Julius Caesar

The Annotated Shakespeare series enables readers to fully understand and enjoy the plays of the world's greatest dramatist

The first tragedy to be played in the new Globe Theatre, Julius Caesar is set at a crucial turning point in Roman history, as the Republican gives way to the imperial. Safely removed in time and place from Shakespeare's Elizabethan England, Rome makes the perfect laboratory for the playwright's free-ranging political analysis.

This fully annotated version of Julius Caesar makes the play completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. It has been carefully assembled with students, teachers, and the general reader in mind. Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. His on-page annotations provide readers with all the tools they need to comprehend the play and begin to explore its many possible interpretations.


About the Author
Burton Raffel (1928-2015) was Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities emeritus and professor of English emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Among his many edited and translated publications are Poems and Prose from the Old English, Cligès, Lancelot, Perceval, Erec and Enide, and Yvain. Harold Bloom (1930-2019) was Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University. His many books include The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.