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The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Wayne A. Rebhorn
Wayne A. Rebhorn*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
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Extract

"The purpose of playing… is to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" (Hamlet, 3.2.20-24).

In his hagiographic treatment of the life of Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville presents the last events in his hero's existence as constituting a particularly exemplary "tragedy"; he celebrates Sidney's generosity towards a common soldier in need of water, his endurance in suffering pain, and his careful "fashioning" of his soul to meet death when the end appeared inevitable.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , Spring 1990 , pp. 75 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1990

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Footnotes

*

I owe several individuals a debt of gratitude for their help with this essay: Louis Montrose, for commenting thoughtfully on an earlier version of it; Brian Levack, for aiding me with historical materials; and Frank Whigham, who offered many helpful suggestions and did careful readings of several versions of the essay. My greatest debt is owed to Eric Mallin, who generously supplied me with a bibliography of material on Essex and Elizabethan politics when I was in an early stage of my work on this essay and whose splendid chapter on Essex, emulation, and Troilus and Cressida in his 1987 Stanford University dissertation prompted me to begin thinking about Julius Caesar in similar terms.

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