Word: caesar
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Although Julius Caesar is not the greatest of these plays, it is by far the best known, probably because of the enormous fascination Caesar has exerted over the ages. In medieval and Renaissance times Caesar was the only Roman to be honored with a place among the Nine Worthies; in Michael Hart's new book The 100, which is an all-time ranking of the most influential persons in world history, Caesar comes...
This summer the American Shakespeare Theatre is offering Julius Caesar for the fifth time in its history. This time the director, Gerald Freedman, spurred by the work's universal applicability, opted to set the play in our own era, in order, as he said, "to place some mutual perspective on the events of Julius Caesar and on the events...
...attraction of presenting Shakespeare in modern dress dates from the productions of Sir Barry Jackson, starting with his Hamlet of 1925. The earliest modern-dress Caesar apparently was the anti-Fascist one with which Orson Welles, at age 22, inaugurated his Mercury Theatre in 1937 (the previous year he had mounted an all-Negro Macbeth set in the voodoo world of Haiti). In 1939 Henry Cass put the play in Mussolini's Italy. Donald Wolfit, Minos Volanakis, Michael Croft and others have since updated this drama...
Freedman here has not settled on a specific city, but he has chosen to make his Caesar a Latin American caudillo, who enjoys wearing his military uniform with its gold braid and rows of campaign service ribbons. Our century is familiar with such personages: Peron in Argentina, Estrada Cabrera and Ubico in Guatemala, Gomez and Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, Vargas in Brazil, Hernandez Martinez in El Salvador, Ibanez in Chile, Stroessner in Paraguay...
...Like Caesar, a number of these Latin leaders met their deaths through assassination: Castillo Armas in Guatemala, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and--within eight years--Carranza, Pancho Villa and Obregon in Mexico. Dictatorship brings with it danger, as today's headlines about Nicaragua's Gen. Somoza Debayle indicate. It is worth recalling that Somoza's father obtained his dictatorial power by assassinating Gen. Sandino, only to be assassinated himself some years later...