(I. ii. 159·)
Here obviously the word we should have expected is infernal not eternal. It has been conjectured[143] that the milder expression was substituted in deference to the increasing disapproval of profane language on the stage; and since three plays published in 1600 use infernal, the inference is that Julius Caesar is subsequent to them. One fails to see, however, why Shakespeare should admit the substantive and be squeamish about the adjective: in point of fact, much uglier words than either find free entry into his later plays. And one has likewise to remember that the Julius Caesar we possess was published only in 1623, and that such a change might very well have been made in any of the intervening years, even though it were written before 1600. The most then that can be established by this set of inferences, is that it was produced after Meres’ Palladis Tamia in 1598 and before Weever’s Mirror of Martyrs in 1601.
The narrowness of the range is fairly satisfactory, and it may be further reduced. It has been surmised that perhaps Essex’ treason turned Shakespeare’s thoughts to the story of another conspiracy by another high-minded man, and that Caesar’s reproach, “Et tu, Brute,” derived not from the Parallel Lives but from floating literary tradition, would suggest to an audience of those days the feeling of Elizabeth in regard to one whom Shakespeare had but recently celebrated as “the general of our gracious Empress.” At any rate the time seems suitable. Among Shakespeare’s serious plays Julius Caesar most resembles in style Henry V., written between March and September 1599, as the above allusion to Essex’ expedition shows,[144] and Hamlet, entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1602, as “latelie acted.” But the connection is a good deal closer with the latter than with the former, and extends to the parallelism and contrast between the chief persons, both of them philosophic students called upon to make a decision for which their temperament and powers do not fit them, and therefore the one of them deciding wrong and the other hardly deciding at all. Both pieces contain references to the story of Caesar, but those in Hamlet accord better with the tone of the tragedy. Thus the chorus says of Henry’s triumph:
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of the antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth to fetch their conquering Caesar in.
(V. prologue 25.)
Would this passage have been penned if Shakespeare had already described how the acclamations of the plebs were interrupted by the tribunes, and how among the senators there were some eager to make away with the Victor?
But the two chief references in Hamlet merely abridge what is told more at large in the Play. Polonius says: “I did enact Julius Caesar: I was killed i’ the Capitol. Brutus killed me” (III. ii. 108), which is only a bald summary of the central situation. Hamlet says: