The purpose of this research is to examine the feminist implications of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. The plan of the research will be to set forth the traditional judgment that this is usually seen as a man's play, and then to discuss how feminist implications nevertheless arise in a close examination of it.
To discuss Julius Caesar in any critical way is to be bound by the facts of history as reported by the historians writing roughly in the same period as the events that took place. Shakespeare's principal source was undoubtedly Plutarch, and the core of the story is undoubtedly the assassination conspiracy formed by political rivals of Julius Caesar who also engage Caesar's longtime friend Brutus in their plot. Later, there is a falling-out of the conspirators, notably between Brutus and the plot leader Cassius. But they are pursued and defeated as rebels by allies Mark Antony and Octavius, who ascends the imperial throne.
All this is the stuff of melodrama and action-adventure stories,- which is to say the stuff of men's stories. The plot, the battles, the conflict over the throne--these are the concerns of the military, of strategy. The sweeping nature of the story, from central Rome to the distant plains of Philippi, is suited to the heroic/epic/poetic form that is associated chiefly with the deeds of great men. Even the personal tragedy that befalls Brutus in the wake of the assassination and the ignominy of defeat can be seen as the tragedy of a flawed individual, inevitably a man for the reason that men are at the center of all significant events in the story. And the fact that Cassius is initially motivated to lead the conspiracy as much by evidence of Caesar's imperial ambitions against the republican governmental structure of Rome is the stuff of politics, military strategy, and the vicious irony that, in the end, Octavius confirms the imperial rather than republican structure of the Roman state. T...