Includes the unabridged text of Shakespeare's classic play plus a complete study guide that features scene-by-scene summaries, explanations and discussions of the plot, question-and-answer sections, author biography, historical background, and more.
Julius Caesar is a key link between Shakespeare’s histories and his tragedies. Unlike the Caesar drawn by Plutarch in a source text, Shakespeare’s Caesar is surprisingly modern: vulnerable and imperfect, a powerful man who does not always know himself. The open-ended structure of the play insists that revealing events will continue after the play ends, making the significance of the history we have just witnessed impossible to determine in the play itself. John D. Cox’s introduction discusses issues of genre, characterization, and rhetoric, while also providing a detailed history of criticism of the play. Appendices provide excerpts from important related works by Lucretius, Plutarch, and Montaigne. A collaboration between Broadview Press and the Internet Shakespeare Editions project at the University of Victoria, the editions developed for this series have been comprehensively annotated and draw on the authoritative texts newly edited for the ISE. This innovative series allows readers to access extensive and reliable online resources linked to the print edition.
Includes the unabridged text of Shakespeare's classic play plus a complete study guide that features scene-by-scene summaries, explanations and discussions of the plot, question-and-answer sections, author biography, historical background, and more.
A fascinating, comprehensive biography of the cunning Roman conqueror Julius Caesar. More than two thousand years after his death, Julius Caesar remains one of the great figures of history. He shaped Rome for generations, and his name became a synonym for “emperor”—not only in Rome but as far away as Germany and Russia. He is best known as the general who defeated the Gauls and doubled the size of Rome’s territories. But, as Philip Freeman describes in this fascinating new biography, Caesar was also a brilliant orator, an accomplished writer, a skilled politician, and much more. Julius Caesar was a complex man, both hero and villain. He possessed great courage, ambition, honor, and vanity. Born into a noble family that had long been in decline, he advanced his career cunningly, beginning as a priest and eventually becoming Rome’s leading general. He made alliances with his rivals and then discarded them when it suited him. He was a spokesman for the ordinary people of Rome, who rallied around him time and again, but he profited enormously from his conquests and lived opulently. Eventually he was murdered in one of the most famous assassinations in history. Caesar’s contemporaries included some of Rome’s most famous figures, from the generals Marius, Sulla, and Pompey to the orator and legislator Cicero as well as the young politicians Mark Antony and Octavius (later Caesar Augustus). Caesar’s legendary romance with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra still fascinates us today. In this splendid biography, Freeman presents Caesar in all his dimensions and contradictions. With remarkable clarity and brevity, Freeman shows how Caesar dominated a newly powerful Rome and shaped its destiny. This book will captivate readers discovering Caesar and ancient Rome for the first time as well as those who have a deep interest in the classical world.
Includes the unabridged text of Hawthorne's classic novel plus a complete study guide that features chapter-by-chapter summaries, explanations and discussions of the plot, question-and-answer sections, author biography, historical background, and more.
Includes the unabridged text of Shelley's classic novel plus a complete study guide that features chapter-by-chapter summaries, explanations and discussions of the plot, question-and-answer sections, author biography, historical background, and more.