text the advantages of a thoroughly modern editorial equipment, embracing the results of Shakespearian scholarship. Deeply conscious of the large legacies bequeathed them by their predecessors, the editors desire here, finally, to express their grateful appreciation of all the work and research which has enriched their own. Especially are they indebted to the archæological researches of Halliwell-Phillipps, and to the labors of the Cambridge editors in collation of the texts, to Dr. Rolfe, and to Dr. Furness, whose new and thoroughly American lead they have followed in adopting for this edition the First Folio text. CHARLOTTE PORTER. INTRODUCTION EARLY readers of Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar' saw in Brutus its hero, and its political ideals in the Republicanism he embodied. Dryden and Rowe, in England, expressed this obvious view of the play and its purport. So, also, more fully, in Germany, later, did Schlegel and Gervinus, as the extracts given from these four writers sufficiently show (Selected Criticism, pp. 197-204). Appreciation of the nobility of Brutus, as a historic figure and as a political idealist, preceded a fuller comprehension and higher appraisement of the worth to the world of the career of Julius Cæsar. As soon as the idea spread among critics that Cæsar and Cæsarism were greater factors in civilization than Brutus and Roman Republicanism, Shakespeare's belittlement of Cæsar's personality in this play was lamented. Then, again, with more insight, while it was regretfully acknowledged, it was condoned, as Hudson and Gervinus condoned it, because it was seen to be a dramatic expedient adapted to the poet's artistic purpose of building his plot on the conspiracy formed to prevent the fulfilment of Cæsar's ambition. What was accounted a failure in historic truth was accepted as an excellence in dramatic plan. So recent an English writer as Mr. Bernard Shaw, in his own comment on his amusing drama of Cæsar and Cleopatra,' implies that he regards Shakespeare's portrait of Julius Cæsar as a token of the poet's insufficient vision. Here a Shaw has outgrown him. His Cæsar is an admitted failure,' he declares. 'Cæsar was not in Shakespear, nor in the epoch now fast waning which he inaugurated. It cost Shakespear no pang to write Cæsar down for the merely technical purpose of writing Brutus up.' Shaw is led, accordingly, to supply an up-to-date Cæsar without foibles detracting from his masterfulness. He is bald, to be sure, but not deaf, like Shakespeare's Cæsar, nor subject to the falling-sickness,' nor given to vainglory nor to soothsaying, and he is quite unlikely to be wheedled from his course through his affection for anybody. In brief, he is a clever confection made after a recipe derived from Mommsen's historic researches and theories, flavored piquantly with a special variety of the Nietzsche Overman sauce with which Shaw also served up Napoleon, in his Man of Destiny.' The result is a novel and entertaining kind of commentary on Shakespeare's Cæsar. But the emphasis it puts upon the Overman notion as the modern equivalent of Cæsarism, which Mr. Shaw thinks Shakespeare and Shakespeare's epoch alike failed to perceive and value, serves better, perhaps, to reveal the contemporary limitations of his own standpoint than the sixteenthcentury limitations of Shakespeare. From a corrected up-to-date Cæsar the contagion of the current enthusiasm for the mechanical piece of heroics called the masterful man may be caught, while from Shakespeare's Cæsar only a healthy human feeling of faulty flesh and blood is to be had, without precise symptoms of tran sient political or philosophical ethics. Such a corrected Cæsar imparts no idea of the historic influence of Cæsarism, apart from Cæsar, while the faulty human Cæsar of Shakespeare, who loved Antony and distrusted men who love no plays and hear no music, yields an overwhelming impression of the paramount value in the drama and in the world of the Cæsar who made Cæsarism a new force in civilization. If The French people were ahead of the English in catching fire from the dream of world-domination cherished by their modern Cæsar, Napoleon. Guizot was one of the first to see that, after all, Shakespeare had understood Cæsarism better than most critics had yet realized that he did, perhaps it was because the French had cause to comprehend the weakness as well as the strength of their Imperator and of the ideas of Imperialism before the Anglo-Saxon race had begun to glorify certain new phases of the old world-winning energy which are still in process of becoming historic. At any rate, Guizot, Gomont, and Stapfer, all French critics, have been among the first to point out that even more potent in the play than the heroic character of Brutus, or the political and philosophical theories he represented, was the spirit of Cæsar (Selected Criticism, pp. 204-208). Brutus himself confesses the continuing influence of Cæsar when he exclaims over the dead body of Cassius: O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet, Thy Spirit walkes abroad, and turnes our Swords And the dominance of Cæsar's spirit over Shakespeare's entire dramatic design appears unmistakably with the |