Julius Caesar
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Romulus and Remus, at least in the flesh, aren’t usually numbered among the dramatis personae of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The famous sculpture of the she-wolf suckling Rome’s founding twins is a not unfamilar sight in modern productions. It’s also favoured by Lucy Bailey as an iconic image for launching her terrific directorial debut for the RSC. As the audience assembles, the lupine sculpture presides over two athletic young men in grubby loincloths wrestling together: at first it is playfully, then ever more violently. Following a crescendo of grunts and shrieks, the bloody corpse of Remus is left upon the stage, the lights go down and the play can begin.
The point, obviously enough, is to underline the irony that civilisation is ever suckled by barbarism. Few would have dared to voice that idea in 1599 at the court of the ageing Elizabeth, but Shakespeare knew that his re-telling of the assassination of the self-deifying Caesar and its bloody consequences would not lack resonance in a London rife with anxieties about the succession and the likelihood of civil war.
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