Julius Caesar (Penguin Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare

Author:William Shakespeare [Shakespeare, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780141923994
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

An Account of the Text

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar was first printed in the Folio edition (F) of Shakespeare’s plays of 1623. The copy the printers used was probably a transcript of some kind rather than Shakespeare’s own manuscript, as there is an absence of typical Shakespeare spellings such as appear in other texts printed from authorial copy. The manuscript may well have been one that had been used as a prompt book, because some of the stage directions appear to be theatrical in character. The Folio text is the only early printed version of the play which has any authority; the texts found in the later Folios of 1632, 1664 and 1685, and in the six seventeenth-century Quarto editions, are all ultimately based on the first printing.

In general the text is a good one, the only errors being a few typographical misprints, occasional mispunctuation, some mislineation due to the requirements of spacing on the Folio page, some wrong assignment of speeches and some verbal corruptions. The origin of most of the readings that are obviously or probably incorrect is susceptible of satisfactory explanation.

But there is some evidence that the play underwent a certain amount of revision between its composition and its first appearance in print. Two passages convincingly support this hypothesis. The first is at III.1.47–8, which reads:

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause

Will he be satisfied.

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