Et tu, Brute? (Julius Caesar, 3.1.77)
i.e., You too, Brutus?
from Shakespeare Online
The Quotation in Context
Caesar and his train approach the Senate. He sees the soothsayer in the crowd and confidently declares, “The ides of March are come” (1). “Ay, Caesar; but not gone” (2), replies the soothsayer. Artemidorus is also on the street and he pleads with Caesar to read his scroll. But Caesar ignores him and enters the Senate. Cassius approaches him with a request to overturn a previous ruling and let a banished countrymen return home. Caesar answers with a flavoured speech, informing Cassius that “I was constant Cimber should be banish’d/And constant do remain to keep him so” (72-3).
The conspirators gather around Caesar and he sees his trusted friend Brutus among them. They pull out their swords and stab Caesar. With his dying breath Caesar addresses Brutus, “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!” (77). Caesar falls lifeless upon the pedestal of Pompey’s statue. Cinna rejoices, crying, “Liberty, Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” (78). Those who have witnessed the assassination flee the Senate and Trebonius reports to Brutus and Cassius that Antony has fled to his house in shock and people run through the streets, “As it were doomsday” (98). Brutus tells the other assassins to bathe their hands and swords in Caesar’s blood and walk outside, proclaiming peace, freedom, and liberty.
The History of the Quotation
Professor George L. Craik, in his comprehensive philological commentary on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, explains:
The only ancient authority, I believe, for this famous exclamation is in Suetonius, I. 82, where Caesar is made to address Brutus (And thou too, my son?). It may have occurred as it stands here in the Latin play on the same subject which is recorded to have been acted at Oxford in 1582; and it is found in The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, printed in 1600, on which the Third Part of King Henry VI is founded, as also in a poem by S. Nicholson, entitled “Acolastus his Afterwit,” printed the same year, in both of which contemporary productions we have the same line: “Et tu, Brute? Wilt thou stab Caesar too?”
It may just be noted, as a historical fact, that the meeting of the Senate at which Caesar was assassinated was held, not, as is here assumed, in the Capitol, but in the Curia in which the statue of Pompey stood, being, as Plutarch tells us, one of the edifices which Pompey had built, and had given, along with his famous theatre, to the public….The mistake which we have here is found also in Hamlet, where (iii.2) Hamlet questions Polonius about his histrionic performances when at the University: “I did enact Julius Caesar,” says Polonius; “I was killed in the Capitol; Brutus killed me;” to which the Prince replies, “It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there” (191).
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Mabillard, Amanda. The History and Context of “Et tu, Brute?”.. Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2006. < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/ettubrute.html>
Craik, George L. The English of Shakespeare. London: Chapman and Hall, 1857.