Julius Caesar Modern Connections

Julius Caesar Modern Connections

One of the major issues Julius Caesar deals with is the overthrow of a ruler. In this play, Shakespeare raises the question of whether this is ever justified, and if so, under what circumstances. At the time Shakespeare was writing, a commonly held view on this topic was that the overthrow of any ruler— good or bad—was morally wrong. This view is prevalent in Dante's The Inferno (a part of a longer work completed between 1308 and 1321). In the poem, Dante (an Italian poet) put Brutus and Cas sius in the lowest level of Hell as punishment for their rebellion. This concept was well-known in Shakespeare's time through literature such as The Inferno and through the views of England's rulers. The two English monarchs during Shakespeare's lifetime, Queen Elizabeth and King James I, shared the view that an attack on the ruler was deeply immoral and dangerous to the...
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