A weird thing for any modern production of Julius Caesar is that for most people who aren’t utter history nerds that are deeply into that period of Roman history, whatever notion they have of the story of Caesar’s assassination very likely comes from this play, if only from classroom memory of Antony’s oration. Which means we lose the important facet of the play: it’s more or less Wicked*.
To explain:
Brutus & Cassius (and the rest of the conspirators) were for centuries seen as just the ultimate awful betrayers (there are even rumors that Brutus could have been Caesar’s illegitimate son). In the Inferno, Dante stuck them in the ninth and centermost circle of hell, where Lucifer, stuck in ice himself, eats them eternally with his three mouths (Judas gets the third one, and even here, as with everything Catholic, there’s a bit of hierarchy, with B&C being eaten (again, eternally) feetfirst while Judas is in headfirst).
So in a world where the Inferno is taken as the most common image of how all this works, to write a play in which one of the three worst people in human history is portrayed as a thoughtful, decent, capital-S Stoic with the best interests of his beloved Republic at heart (who made some remarkably ill-considered decisions), one of the other worst people in history is portrayed as maybe Machiavellian but certainly not even the worst person in Shakespeare much less all of humanity by the time all is done, and The Betrayed is sort of barely there at all but for a couple of pompous pronouncements, more talked about than talking, it’s really…well, a bit of a twist on the received notions of how one tended to interpret the story at the time it was written.
So imagine now that for hundreds of years, The Wizard of Oz has been an interesting footnote that some grad students are into, but the story everyone gathers around to watch every year** is instead Wicked.
Because that’s sort of the perspective we’ve got on Julius Caesar now.
Just an observation.
*Was I the only person a little disappointed that Hamilton wasn’t a hip-hop bio-musical of the two Margaret Hamiltons (the actress and the NASA computer scientist)? Probably.
**Am I showing my age here or what? When was the last time a family movie was subject to network TV holiday schedules and not evermore at the fingertips to shut the little darlings up on road trips?
Yellowstocking Tales 