18 June, 1595 - The Second Part of Caesar

Here's what the Admiral's Men performed at the Rose playhouse on this day, 424 years ago...

Henslowe writes: y^e 18 of June 1595 ... Ne ... R at the 2 pte of sesore ... lv^s 

In modern English: 18^th June, 1595 ... New ... Received at The Second Part of Caesar ... 55 shillings.

Today, the Admiral's Men premiered a sequel to one of their older plays! The Second Part of Caesar is lost, but it was presumably the followup to Caesar and Pompey, a play that the company was performing at the Rose a few months ago.

Because both parts are lost, we can only speculate as to their content. But if, as seems likely, the previous play dealt with the civil war between Julius Caesar and Sextus Pompeius, and ended with Pompey's death, the next part of the tale would have told of Caesar's triumph and then death.

Mark Antony displaying
the body of Caesar, from
Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition
of Shakespeare

In his catalogue of British drama, Martin Wiggins imagines a possible synopsis of the play. Perhaps it began with Caesar's triumphant arrival in Rome and his being made dictator. It would then have told of Caesar's reluctance to give up power, and of the transformation of Rome into a monarchy. Brutus and Cassius would then conspire to have Caesar killed, and the play might have ended with the famous scene of his visit to the Senate on the Ides of March, where the Roman senators assassinate him.

If so, The Second Part of Caesar probably told a similar story to that which Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar would do a few years later. Perhaps Shakespeare, now performing at the other end of the city, was deliberately imitating (in his inimitable way) a play by his rivals at the Rose.

Anyway, there are now three two-part plays in the Rose repertory: Tamburlaine, Hercules and Caesar. But unlike Hercules, which seems to have been designed as a two-parter from the get-go, The Second Part of Caesar is an afterthought, appearing a long time after the first play's debut, and indeed a long time after their last performance of Part One. It was presumably fairly self-contained, since the company is debuting it without bothering to revive Part One, and is thus assuming that the audience will understand who the characters are. The company may have noticed that two-parters are popular and may be scouring the archives for plays that could accommodate a sequel.

Whatever its content, The Second Part of Caesar received fairly good box office, drawing an audience that was large, but not as large as most other premieres.

FURTHER READING

The Second Part of Caesar information

• Martin Wiggins, British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2013), entry 1004.
• Domenico Lovascio, "Caesar and Pompey, Parts 1 and 2", Lost Plays Database (2015). 

Henslowe links

• Transcript of this page of the Diary (from W.W. Greg's 1904 edition)
• Facsimile of this page of the Diary (from the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project)

Comments?

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