Julius Caesar

Discover books, costume sketches, and theatrical props for Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in the Folger collection along with items from Folger Theatre’s production of Al Letson’s Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. 

Journalist, playwright, and poet Al Letson talks about Julius X, his play that borrows lines, characters, and plot from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to tell the story of Malcolm X. He shares the play’s origins and his approach to creating art.

Challenge yourself with this new quiz about Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.

Rosa Joshi’s bold staging of Julius Caesar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, performed entirely by women and nonbinary actors, reframes Shakespeare’s political thriller for today’s fight against autocracy.

Shakespeare’s tragedy is filled with memorable lines, including Mark Antony’s speech that begins “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.” Explore some of the play’s most well-known quotes.

We ask theater artists across the country to tell us why it isn’t.

Interested in politics and communication? Try our quiz and rearrange the lines of Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech from Julius Caesar, a famous passage from Shakespeare’s plays and a brilliant example of political oratory.

Early 19th-century American students would study speeches from Shakespeare’s plays as examples of good public speaking, not as literature. How did Shakespeare’s place in the school curriculum change?

Brutus (Anthony Cochrane, left) and Julius Caesar (Michael Sharon, right), Julius Caesar, directed by Robert Richmond, Folger Theatre, 2014. Photo by Teresa Wood. In 1599, in the 40th year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, when she had no heir or obvious…

In 2012, London’s Donmar Warehouse opened an all-female Julius Caesar, starring Dame Harriet Walter as Brutus and directed by Tony nominee Phyllida Lloyd. Set in a women’s prison, it was the first of a trilogy of all-female productions, all starring Walter.

Artist Paul Glenshaw describes drawing the Folger bas-relief of “Julius Caesar,” in which assassins with their knives start to turn away as Caesar dies. He pairs the image with a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Walters Art Museum in…

In 2012 the Royal Shakespeare Company staged the first-ever, high-profile, all-black British Shakespeare production, Julius Caesar, set in Africa. The actor who played Brutus, Paterson Joseph, wrote a book about the experience. He also talks about his early work, his thoughts about race in the British theater, about the proper way to play Brutus, and much more.