Calpurnia in Literature and Popular Culture
- In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Calpurnia has a dream that a statue of Caesar was flowing with blood as many Romans wash their hands in the blood. She also sees in her dream that Julius Caesar would die in her arms.
- A version of Calpurnia was portrayed by Haydn Gwynne in HBO's series Rome.
- Her character from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar was also portrayed by Sylvia Lennick in Wayne and Shuster's comedy sketch "Rinse the Blood Off My Toga", parodied as a hysterical Italian-American housewife repeatedly wailing "I told him, Julie! Don't go!" in a Bronx accent.
- She was also portrayed by British actresses Greer Garson in the 1953 adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, by Joan Sims in Carry on Cleo, by Italian actress Valeria Golino in the 2002 made for TV movie Julius Caesar, by Gertrude Michael in Cecil B. DeMille's 1934 Cleopatra, and by Gwen Watford in 20th Century Fox's 1963 "Cleopatra."
- She is shown taking part in solving a murder in Mist of Prophecies (2002) - part of the Roma Sub Rosa series by Steven Saylor. She gets Gordianus the Finder to look into a threat to her husband in a later book in this series, The Triumph of Caesar (2008).
- In the motion picture The Addams Family, there is a portrait of Calpurnia on the wall of the Adams'.
Read more about this topic: Calpurnia Pisonis
Famous quotes containing the words literature, popular and/or culture:
“The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)
“Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”
—Anonymous. Popular saying.
Dating from World War I—when it was used by U.S. soldiers—or before, the saying was associated with nightclub hostess Texas Quinan in the 1920s. It was the title of a song recorded by Sophie Tucker in 1927, and of a Cole Porter musical in 1929.
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)