Here’s my latest piece on the Christian Shakespeare website …

I am thrilled to be conducting acting workshops this summer for the cast of Julius Caesar.  This great political tragedy of Shakespeare’s will be performed in September at the Flint Hills Shakespeare Festival in St. Mary’s, Kansas.

In preparation, I recently listened to a tremendous audio performance of Julius Caesar by the Arkangel Players, which featured a particularly well done funeral oration scene.  This production is available through Audible for ten bucks, and I highly recommend it.

Here are a few things that strike me about this play.  Some of what I say may unintentional mimic the theory of mimicry or mimesis of Rene Girard, who saw in Julius Caesar a tale of imitation and scapegoating, expressed by an act of sacrificial murder that not only failed to purge the political

problem in ancient Rome, but only made it worse.  And while I think Shakespeare is indeed showing us the conspirators engaged in a deliberate act of human sacrifice that carries with it a kind of ritual import, he is also showing this against an implied background of Christian theology that Girard and many moderns miss or fail to emphasize properly.

Shakespeare’s original audience would have known a meta-setting of this play that transcends the setting in ancient Rome that is explicit in the drama.  They would have known the secular authority of Rome as occupiers of first century Israel, and the role of Caesar Augustus (Marc Antony) in establishing the Pax Romana, which began at about the time of the earthly life of Our Lord and his first disciples, and which served as a secular echo or foreshadowing of the far deeper Peace offered by the cross of Christ.

This alone ties the play to Jesus and His Passion, as does the entire problem at the center of the story.  How are men to be free?  How is ambition in its most dangerous form, the desire of man to be God, to be checked?  Can a political solution – especially one of violent murder and conspiracy – solve a problem that is much more than merely political?

… to read the rest of the piece, click here!