SOURCE: Chang, Joseph S. M. J. “Julius Caesar in the Light of Renaissance Historiography.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 69, no. 1 (January 1970): 63-71.

In the following essay, Chang views Julius Caesar as a demonstration of Shakespeare's historical relativism.

Criticism of Julius Caesar has moved steadily toward the position recently taken by Mildred E. Hartsock, that the play “is a demonstration that the truth of character cannot be known.”¹ Earlier critics had become reconciled to a divided characterization of Caesar, and they began to find inconsonances in Brutus as well.² The more the play is examined, the more one is inclined to accept the conclusion Miss Hartsock tentatively offers: “Perhaps Shakespeare was playing a bitter ‘modern’ trick, and, in the spirit of Pilate's embarrassing question, implying that the truth cannot be known.” The difficulty, by her own admission, is that this interpretation comes close to proposing “that in 1599, a...