Word: plutarch
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...There is no sub-plot, no comic relief, not even any mildly humorous lines except for a handful of Casca's; and the play is freer of bawdry than any other save Richard II. Aside from a little compression of chronology, Shakespeare followed closely his three source biographies in Plutarch's Lives, often just turning its line of prose into verse...
Brutus' young page Lucius is the only character Shakespeare did not find in Plutarch, and he was invented chiefly to illustrate Brutus' considerateness of others. Fifteen-year-old Alan Howard plays him ardently and appealingly. When he falls asleep in the midst of singing and plucking his harp, Brutus affectionately covers him with a gown. When, after the battle at Philippi, Lucius is carried in, lain on the ground and tenderly shrouded in a blanket, one is more moved than by the death of any of the play's principals...
Seldom this side of Plutarch have a great man's earliest moments been recorded in such pluperfect detail. But then, as Rebekah Baines Johnson went on to explain, her first son came from no common clay. Her matriarchal scrapbook saga of Lyndon's life, from birth (weight: 10 Ibs.) in "the rambling old farmhouse of the young Sam Johnsons" on the Pedernales until 1931, when he went to Washington as secretary to Congressman Richard M. Kleberg, was presented to her son four years before her death in 1958. Last week, New York's McGraw-Hill published Rebekah...
Still unknown is the location of Pella's great palace-the place where Queen Olympias gave birth to Alexander the Great, after dreaming, says Plutarch, that a "thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire...
...became a Birmingham police-court judge and a crack negligence lawyer. In 1926, his Populist fervor persuaded Alabamians to elect him to the U.S. Senate. Aware of his spotty schooling, he spent his first term buried in the Library of Congress reading Aquinas, Aristotle, Herodotus, Locke, Marx, Mill, Montesquieu, Plutarch, Tacitus, Spinoza, Thucydides, Shakespeare, the records of the Constitutional Convention, and all of Thomas Jefferson...