APPENDIX A
Sources of the Play
There were, of course, earlier plays in Elizabethan England on the subject of Cæsar's career (Henslowe's Diary attests their popularity in the 1590's) and they may well have influenced Shakespeare's work. For a careful study of these possibilities, see H. M, Ayres' 'Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar in the Light of Some Other Versions' (Pub. Mod. Lang. Assoc. of America, 1910). Dr. A. Boecker also has put forward an elaborate effort to establish Shakespeare's indebtedness to Orlando Pescetti's 'Il Cesare,' a tragedy running to nearly four thousand lines of verse and published in Verona in 1594, 2d ed. 1604 ('A Probable Italian Source of Shakespeare's Julius Cæsar,' N. Y. Univ. Dissertation, 1913). But after all due allowances have been made for this sort of influence, and for the less important possibility of indebtedness to classic authors such as Appian, it still remains true that the great source of the play is 'The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, Compared together by that grave learned Philosopher and Historiographer, Plutarke of Chæronea: Translated out of Greeke into French by Iames Amyot . . . and out of French into Englishe, by Thomas North. Imprinted at London . . . 1579,' 2d ed. 1595, 3d ed. 1603. To this famous and splendid monument of Elizabethan prose Shakespeare owes the whole action or plot of the play, the separate incidents, many personal details of characterization, some few errors in fact, and occasional verbal suggestions: but his supreme skill in selecting, rejecting, combining, and arranging historical material has rarely been shown
