Shakespeare rarely made up his own stories. He frequently adapted historical events from chronicles or fictional tales from various places. He wrote at least eight plays with HISTORY in the title. Every event portrayed in those two tetralogies were over a hundred years old. Consequently, talking about history in a Shakespeare play requires two overlapping conversations: the history portrayed in the play and the history taking place when the play was written.
Everyone who writes about The Tragedy of Julius Caesar addresses why Shakespeare would have told this story of Roman History in 1599. His main source is pretty clearly Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which he would have access to via Thomas North’s translation (Plutarch wrote in Attic Greek, not Latin). Most scholars conclude something that is the opposite of my argument. I argue that Shakespeare exposes Rome’s politics as the state religion. The dominant argument from the last thirty years is that Shakespeare exposes England’s religion as a subtle means of politics. Both interpretations are products of larger worldviews. Most Shakespeare scholars see religion as another form of politics. I see humanist politics as a counterfeit religion.
Caesar’s Rome was supposed to be the “good old days” for citizens of the English Renaissance. It was a dangerous place for poets, Shakespeare observes. Cinna the poet dies because he shares a name with a conspirator. It was no less fraught for rulers and revolutionaries. The good old days weren’t so good.
By making clear the religious commitments of the play’s characters in a way that goes beyond his source text, Shakespeare also draws attention to the religious dimension of pagan political life. Religion and politics are connected. The church and state are parallel institutions each with separate ethical domains. They both receive their power from God, not human beings. So too do the parallel domains of literature and history.
Experiments in Criticism 