External Evidence

1. Negative. Julius Cæsar is not mentioned by Meres in the Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, which gives a list of twelve noteworthy Shakespeare plays in existence at that time. This establishes 1598 as a probable terminus post quem.

2. Positive. In John Weever's Mirror of Martyrs or the Life and Death of Sir John Oldcastle Knight, Lord Cobham, printed in 1601, are the following lines:

The many-headed multitude were drawne

By Brutus speech that Cæsar was ambitious,

When eloquent Mark Antonie had showne

His vertues, who but Brutus then was vicious?

Man's memorie, with new, forgets the old,

One tale is good, until another's told.

Halliwell-Phillipps was the first to note that here is a very pointed reference to the second scene of the third act of Julius Cæsar, as the antithesis brought out is not indicated in any of Shakespeare's historical sources. The fact that Weever states in his Dedication that the Mirror "some two years agoe was made fit for the print" has been held by Mr. Percy Simpson[13] to indicate that the play was not brought out later than 1599, a conclusion supported, he thinks, by a passage in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour, produced in that year, where Clove (III, i) says, "Then coming to the pretty animal, as Reason long since is fled to animals, you know," which may be a sneering allusion to Antony's "O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts" (III, ii, 104). The "Et tu, Brute" quotation in the same play has been used to strengthen the argument. But the xix lines from the Mirror of Martyrs quoted above may easily have been inserted by Weever into his poem in consequence of the popularity of Shakespeare's play. This contemporary popularity is well attested. Leonard Digges,[14] in his verses Upon Master William Shakespeare prefixed to the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's Poems, thus compares it with that of Ben Jonson's Roman plays:

xix

So have I seene, when Cesar would appeare,

And on the Stage at halfe-sword parley were

Brutus and Cassius: oh how the Audience

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