar's blood, their improvised language of ritual cleansing comes uncomfortably close to the Christian religious imagery with which Shakespeare's audience was deeply familiar. Shakespeare was working in an environment in which the nature and function of commercial public theaters was far from clear. Shakespeare's scenes of sacrifice contribute to a long tradition of thinking about the nature and function of theater as it emerges from various kinds of rituals. Renaissance thinkers were deeply interested in the origins of tragedy in "the frenzied, Dionysian song chanted around the sacrificial victim". The scene of Caesar's death generates a disjunction between theatrical consciousness and the ritual action.
