This chapter considers two questions what is Christian liberty and is it compatible with female rule, as they were debated in early modern Europe. It also considers the work of a number of English and Scottish Protestant political theologians during the 1550s. As Constance Jordan writes about the political and spiritual status of early modern women: 'In the language of Renaissance political thought, she is a persona mixta: her natural and political self balanced by her spiritual self '. The chapter argues that in each man's discussion of female rule in the Bible, the authority of women is regularly deprecated at a patriarchal level. Biblical exegesis and contemporary reality become intertwined: thraldom and slavery are the antonyms of Christian liberty. Mary Tudor, and her biblical antecedents like Jezebel, stand as wilful deniers of Christian liberty in the secular realm.

Chapter 3 explores the relationship between whiteness and the awareness of pretense. For some Cubans, racial mixing could be an effective means to eliminate blackness and the possibility of its communal or political articulation; for others, it would doom the nation. Racial passing and the pretense of acting as if races could be neatly demarcated endowed racism with the flexibility it required to preserve structures of inequality. When writers of African descent began to publish on the question in the 1880s, they often addressed this logic of pretense. Rodolfo de Lagardere, for example, deployed racial doubt in his 1889 booklet Blancos y negros to demonstrate that whiteness entailed a collective effort to forget the African origins of Cuban society. While some people of known African descent participated in whitening processes, others mobilized racial doubt to call attention to the amnesia and denial inherent to whiteness as an institution and set of lived practices.

This chapter considers three productions which model different forms of that modernist impulse: Lindsay Anderson's 1964 production at the Royal Court; John Barton's 1968 production for the RSC; and Trevor Nunn's production, also for the RSC, in 1972. It focuses on an aspect of the staging of Julius Caesar as a particular instance of a larger debate surrounding Shakespeare on stage. In 1964, Lindsay Anderson directed Julius Caesar at the Royal Court for the English Stage Company. If Britain in the 1960s and 1970s was to find a modernist frame for this emphatically premodern play, it would have to come to it via some route other than a deconstruction of what Anderson called rhetorical acting. As Lindsay Anderson was mounting his iconoclastic Caesar, sights levelled on the Peter Hall verse-speaking method, John Barton was working with Hall on The Wars of the Roses.

In the Soviet Union, the Julius Caesar seems to have been considered too republican for its dictators, but not clear-sighted enough about that republic to be a useful tool for those opposed to communism. This chapter considers those places where Julius Caesar has been a significant force on stage, first in those countries most clearly marked by European Fascism and then in the postcolonial cultures of India and South Africa. As Wilhelm Hortmann points out, Shakespeare was staged with astonishing regularity in early twentieth-century Germany, performed largely in translations by August Wilhelm Schlegel working with Ludwig and Dorothea Tieck, translations which had been well-known for a century. After India achieved independence from Britain, productions of Shakespeare in indigenous languages became more common, the translations tapping into those elements of the stories that made them feel familiar to audiences used to their own brand of folk drama.

The challenge for Julius Caesar in the twentieth century was the negotiation of the play's politics once Orson Welles had demonstrated the triumphs and perils of making explicit comparison with recent or contemporary events. From the Second World War onwards the oratory, heroism and spectacle of the nineteenth century were steadily replaced by more modernist notions of character and totalitarianism. It is fitting that the last conspicuous Julius Caesar production of the old millennium took place at the reconstructed Globe theatre in London in Spring 1999. Edward Hall's 2001 production, which opened at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre before transferring to the Barbican, evoked both the early twentieth century with its black shirts and strutting, jack-booted Caesar, and the Italian present.

Julius Caesar on stage had been defined by the play's classicism, by its oratory, and by a perceived idealist treatment of its characters and subject matter. Charlton Heston's Mark Antony is, not surprisingly, the stand-out performance. He brings a refreshing sense of character to the film in moments such as his flippant damning of his nephew with a drop of wine in the proscription scene. With Heston looming so large over the production, it is tempting to read it in terms of the actor's own politics, but this is surprisingly tricky. Sarah Hatchuel credits Heston for his variety compared to Brando but gives the palm to Mankiewicz for his approach to cinematography. Between 1937 and 1996 the BBC aired an astonishing twelve different versions of Julius Caesar on television.

The evolution of Shakespeare play on stage is always in part the story of Shakespeare's standing in society at large, and the trajectory mapped by Julius Caesar is a familiar one. David Daniel calls the story of the prelude to and aftermath of Julius Caesar's death 'the most famous historical event in the West outside the Bible'. The play reappears on Drury Lane, performed by the King's Company with Charles Hart as Brutus and Michael Mohun as Cassius, both of whom had been actors before the Civil War and saw military service during it. Thomas Betterton continued to play Brutus until January 1707/8, treating the role as that of a dignified, patriotic and thoughtful hero, establishing a sense that he was the play's tragic hero. Thomas Hamblin was particularly renowned for his Brutus in the 1830s and 1840s, and Edward Loomis Davenport persisted in the role from 1853 to 1870.

John Houseman believed that Herman Mankiewicz should have been considered the primary writer, instead of sharing writing credits with Orson Welles as appeared in the billing. One of the MGM pictures paired John Houseman with Herman Mankiewicz's younger brother Joseph as director, and returned him to Shakespeare's Caesar. Shakespeare's play becomes a forum for a consideration of an ethics of American identity. The film's American affect was emphasised by moments like the battle scenes, which were filmed to resemble contemporary Westerns and shot on location at Bronson Canyon. MGM had dominated the 1930s box office but had struggled to draw audiences after the war as television kept people at home. On Mankiewicz's return to Hollywood, B. DeMille engineered another open ballot calling for his dismissal, a ballot permitting only a 'yes' verdict, which was forcibly hand-delivered by motorcycle couriers during the night to the entire membership.