‘Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!’ (1.1.1). How angry and hectoring are the words which open the play. But Murellus and Flavius, the speakers, are tribunes of the people; that is, magistrates that the people have elected to protect their interests. As he takes the first step into the world which is moving towards the crisis of Caesar's death, Shakespeare chooses to invite us to make our own entrance, with him, at a point of collision. We are thrown immediately off-balance into confusion. Wanting to extricate ourselves from that, we might be tempted to suppress what as educated people we might be expected to know: that the tribunes are meant to be on the people's side. On the other hand these words might be a cue to us, as audience, to listen carefully, to be alert to the difference between what we see for ourselves and the official version of events. The magistrates are not protecting but attacking the commoners. It is sometimes argued that fear of the Elizabethan mob is what Shakespeare is dramatizing here in the clash between the tribunes and the common men who speak from the crowd. I suspect that to say this means that you have already aligned yourselves with the authorities and turned away from the common people in the scene. Let us try keeping a more open mind as we move forward into the world of the play.

What we are shown is a battle carried on in terms of language: the men of Rome are already fighting each other when the play begins. If it is a battle, since only one side is really on the attack. The tribunes are harrying the men that they have met with just for being out in the street. Who has a right to speak, what happens when people are silenced? These are questions that Shakespeare did not take from his source in Plutarch, just as he found no original there for his opening scene.’ Cobblers, tapsters, or suchlike base mechanical people’ (JC 164) was a phrase dismissively used by Cassius in Plutarch's Life of Marcus Brutus: on reading it perhaps Shakespeare balked. Out of that resistance, his refusal to recapitulate the casual disdain of that description, he may have forged his play.