Julius Caesar William Shakespeare, Burton Raffel

The first tragedy to be played in the new Globe Theatre, "Julius Caesar "is set at a crucial turning point in Roman history, as the Republican gives way to the imperial. Safely removed in time and place from Shakespeare's Elizabethan England, Rome makes the perfect laboratory for the playwright's free-ranging political analysis.

Burton Raffel is Endowed Chair in Arts and Humanities Emeritus and professor of English emeritus, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His most recent of many edited and translated publications is Nibelungenlied, published by Yale University Press. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, is the author of many books, including The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine.