Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar is the Shakespearean play at the center of Tony Danza’s attempt to make difficult literature meaningful to his students. Initially intimidated by its Elizabethan language and unsure how to justify the assignment, he gradually turns the play into a shared experiment in translation, performance, historical inquiry, and assessment. The class’s growing command of the tragedy ultimately becomes evidence that engagement can coexist with rigor, even as a cheating incident exposes the complications of teaching in a technologically saturated classroom.

Why the Play Is Taught

Tony Danza begins with a fundamental challenge: why should tenth graders be required to study Shakespeare at all? The question is not merely administrative. He is about to begin Julius Caesar and feels as intimidated as the students by the archaic language and by the responsibility of teaching a work he is not certain he knows well enough. David Cohn answers his question with another, asking why Tony Danza thinks Shakespeare is taught. The eventual rationale is that the intellectual work Shakespeare demands will serve students when they are older, but Tony Danza finds that explanation difficult to sell even to himself. He needs a reason persuasive enough to carry both his own uncertainty and the students’ resistance.

David Cohn advises him to “front-load the unit,” meaning that the class should receive enough preparation to enter the text rather than being abandoned inside its language. The problem becomes more manageable through No Fear Shakespeare, a resource that translates the old English into modern English. Tony Danza first encounters the tool almost accidentally, after David Cohn jokes that the students should not discover it, and immediately recognizes its usefulness. The contrast between “And you, too, Brutus?” and “Et tu, Brute?” gives the adaptation a comic concreteness: the famous line remains recognizable, but its altered phrasing makes the difficulty of Shakespeare’s language visible and solvable.

Classroom Adaptation and Performance

Once the unit begins, Tony Danza is no longer merely enduring Shakespeare; he becomes excited by the challenge. He asks each student to create a project demonstrating the Bard’s importance and influence. Eric Choi constructs a detailed model of the Old Globe Theatre from small pieces of paper. Other students make posters and dioramas. Daniel creates a portrait of Shakespeare that surprisingly resembles David Cohn, while Laura designs a board game tracing Shakespeare’s life and career that becomes popular with the class. These projects shift the play from an opaque block of assigned reading into a set of creative objects that students can build, inspect, and play with.

The language remains the central obstacle. Students still complain whenever Tony Danza asks them to read a scene, and the class has not yet reached the Ides of March. No Fear Shakespeare inspires an exercise called Shakespeare to Street, in which students must rephrase Julius Caesar in their own slang and then perform the result. Tony Danza explicitly turns the students’ everyday speech, which usually frustrates him, into a classroom resource. Each student acts out a scene, and the class votes for the winners. The exercise makes translation an active, social task rather than a private act of decoding.

The performances do not always produce language Tony Danza understands. Paige describes Caesar as “draulin’,” and explains that the word means acting completely off the chain. Tony Danza can only nod as though the definition is obvious, but the uncertainty itself reveals the point of the exercise. The crucial achievement is not that the teacher masters every student expression; it is that the students demonstrate their own understanding by transforming Shakespeare’s actions and conflicts into a language they control. In this classroom, comprehension is proved through performance rather than through imitation of an authorized vocabulary.

Assessment, Technology, and Cheating

The play’s first major assessment suggests that the approach is working. When Tony Danza tests the class on the first three acts, every student present except Howard attempts the paper rather than surrendering immediately. The review shows that students can identify the date of the Ides of March and the first man to stab Caesar, and they are engaged enough to discuss the story. Tony Danza plans to complete the unit by showing a film featuring James Mason as Brutus and Marlon Brando as Antony, extending the play from reading and discussion into screen performance.

That success is complicated by the classroom’s dependence on technology. Tony Danza has access to an unusually fast wireless connection, the wider Internet, and YouTube through the production company supporting the class. He uses online resources to make literature more vivid, but he also worries that technology may be contributing to students’ shrinking attention spans and difficulty staying on task. Julius Caesar turns this abstract concern into a concrete problem when Matt takes out his phone during the review. Because Matt and Howard are close friends, solid athletes, and authors of tests containing almost identical right and wrong answers, Tony Danza suspects that the phone was used to transmit answers while Howard was taking a makeup test in the hall.

The production cameras confirm the suspicion. Footage shows Howard repeatedly dropping the phone from his pocket, checking the screen, and writing on his test, all while wearing a grin that makes the act resemble a small heist. The incident produces an ironic lesson: the same technological infrastructure that helps Tony Danza teach Shakespeare also makes academic dishonesty easier to perform and easier to document. He realizes that a teacher cannot be a Luddite and remain fully attuned to contemporary classroom life. Julius Caesar therefore becomes not only a text about conspiracy and betrayal, but also the occasion for a modern conflict over surveillance, communication, and trust.

Historical Encounter and Student Engagement

The students’ relationship with Julius Caesar expands beyond the classroom during the trip to Washington, D.C. At the Folger Shakespeare Library, they encounter vintage texts and illustrations in the Great Hall and respond to the exhibits with unexpected enthusiasm. Katerina points out that Julius Caesar is dying, while Nakiya asks why Shakespeare did not write the play in Latin and says she would rather read it than endure grammar lessons in her Latin class. Her question is comic, but it also shows that the play has become more immediate to her than the surrounding apparatus of classical instruction.

The visit continues in an Elizabethan replica theater, where Bill’s Buddies perform scenes from several Shakespeare plays and invite the students onto the stage. Nakiya, Chloe, and Eric Lopez act naturally, while Monte and Eric Choi also participate despite their earlier distance from theatrical performance. The students laugh so intensely that they may not realize they are learning, yet their answers when the troupe quizzes them demonstrate substantial knowledge of Julius Caesar. The Folger program confirms what Tony Danza has been trying to establish: students can master difficult material when the route into it is active, collaborative, and dramatic.

The same principle governs the visit to the National Archives. There, students act as archivists, selecting and analyzing diaries, letters, and memoirs for evidence of constitutional issues such as separation of church and state and checks and balances, then locating the relevant principles in the Constitution. The activity connects historical ideas to ordinary lives rather than leaving them as abstractions. Even students usually described as unmotivated work productively when they have a shared task. Their uniforms, their research teams, and the video recorded by White Nick and Ben-Kyle with Nakiya narrating make the learning visible: Julius Caesar has helped prepare them to approach history as something to investigate, stage, and interpret.

Significance in the Book

Julius Caesar functions as a test of Tony Danza’s developing teaching philosophy. At the beginning, the play represents an intimidating obligation that he must justify before he can teach it. By the end of the unit’s documented episodes, it has become a flexible meeting place between Shakespearean language and student language, between printed drama and performance, and between literary history and civic history. The students’ models, slang translations, test answers, theatrical participation, and historical research each offer a different form of access.

The play also exposes the limits of any simple celebration of technology or engagement. No Fear Shakespeare and online media reduce barriers to understanding, but the phone used in the Julius Caesar test cheating incident turns the same technological environment into an instrument of deception. The play’s educational value therefore lies not in making difficulty disappear. It lies in giving students enough structure, performance, collaboration, and interpretive ownership to confront difficulty without retreating from it.