Why do you think Shakespeare opens the play with humor when the story is the tragedy of Julius Caesar?

Shakespeare often juxtaposes humor and tragedy. In fact, almost all of his major tragedies include "light" scenes that both cut through the tension and provide dramatic contrast with the gut-wrenching scenes that characterize plays like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, and others. Commoners especially exhibit a wry, sometimes coarse, but often perceptive wit in Shakespeare's plays. In the case of Julius Caesar, the play opens with Flavius and Marullus , two tribunes, encountering a crowd of commoners celebrating Caesar's victory. They confront a cobbler, who responds with a number of puns that would have resonated with Shakespeare's audiences: the cobbler describes himself as a "mender of bad soles," and says that he is leading the crowd of commoners to create more business for himself by wearing out their shoes walking about Rome. In this case, Shakespeare seems to show that the rise of Caesar has disrupted the social bonds and hierarchies that undergirded Roman society. By making these jokes, and carrying them even further--saying, for example, that he could "mend" Marullus--the cobbler is behaving above his station. Shakespeare's audiences would have found this funny, and the mild humiliation that the tribunes experienced would have underscored their alarm at Caesar's popularity. So in this case, humor is used to create dramatic tension.