Julius Caesar

Two new productions, Al Letson’s Julius X and the Q Brothers Collective’s Rome Sweet Rome, explore contemporary themes of political upheaval and personal betrayal while illuminating aspects of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar we might have missed. 

Scholar Carla Della Gatta looks at the growth of Latinx-inspired Shakespeare productions in the US beginning with West Side Story on Broadway in 1957. She finds the performances as richly diverse in form as they are in content.

Al Letson’s play Julius X acts as a sort of Venn diagram that allows us to twice witness a familiar text (Julius Caesar), with a harsh and violent moment of American history that marked a significant contest waged by Black Americans for freedom and equality.

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?

Don’t let the title fool you! William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is about the death of a tyrant, but its title character is not its central protagonist. Shakespeare’s play focuses instead on two of the leaders of the conspiracy: Gaius Cassius and Marcus Brutus.