Customer Reviews

Cliffs Notes on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

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I needed cliff notes for English as we were reading the play Julius Caesar. I looked around and finally found these. They are great! They are in modern version and they go along with most/lots of HS English books today. THANKS!

This book helped me understand and study "Julius Caesar" more than most textbooks do, and certainly better than reading it over and over again. I had trouble with decifering the old English text sometimes, and this book clears up meanings while presenting a clear theme, involved analysis of characters, summary, and an explaination of each scene.

This CLIFFS NOTES ON JULIUS CAESAR is a fairly good supplement in helping one to understand or better teacher Shakespeare's play. The guide begins with a short essay about the life of Shakespeare. This is followed by a synopsis of the play. Next comes a list of the characters, including a brief paragraph about each one. The main chunk of the aid are the summaries and commentaries on the text. Like all CLIFFS NOTES (and SPARK NOTES for that matter), the books are not meant to be a replacement for the work, but as a supplement to better understanding. JULIUS CAESAR is filled with many great lines, but the editor's don't even mention many of them in this book. Therefore, if one were to only read the CLIFFS NOTES, one would fail to grasp the most important part of Shakespeare's play, the words themselves.
Following the commentaries, there are some character analyses of the major characters of the play (Caesar, Antony, Octavius, Brutus, and Cassius). Finishing out the book are some review questions, essay topics, and a selected biography. Though the editors don't touch much in their comments about the political implications of the play at the time of Shakespeare's writing, this CLIFFS NOTES does offer a lot of other great information. In short, it is a excellent supplement to a famed Shakespearean play.