The play was first performed in a climate of censorship, when fears of what might follow the childless queen’s death were running high. Elizabeth’s subjects dreaded a return to the chaos that had followed her father, Henry VIII. The lack of a mature and settled heir, religious turmoil and bloodshed, foreign threats to an insecure government — all these anxieties provided a context which made the fate of Julius Caesar and his successors highly relevant to a Tudor audience.
Successive performances have recontextualised the play. While its original audience were used to finding relevance to their times in depictions of Roman history, later audiences find the play’s themes pertinent to their own circumstances. Any critic who demands that a production should aim to authentically reproduce the experience of the play’s Tudor staging is asking the impossible. After all, Shakespeare used an English translation of Plutarch’s Lives for his Roman plays, so he was already engaged in interpreting and reworking stories that reflected the preoccupations of his contemporaries.
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