Page:Julius Caesar (1919) Yale.djvu/127

Julius Cæsar For it is reported, that he had three and twenty wounds upon his body: and divers of the conspirators did hurt themselves, striking one body with so many blowes. When Cæsar was slaine, the Senate (though Brutus stood in the middest amongst them, as though he would have saied somewhat touching this fact) presently ran out of the house, and flying, filled all the city with marvellous feare and tumult.' (From 'The Life of Julius Cæsar,' North's 2d ed., 1595, as quoted by Furness, pp. 300, 301.)

 

The earliest extant version of Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar is that found in the famous First Folio collected edition of his plays, published in 1623, which therefore necessarily forms the basis of all modern texts; for the only known Quarto editions belong to the late Restoration period and so, unfortunately, have little critical value for the solution of the problems presented by the original text. It seems fairly certain now that Julius Cæsar was written and first produced in 1599, for on the twenty-first of September in that year a German traveller witnessed a performance of what was presumably Shakespeare's play at the Globe Theatre (cf. 'Londoner Theater und Schauspiele im Jahre 1599,' G. Binz, Anglia, xxii, 456, 1899). The next performance that we can date seems to have taken place at court early in 1613, the next at St. James', January 31, 1636–7, and the next at the Cockpit, November 13, 1638; but that the popularity of the play was far greater than these meagre records suggest is attested by various kinds of evidence, from Henslowe's effort to capitalize its success 