Abstract
In David Zucker’s 1988 film of The Naked Gun, a hapless Los Angeles Chief of Police, Lieutenant Frank Drebin, is warned by his relatively pacifist Mayoress employer to curb his propensity for violence. Drebin, himself an exaggerated postmodernist collocation of easily recognisable film texts, counters with a policy statement of his own sufficient to rival any pronouncement of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry:
Yes, well when I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards. That’s my policy.
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Notes
See Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London and New York, 1977), vol. 5, pp. 58–211, for the full range of source material for Julius Caesar.
Thomas Heywood, An Apology For Actors, I. G., A Refutation of The Apology For Actors, The English Stage: Attack and Defense 1577–1730 (New York and London, 1973), sig. E3V.
C. Suetonius Tranquillius, The Historie of Twelve Caesars, Emperors of Rome, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1606), sigs. C2V-3, and sigs. R4–4V.
Suctonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth, 1957), pp. 26ff. and pp. 219ff.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (St Albans, Herts, 1973), p. 109.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. A. R. Humphreys (Oxford and New York, 1984), p. 1.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1941), p. ix.
Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1981), p. 133.
See John Drakakis, The Plays of Shackerley Marmion (1603–39): A Critical Old-spelling Edition, 2 vols, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds (1988), vol. 1, pp. 494ff. for a full account of the controversial position of dancing during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Steven Mullaney, The Place of The Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London, 1988), p. 9.
V. N. Volosinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. I. R. Titunik (New York, San Francisco and London, 1976), p. 88.
Antony Easthope, Poetry and Phantasy (Cambridge and New York, 1989), pp. 36–7.
For a fuller articulation of the debate to which Easthope responds, see Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London, 1978), pp. 85ff.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London, 1981), pp. 17–103.
Cf. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 51–7.
See John Drakakis, ‘The Representations of Power in Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy’, Cosmos: The Yearbook of the Traditional Cosmology Society, vol. 2 (1986), ed. Emily Lyle, pp. 111–35.
Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘History and Ideology: the instance of Henry V’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (London, 1985), pp. 222–3.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, 1978), p. 280.
See Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 146–56.
Robert Weimann, ‘Towards a Literary Theory of Ideology: Mimesis, Representation, Authority’, Jean E. Howard and Marion O’Connor, (eds), Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology (New York and London, 1987), p. 271.
Cf. Richard Wilson, ‘“Is this a Holiday?”: Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival’, English Literary History, 54: 1 (Spring, 1987), 31–44 [reprinted in this volume, pp. 55–76–Ed.]
Mark Rose, ‘Conjuring Caesar: Ceremony, History, and Authority in 1599’, English Literary Renaissance, 19: 3 (Autumn, 1989), 291–304. For a more general discussion of the anti-authoritarian notion of festivity
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1968), pp. 21ff.
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1979), pp. 182ff.
Sir John Davies, The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Robert Kreuger (Oxford, 1975), pp. 182ff.
I have followed the reading of I.140 in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford, 1986). However, the Folio reading of the line is: ‘Men at sometime, are Masters of their Fates’, and this is followed in
A. R. Humphreys (ed.), Julius Caesar (Oxford and New York, 1984)
T. S. Dorsch (ed.), Julius Caesar (London, 1965). The use of the present tense of the verb lends greater immediacy to Cassius’s machiavellian proposition to Brutus.
Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1963), p. 32.
Cf. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Manchester, 1978), p. 63: Though some speak openly against my books, Yet will they read me, and thereby attain To Peter’s chair: and when they cast me off Are poisoned by my climbing followers. (Prologue: ll.10–13)
Michael Holquist, ‘The Politics of Representation’, in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore and London, 1981), p. 169.
Cf. Irving Ribner, Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy (London, 1969), p. 60.
Ernst Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response (London, 1976), p. 50;
Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and The Roman Plays (London, 1988), p. 144;
Vivian Thomas, Shakespeare’s Roman Worlds (London, 1989), p. 76.
For a more negative view, see Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare’s Rome (Cambridge, 1983), p. 93, where it is suggested that ‘Brutus’s words reveal the savagery of the impending Roman ritual; in addition they expose the self-delusion of the conspirators.’
Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgements (London 1597), p. 249, STC 1659.
William Fulbecke, An Historicall Collection of the Continuall Factions, Tumults, and Massacres of the Romans and Italians (London, 1601), p. 170, STC 11412.
See John Drakakis, ‘Writing The Body Politic: Subject, Discourse, and History in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, ed. Gunther Klotz (forthcoming, 1992).
Anne Righter, Shakespeare and The Idea of The Play (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 141.
Boris Ford, ‘Bardbiz’, Letters: The London Review of Books, vol. 12, no. 14 (2 August 1990).
John McGrath, The Bone Won’t Break: On Theatre and Hope in Hard Times (London, 1990), p. 161.
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© 2002 Richard Wilson
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Drakakis, J. (2002). ‘Fashion it thus’: Julius Caesar and the Politics of Theatrical Representation. In: Wilson, R. (eds) Julius Caesar. New Casebooks. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21330-2_4
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