There saw you labouring for him. What was 't

That mov'd pale Cassius to conspire; and what

Made the all-honour'd, honest Roman, Brutus,

With the arm'd rest, courtiers of beauteous freedom,

To drench the Capitol; but that they would

Have one man but a man?

[II, vi, 12-19.]

We have the same popular tradition in the first scene of the last act of Fletcher's The Noble Gentleman. So, too, in the Prologue to Beaumont and Fletcher's, or Fletcher and Massinger's, The False One, a tragedy dealing with Cæsar and Cleopatra:

To tell

Of Cæsar's amorous heats, and how he fell

I' the Capitol.

Here the reference is to Shakespeare's play.

xvi

xvi

 "Et Tu, Brute"

"Et Tu, Brute"

Dyce and other researchers have made clear that in Shakespeare's day "Et tu, Brute" was a familiar phrase which had special reference to a wound from a supposed friend. It probably owed its popularity to having been used in the earlier plays on the subject of Julius Cæsar. In The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York (1595), upon which Shakespeare's 3 Henry VI is based, occurs the line,

Et tu, Brute? wilt thou stab Cæsar too?

This line is repeated in S. Nicholson's poem, Acolastus, his Afterwitte (1600). In Ben Jonson's Every Man out 

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