In "Julius Cæsar" Shakespeare availed himself of a theme already a favorite. The story of the overthrow of a tyrant, the progress of a conspiracy, the fall of a prince, and his revenge upon the murderers furnished material well approved for tragedy, while the greatness of the events and the actors both gave assurance of popular interest and incited the poet to his best. Shakespeare was not directed by scrupulous regard for historical accuracy, but his genius was stirred by that of Plutarch to give the events of the Roman civil war the interest and vitality he had given to the reigns of English kings. In dealing with a story that followed so closely the standard lines of tragedy,--the murder and the revenge,--Shakespeare adopted some of the methods current in contemporary plays. There is really no evidence to support Mr. Fleay's ingenious surmise that the play was originally in two parts,--I, The Death, and II, The Revenge of Cæsar,--but the play seems to have separated itself naturally into those two divisions. The rise of the action traces the rise of the conspiracy to Cæsar's death; the return of the action proceeds to the failure and deaths of the conspirators. But from the beginning Shakespeare must have found his interest engaged less by the story of conspiracy or revenge, or even by the presentation of the turmoil of an empire, than by the delineation of the character of Brutus. There, for him, lay the kernel of the tragedy, in the struggle of a highly gifted nature with a task unfit for his accomplishment. The play became not a tragedy of over-reaching ambition, as Marlowe might have made "The Tragedy of Cæsar," nor the tragedy of supernaturally ordained revenge, as Kyd might have made "Cæsar's Revenge," but the tragedy of Brutus,--the fateful struggle of a noble mind against counter actors and against chance, and also against an incurable deficiency in his own temperament.