The murder of the king in Hamlet, Richard II, Henry VIII, Macbeth and Julius CaesarKings are everywhere in Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Richard the Second, from Henry the Eighth to Macbeth; many of the plays contain a central element of a king or an autocratic head of state such as Julius Caesar, for example. They focus more specifically on the nature of that person's power, especially the question of its removal; what it means on both a political and psychological level, how it can be achieved and what happens next. This is not surprising, considering the era in which Shakespeare lived: as the question of who ruled and where his authority came from was increasingly asked in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, the observations he makes are particularly pertinent. Kings and royalty also lend themselves well to drama; the king is a symbol of the order (or disorder) of the day and a man who possesses (nearly) absolute authority and the status that accompanies it, while conversely he is also a human being with the ordinary weaknesses of that condition. It is also said that Shakespeare loved the drama of killing; according to legend he "made a speech when he killed a calf" in his father's slaughterhouse (Richard Wilson: 'A Brute Part'.) The dramatic image of sacrifice is particularly widespread in Julius Caesar; Brutus says: "We are sacrificers but not butchers, Gaius. We all oppose the spirit of Caesar; and in the spirit of men there is no blood: oh! then we might come from the spirit of Caesar, and not dismember Caesar. But alas! Caesar must bleed for this.”( II.i.166-171 )Many images of sacrifice are present throughout the work, such as the return of the servant… in the center of the sheet… doubt it; and if it goes, something else equally beautiful will take its place. It will be the same thing with a different dress. You can't invent anything more beautiful than royalty, than the idea of ​​the king. "This may be true of many others besides the playwright, more modern kings, queens and other demagogues are widespread throughout the world today and we are still far from the more just and truly democratic world order of the seventeenth century revolutionaries and many others . have since struggled to.Works Cited.Craig,EG/ ON THE ART OF THE THEATER HarvesterDollimore,J./ RADICAL TRAGEDY Harvester.Freer,C./ POETICS OF JACOBIAN DRAMA Hopkins University Press.Kirsch,J./ ROYAL SELF Putnams. Knight ,GW/ IMPERIAL THEME Methuen.Knight,GW/ SOVEREIGN FLOWER Methuen.Mack,M./KILLING THE KING Yale Univ Press.Wilson,R./A BRUTE PART (Lecture handout)