Jules César

Having reached the pinnacle of power, which he has concentrated in his own hands, Caesar is murdered in the very place where he exercises his authority, in the Senate, at the hand of his protégé Brutus. The episode that inspired Shakespeare has inevitably given rise to metaphors and comparisons with contemporary politicians in every era since. Setting the action in Roman antiquity offered Shakespeare the means of bypassing the censorship prohibiting the depiction of political subjects considered as critical of royal power. His “history plays” on political subjects therefore prudently go no further than the reign of Henry VIII. Among the many heads crowned with laurels or diadems in Shakespearean, and more broadly in Elizabethan theatre, Julius Caesar lends his name here to a play that marked the history of two historical troupes on either side of the English Channel, for it probably inaugurated the new Globe Theatre in 1599 and was first performed in France in 1905 by Comédie-Française actors at the Roman theatre of Orange.

While identity issues are at the heart of Othello and the Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare deals above all with the exercise of power, from the moment it is acquired to the moment it is lost. Mark Antony’s famous political speech before a mob hostile to Caesar likens Julius Caesar to Timon of Athens for the importance of rhetoric and to Richard III for the way the situation is reversed. These political manipulations, clumsily attributed to Machiavelli by Shakespeare, whose Merry Wives of Windsor even names the former, are often carried out by violent means. Exercised by omnipotent kings capable of regicide and infanticide (Richard II, Richard III, Macbeth), power is also usurped in non-historical plays, which among other themes, deal with the question of colonialism (The Tempest), death (Hamlet) or sibling relations (As You Like It).
In the interplay of light and shadow that characterises this theatre, love, through its romantic conflict with power, can also make a mockery of the latter (the Trojan War in Troilus and Cressida), sow chaos (the royal succession in King Lear), destroy the desire for hegemony (the survival of Rome in Coriolanus) but also bring about the death of another great figure of Antiquity (Antony in Antony and Cleopatra), an unerring lover defying his political destiny for the East and his irresistible Cleopatra.