SOURCE: Wilson, Richard, ed. “‘Is This a Holiday?’: Shakespeare's Roman Carnival.” In New Casebooks: Julius Caesar, pp. 55-76. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002.

In the following essay, originally published in 1993, Wilson examines the carnivalesque elements of Julius Caesar.

Julius Caesar was the first Shakespearean play we know to have been acted at the Globe, and was perhaps performed for the opening of the new Bankside theatre in 1599. The Swiss tourist Thomas Platter saw it on 21 September, and his impressions help to locate the work within the different cultural practices that went to make the Elizabethan playhouse. To our minds, accustomed to a decorous image of both Shakespeare and ancient Rome, it is just this collision of codes and voices which makes the traveller's report so incongruous and jarring:

After lunch, at about two o'clock, I and my party crossed the river, and there in the house with the thatched roof...