The New Hudson Shakespeare · William Shakespeare
EXTERNAL EVIDENCE
So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare, And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were _Brutus_ and _Cassius_: oh how the Audience Were ravish'd, with what new wonder they went thence, When some new day they would not brooke a line Of tedious (though well laboured) _Catiline_; _Sejanus_ too was irkesome, they priz'de more Honest _Iago_, or the jealous _Moore_. "Fustian" Clove's quotation may apply to references to the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls in Shakespeare's earlier plays and other Elizabethan literature; and little can be based upon the "_Et tu, Brute_" quotation, as Ben Jonson may have drawn it from the same source as Shakespeare did. On the other hand, Henslowe in his _Diary_ under May 22, 1602, notes that he advanced five pounds "in earneste of a Boocke called _sesers Falle_," which the dramatists Munday, Drayton, Webster, Middleton "and the Rest" were composing for Lord Nottingham's Company. _Cæsar's Fall_ was plainly intended to outshine Shakespeare's popular play, but, as Professor Herford comments, "the lost play ... for the rival company would have been a somewhat tardy counterblast to an old piece of 1599." He adds: "_Julius Cæsar_ was certainly not unconcerned in the revival of the fashion for tragedies of revenge with a ghost in them, which suddenly set in with Marston's _Antonio and Mellida_ and Chettle's _Hoffman_ in 1601."
Dr. Furnivall, a strong advocate for 1601 as the date of composition, has suggested[1] that Essex's ill-judged rebellion against Queen Elizabeth, on Sunday, February 8, 1601, was the reason of Shakespeare's producing his _Julius Cæsar_ in that year. "Assuredly," he says, "the citizens of London in that year who heard Shakespeare's play must have felt the force of '_Et tu, Brute_,' and must have seen Brutus's death, with keener and more home-felt influence than we feel and hear the things with now." Drayton's revised version of his _Mortimeriados_ (1596-1597); published in 1603 under the title of _The Barons' Wars_, has a passage which strongly resembles some lines in Antony's last speech (V, v, 73-74), but common property in the idea that a well-balanced mixture of the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) produces a perfect man invalidates any argument for the date of the play based upon this evidence. See note, p. 167, l. 73.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.