The play is entitled Julius Caesar even though Caesar is dead by Act III. Do you think this is an appropriate title? If not, choose a more...

This question is often asked in one form or another. Many feel that Brutus is a more important character than Caesar and that the play might be titled "Brutus." Shakespeare himself must have realized that he would have problems writing a play titled Julius Caesar if Caesar was going to be assassinated halfway through. But Julius Caesar was one of the most famous men in all of recorded history. His name would attract audiences. Shakespeare tries to keep Julius Caesar prominent in his play even after his assassination. Mark Antony's funeral oration is all about Caesar, and Caesar's mutilated body is on display throughout Antony's speech. Prior to that marvelous funeral oration, Mark Antony addresses a soliloquy to the dead Caesar in which he states, in effect, that Caesar is not really dead but that he will be present in spirit to direct the course of history until the reforms he intended to enact if he became king are enacted by a successor. Caesar's legacy did in fact continue for many centuries. The Roman emperors all added the name "Caesar" to their other names. Here is Antony's prophecy from Act Three, Scene 1:

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy
Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue,
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds,
And Caesar's spirit ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Caesar's ghost appears to Brutus before the battle of Philippi. Shakespeare uses the same actor who played Julius Caesar in the first three acts. This is how the audience knows they are seeing a ghost. They have seen this actor stabbed to death at the Capitol and know for certain that he must be dead. And both Brutus and Cassius attribute their defeats and their deaths to the great Julius Caesar at the battle of Philippi in Act 5, Scene 3.

CASSIUS
Caesar, thou art revenged,
Even with the sword that killed thee.

BRUTUS
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet.
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.

Shakespeare was determined to write a play titled Julius Caesar, using the plentiful historical material available in the North translation of Plutarch's Lives. The playwright emphasized that Caesar might have been killed by the conspirators but that he was such a powerful figure and possessed of such a formidable will that his influence would continue right up to the deaths of his enemies Cassius and Brutus and far beyond their deaths into the future history of Rome. Shakespeare's play is all about the events leading up to the assassination of Julius Caesar and the events that transpired as a result of Caesar's assassination. Caesar does not have to be represented as a great man, which would be hard for any playwright to do; his greatness is shown by the fact that everybody else is talking about Caesar, thinking about Caesar, and influenced by Caesar.