history book; don’t watch plays. Defenders of this last view, if they are
not mad, are not suggesting that there is no connection betweenJulius
Caesarand the historical events that inspired it, and that it depicts. Nor
would they say that there is no route, as it were, between thefictional
claims ofJulius Caesarand the factual claims of the historian. What they
are suggesting, I take it, is that the interesting and important features of
Julius Caesarare best understood in terms of its essence asfiction.^22 It
ought to be construed as a work offiction, not as a work of history. A
variant of this would be to say much the same thing aboutliteratureand
history: given its status as a literary work, Julius Caesar must not be
construed as ‘a piece of reportive or fact-stating discourse,’ in which
scenes are included‘to establish certain propositions as true in the mind
of the reader’; indeed, say some, our literary appreciation depends upon
not construing it in this way.^23 The question of the play’s connection
with the death of the historicalfigure is peripheral (which is not to say
unanswerable), and ought to be recognised as such.
I do not wish to challenge these views offictionality (or literature) in
general. But I do want to reject using afirm distinction between history
andfiction (or literature) to conclude that we shouldn’t bother asking
about the connection betweenJulius Caesar and the events it depicts.
Looking at what a history play is–a focused, engaged depiction of real
events, which assume responsible engagement with the sources on the
part of the playwright and independent, historical knowledge on the part
of the spectator–it seems a perfectly reasonable thing to ask.
History Plays As History
Sticking toJulius Caesarfor the moment (we will look at other kinds of
history play in the following), one answer to our guiding question–did
it happen like that?–might, of course, be‘yes’. For a long time, Shake-
speare’s history plays have been thought to have considerable value as
educational tools. We force children to sit through them, not just because
we want them to learn about Shakespeare but also, perhaps, because we
want them to learn about Rome. Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, put
on Shakespeare’s Roman plays with the explicit intention of giving the
audience a historical education. Often known as the‘first modern direc-
tor’, Georg had studied something very unmodern, namely archaeology;
and he used recent archaeological discoveries to inform his productions.^24
Now, as we have seen, history plays are not necessarily accurate in terms
of the words spoken by the characters and sometimes in terms of the
events depicted on stage. For Georg II, this was no problem: he‘cor-
rected’them: moving Caesar’s death from the Capitol (where Shakespeare
has it) back to the Curia of Pompey.
History in the making 81