Did Shakespeare revise to satisfy Ben Jonson?
Just before his murder, Caesar utters a phrase that has mystified actors, scholars, critics, directors, and audiences for four centuries: “Know, Cæsar doth not wrong, nor without cause / Will he be satisfied” (3.1.47-48; 1254-5). The doomed dictator, monstrously egotistical, seems to defend himself from the imputation of “wrong,” even though his soon-to-be assassins do not actually use this word. However, the controversy arose not because of what appears in the First Folio, which we reproduce here, but because of the much different way that Ben Jonson remembered (and ridiculed) the passage, in this form: “Cæsar doth not wrong, but with just cause.” Did Shakespeare, chastened, hurriedly revise the phrase into its present form, which represents a palimpsest of the previous version? Or is there some other explanation that scholarship has failed to discover? Our predecessor, H. H. Furness Jr., devotes over four pages of eight-point type to the lines in v1913, which we may well exceed in accounting for critical opinion on them in the century that has passed since publication of this first New Variorum edition of the play. We also make available the essay elsewhere on our website