SOURCE: "Thou Bleeding Piece of Early': The Ritual Ground of Julius Caesar," in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. XIV, 1981, pp. 175-96.

In the essay below, Liebler argues that Shakespeare's reference to the Lupercalian rites in Li is more significant than most critics have assumed, and that in fact the importance of celebrating rites in the traditional manner and the perversion of those rites by the plebeians would probably have resonated with Elizabethan audiences.

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar begins at the Feast of the Lupercal, the Roman celebration which took place on February 13-15 and which, in the play, quickly passes into history's most famous ides of March. Among those readers who attach any significance at all to this opening, Shakespeare's conflation of the festival and Caesar's assassination is understood primarily as a "dramatic economy," a structural device for the exposition of the main...