SOURCE: “Play, Ritualization, and Ambivalence in Julius Caesar,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. 1, November, 1974, pp. 24-33.

In the following essay, de Gerenday explores the psychological and thematic significance of Brutus's ritualization of Caesar's murder, and the resulting ambiguity this produces in Julius Caesar.

Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time: But men may construe things after their fashions, Clean from the purpose of the things themselves. 

Cicero, Act I, scene iii

One of the frustrations of reading criticism on Julius Caesar is the extent to which we may be caught up in the critic's attempt to determine what attitude we should assume toward the play as a whole, and toward the character of Brutus in particular. This propensity for either/or interpretations; this need for a norm of heroism and villainy; this insistence that, in the words of one graduate student, lamenting the ambiguity of the main characters, “there's...