By
the eighth hour: is that the uttermost?
Marcus Butus
Julius Caesar Act II,
scene i Line 213
Oh boy, lots to talk about here. For starters, now that
we’ve covered Julius Caesar we’ve hit all the plays in my compilation. So that’s 37
plays and it took 141 days. We’ve spent a lot of time on all those Henrys, and
quite a bit on Coriolanus. But now we’ve hit them all at least once. So that’s
a relief.
Now this is a very interesting scene for one particular
thing: it’s got a clock in it. In fact, this line makes reference to that by
talking about the eighth hour. Of course you know that Julius Caesar takes
place in Roman times. Well a few lines earlier there’s a stage direction Clock Strikes. Of course clocks were not
invented until centuries later. I guess they did have sundials, but I’ve no way
of knowing whether or not the sundials gave them the ability to schedule things
by the eighth hour or not. In any event, when you look up the word
anachronistic you have a pretty good chance of getting Julius Caesar’s clock
striking as an example. So that’s pretty interesting.
This is also one of the first Shakespearean plays I ever
saw. We saw it performed at the Stratford Shakespeare Theater. This was in
Connecticut and I was in high school, so it was in the seventies. I don’t know
if that theater is even still there. The only thing I remember about the play
was that they used a lot of fake blood in the scene where Caesar gets killed. It
figures that’s all I remember.
This is the oldest clock I own, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't date back to Shakespeare's time, let alone Julius Caesar's.
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