It's rather surprising that it took the Abbey 103 years to put on Julius Caesar, if only because of the play's historical relevance for Ireland, writes Frank Nally.
Not that this country merits mention anywhere in a drama set in ancient Rome. But the play's themes reflect the sense of crisis in England at the time Shakespeare wrote it. And that crisis had a lot to do with events across the Irish Sea.
Although nobody knows when exactly it first opened, a visiting Swiss doctor records seeing a version of Julius Caesar "very pleasingly performed" at a London theatre that sounds like the Globe on September 21st, 1599. If that was Shakespeare's, it may already have opened two weeks earlier, when another riverside drama was being played out, hundreds of miles away on the borders on south Ulster.
The dialogue between Hugh O'Neill and the second Earl of Essex is unrecorded. But whatever passed between them persuaded the latter to abandon his mission - backed by one of the biggest armies ever dispatched from England - to crush the Earl of Tyrone. Instead, he tried the already strained patience of his queen by returning to England and famously bursting into her bedchamber to present his version of events before his enemies did.
The man considered, not least by himself, to be the greatest soldier of his age was on a slippery slope that would lead to the loss of his head. By contrast, O'Neill's reputation soared even higher than it had a year before, when he routed the previous expeditionary force at the Yellow Ford. As Sean O'Faolain put it in his biography of the chieftain, it was left to Queen Elizabeth "to swallow the astonishing fact that an army of 16,000 men had gone across the Irish Sea to smash their golden calf, her new name for Tyrone, and that it was now scattered to the four winds without striking even one solitary blow against him".
We know now that O'Neill's own nemesis was not far away. But in the summer of 1599, he was a considerable source of anxiety for the English, who had plenty to worry about already. Another Spanish Armada was expected any day. And even if it didn't come, there were fears of what would happen when the ageing and heirless queen died, with frequent rumours of Catholic plots to hasten her departure.
It was against this background that Shakespeare wrote his play, ostensibly about events from more than 1,600 years earlier. This was one way of coping with censorship at a time when, according to one contemporary source, it was "forbidden, on pain of death, to write or speak of Irish affairs". But since Julius Caesar deals with assassination, political ambition, court intrigue, and civil war, it covered all the ground necessary for a clued-in Elizabethan audience.
It also deals with the idea of courting popularity - fatal for Caesar, and something at which Lord Essex was also adept. Popularity sounds to a modern audience like a good thing. But as James Shapiro explains in 1599: A year in the Life of William Shakespeare, it was such a loaded term in 1599 that playwrights avoided explicit reference to it. The author of Julius Caesar knew the p-word was dangerous, and "made all the more so by [ Elizabeth's] deep anxiety about Essex's cultivation of the people".
The army's departure from London in late March had been typically theatrical, with crowds lining the streets to cheer Essex off. Unfortunately, the scene was undermined by a sudden storm that was so violent and unexpected that it was still cited as an example of a particular meteorological phenomenon in a dictionary compiled more than a decade afterwards. Shakespeare was fond of recruiting the weather to foreshadow his plots, but the storm that prefigures Caesar's demise may have auditioned for the role on that March day.
The earl's departure provoked mixed feelings at court. On the one hand, his enemies could intrigue against him in his absence. On the other, a triumphant return would only increase his dangerous popularity. In the event, they could count on Ireland's reputation as a graveyard for ambition. What the weather and the rebels did not do to Essex's army, shady recruitment practices did.
Shapiro suggests that Shakespeare's audience may have winced at the line in which Brutus castigates Cassius for corruption and for denying him "gold to pay my legions". By July 1599, word was out that soldiers in Ireland were threatening mutiny "for want of pay and scarcity of victuals". It was also rumoured at court that Essex and the queen had "each threatened the other's head".
The earl had added to his problems by first embarking on an impromptu tour of Ireland's southern provinces, with little success. So that by the time he could put it off no longer and headed north, sickness and starvation had reduced his army to a shadow of the one that left London.
When he finally met O'Neill in the river at Aclint, Essex appealed to the older man's sense of chivalry by challenging him to single combat. The Earl of Tyrone had not come down in the last shower, however, and declined. Carrying a big stick, he could afford to speak softly, and whatever he said turned both Essex's head and his army.
O'Faolain has fun speculating about it and quotes O'Neill cryptically telling someone soon afterwards that "within these two months, he would see the greatest alteration [ in matters] that he could imagine, or ever saw in his life". Asked to explain, he laughed and said he hoped before long "to have a good share in England".
History decided otherwise. Elizabeth lived long enough to see Essex executed and O'Neill humbled, and Protestant England survived, after a fright. You won't see any of this mentioned in the fine production currently playing at the Abbey. But it adds to the fun when you can read between the lines.