(2) Apart, however, from these apparent adaptations in 1603, there is reason to conjecture that the play had been performed by May in the previous year. At that date, as we know from Henslowe’s Diary, Drayton, Webster and others were engaged on a tragedy on the same subject called Caesar’s Fall. Now it is a well ascertained fact that when a drama was a success at one theatre, something on a similar theme commonly followed at another. The entry therefore, that in the early summer of 1602 Henslowe had several playwrights working at this material, apparently in a hurry, since so many are sharing in the task, is in so far presumptive evidence that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar had been produced in the same year or shortly before.
(3) But these things are chiefly important as confirming the probability of another allusion, which would throw the date a little further back still. In Weever’s Mirror of Martyrs there is the quatrain:
The many headed multitude were drawne
By Brutus speech, that Caesar was ambitious,
When eloquent Mark Antony had showne
His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious.[140]
Now this has a much more specific reference to the famous scene in the Play than to anything in Plutarch, who, for instance, even in the Life of Brutus, which gives the fullest account of Brutus’ dealings with the citizens, does not mention the substance of his argument and still less any insistence on Caesar’s ambition, but only says that he “made an oration unto them to winne the favor of the people, and to justifie what they had done”; and this passage, which contains the fullest notice of Brutus’ speeches, like the corresponding one in the Life of Caesar, attributes only moderate success to his appeal in the market place, while it goes on to describe the popular disapproval as exploding before the intervention of Antony. [141] Thus it seems fairly certain that a knowledge of Shakespeare’s play is presupposed by the Mirror of Martyrs, which was printed in 1601.
On the other hand, it cannot have been much earlier. The absence of such a typical “tragedy” from Meres’ list in 1598 is nearly proof positive that it was not then in existence.
After that the data are less definite. A Warning for Fair Women, printed in 1599, contains the lines:
I have given him fifteen wounds,