Unusually for a Shakespeare play, we have a pretty close idea of when Julius Caesar was performed because a Swiss tourist called Thomas Platter saw it at the Globe towards the end of September 1599. (He has disappointingly little to say about it except that it was ‘pleasingly performed’ and that at the end ‘they danced together admirably and exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, two in each group dressed in men’s and two in women’s apparel’ – it’s an interesting coda to the solemnity of the victorious Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar acknowledging Brutus as ‘the noblest Roman of
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