Ramsay – Campion Great Books Podcast: Episode 5 Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – Part 1

Welcome to the 2023 Ramsay – Campion Great Books Podcast Series.

We turn now to Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar, the story of Julius Caesar’s downfall, the demise of his assassins and the rise of Mark Antony.

In this podcast Dr Stephen McInerney, Director of the Centre for the Study of the Western Tradition at Campion College is joined by Dr Colin Dray, Lecturer in Literature at Campion College, together with Dr Kishore Saval, Senior Lecturer in the Western Civilisation Program at Australian Catholic University.

In this episode we ask: What motivates the conspirators and how are our sympathies towards different characters determined simultaneously by Shakespeare’s language and by the assumptions we bring to the play? Should we side with the conspirators or Caeasar, and why? And how do we manipulate language not only to convince others of the justness of our actions but to convince ourselves? We consider all of these other questions in light of the framing question: Is this really Caesar’s tragedy or Brutus’s?