-NRLF SHAKSPERE JULIUS CAESAR NEILSON f SY General Editor LINDSAY TODD DAMON Professor of English, Brown University ADDISON AND STEELE Sir Roger de Coverly Papers ABBOTT ADDISON AND STEELE Selections from The Taller and The Spectator ABBOTT American Short Stories ROYSTER AUSTIN Pride and Prejudice WARD BROWNING Selected Poems REYNOLDS Builders of Democracy GREEN LAW BUNYAN The Pilgrim's Progress LATHAM BURKE Speech on Conciliation with Collateral Readings WARD BURNS Selected Poems \ 1 , MAKS-T CARLYLE Essay on Burns $ l 1. MARS.I CHAUCER Selections GREENLAW COLERIDGE The Ancient Mariner \ ., , Mftrmv LOWELL Vision of Sir Launfal $ X vol. MOODI COOPER The Last of the Mohicans LEWIS COOPER The Spy DAMON DANA Two Tears Before the Mast WESTCOTT DEFOE Robinson Crusoe HASTINGS Democracy Today GAUSS DE QUINCEY The Flight of a Tartar Tribe FRENCH DE QUINCEY Joan of Arc and Selections MOODY DICKENS A Christmas Carol, etc. BROADUS DICKENS A Tale of Two Cities BALDWIN DICKENS David Copper field BALDWIN DRYDEN Palamon and Arcite COOK ELIOT, GEORGE Silas Marner HANCOCK ELIOT, GEORGE The Mill on the Floss WARD EMERSON Essays and Addresses HEYDRICK English Poems From POPE, GRAY, GOLDSMITH, COLERIDGE, BYRON, MACATJLAY, ARNOLD, and others SCUDDER English Popular Ballads HART Essays English and American ALDEN Familiar Letters, English and American GREENLAW FRANKLIN Autobiography GRIFFEN French Short Stories SCHWEIKERT GASKELL (Mrs.) Cranford HANCOCK GOLDSMITH The Vicar of Wakefield MORTON HAWTHORNE The House of the Seven Gables HERRICK HAWTHORNE Twice-Told Tales HERRICK AND BRUERE HUGHES Tom Brown's School Days DE MILLF IRVING Life of Goldsmith KRAPP IRVING The Sketch Book KRAPP Hafee Cnsltef) Claic continue* IRVING Tales of a Traveller and parts of The Sketch Book KRAPP LAMB Essays of Elia BENEDICT LONGFELLOW Narrative Poems POWELL LOWELL Vision of Sir LaunfalSee Coleridge MACAULAY Essays on Addtson and Johnson NEWCOMER MACAULAY Essays on Clive amd Hastings NEWCOMER MACAULAY Goldsmith, Frederic the Great, Madame D'Arblay NEW- COMER MACAULAY Essays on Milton and Addison NEWCOMER MILTON L' Allegro, II Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas NEILBON MILTON Paradise Lost, Books I and II FARLEY Modern Plays, A Book of COFFMAN Old Testament Narratives RHODES One Hundred Narrative Poems TETER PALGRAVE The Golden Treasury NEWCOMER PAR KM AN The Oregon Trail MACDONALD POE Poems and Tales, Selected NEWCOMER POPE Homer's Iliad, Books I, VI, XXII, XXIV CRES8Y AND MOODY READE The Cloister and the Hearth DE MlLLE RUSKIN Sesame and Lilies LlNN Russian Short Stories SCHWEIKERT SCOTT Lady of the Lake MOODf SCOTT Lay of the Lust Minstrel MOODY AND WlLLARD SCOTT Marmion MOODY AND WlLLARD SCOTT Ivanhoe SlMONDS SCOTT Quentin Durward SlMONDS Selections from the Writings of Abraham Lincoln HAMILTON SHAKSPERE The Neilson Edition Edited, by W. A. NEILSON, As You Like It Macbeth Hamlet Midsummer-Night's Dream Henry V Romeo and Juliet Julius Caesar The Tempest Twelfth Night SHAKSPERE The Merchant of Venice LOVETT SOUTHEY Life of Nelson WESTCOTT STEVENSON Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey LEONARD STEVENSON Kidnapped LEONARD STEVENSON Treasure Island BROADUS TENNYSON Selected Poems REYNOLDS TENNYSON The Princess COPELAND THACKERAY English Humorists CUNLIFFE AND WATT THACKERAY Henry Esmond PHELPS THOREAU WaWn BOWMAN Three American Poems The Raven, Snow-Bound, Miles Standish GREEVER Types of the Short Story HEYDRICK VIRGIL Aeneid ALLIN8ON AND ALLINSON Washington, Webster, Lincoln, Selections from DENNEY SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY CHICAGO ATLANTA NEW YORK Hafec Cngltsii) REVISED EDITION WITH HELPS TO STUDY SHAKSPERE'S JULIUS G^SAR EDITED BY WILLIAM ALLAN NEILSON PRESIDENT SMITH COLLEGE SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY CHICAGO ATLANTA NEW YORK CASE COPYRIGHT 1901, 1919 BY SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 302.39 TO 2.04 5 >' A PEEFACE. The aim in the present volume, as in the others of the series, is to present a satisfactory text with as full an equipment of introduction and notes as is necessary for thorough intelligibility. The sec- tion of the introduction dealing with Shakspere and the drama is intended to give the student a clear idea of the place of the play in literary his- tory. The treatment of the relation of Shaks- pere's Julius Caesar to North's Plutarch is an attempt to solve a difficulty which meets the editor of any of the Roman plays; A mere state- ment of indebtedness fails to convey a true idea of the real facts of the case; and the reprinting of the whole text of which Shakspere availed him- self does not explain the situation without much detailed study. The comparative table given oi/ pp. 40-42 tells much at a glance ; and the teacher who wishes to illustrate further Shakspere's use of his material will find it easy to do so by means of the references to Skeat's Shakespeare's Plutarch, a book which every teacher of the play should have at hand. The sections on language and metre present some of the peculiarities of Shaks- pere's English and versification in a more system- atic fashion than is possible in separate notes. 863504 PREFACE, The task of aesthetic interpretation has been, for the most part, left to the teacher; yet it may be pointed out that this play offers exceptionally good opportunities for explaining the elements of dramatic construction. The action in Julius Caesar is less complicated than in most of Shaks- pere's other tragedies; there is no under plot; and the rise and fall of the action, up to the climax in Caesar's death and down to the catastrophe at Philippi, is easily traced. If we regard the tragedy as a conflict between the party of conspirators and the party of Caesar, we see that the movement which culminates m the assassination deals with the triumph of the former; while in the second part, the friends of Caesar, deprived of his pres- ence but animated by his spirit, avenge his death on his murderers. This final triumph of Caesar's faction, the acknowledgement by Brutus that it is the spirit of Caesar that brings disaster on the conspirators, and the obvious advertising value of the name of Caesar in a title, seem sufficient to answer the much debated question as to why Shakspere called the play Julius Caesar and not Marcus Brutus. The admirably conceived contrasts of character, and the elaboration of these from Plutarch's hints, should give rise to suggestive discussion, oral or written. The play as a whole, while not reaching the pitch of intensity in feeling and expression of the greatest of Shakspere's trag PREFACE. 7 edies, is less concentrated and difficult in style than, for example, Hamlet or Lear, while its rhetorical brilliance easily arouses the enthusiasm of even the younger students. Attention might profitably be drawn to the political significance of the play. The hopeless- ness of curing national degeneracy by the removal of any one man, and the total failure of the populace to see the aim of the conspirators' action, are most pointedly expressed in the shout of the Third Citizen after the republican speech of Brutus, "Let him be Caesar." For further details on the life and works of Shakspere, the following may be referred to: Dow-den's Shakspere Primer and Shakspere, His Mind and Art; Sidney Lee's Life of William Shakespeare; William Shakspere, by Barrett Wen- dell; Shakspere and His Predecessors, by F. S. Boas. The most exhaustive account of the Eng- lish Drama is the new three-volume edition of A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature. Both this work and that of Sidney Lee are rich in bibliographical information. For questions of language and grammar, see A. Schmidt's Shakes- peare Lexicon; J. Bartlett's Concordance to Shakespeare; E. A. Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar; and, for philological commentary on the present play in particular, Eolfe's edition of Craik's English of Shakespeare. For general ques- tions of dramatic construction, see Gustav Frey- 8 PREFACE. tag's Technik des Dramas, translated into English by E. J. MacEwan, and Dr. Elisabeth Wood- bridge's The Drama, its Law and its Technique, HARVARD May, 1901, CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE . . INTRODUCTION I. Shakspere and the English Drama . . 11 II. Julius Caesar 29 TEXT NOTES 159 WORD INDEX APPENDIX Helps to Study 19 ? Theme Subjects 201 Selections for Class Heading . . . .203 INTRODUCTION. 1. SHAKSPERE AND THE ENGLISH DRAMA The wonderful rapidity of the development of the English drama in the last quarter of the six-' teenth century stands in striking contrast to the slowness of its growth before that period. The religious drama, out of which the modern dramatic forms were to spring, had dragged through centu- ries with comparatively little change, and was still alive when, in 1576, the first theatre was built in London. By 1600 Shakspere had written more than half his plays and stood completely master of the art which he brought to a pitch unsurpassed in any age. Much of this extraordinary later progress was due to contemporary causes; but there entered into it also certain other elements which can be understood only in the light of the attempts that had been made in the three or four preceding centuries. In England, as in Greece, the drama sprang from religious ceremonial. The Mass, the centre of The Drama ^ e P 11 ^ worship of the Roman before church, contained dramatic mate- Shakspere. ating priests, in the narratives contained in the Lessons, and in the responsive singing and chant- 1) 12 ; ; t , ' . INTRODUCTION. ing. Latin r ,*tbq .language m which the services were cto'nductJed,' was unintelligible to the mass of the people, and as early as the fifth century the clergy had begun to use such devices as tableaux vivants of scenes like the marriage in Cana and the Adoration of the Magi to make comprehen- sible important events in Bible history. Later, the Easter services were illuminated by repre- sentations of the scene at the sepulchre on the morning of the Eesurrection, in which a wooden, and afterwards a stone, structure was used for the tomb itself, and the dialogue was chanted by differ- ent speakers representing respectively the angel, the disciples, and the women. From such begin- nings as this there gradually evolved the earliest forms of the MIRACLE PLAY. As the presentations became more elaborate, the place of performance was moved first to tho churchyard, then to the fields, and finally to the streets and open spaces of the towns. With this change of locality went a change in the language a,nd in the actors, and an extension of the field from which the subjects were chosen. Latin gave way to the vernacular, and the priests to laymen; and miracle plays representing the lives of patron saints were given by schools, trade gilds, and other lay institutions. A further development appeared when, instead of single plays, whole series such as the extant York, Chester, and Coventry cycles were given, dealing in chrono- SHAKSPERE AND ENGLISH DRAMA. 13 logical order with the most important events in Bible history from the Creation to the Day of Judgment. The stage used for the miracle play as thus developed was a platform mounted on wheels, which was moved from space to space through the streets. Each trade undertook one or more plays, and, when possible, these were allotted with reference to the nature of the particular trade. Thus the play representing the visit of the Magi bearing gifts to the infant Christ was given to the goldsmiths, and the Building of the Ark to the carpenters. The costumes were conventional and frequently grotesque. Judas always wore red nair and a red beard ; Herod appeared as a fierce Saracen ; the devil had a terrifying mask and k tail ; and divine personages wore gilt hair. Meanwhile the attitude of the church towards these performances had changed. Priests were forbidden to take part in them, and as early as the fourteenth century we find sermons directed against them. The secular management had a more important result in the introduction of comic elements. Figures such as Noah's wife and Herod became frankly farcical, and whole episodes drawn from contemporary life and full of local color were invented, in which the original aim of edification was displaced by an explicit attempt at pure entertainment. Most of these features vere characteristic of the religious drama in gen- 14 . INTRODUCTION. eral throughout Western Europe. But the local and contemporary elements naturally tended to become national ; and in England we find in these humorous episodes the beginnings of native comedy. Long before the miracle plays had reached their height, the next stage in the development of the drama had begun,, Even in very early performances there had appeared, among the dramatis personae drawn from the Scriptures, personifications of abstract qualities such as Eighteousness, Peace, Mercy, and Truth. In the fifteenth century this allegorical tendency, which was prevalent also in the non-dramatic literature of the age, resulted in the rise of another kind of play, the MORALITY, in which all the characters were personifications, and in which the aim, at first the teaching of moral lessons, later became frequently satirical. Thus the most powerful of all the Moralities, Sir David Lindesay's Satire of the Three Estates, is a direct attack upon the corruption in the church just before the Keformation. The advance implied in the Morality consisted not so much in any increase in the vitality of the characters or in the interest of the plot (in both of which, indeed, there was usually a falling off), as in the fact that in it the drama had freed itself from the bondage of having to choose its subject matter from one set of sources the Bible, the Apocrypha, and the Lives of the Saints. SHAKSPERE AND ENGLISH DRAMA. 15 This freedom was shared by the INTERLUDE, a form not always to be distinguished from the Morality, but one in which the tendency was to substitute for personified abstractions actua) social types such as the Priest, the Pardoner, or the Palmer. A feature of both forms was the Vice, a humorous character who appeared under the various disguises of Hypocrisy, Fraud, and the like, and whose function it was to make fun, chiefly at the expense of the Devil. The Vice is historically important as having bequeathed some of his characteristics to the Fool of the later drama. John llVywood, the most important writer of Interludes, lived wei" into the reign of Elizabeth, and even the miracle play persisted into the reign of her successor in the seventeenth cen- tury. . But long before it finally disappeared it had become a mere medieval survival. A new England had meantime come into being and new forces were at work, manifesting themselves in a dramatic literature infinitely beyond anything even suggested by the crude forms which have been described. The great European intellectual movement known as the Kenaissance had at last reached England, and it brought with it materials for an unparalleled advance in all the living forms of literature. Italy and the classics, especially, supplied literary models and material. Not only 16 INTRODUCTION. were translations from these sources abundant, but Italian players visited England, and per- formed before Queen Elizabeth. France and Spain, as well as Italy, flooded the literary mar- ket with collections of tales, from which, both in the original languages and in such translations as are found in Paynter's Palace of Pleasure (pub- lished 1566-67), the dramatists drew materials for their plots. These literary conditions, however, did not do much beyond offering a means of expression. For a movement so magnificent in scale as that which produced the Elizabethan Drama, some- thing is needed besides models and material. In the present instance this something is to be found in the state of exaltation which characterized the spirit of the English people in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Politically, the nation was at last one after the protracted divisions of the Eeformation, and its pride was stimulated by its success in the fight with Spain. Intellectually, it was sharing with the rest of Europe the exhilaration of the Eenaissance. New lines of action in all parts of the world, new lines of thought in all depart- ments of scholarship and speculation, were open- ing up ; and the whole land was throbbing with life. In its very beginnings the new movement in Eng- land showed signs of that combination of native tradition and foreign influence which was to char- SHAKSPERE AND ENGLISH DRAMA. 17 acterize it throughout. The first regular English comedy, Udall's Ralph Roister Doister was an adaptation of the plot of the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus to contemporary English life. After a short period of experiment by amateurs working chiefly under the influence of Seneca, we come on a band of professional playwrights who not only prepared the way for Shakspere, but in some instances produced works of great intrinsic worth. The mythological dramas of Lyly with the bright repartee of their prose dialogue and the music of their occasional lyrics, the interesting experiments of Greene and Peele, and the horrors of the tragedy of Kyd, are all full of suggestions of what was to come. But by far the greatest of Shaks- pere's forerunners was Christopher Marlowe, who not only has the credit of fixing blank verse as the future poetic medium for English tragedy, but who in his plays from Tamburlaine to Edward II. contributed to the list of the great permanent masterpieces of the English drama. It was in the professional society of these men that Shakspere found himself when he came to London. Born in the provincial Eari k yTife. 8 town of Stratford-on-Avon in the heart of England, he was bap- tized on April 26, 1564 (May 6th, according to our reckoning). The exact day of his birth is unknown. His father was John Shakspere, a fairly prosperous tradesman, who mav be upposed 18 INTRODUCTION. to have followed the custom of his class in edu eating his son. If this were so, William would be sent to the Grammar School, already able to read, when he was seven, and there he would be set to work on Latin Grammar, followed by read- ing, up to the fourth year, in Cato's Maxims, Aesop's Fables, and parts of Ovid, Cicero, and the medieval poet Mantuanus. If he continued through the fifth and sixth years, he would read parts of Vergil, Horace, Terence, Plautus, and the Satirists. Greek was not usually taught in the Grammar Schools. Whether he went through this course or not we have no means of knowing, except the evidence afforded by the use of the classics in his works, and the famous dictum of his friend, Ben Jonson, that he had " small Latin and less Greek." What we are sure of is that he was a boy with remarkable acuteness of observation, who used his chances for picking up facts of all kinds; for only thus could he have accumulated the fund of information which he put to such a variety of uses in his writings. Throughout the poet's boyhood the fortunes of John Shakspere kept improving until he reached the position of High Bailiff or Mayor of Stratford. When William was about thirteen, however, his father began to meet with reverses, and these are conjectured to have led to the boy's being taken from school early and set to work. What business he was taught we do not know, and indeed we SHAKSPERE AND ENGLISH DRAMA ,19 have little more information about him till the date of his marriage in November, 1582, to Anne Hathaway, a woman from a neighboring village, who was seven years his senior. Concerning his occupations in the years immediately preceding and succeeding his marriage several traditions have come down, of his having been apprenticed as a butcher, of his having taken part in poaching expeditions, and the like but none of these is based upon sufficient evidence. About 1585 he left Stratford, and probably by the next year he had found his way to London. How soon and in what capacity he first became attached to the theatres we are again unable to say, but by 1592 he had certainly been engaged in theatrical affairs long enough to give some occasion for the jealous outburst of a rival play- wright, Robert Greene, who, in a pamphlet posthumously published in that year, accused him of plagiarism. Henry Chettle, the editor of Greene's pamphlet, shortly after apologized for his connection with tae charge, and bore witness to Shakspere's honorable reputation as a man and to his skill both as an actor and a dramatist. Robert Greene, who thus supplies us with the earliest extant indications of his rival's presence in London, was in many ways a typical figure among the playwrights with whom Shakspere worked during this early period. A member of both universities, Greene came to the metropolis while 20 INTRODUCTION. yet a young man, and there led a life of the most diversified literary activity, varied with bouts of the wildest debauchery. He was a writer of satirical and controversial pamphlets, of romantic tales, of elegiac, pastoral, and lyric poetry, a translator, a dramatist, in fact, a literary jack- of -all-trades. The society in which he lived con- sisted in part of "University Wits" like himself, in part of the low men and women who haunted the vile taverns of the slums to prey upon such as he. "A world of blackguardism dashed with genius," it has been called, and the phrase is fit enough. Among such surroundings Greene lived, and among them he died, bankrupt in body and estate, the victim of his own ill-governed passions. In conjunction with such men as this Shakspere began his life-work. His first dramatic efforts were made in revising the plays of his predeces- sors with a view to their revival on the stage ; and in Titus Andronicus and the first part of Henry VI. we have examples of this kind of work. The next step was probably the production of plays in collaboration with other writers, and to this practice, which he almost abandoned in the middle of his career, he seems to have returned in his later years in such plays as Pericles, Henry VIII., and The Two Noble Kinsmen. How far Shakspere was of this dissolute set to which his fellow-workers belonged it is impossible to tell; but we know that by and by, as he gained mastery SHAKSPERE AND ENGLISH DRAMA. 21 over his art and became more and more independ- ent in work and in fortune, he left this sordid life behind him, and aimed at the establishment of a family. In half a dozen years from the time of Greene's attack, he had reached the top of his profession, was a sharer in the profits of his theatre, and had invested his savings in land and houses in his native town. The youth who ten years before had left Stratford poor and burdened with a wife and three children, had now become "William Shakspere, Gentleman." During these years Shakspere's literary work was not confined to the drama, which, indeed, was then hardly regarded as a form of literature. In 1593 he published Venus and Adonis , and in 1594, Lucrece, two poems belonging to a class of highly wrought versions ^f classical legends which was then fashionable, and 01 which Marlowe's Hero and Leander is the other most famous ex- ample. For several years, too, in the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first few years of the seventeenth, he was composing a series of sonnets on love and friendship, in this, too, following a literary fashion of the time. Yet these give us more in the way of self -revelation than anything else he has left. From them we seem to be able to catch glimpses of his attitude towards his profession, and one of them makes us realize sc vividly his perception of the tragic risks of his surroundings that it is set down here : 22 INTRODUCTION. O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand: Pity me then and wish I were renewed ; Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink Potions of eisel 'gainst my strong infection; No bitterness that I will bitter think, Nor double penance to correct correction. Pity me then, dear friend, and I assure ye Even that your pity is enough to cure me. It does not seem possible to avoid the inferences lying on the surface in this poem ; but whatever confessions it may imply, it serves, too, to give us the assurance that Shakspere did not easily and blindly yield to the temptations that surrounded the life of the theatre of his time. For the theatre of Shakspere's day was no very reputable affair. Externally it appears to us now The Eliza- a Yei T meagre apparatus almost bethan absurdly so, when we reflect on the grandeur of the compositions for . which it gave occasion. A roughly circular wooden building, with a roof over the stage and over the galleries, but with the pit often open to the wind and weather, having very little scenery and practically no attempt at the achievement of stage-illusion, such was the scene of the production of some of the greatest SHAKSPERE AND ENGLISH DR^MA. %3 -.imaginative works the world has seen. Nor was the audience very choice. The more respectable citizens of Puritan tendencies frowned on the theatre to such an extent that it was found advis- able to place the buildings outside the city limits, and beyond the jurisdiction of the city fathers. The pit was thronged with a motley crowd of petty tradesfolk and the dregs of the town; the gallants of the time sat on stools on the stage, Which give | some soil | perhaps | to my | behav | ioura, I. ii. 42. Then, Bru | tus, I | have much I mistook | your pas | sion, I. ii. 48. And be | not jeal | ous on | me, gen j tie Bru | tus, L ii. 71. Occasionally this extra syllable occurs in the mid die of the line, at the main pause known as the caesura, which is most frequent after the third foot; e.g., The melt | ing spirits | of worn | en, \\ then, coun I try men 1 , II. i. 122. Brutus | and Cae | sar \\ : what should | be in | that "Cae | sar," I. ii. 142. 2. Frequently what seems an extra syllable is to be slurred in reading; e.g., "spirits" in the line quoted above is a monosyllable. So Being crossed | in con | ference by | some sen | ators ) , I. ii 188. where u Being" is monosyllabic and "conference" dissyllabic. So also "whether" is a monosyl- lable in See, whether | their bas ] est met I al be | not moved | r . I. i. 65. Whether Cae ] sar will | come forth | to-day | , or ao I II. i. 194. JULIUS CAESAR. 35 Similarly "Either" is a monosyllable in Either led | or driv | en, as | we point | the way | , IV. i. 23. In some lines it is doubtful whether a syllable is to be slurred or sounded as a light extra syllable, as, e.g., " together" in Write them | together | , yours is | as fair | a name | , I. ii. 144. 3. Sometimes an emphatic syllable stands alone as a foot, without an unaccented syllable ; e.g. , Speak | , strike \ , redress 1 ! Am I | entreat | ed, IL i. 55. 4. Short lines, lacking one or more feet, occur j Made in his concave shores, I. i 51. For that which is not in me, L ii. 65. 5. Long lines of twelve or thirteen syllables occur; e.g., The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber, L ii. 114. None that I know will be, much that I fear may chance, II. iv. 32. To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy, IL i. 81. Usually in such lines some words bearing the metrical accent are quite unemphatic in reading, as in the fourth foot of the first example. 6. Frequently, especially in the first foot, & trochee is substituted for an iambus, t,e. the 36 INTRODUCTION. accent falls on the odd instead of the even syllable; e.g., t Being [ mechanical, you ought not walk, I. L 3. j_ Therefore | , good Brutus, be prepared to hear, I. ii 66. j_ When went there by an age | since the [ great flood, I ii. 152. j_ Till then, my noble friend, | chew up | on this, I. ii. 171. It must be remembered, however, that some frords have changed their pronunciation since Shakspere's time. Thus "compact" was usually accented on the last syllable, as in the following line, ^ But what compact mean you to have with us, III. i. 216 Again, from Even at the base of Pompey's statue, III. ii. 198, we see that " statue" was sometimes trisyllabic, and from Fearing to strengthen that impati-ence, II. i. 248, that "impatience" had four syllables. Although differences between the language of Shakspere and that of our own day are obvious to the most casual reader, there is a risk that the student may under- estimate the extent of these differences, and, assuming that similarity of form implies iden- tity of meaning, miss the true interpretation. The most important instances of change of meaning are explained in the notes; but a JULIUS CAESAR. 87 clearer view of the nature and extent of the contrast between the language of Julius Caesar and modern English will be gained by a classifi- cation of the most frequent features of this con- trast. Some of the Shaksperean usages are merely results of the carelessness and freedom which the more elastic standards of the Elizabethan time permitted ; others are forms of expression at that time quite accurate, but now become obsolete. (1.) NOUNS, (a) Shakspere frequently uses an abstract noun with "of" where modern English has an adjective. Thus in Hamlet , I. ii. 4, "brow of woe" = woful brow, and in Twelfth Night, I. v. 77,