Julius Caesar

Thomas May (1625-30)

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Historical Records

Biographia Dramatica (1812), 3:437 Google Books:

Julius Caesar. Trag. by Thomas May. The original MS. of this play, which is in five short acts, is in the possession of Mr. Stephen Jones. The author has affixed his name at the conclusion of the piece.

Theatrical Provenance

It has been suggested that the play may have been performed either at Sidney Sussex College or at Gray's Inn, but there is no evidence to support these claims. See the "Critical Commentary" section below.

Probable Genre(s)

Latin tragedy (Harbage).

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

Although May's passionate interest in Lucan makes the latter's Civil War appear as the most probable source of the play, Caesar's legacy had reached the Renaissance through many other texts, such as such as Appian's Civil Wars, Plutarch's Lives, Lucan's Civil War, Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Cassius Dio's Roman History and Caesar's own works. The use of these as sources can in no way be ruled out.

For a summary of Catiline's conspiracy, in which Caesar was rumoured to have taken part, see "Catiline's Conspiracy"; for the main events of Caesar's life from the so-called First Triumvirate, see "Caesar and Pompey".

References to the Play

None known.

Critical Commentary

Moore Smith (105) suggests, for unfathomable reasons, that a production of the play took place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1616, but this is unprovable and not especially probable.

As far as the dating of the play is concerned, Chester (99) contends as follows:

Concerning the Latin tragedy of Julius Caesar, our suppositions must be even more tenuous. Although this play, which never reached the press, existed for many years in manuscript, it has disappeared without a trace. If we exclude the possibility that May wrote it during the tender years of his residence at Cambridge, two possible dates of composition suggest themselves. The first of these is the period of May's residence at Gray's Inn – that is, 1616 or 1617 – when the play may have been written for performance at the Inns of Court. A more plausible supposition would be a date between 1625 and 1630, during which years May's attention was engaged by Roman history, as witness his English tragedies and his translation of the Pharsalia, the latter a work which undoubtedly served as an important source for the play. We may conclude, I think, that all of May's tragedies were written between 1625 and 1631.

Bentley (4:838): "One suspects that most of this information is not first-hand. Dr. Chester searched for the manuscript without success (Thomas May, p. 99, n. 5.) The evidence for the authorship or even the existence of this play is so slight as to make speculation concerning its date futile."

Bowers (192) . . .

Norbrook argues that this play may have shared the political concerns of May's tragedy of Julia Agrippina (1628), which "drew on Lucan in a stark portrayal of imperial corruption."

For What It's Worth

Given that May's Cleopatra was performed in 1626, that the first three books of his translation of Lucan were published in the same year and the complete ten-book version in 1627, and that the Continuation of Lucan’s Historical Poem till the Death of Julius Caesar appeared in 1630, it seems overwhelmingly likely, as suggested by Chester, that May worked on the play during these years. As Paleit (215) remarks, Cleopatra, the translation and the Continuation "initiated May's complex and sustained association with Lucan, which lasted until his death in November 1650. Until then . . . he had been primarily a comic dramatist, with a sideline in minor translation work.’ The fact that he devoted himself mainly to prose history later in his life further corroborates this hypothesis, even though one might contend that May could have written the play while working on the Supplementum Lucani, a translation of his Continuation into Latin dactylic hexameters published in 1640. However, this does not seem especially likely, and there is no allusion to the play in the Dutch scholar Daniel Heinsius's letters of the period that mention the fact that May wrote the Supplementum in the Netherlands (Paleit, 286).

In the light of May's admiration of Lucan, it is safe enough to assume that the main source of the play was the Bellum civile, as was the case with Cleopatra. As Paleit (224-225) points out, close analysis of May’s production of the 1620s suggests that he was carefully exploring the multiple analogies between late republican Rome and Caroline England and that he "perceived the English political order . . . to be under threat from the claims and practices of Stuart absolutism in the same way that, in Lucan’s narrative, the Roman senatorial republic had been threatened (and then overturned) by Julius Caesar and his supporters." May’s "Julius Caesar" was probably informed by similar concerns, and it would not be surprising to discover that it offered a depiction of Caesar akin to the "unflattering portrait of the early Augustus . . . offered in Cleopatra, . . . criticizing arbitrary distribution of rewards" (Paleit, 236). Moreover, as Jonson was a major influence on May’s dramatic writing, the latter could have been also influenced by the former’s highly negative depiction of Caesar in Catiline His Conspiracy (1611).

It appears legitimate to conjecture that the play may have taken the shape of a reduced dramatic version of Lucan’s poem together with May’s own Continuation, and that it may have elaborated May’s favourite Lucanic themes, namely loss of liberty, the ruinous consequences of ambition and the unintelligible role of providence. However, it is also intriguing to wonder whether the play followed the Continuation and Supplementum in portraying Caesar on the Ides of March "as a necessary victim of the historical forces he unleashed though his illegal act of usurpation" (Paleit, 282) despite the overall anti-Caesarean tone. And also, did the play end with Caesar’s death like the Continuation and Supplementum or did it also chronicle the ensuing war between Brutus and Cassius on the one side, and Antony and Octavian on the other, as occurs in Shakespeare's play?

The fact that the play remained in manuscript may suggest that the piece was never intended for performance but rather for circulation among selected people. As the use of Latin may have made him feel somewhat freer to express a stronger anti-Caesarean – and anti-absolutist – sentiment than in his other writings, May might have ended up feeling so uncomfortable with the final content of the play that he never circulated it, a hypothesis that would be consistent both with the lack of contemporary references and with May’s characteristic unwillingness to take strong stands on political issues.

Will the manuscript containing the tragedy ever be recovered? As early as 1909, Ayres asked in Notes an Queries: "Can any one tell me where the MS. of Thomas May's tragedy on Julius Caesar is to be found?" Over 100 years later, the hopes of recovering it appear exceedingly faint.

Works Cited

Ayres, Harry Morgan. Notes and Queries 11 (1909), 248. Internet Archive

Baker, David Erskine, Issac Reed, and Stephen Jones, eds. Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse. 3 vols. London: Longman et al., 1812. (NB: Baker to 1764, Reed to 1782, and Jones to 1811.)

Bowers, Fredson Thayer, ed. The Dictionary of Literary Biography vol. 58: Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1987.

Chester, Allan Griffith. Thomas May: Man of letters, 1595-1650. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932.

Moore Smith, George Charles. College Plays: Performed in the University of Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923.

Norbrook, David. "May, Thomas (b. in or after 1596, d. 1650)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Paleit, Edward. War, Liberty, and Caesar: Responses to Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile, ca. 1580–1650. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Site created and maintained by Domenico Lovascio, University of Genoa; updated 26 July 2015.