Monday, March 29, 2021, 11:30 AM – 12 PM EDT
Bradd Shore, Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology Emeritus
“The Body Politic, The Body Poetic: Julius Caesar and Legacy of ‘The King’s Two Bodies’ “ Shakespeare's Julius Caeser, long a staple of American High School English classes, has found new and disturbing relevance in contemporary American politics. Despite its familiarity to audiences, the play is far from easy to interpret. Generations of critics have failed to agree on the hero of Julius Caesar. Neither Caesar nor Brutus seems to qualify. Despite all the gorgeous speeches in the play, view of Caesar's assassination remains murky. The old and politically sensitive “tyrannicide debate” made it hard for an Elizabethan playwright to condone Caesar’s assassination, while Caesar’s ambitions and personal weakness made (and still make) him an unlikely hero. But Shakespeare does have a point we can understand if we recognize the conflicted “body politic” of Rome itself as the play’s tragic hero. The opposed representations of Rome in the play mirror changing ideas of the nature of society alive in Shakespeare’s day (and far from dead in our own). Julius Caesar comes into view in a surprising new way when we see it as Shakespeare’s staging of grand social theory framed as a political tragedy.