Caesar On and Off the Renaissance English Stage

“J. C.”—initials for two individuals continually discussed in medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Bible associates the two, when Jesus urges that “we render unto Caesar …” (Matt. 22.21). In some quarters, Gaius Julius Caesar was almost as highly praised as Jesus. Their betrayers are practically equated in Dante (Inferno, 34.58–63). In Shakespeare, the Dictator drinks wine with his followers at a Last Breakfast, before suffering from thirty-three wounds—the same number as the traditional age of the crucified Christ rather than the twenty-three wounds that history ascribes to the assassins. ¹ Both Christ and Caesar were reputed altruists, and yet radical destroyers. At their demise, they left bloody sacred relics ² and precipitated cosmic disorders. And after their deaths, both were seen again and frequently accounted as divine.