Some four years ago I was set the task of tracing the origin of two Dutch plays on Julius Cæsar which up to that time had received no critical attention. The examination of the dramatic treatment of Cæsar in various ages and literatures involved in the solution of this problem led me to the belief that we possessed a body of plays on this subject which might be made to yield some little light on Shakespeare's treatment of the character. His after all is only one of many. Cæsar has to the succeeding generations of men been everything from Satyr to Hyperion: from the “divus Julius” of Valerius Maximus to the arch-destroyer and brilliant opportunist of Professor Ferrero; from the execrated oppressor of Roman liberties of Lucan to the demi-god of Mommsen; from the perfect knight of Jehan de Tuin to the silly tyrant of Hans Sachs; and finally Dante's desperate resort to the last refuge of embarrassed compliment—“ What fine eyes he has;” almost every view, in short, has been held of him except that he was an inconsiderable or negligible person. A priori, then, the conjunction of great subject and great poet in the case of Shakespeare was auspicious, but the result, from Ben Jonson to Mr. Bernard Shaw, has seldom passed unchallenged. It is not, however, with what Shakespeare might have made of Cæsar, and has not, that I am here concerned; but rather with the attempt to explain, if it is possible, how he came to make of him what he did. At the risk, then, of saying some fairly trite things, I propose to examine Shakespeare's treatment of the character of Cæsar as it appears in his immediate source, Plutarch, with a view to showing at what points other dramatic treatments of the character serve, in my opinion at least, to explain Shakespeare's.