SOURCE: Levitsky, Ruth M. “The Elements Were So Mix'd …” PMLA 88, no. 2 (March 1973): 240-45.

In the following essay, Levitsky illuminates Brutus's Stoic virtues and contrasts his character with the less admirable Caesar.

In a survey of the half-century (1900-50) of scholarship dealing with Shakespeare's Roman plays, J. C. Maxwell commends Sir Mark Hunter's “Politics and Character in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar” as “one of the first among modern attempts to correct the tendency to overidealize Brutus and give him too central a part in the play.”¹ In the thirty-odd years since Hunter's study was published this overidealization, I suggest, has been overcorrected.² For while it is true that Brutus is not the ideal hero that Henry v is, he is still the noblest Roman of them all. This, I submit, is all that Shakespeare ever intended him to be; but that all is no little, and it ought not be...