Have one man but a man?
[II, vi, 12-19.]
We have the same popular tradition in the first scene of the last act of Fletcher's The Noble Gentleman. So, too, in the Prologue to Beaumont and Fletcher's, or Fletcher and Massinger's, The False One, a tragedy dealing with Cæsar and Cleopatra:
To tell
Of Cæsar's amorous heats, and how he fell
I' the Capitol.
Here the reference is to Shakespeare's play.
["Et Tu, Brute"]
Dyce and other researchers have made clear that in Shakespeare's day "Et tu, Brute" was a familiar phrase which had special reference to a wound from a supposed friend. It probably owed its popularity to having been used in the earlier plays on the subject of Julius Cæsar. In The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York (1595), upon which Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI is based, occurs the line,