julius caesar ignatius critical editions william shakespeare

A reaction against neo-classical poetry in the late eighteenth century, especially by Wordsworth and Coleridge, quickly led to a reaction against neo-classical criticism as well, and Shakespeare emerged as the model of an innovative style. Julius Caesar was assessed in light of criteria supposedly derived from the ancient critics, Aristotle and Horace, and by those criteria the play was generally found wanting.

The following discussion of how Julius Caesar in particular has been interpreted bears out Eliot's observation and aims to assist understanding of the play by a critical summary of historical views.ĢCriticism of Shakespeare began with a strong bias in favor of Renaissance Italian neo-classicism whose assumptions continued to dominate commentary for almost 200 years. In the process old ideas will be rediscovered and sometimes even repeated, while genuinely new insights will be introduced. Though more comfortable and seemingly more natural than anything else, our view is not the right view it departs from what preceded it but only at the cost of introducing new distortions that will in turn need to be corrected. A corollary of Eliot's insight is that one benefit of recognizing how Shakespeare has been understood in the past is to recognize better how we understand him ourselves. Eliot's comment that while we can never be right about Shakespeare, 'we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.' Bate's point is that 'the Romantics were especially good at driving out assorted errors of Voltaire and Dr Johnson with new errors of their own' ( Romantics, 3). 1Reflecting on the decisive transition from neo-classical to Romantic criticism of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate cites T.

Julius caesar ignatius critical editions william shakespeare