{"id":4946,"date":"2026-05-24T13:52:43","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T17:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=4946"},"modified":"2026-05-24T16:33:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T20:33:18","slug":"andrew-james-hartley-william-shakespeare-and-julius-caesar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2026\/05\/24\/andrew-james-hartley-william-shakespeare-and-julius-caesar\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew James Hartley, William Shakespeare, and Julius Caesar\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My friend Andrew James Hartley uses his full name when writing or editing scholarly books about William Shakespeare, but he usually writes as AJ Hartley when he is writing works of fiction. From 2005 until 2023, Andrew served as the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at UNC Charlotte, and during that time he brought out numerous scholarly works related to Shakespeare\u2019s plays.  Upon his retirement in 2023, he told me that he planned to focus on writing fiction, so I assumed that he would not be bringing out any more scholarly books under his full name.  I was wrong. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew James Hartley\u2019s Arden edition of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar <\/em>came out on May 14, 2026. Part of the Arden Shakespeare Fourth Series, this edition is rooted in the first known performance of the play in London in 1599. It includes a critical introduction to the play’s textual, cultural and performance history. It also provides detailed on-the-page notes explaining language, character and performance. For more information about this edition, please click on the following link:  https:\/\/www.bloomsbury.com\/us\/julius-caesar-9781350110878\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

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I contacted Andrew and asked him for more information about this project:  Here is what he sent to me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Arden edition of Shakespeare\u2019s <\/em>Julius Caesar was almost nine years in the making. It began when I was invited by the editorial board to contribute a proposal for the play, since I had published two previous books on it (a performance history and an essay collection) along with a couple of student guides. It was daunting to say the least. I had only ever edited Shakespeare for specific stage productions so editing an actual edition\u2014an Arden, no less\u2014was extremely intimidating.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I began by identifying what the edition was to be. The new Ardens are committed to producing specific iterations of the plays rather than an \u2018ideal\u2019 composite text which combines or otherwise selects pieces from the earliest printed texts according to editorial preference. I aimed to recreate a clean version of the performance text of the first productions from 1599. That meant taking the earliest existing text (the Folio text of 1623), addressing its errors and ambiguities and restoring elements which\u2014based on external evidence\u2014seem to have been changed between the play\u2019s first appearance on stage and the Folio\u2019s printing. The Folio contains, for example, a number of significant mistakes about who is and is not present in key scenes. Some lines contain so-called textual cruxes where the precise meaning is unclear. Such discrepancies needed to be rectified. Other issues were less immediately apparent. Shakespeare\u2019s friend and fellow playwright Ben Jonson made fun (twice!) of a line delivered by Caesar, but the line does not appear in the Folio text. I decided to restore it. (It\u2019s a perfectly good line in terms of character, but contains a logical paradox which Jonson thought absurd). <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the proposal was approved by the board I had to deliver a sample scene. I chose act 3 scene 1, the assassination scene, because it contained several knotty problems particularly related to staging and casting. The sample scene is where you\u2014hopefully– demonstrate your judgment in more than just textual editing; you have to show you can format the text correctly and according to the incredibly baroque Arden style sheet (currently at 34 closely typed pages). More importantly, you have to show how you will approach the things for which the Arden editions are best known, their full textual notes (in which you signal every significant alteration made by every editor in every previous edition produced over the last 400 years) and their extensive commentary notes. These are where the editor glosses or otherwise unpacks the content of difficult or suggestive words and phrases, shows how key performances have handled the choices presented by the given moment, and offers what you might call teachable insights. They are the meat of the edition, and sometimes fill more of the page than the Shakespearean text itself. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the sample scene had been approved (late 2018), I went back to the first scene of the play and started over, working with a facsimile of the Folio text in front of me and every previous edition (physical or digital) to hand for cross checking. Most days I managed to get through about five lines of text, handling the textual notes and commentary as I went, though sometimes a single phrase would send me down the rabbit hole of research for days. As I completed each act, I would run it by the general editor assigned to me (Tiffany Stern) and respond to any questions she raised or errors of formatting etc. It was a long, slow business, and became my primary academic activity through the pandemic and beyond. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it was done I turned to the introduction which, like everything else in the Arden edition is thorough and extensive, in this case, over a hundred pages of critical and performance history asserting the play\u2019s inherently political dimension from its earliest days. <\/em>Julius Caesar is shot through with specifically Elizabethan issues of political overreach and the threat of rebellion which has resonated for many subsequent periods (think of Orson Welles\u2019 expressly Fascist <\/em>Caesar in his 1937 production, or the Public Theatre\u2019s collision with the first Trump administration in 2017). The edition also contains lengthy extracts from Shakespeare\u2019s primary source, <\/em>Plutarch\u2019s Lives, and the usual academic apparatus of references and works cited. I expect it will be the go-to scholarly edition for many years to come. It is certainly the pinnacle of my academic career.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll be talking about these things at Park Road Books on June 3rd<\/sup> at 7pm where editions will be available for purchase. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I congratulate Andrew on the publication of his Arden edition of Shakespeare\u2019s Julius Caesar. <\/em>As the publication of this edition demonstrates, Storied Charlotte is gaining a reputation as a center for Shakespeare Studies. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Andrew James Hartley uses his full name when writing or editing scholarly books about William Shakespeare, but he usually writes as AJ Hartley when he is writing works of fiction. From 2005 until 2023, Andrew served as the Robinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at UNC Charlotte, and during that time he brought out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[398,397],"class_list":["post-4946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-andrew-james-hartley","tag-arden-shakespeare-series"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4946"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4951,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4946\/revisions\/4951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}