Since the 16th century, a wide variety of productions have used modern costumes to draw explicit parallels between the events of the play and politicians of all stripes. The most famous is arguably Orson Welles’s 1937 anti-fascist production at the Mercury Theatre in New York, which used a minimal set and military costumes to evoke Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. The show was described by The Nation as “the most vivid production of Shakespeare seen in New York in this generation.” It also inspired a fleet of imitators, spawning a modern-dress production in Cambridge in 1938, and the first televised adaptation of Julius Caesar by the BBC the same year, which appropriated Welles’s imagery.

More recently, modern-dress productions have not-so-subtly pointed to politicians across the political spectrum. The current Julius Caesar at the Public Theater is directed by Oskar Eustis, who also helmed a 1990 production set in ’60s America that nodded to the assassination of President Kennedy. “Against the step-by-step dirge of Matthias Gohl’s loud and haunting music, the TV screens unreel Kennedy’s funeral in black-and-white,” a Boston Globe review read. “Later, in color, there are scenes of mass protest and police brutality. Caesar and his cronies wear dark business suits, white shirts, glossy shoes. (When Calpurnia arrives she wears a Jackie Kennedy pillbox.)”

A 2012 production by The Acting Company cast Bjorn DuPaty as Caesar, an actor whose resemblance to President Obama was noted by many critics. Noah Millman of The American Conservative praised the show’s timely inferences:

Director Rob Melrose has set his Caesar at our precise historical moment, in Obama’s Washington, D.C. The capital is rocked by “Occupy Rome” protests. His Caesar (the suavely confident Bjorn DuPaty) is a tall, charismatic African-American politician; he doesn’t look or sound much like Obama (he more closely recalls Michael Jordan), but the audience is unquestionably going to read him as an Obama stand-in nonetheless, particularly when his opponents bear a marked resemblance to Eric Cantor (Sid Solomon’s snappy terrier Cassius) and Mitch McConnell (Kevin Orton’s cynical old pol Casca). Even Mark Antony is recognizable as a standard Democratic politician type, Clinton/Gore division.

Clearly, the temptation to use the play to reference current political events is nothing new. So much so that the director Jules Aaron, helming a show at the Grove Shakespeare Festival in 1987, explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that his choice of period costumes was a deliberate one, given the play’s timing—it premiered right in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal. “The modern political resonances are so relevant,” Aaron said, “so clear and vivid, that they speak for themselves. To make it about Central America or Reagan would be beating you over the head.”