Julius Caesar
by William Shakespeare (1623)
5 chapters · 5 chapter quizzes · 253 vocabulary words
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Rome, in the middle of February, and the streets are full. A general has come home from a war fought against other Romans, and the working people of the city have shut up their shops to cheer him. Not everyone is cheering. Two officials try to break up the crowd, and in the Senate there are men who have begun to speak carefully to one another about what it means when a single person becomes this popular, this necessary, and this hard to refuse. Julius Caesar is Shakespeare's play about that unease. Rome has been a republic for centuries — a state proud of having no king, run by elected officials and a Senate — and the men in this play were raised on stories about the ancestors who threw the last king out. Now they watch Caesar move through the city with crowds at his heels, and each of them has to decide privately what he actually believes and what, if anything, he is willing to do about it. The play gives you the arguments from the inside: not a lecture about tyranny, but a handful of intelligent people talking each other into and out of things, mostly at night, mostly in private. The play opens with two conversations happening at once. In public, Caesar moves through a festival crowd with his wife and his friends, and a stranger's voice calls a warning to him out of the noise. In private, a little apart from the celebration, a senator named Cassius begins working on his brother-in-law Brutus — the most respected man in Rome, and Caesar's friend — asking him what he really thinks about the direction the city is heading. What Brutus decides will shape everything that follows.
This is the play people quote without knowing they are quoting it, and for high school readers it is the most useful thing Shakespeare wrote about how public arguments actually work. Every character in it is trying to move someone: a friend, a crowd, a spouse, a rival, or themselves. Because Shakespeare gives serious, genuinely persuasive speeches to people on opposite sides, you cannot get through the play by deciding early who is right and coasting — you have to keep testing arguments as they are made, which is exactly the skill you need for reading political speech, advertising, and social media in your own century. It is also short, fast, and mostly written in plain, muscular language, which makes it a good first full Shakespeare play to read closely rather than merely survive.
Meet the Characters
Pre-Reading Discussion Questions
- What is the difference between a leader who is popular and a leader who is good at the job? Can you think of ways the two get confused?
- When you disagree with someone you also admire, what changes about how you argue with them?
- Where do your own political opinions actually come from — evidence, the people you trust, or the group you want to belong to?
- How much should a crowd's reaction count as proof that something is true or right?
- What do you owe a friend, and is there anything you could owe your country that would outrank it?
- The word 'ambitious' can be a compliment or an accusation. What makes the difference?
Themes & Big Ideas to Track
- Watch how often a character's argument depends less on evidence than on who is making it and how much that person is trusted.
- Notice the gap between what characters say in public and what they admit when they are alone or with one other person.
- Track the question of whether events are driven by fate, by omens, or by ordinary human choices — different characters answer this differently, and they say so out loud.
- Pay attention to the word 'honour' every time it appears, and to who is defining it at that moment.
- Consider how the ordinary people of Rome are portrayed, and who in the play takes them seriously as an audience.
- Watch what happens to friendship when it has to share space with politics.
Chapter-by-Chapter Study Guide
Chapter 1: Act I
Before you read — think about:
- Reading a play is different from reading a novel: there is no narrator to tell you what a room looks like, what a character is thinking, or how a line is delivered. What will you have to supply for yourself, and where might you go wrong doing it?
- What do you already picture when you hear the words 'ancient Rome' — and where did that picture actually come from? Films, games, history class, something else?
- Most of this play is written in verse, with speech measured out in lines of a fixed length rather than in paragraphs. What does that formality do to you as a reader before you have understood a single sentence?
- Roman naming is dense: several men in this play share a family name, and the same person may be called by different parts of his name in different lines. What strategies do you already use to keep a large cast straight in the opening pages of anything you read?
- Shakespeare wrote for an audience that mostly heard his plays in a noisy open-air theatre rather than reading them quietly. What might a writer do differently when the audience cannot turn back a page?
Watch for these while reading:
- Cassius's way of building an argument — how many of his sentences are questions, and who he lets answer them.
- Where the dialogue is set in verse and where it drops into ordinary prose, and which characters tend to speak which.
- Images taken from animals, weather, and the river Tiber, and which characters reach for them when they are describing people.
- Brutus's habit of holding back: how much he actually tells anyone about what he is thinking, and how he changes the subject.
- Physical detail — what these characters notice about one another's faces, build, and way of walking, and what they conclude from it.
Vocabulary to know:
mechanical (adjective) — belonging to the manual trades; working with your hands for a living; apparel (noun) — clothing, especially the best clothes someone owns; cobbler (noun) — a person whose trade is mending shoes; knave (noun) — an insulting word for a dishonest or cheeky man of low rank; beseech (verb) — to beg someone earnestly for something; awl (noun) — a small pointed tool used for punching holes in leather; triumph (noun) — an official Roman victory parade honouring a general who has come home from war; tributaries (noun) — conquered peoples or rulers forced to pay money and goods to Rome; battlements (noun) — the notched top of a defensive wall, where soldiers can stand; replication (noun) — an echo; a sound thrown back from a surface; intermit (verb) — to hold back or delay something for a while; ingratitude (noun) — failure to be thankful to someone who deserves thanks; exalted (adjective) — raised high above the rest; disrobe (verb) — to strip the coverings or decorations off something; servile (adjective) — behaving like a slave; cringing and submissive; vulgar (noun) — the common people of the city, spoken of as a single mass; barren (adjective) — unable to have children; soothsayer (noun) — a person who claims to be able to foretell the future; Ides (noun) — in the Roman calendar, the middle day of the month — the fifteenth of March, May, July and October; gamesome (adjective) — playful; fond of sport and games; countenance (noun) — the face, or the expression a face is wearing; construe (verb) — to interpret something; to read a particular meaning into it; cogitations (noun) — thoughts, especially serious private ones; yoke (noun) — a heavy wooden collar joining oxen to a plough; used here for the burden of being ruled; jealous (adjective) — suspicious; mistrustful of someone's motives (not envious); fawn (verb) — to flatter someone in a cringing way, the way a dog begs for attention; rout (noun) — a disorderly crowd of people; accoutred (adjective) — dressed and equipped, as a soldier is; buffet (verb) — to strike at or fight against something with the arms; sinews (noun) — tendons and muscles; bodily strength; lustre (noun) — brightness or shine; bestride (verb) — to stand over something with a leg on either side of it; Colossus (noun) — an enormous statue; anything of giant size; underlings (noun) — people of lower rank who take orders from others; chidden (adjective) — scolded; told off; spare (adjective) — thin; lean, with no extra flesh; thrice (adverb) — three times; rabblement (noun) — a noisy, disorderly crowd; swoon (verb) — to faint; infirmity (noun) — a physical weakness or illness; foolery (noun) — silly, worthless behaviour; mettle (noun) — spirit and courage; the stuff a person is made of; tempest (noun) — a violent storm; prodigies (noun) — unnatural happenings treated as warnings from the gods; portentous (adjective) — seeming to give warning of something bad to come; unbraced (adjective) — with clothing loosened or hanging open; bondman (noun) — a man held in slavery; sufferance (noun) — patient endurance of something painful or unjust; factious (adjective) — ready to join a party or faction working against someone; redress (noun) — the putting right of a wrong; gait (noun) — a person's particular way of walking; alchemy (noun) — the old art of turning cheap metal into gold; any magical-seeming transformation; enterprise (noun) — a bold and difficult undertaking; surly (adjective) — bad-tempered and unfriendly; ghastly (adjective) — pale and horrified; frightful to look at; strew (verb) — to scatter something loosely over a surface; cull (verb) — to pick out or select from a larger group; Lupercal (noun) — an ancient Roman February festival that included a ceremonial race through the city.
Chapter 2: Act II
Before you read — think about:
- At the end of Act I you heard Cassius speak alone on stage, with no one to hear him but you. How much should a reader trust what a character says when they believe nobody is listening?
- Cassius argued that the fault lies in ourselves and not in our stars. Before you read on, where do you actually stand on that? How much of what happens to a person is theirs to control?
- The Romans in this play keep invoking their ancestors. How much should the behaviour of people who came before — in a family, a school, a country — obligate the people living now?
- Act I's last scene moved out of daylight and into a night street. What changes for you as a reader when a scene is set at night rather than in the middle of the day?
- Much of what you learned in Act I came second-hand, from someone describing what he saw. How do you decide how much to trust an account of an event you did not witness yourself?
Watch for these while reading:
- Time of day: how often characters ask what hour it is, what they are using for light, and how they can tell how close dawn is.
- How these men speak when several of them are in a room at once, compared with the one-to-one conversations of Act I.
- The way characters describe their own bodies — sleep, appetite, health, weakness — and whose body gets talked about most.
- The household figures who move through these scenes, and the tone the powerful characters take with them.
- Portia and Calphurnia: how much room the play gives each of them to speak, and how the men answer them.
Vocabulary to know:
taper (noun) — a slender candle; adder (noun) — a poisonous snake; remorse (noun) — pity or mercy that holds a powerful person back; affections (noun) — feelings and passions, as opposed to cool reason; extremities (noun) — extreme actions or conditions; mischievous (adjective) — causing serious harm (not merely naughty); exhalations (noun) — meteors or glowing vapours in the night sky; instigations (noun) — urgings meant to push someone into action; phantasma (noun) — a nightmare or waking hallucination; insurrection (noun) — a revolt against those in charge; conspiracy (noun) — a secret agreement between people to do something unlawful; affability (noun) — friendliness and easy, welcoming manners; Erebus (noun) — in Greek myth, the region of total darkness on the road to the underworld; cautelous (adjective) — crafty and deceitful; insuppressive (adjective) — impossible to hold down or crush; palter (verb) — to speak or act deceitfully; to wriggle out of what you promised; augurers (noun) — Roman priests who looked for the will of the gods in sacrifices and in birds; entrails (noun) — the inner organs of an animal, which Roman priests examined for signs; ceremonies (noun) — omens and superstitious observances; lowliness (noun) — a show of humility; flatterers (noun) — people who praise others insincerely in order to get something; physical (adjective) — good for the health; medicinal; humours (noun) — in old medicine, the body fluids believed to govern health and mood; also a passing mood; dank (adjective) — unpleasantly damp and cold; contagion (noun) — disease believed to be carried in the air; rheumy (adjective) — damp in a way that brings on colds and running noses; unpurged (adjective) — not yet cleaned or cleared — of morning air before the sun burns off the damp; constancy (noun) — steadiness; refusing to be shaken or to give way; charactery (noun) — writing; the marks that spell something out; exploit (noun) — a bold and daring deed; mortified (adjective) — deadened; drained of life and feeling; vouchsafe (verb) — to grant or offer something graciously; kerchief (noun) — a cloth wrapped around the head, worn here as a sign of illness; ague (noun) — a fever that comes with fits of shivering; suitor (noun) — a person who comes to a powerful figure with a request or petition; emulation (noun) — jealous rivalry; the urge to pull a better person down to your level; whelped (verb) — given birth — said of an animal; hurtled (verb) — crashed and clattered violently; comets (noun) — bright objects with tails that cross the sky and were read as signs; valiant (adjective) — brave; spurn (verb) — to reject something scornfully, as if kicking it aside; prevention (noun) — being stopped before you can act; wafture (noun) — a wave or sweep of the hand; enkindled (adjective) — set alight; stirred up; incorporate (adjective) — joined together into one body; closet (noun) — a small private room used as a study; counsels (noun) — private plans and secrets; amiss (adverb) — wrongly; in a mistaken way; security (noun) — over-confidence; a false feeling of being safe; contrive (verb) — to plot or scheme together; bustling (adjective) — busy and noisy; fray (noun) — a noisy fight or brawl; toils (noun) — nets used to trap animals during a hunt.
Chapter 3: Act III
Before you read — think about:
- Act II ended by cutting away from a long scene in Caesar's house to two very short ones. What does a playwright get out of a twenty-line scene built around a minor character?
- So far this play has done most of its serious business at night, indoors, and between two or three people at a time. What do you expect to be different about a scene played in daylight and in public?
- Roman custom gave enormous weight to precedent — to what had been done before, and by whom. Where in your own life does 'we have always done it this way' still settle an argument?
- In Acts I and II, characters kept reading signs — a dream, the weather, birds, a sick man's face — and drawing opposite conclusions from them. What makes two intelligent people look at identical evidence and disagree completely?
- You have now met most of this play's cast. Which of them do you currently find yourself trusting most, and what exactly is that trust based on — what they say, what they do, or what others say about them?
Watch for these while reading:
- Where characters place themselves: who stands close to whom, who kneels, and who keeps to the edge of the group.
- Caesar's habit of speaking about himself in the third person, and the places where it thickens.
- How often characters appeal to what other people will think of them, and whose opinion each one seems to care about.
- Which characters are allowed to finish a sentence, and which get interrupted or talked over.
- Antony: how much he actually says himself, measured against how much other characters have been saying about him.
Vocabulary to know:
schedule (noun) — a written paper or document; puissant (adjective) — powerful; mighty; couchings (noun) — low bows made by bending the body down; curtsies (noun) — bows or bends of the knee made as a sign of respect; spaniel (noun) — a breed of dog known for its eager, devoted behaviour; used as an insult for cringing flattery; cur (noun) — a mongrel dog; a contemptible person; repeal (noun) — the calling back of someone who has been banished; enfranchisement (noun) — the restoring of someone's freedom and rights as a citizen; firmament (noun) — the sky, thought of as a fixed arch holding the stars; unassailable (adjective) — impossible to attack or shake; apprehensive (adjective) — able to understand and perceive (not 'nervous'); bootless (adjective) — useless; pointless; confounded (adjective) — bewildered; thrown into confusion; mutiny (noun) — a violent uprising against authority; pulpit (noun) — a raised platform a speaker stands on to address a crowd; prostrate (adjective) — lying face down on the ground; misgiving (noun) — a feeling of doubt or unease about what is coming; shrewdly (adverb) — sharply and accurately; dignities (noun) — high offices and honours; multitude (noun) — a very large crowd of people; prophesy (verb) — to foretell what is going to happen; cumber (verb) — to burden or clog something so that it cannot move freely; havoc (noun) — in old warfare, the shouted order that released soldiers to destroy without restraint; oration (noun) — a formal public speech; rendered (verb) — given or delivered publicly; censure (verb) — to judge or assess (not necessarily to condemn); extenuated (verb) — made to seem less; played down; commonwealth (noun) — the state, thought of as the shared property and business of all its citizens; beholding (adjective) — indebted; under an obligation to someone; interred (verb) — buried; grievous (adjective) — very serious; causing great harm; coffers (noun) — strong chests for holding money; a treasury; ransoms (noun) — payments made to free captured people; testament (noun) — a legal document setting out what a person leaves behind at death; parchment (noun) — writing material made from treated animal skin; napkins (noun) — small cloths or handkerchiefs; legacy (noun) — something left to someone in a will; bequeathing (verb) — leaving something to someone in a will; issue (noun) — a person's children and descendants; drachmas (noun) — silver coins used in the Greek world and known throughout the Roman one; arbors (noun) — shady garden walks covered by trees or climbing plants; mantle (noun) — a loose sleeveless cloak worn over other clothes; vesture (noun) — clothing; garments; rent (noun) — a tear or split in cloth; dint (noun) — the force or impression something makes; hearse (noun) — the frame or bier on which a body is carried at a funeral; brands (noun) — burning sticks used as torches; forms (noun) — long wooden benches; fantasy (noun) — the imagination; the part of the mind that produces dreams and images; Ate (noun) — in Greek myth, the goddess of ruin and reckless destruction; monarch (noun) — a king or sole ruler; confines (noun) — the borders or territory of a place; doomsday (noun) — the end of the world; a day of final judgement; sirrah (noun) — an old form of address used to a servant or to someone treated as an inferior; knot (noun) — a tight group of people bound together by a shared purpose; base (adjective) — low; dishonourable; compact (noun) — an agreement or pact between parties; severally (adverb) — separately; one at a time; untrod (adjective) — not yet walked on; never travelled before.
Chapter 4: Act IV
Before you read — think about:
- Act III ended in a street, with a crowd and nobody left to argue with them. What kind of scene do you expect a play to give you after a public catastrophe, and why might a writer deliberately avoid the obvious one?
- Antony told the citizens he was no orator, and then did what he did. Having watched that, how do you now read any public figure who introduces themselves as a plain, blunt speaker?
- This play has moved from streets to private houses to the Senate to the forum. What does a change of location do to your sense of who is holding power in a scene?
- Rome's civil wars were fought by armies loyal to individual generals rather than to the state itself. Why is that a dangerous arrangement for a republic, and what keeps armies loyal to a country instead of to a person?
- Shakespeare's first audiences knew the outline of this history before the play began, from school and from Plutarch. What is it like to read a story whose outcome is already a matter of public record — does knowing change what you pay attention to?
Watch for these while reading:
- Who is actually in the room when decisions get made now, compared with the crowded scenes of Acts II and III.
- The play's arithmetic: how often characters count things — men, days, hours, sums of money — and how precise they are.
- Lucius, and the tone Brutus takes with him.
- Music, sleep and rest: who asks for them, who is refused them, and who gets any.
- Anyone new who appears, and how quickly the play tells you what that person is there for.
Vocabulary to know:
prick (verb) — to mark a name on a list, originally by pricking the paper with a pin; proscription (noun) — an official published list of citizens condemned to death and to the loss of their property; unmeritable (adjective) — having no merit; not deserving anything; provender (noun) — dry food kept for horses and cattle; corporal (adjective) — having to do with the body; property (noun) — a stage prop; something kept only to be used as a tool; levying (verb) — raising or collecting — used of armies and of taxes; covert (adjective) — hidden; concealed; salutation (noun) — a formal greeting; jades (noun) — worn-out or worthless horses; mart (verb) — to trade or sell something as if at a market; offices (noun) — official positions of public responsibility; chastisement (noun) — punishment or severe correction; choler (noun) — hot anger; in old medicine, the bodily fluid thought to cause it; testy (adjective) — irritable; quick to take offence; venom (noun) — poison, especially the kind an animal carries; spleen (noun) — an organ of the body once believed to be the seat of anger and bad temper; waspish (adjective) — sharp-tongued and easily stung into anger; vaunting (noun) — boasting; covetous (adjective) — greedy for money or possessions; counters (noun) — small metal discs used for counting; a contemptuous word for coins; indirection (noun) — dishonest or roundabout means of getting something; Olympus (noun) — the mountain that Greek myth made the home of the gods; a byword for something enormous; Plutus (noun) — in Greek myth, the god of wealth, whose name stood for buried treasure; sheathe (verb) — to put a blade back into its case; mirth (noun) — laughter and amusement; cynic (noun) — a rude, sneering critic who claims to be telling hard truths; jigging (adjective) — rhyming in a jerky, sing-song way; companion (noun) — used here as an insult — 'fellow', someone beneath notice; philosophy (noun) — here, the Stoic teaching that a wise person meets misfortune without being shaken; distract (adjective) — driven out of one's senses by grief or fear; tenor (noun) — the general sense or content of a message; outlawry (noun) — an order putting someone outside the protection of the law; repose (noun) — rest; peaceful sleep; apparition (noun) — a figure that appears without warning and seems not to be solid; monstrous (adjective) — unnatural in size or kind; against the ordinary order of things; betimes (adverb) — early; in good time; powers (noun) — armed forces; troops; expedition (noun) — a swift military march toward a target; ventures (noun) — risky undertakings, especially ones with money or lives staked on them; contribution (noun) — money or supplies demanded from a district to support an army; legions (noun) — the large units that made up a Roman army; scope (noun) — free room to act or to express something.
Chapter 5: Act V
Before you read — think about:
- Battles on Shakespeare's stage were fought by a handful of actors with trumpets, drums and noise from offstage. What does a reader have to supply to make a battle scene work on the page, and what does a play gain by not showing you the whole field?
- In Act IV, Cassius wanted to let the enemy come to them and Brutus wanted to march. Which argument did you find more convincing at the time, and has anything since made you reconsider?
- Knowing nothing yet about what is in it, what jobs does a final act have to do in a play — and which of those jobs do you think is hardest to do well?
- Characters in this play have argued about the gods, about fate, and about what people choose for themselves. Where has the play left that argument for you so far, and which character has made the best case?
- After Act I, Shakespeare's Rome contains almost no one who is not a political actor — no shopkeepers, no children, no ordinary households except two. What has been left out of this city, and what might including it have changed?
Watch for these while reading:
- Stage directions: there are more of them here than anywhere else in the play, and they carry information the dialogue never states.
- How characters address one another now — titles, names, insults — compared with the way they spoke in earlier acts.
- Who gives orders in each scene, and how far down the chain of command those orders actually travel.
- The words each side uses for the other, and whether either army ever uses the same word about itself.
- Whether the omen-language of Acts I and II is still in circulation, and which characters are using it now.
Vocabulary to know:
parley (noun) — a talk held between enemies, usually before or during a fight; exigent (noun) — a moment of crisis when a decision cannot wait; Hybla (noun) — a town in Sicily famous throughout the ancient world for its honey; peevish (adjective) — childishly irritable and complaining; reveller (noun) — someone devoted to parties and late nights; masker (noun) — a person who takes part in masked entertainments and dances; defiance (noun) — open refusal to submit; a challenge flung at an enemy; stomachs (noun) — appetite for a fight; courage; hazard (noun) — risk; a throw of the dice; bark (noun) — a sailing ship; billow (noun) — a large swelling wave; presage (verb) — to give warning of something before it happens; Epicurus (noun) — a Greek philosopher who taught that the gods do not send signs and that omens mean nothing; ensign (noun) — a battle standard carried in front of an army; also the soldier who carries it; gorging (verb) — eating greedily and to the full; kites (noun) — birds of prey that circle over dead or dying animals; canopy (noun) — a cover stretched overhead, like a roof of cloth; incertain (adjective) — uncertain; not to be relied on; alarum (noun) — a call to arms — in stage directions, the trumpet and drum noise of a battle offstage; bills (noun) — written orders or notes; demeanor (noun) — the way someone carries and conducts themselves; overthrow (noun) — a defeat that brings someone down; spoil (noun) — plunder taken from an enemy during a battle; enclosed (adjective) — surrounded on every side; consorted (verb) — kept company with; travelled alongside; compass (noun) — a full circle; the complete round of something; disconsolate (adjective) — beyond comforting; wreath (noun) — a ring of leaves worn on the head as a mark of victory; garland (noun) — a woven circle of flowers or leaves given as a prize or an honour; apace (adverb) — quickly; at speed; vessel (noun) — a container; used of a person as a container of feeling; tarry (verb) — to stay behind; to linger; smatch (noun) — a taste or trace of something; retreat (noun) — the trumpet signal ordering soldiers to break off and withdraw; bestow (verb) — to give or grant something; prefer (verb) — to recommend someone for a position; entertain (verb) — to take someone into your service; to employ; elements (noun) — the four substances — earth, water, air and fire — that were believed to be mixed together in every person; vile (adjective) — worthless and contemptible; fatal (adjective) — carrying death with it; decided by fate.
About the Author
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was an actor, part-owner of a theatre company, and the most successful playwright in London at a time when the public theatre was a new and slightly disreputable business. He grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon as the son of a glove-maker, never attended university, and learned Roman history the way most educated Englishmen of his day did — from grammar-school Latin and from translations, especially Sir Thomas North's English version of Plutarch's biographies of famous Greeks and Romans. Over roughly twenty years he wrote or co-wrote around thirty-eight plays, inventing very few of his plots and improving nearly all of them. Julius Caesar was probably one of the first plays performed at the newly built Globe Theatre.
The events behind the play are real. By 44 BC the Roman Republic had survived for almost five hundred years without a king, but decades of civil war had left enormous power in the hands of successful generals, and Caesar had recently defeated his rival Pompey and returned to Rome holding more authority than any Roman before him. Shakespeare found the story in Plutarch and compressed it hard, moving events together and giving his Romans the arguments of his own age: England in 1599 was ruled by an ageing Elizabeth I who had no heir, and English audiences were nervous about what happens to a country when the succession is uncertain. Writing about Rome let Shakespeare stage dangerous questions about power and legitimacy at a safe distance of sixteen hundred years.