Caesar's Fall

Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, Anthony Munday and John Webster (1602)

Historical records

File:CaesarsFall.JPG See the relevant MS entry in the Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project site here.

Henslowe's Diary

Lent unto the company the 22 of maij

1602 to geue vnto antoney monday &

mihell drayton webester & the Rest [interlined: mydelton] in

earneste of a Boocke called sesers ffalle

the some of v^ll (Greg I, 166)

Theatrical provenance

Henslowe's diary attributes this play to the Admiral's Men.

Probable Genre(s)

Tragedy.

Possible Narrative and Dramatic Sources or Analogues

None known.

References to the Play

None known.

Critical Commentary

Relationship with Two Shapes

W.W. Greg identified this play with the lost Two Shapes, recorded in the diary one week later. Henslowe paid out £3 for Two Shapes and attributed it to Dekker, Drayton, Middleton, Webster and Munday. Although Dekker's name does not appear in the Caesar's Fall record, Greg argued that the close correspondence between the dramatists and the payments make this identification "beyond doubt" (Greg II, 222). Subsequent commentators have followed suit in treating these two plays as the same.

Relationship with other Caesar plays

Doris Feldman and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador note that Caesar's Fall may have belonged to a fashion for dramatizations of Julius Caesar's life that ran throughout the 1590s in all kinds of theatrical venues, including Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra and the Trinity College play Caesar's Revenge as well as the public theatre plays such as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (328).

Furthermore, they note that the Admiral's Men themselves had already produced a two-part anonymous Caesar and Pompey (see part one, and part two) and the lost (possibly unfinished) Catiline's Conspiracy by Henry Chettle and Robert Wilson. They speculate further that this repertoire of Caesar plays could have been a multi-play "Caesarean project", which would begin with the war with Pompey in Caesar and Pompey Part 1, continue with the war against his son Sextus in Part 2, and then explore his political triumphs in Catiline's Conspiracy. As its title suggests, Caesar's Fall would thus conclude the narrative, creating a tragedy in the de casibus tradition (328-9).

Feldman and Tetzeli von Rosador note that references to Caesar appear in the works of each of the five dramatists, but that the attitudes displayed toward him are so diverse that it is impossible to speculate on how he might have been portrayed in the play (329).

For What It's Worth

(Content welcome)

Works Cited

Feldmann, Doris and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador. "Lost Plays: A Brief Account." Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works. Ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. 328-333. Print.

Site created and maintained by David Nicol, Dalhousie University; updated 14 May, 2011.