Caesar, played with roguish charm and cold resolve by Jeffery Kissoon, is in the company of such manipulative despots as Idi Amin Dada, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.

Doran highlights the political aspect of the play, and this is to the good, for it is still necessary to insist on Africa as a site of political and ideological contest, and not a static place mired in an unchanging anthropological past. The assassination of Caesar himself feels like a story from one of the newly independent African countries of the nineteen-sixties. It is an African “Julius Caesar,” and the play contains many elements that aid this conceit: the soothsayer is a féticheur in body paint, Brutus has a silly houseboy, there’s a lynching (of a poet who happens to share a name with one of the conspirators). production has an all-black cast, and is directed by Gregory Doran. players do their best with this later material, though they are hampered somewhat by a minimalist staging in which we get neither the sense of battle nor the tension of a battle camp. Shakespeare then takes us into the less interesting matter of the conspirators’ fates, their various suicides and deaths by misadventure. A tight conspiratorial knot leads up to the assassination, which is followed by the funeral orations by Brutus and Mark Antony. This finely balanced ambiguity is the material for the first half of the play it is no surprise that Shakespeare’s coinage “misgiving” should make its first appearance in English in this play of doubts. That he waved it off with the self-promoting and self-abnegating line “What touches us ourself shall be last serv’d” is evidence of his popularity. He might have escaped assassination had he read the note proffered him by Artemidorus as he entered the Senate on the Ides of March. But he also has “popularity” in the sixteenth-century sense of that word, as the scholar James Shapiro has written: his rule is a radical democracy that is the very opposite of tyranny. “Julius Caesar” bristles with augury, but hinges on a more terrestrial concern: Was Caesar a tyrant and thus deserving of tyrannicide? The Caesar of the play is imperious and inflexible, happy to compare himself to Mount Olympus and the North Star. Too much can be made of this sort of thing, but Shakespeare’s love of superstition is rich soil for suggestible minds. The coincidence was theatrical in a literal sense, too: Lincoln died in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, Caesar died in Pompey’s Theatre in Rome, “Julius Caesar” was premièred at the Globe Theatre in London, and I watched it at the Harvey Theatre, in Brooklyn (where the play continues until April 28th). It happened to be on April 13th, the Ides of April, and a day before the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. I saw “Julius Caesar” recently in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Royal shakespeare company julius caesar