Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Old and New Comedy
- An Approach to Shakespearian Comedy
- Shakespeare, Molière, and the Comedy of Ambiguity
- Comic Structure and Tonal Manipulation in Shakespeare and Some Modern Plays
- Laughing with the Audience: ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and the Popular Tradition
- Shakespearian and Jonsonian Comedy
- Two Magian Comedies: ‘The Tempest’ and ‘The Alchemist’
- ‘Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget’: Transformation in ‘Pericles’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’
- The Words of Mercury
- Why Does it End Well? Helena, Bertram, and The Sonnets
- Some Dramatic Techniques in ‘The Winter’s Tale’
- Clemency, Will, and Just Cause in ‘Julius Caesar’
- Thomas Bull and other ‘English Instrumentalists’ in Denmark in the 1580s
- Shakespeare in the Early Sydney Theatre
- The Reason Why: The Royal Shakespeare Season 1968
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate Section
Clemency, Will, and Just Cause in ‘Julius Caesar’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Old and New Comedy
- An Approach to Shakespearian Comedy
- Shakespeare, Molière, and the Comedy of Ambiguity
- Comic Structure and Tonal Manipulation in Shakespeare and Some Modern Plays
- Laughing with the Audience: ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and the Popular Tradition
- Shakespearian and Jonsonian Comedy
- Two Magian Comedies: ‘The Tempest’ and ‘The Alchemist’
- ‘Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget’: Transformation in ‘Pericles’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’
- The Words of Mercury
- Why Does it End Well? Helena, Bertram, and The Sonnets
- Some Dramatic Techniques in ‘The Winter’s Tale’
- Clemency, Will, and Just Cause in ‘Julius Caesar’
- Thomas Bull and other ‘English Instrumentalists’ in Denmark in the 1580s
- Shakespeare in the Early Sydney Theatre
- The Reason Why: The Royal Shakespeare Season 1968
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate Section
Summary
A passage in Seneca’s De Clementia throws light on the celebrated ‘just cause’ crux in Julius Caesar and offers a vantage point from which to make a reading of the play.
Shortly before the conspirators assault him in III, i, Caesar protests that his harshness in maintaining the banishment of Publius Cimber is not wrong and that the importunate suppliants have not given him sufficient reason to alter his determination in the matter:
Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied.
Ben Jonson twice alluded to this passage, but both times he cited it in wording quite different from that of the Folio text. In Discoveries he gave as an example of Shakespeare's unbridled pen Caesar's supposed statement: 'Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause; Jonson labelled this line 'ridiculous'. In 1626, in the Induction to A Staple of News, Jonson had one character exclaim facetiously, 'Cry you mercy, you neuer did wrong, but with iust cause'.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 109 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1970