know their grave:
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust."

_Julius Caesar._

_Written._ 1601 (?)

_Produced._ (?)

_Published_, in the first folio, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The Lives of Antonius, Brutus and Julius
Caesar in Sir Thomas North's _Plutarch_.

A tragedy of Julius Caesar, now lost, was performed by Shakespeare's
company in 1594. Shakespeare must have known this play.

_The Fable._ Cassius, fearing that Julius Caesar is about to
extinguish all trace of Republican rule in Rome, persuades Brutus
and others to plot a change. They decide to murder Caesar.

On the morning chosen for the murder, Caesar is warned by many omens
not to stir abroad. He is persuaded to ignore the omens. He goes to
the Senate House, and is there killed. Mark Antony, his friend,
obtains leave from the murderers to make a public oration over the
corpse.

In his speech he so inflames the populace against the murderers
that they are compelled to leave Rome.

Joining himself to Octavius, he takes the field against Brutus and
Cassius, and helps to defeat them at Philippi.

Cassius is killed by his servant when he sees that all is lost.
Brutus, seeing the battle go against him, kills himself.

The modern play climbs to its culmination by a series of interruptions
or crises. The modern playwright tries to end his acts at an arresting
or splendid moment, artfully delayed, and carefully prepared. He tries
to end his play by a gradual knitting together of all the energies of
his characters into a situation, happier or more haunting, than any that
has preceded it in the course of the action. The art by which this is
done, when it is done, is called dramatic construction. There are many
kind of dramatic construction. Each age tends to form a new one. Each
writer uses many. In art a subject can only be expressed in the form
most fitting to it. In the art of the theatre a mistake in the choice of
the form, or in the right handling of it when chosen leads infallibly to
the irritation of the audience and the failure of the play. When a play
is badly constructed the actors cannot so interpret the author's emotion
that it will dominate the collective emotion in the audience.

It is often said, by those who ought to know better (it was said to
Racine by Frenchmen), that dram