This revised edition preserves the play text as it was edited by Marvin Spevack for the 1988 first edition. Jeremy Lopez's new introduction provides a detailed discussion of Julius Caesar's strange and innovative form by focusing on the interpretive challenges the play has presented to audiences, scholars and theatre companies from Shakespeare's time to our own. The textual commentary has been revised and updated with an eye, and an ear, to the contemporary student reader, and the list of further reading has been updated to reflect the latest developments in Shakespearean criticism. Like the first edition, this edition concludes with an appendix containing relevant excerpts from Shakespeare's main source, Plutarch's histories of the lives of Caesar and Brutus as translated by Sir Thomas North in 1579.

This revised edition preserves the play text as it was edited by Marvin Spevack for the 1988 first edition. Jeremy Lopez's new introduction provides a detailed discussion of Julius Caesar's strange and innovative form by focusing on the interpretive challenges the play has presented to audiences, scholars and theatre companies from Shakespeare's time to our own. The textual commentary has been revised and updated with an eye, and an ear, to the contemporary student reader, and the list of further reading has been updated to reflect the latest developments in Shakespearean criticism. Like the first edition, this edition concludes with an appendix containing relevant excerpts from Shakespeare's main source, Plutarch's histories of the lives of Caesar and Brutus as translated by Sir Thomas North in 1579.

This is the first book-length presentation of the life and works of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillips (1820-1889), the eminent Shakespearean scholar and author, whom critics of widely diverse orientation recognize as the greatest contributor of his age to our knowledge of Shakespeare's life and times. Halliwell was a man of prodigious energy and wide interests. Some six hundred publications deal not only with Shakespeare and early modern literature but also with mathematics, lexicography, the history of science, archaeology, dialectology, history and theology. He was a founder or council member of the Shakespeare Society, Percy Society, Camden Society, among others, as well as a member of numerous local, national and international organizations. Before the age of 20 he was Fellow of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. In the course of his career he received many other honours, at home and abroad: at age 18, he was the youngest Fellow ever elected to the Royal Society, and he became the first honorary member of the Shakespeare Society of New York. Also noteworthy were his efforts to establish Stratford-upon-Avon as a fitting memorial to Shakespeare, beginning with his purchase of Shakespeare's house, New Place, and continuing with his promotion of its library and museum. From beginning to end, his life was colourful as well as productive: his exclusion in the mid-1840s from the British Museum Library for purportedly stealing manuscripts from Trinity College, Cambridge (where he had been a student), caused a national uproar, as did his involvement toward the end of the century, along with Algernon Swinburne, in a controversy with F.J. Furnivall and his New Shakespeare Society over the direction of literary studies. Very Victorian was Halliwell's long conflict with his father-in-law, the renowned collector Sir Thomas Phillips, who was enraged and unforgiving because Halliwell had eloped with his daughter. Halliwell's life affords a panoramic as well as a personal view of Victorian literary theory and practice, the founding and organization of scholarly societies, popular education, the book trade, and, not the least interesting, the domestic everyday of England in the 19th century.