Caesar:
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue shriller than all the music
Cry "Caesar!" Speak, Caesar is turn'd to hear.
Soothsayer:
Beware the ides of March.
Caesar:
What man is that?
Brutus:
A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
Shakespeare borrowed this scene, along with other details of
Caesar's demise, from Plutarch's Life of Julius Caesar. An English
translation was readily available, but its precise phrasings
weren't quite dramatic enough for Shakespeare's purposes. Where he
has the soothsayer declaim, "Beware the Ides of March," the more
prosaic original notes merely that the soothsayer warns Caesar "to
take heed of the day of the Ides of March."
Julius Caesar
Act 1, scene 2, 15–19
E Notes - Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
never published any of his plays and therefore none of the original
manuscripts have survived. Eighteen unauthorised versions of his plays
were, however, published during his lifetime in quarto editions by
unscrupulous publishers (there were no copyright laws protecting
Shakespeare and his works during the Elizabethan era). A collection of
his works did not appear until 1623 ( a full seven years after
Shakespeare's death on April 23, 1616) when two of his fellow actors,
John Hemminges and Henry Condell, posthumously recorded his work and
published 36 of William’s plays in the First Folio.
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