What actions are justified when the fate of a nation hangs in the balance, and who can see the best path ahead? Julius Caesar has led Rome successfully in the war against Pompey and returns celebrated and beloved by the people. Yet in the senate fears intensify that his power may become supreme and threaten the welfare of the republic. A plot for his murder is hatched by Caius Cassius who persuades Marcus Brutus to support him. Though Brutus has doubts, he joins Cassius and helps organize a group of conspirators that assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March. But, what is the cost to a nation now erupting into civil war? A fascinating study of political power, the consequences of actions, the meaning of loyalty and the false motives that guide the actions of men, Julius Caesar is action packed theater at its finest.

On 1 August 1935, only a few months before Mussolini launched the colonial enterprise in Ethiopia, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was produced at the Maxentius Basilica in Rome. The performance was organised by The National Workers’ Recreational Club (O.N.D.) and the script was submitted for censorship. However, the procedure followed a different course from the usual one as the commissioner was also part of the Fascist political system. This parallel edition presents for the first time the integral script of the censored text of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in Raffaello Piccoli's 1925 Italian translation, and explores the implications of this peculiar type of censorship at the moment when, through Shakespeare, censoring became one and the same with political propaganda.