This summer marks the tenth anniversary of a landmark production for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their 2012 Julius Caesar was Britain’s first ever high-profile production of a Shakespeare play with an all-Black cast—a milestone that came 76 years after it was first done in the US and 15 years after it was first done in Canada. The production featured Paterson Joseph as Brutus, and he was so impressed by the experience that he wrote Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play. The book takes an unflinching look at Joseph’s time at the RSC, both while working on Caesar and in the 1990s, when the son of St. Lucian parents found himself one of only four Black people in the building. He also writes about his early work, performing sharp and boldly reimagined Shakespeare with the Cheek by Jowl company; his thoughts about race in the British theater; the proper way to play Brutus; Received Pronunciation, and much more.

In 2018, Joseph was at the National Black Theater in Harlem, performing his one-man show, Sancho: An Act of Remembrance, about the first Black man in England to cast a vote. We invited him into the studio to talk about the book, Brutus, and more, and we bring that conversation to you again now. Paterson Joseph is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Paterson Joseph is an acclaimed British actor who has performed major roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, including the title role in Othello; and the leads in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and The Emperor Jones. He has also worked extensively in film, and in television, including recently The Leftovers and Timeless. In 2015, he wrote and performed his one-man play Sancho: An Act of Remembrance on tour. Julius Caesar and Me: Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play was published in the US by Methuen Drama, a division of Bloomsbury Books, in 2018.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Originally published May 29, 2018, and rebroadcast August 16, 2022. ©Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Bear It, As Our Roman Actors Do,” was produced under the supervision of Garland Scott, and is presented with permission of rlpaulproductions, LLC, which created it for the Folger. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster and Esther Ferington. Esther French and Ben Lauer are the web producers. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquardt at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Robert Auld and Deb Stathopulos at the Radio Foundation in New York. Special thanks to ‘Illuminations’ for allowing us to use excerpts from their DVD of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2012 production of Julius Caesar.