Julius Caesar Fate And Free Will Essay

Calpurnia dreams that Caesar will be murdered and thinks it is foolish. It is a mistake by Caesar to think it is foolish because it foreshadowed his death that eventually happened. His personality got in his own way and ended up costing his life. Caesar ignoring the signs and foreshadows throughout the play ended up costing his own life as his personality got in his own way.

One of the biggest misinterpretations within the play was in Act one, scene two when the soothsayer warned Caesar about the Ides of March. Caesar ignored the soothsayer’s warning and paid little regard to the seriousness of the situation. In another example, with the assistance of Decius, Caesar completely misinterprets Calpurnia’s bloody dream in which Romans bathe in Caesar’s blood. These events are crucial to the downfall of Caesar. In fact, if Caesar had heeded these warnings, then he could have possibly prevented his assassination.

Superstition is considered a myth to most people, but for the ancient Romans, this was a historical belief. For the Romans, believing in superstition was a very ordinary thing. To them superstition explained the supernatural and strengthened their relationships with the gods (The Roman Empire). In the play Julius Caesar, the author William Shakespeare uses superstition repeatedly to affect the plot as well as the characters. Superstition in the play is used to foreshadow Caesar’s death, impact Brutus’ actions in the battlefield and to emphasize the Roman’s connection to superstition and fate.

In Shakespearean times, and even today, an important issue affecting persons’ motivations is the idea of fate, which is that there is some outside, omnipresent force that predetermines a “destiny” for all humans. This, however, is contrasted by the idea of free will, which is that humans have absolute control over their actions. Many people, after having taken their stance on this issue, allow aforementioned stance to affect their judgement and motivations for actions. This is greatly evident in Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare’s seminal romantic comedy. One instance where this theme is particularly obvious is in the first scene of the play’s second act, in which Sebastian is talking to Antonio, the loyal friend who rescued him from a shipwreck.

Since no one can know the future, the problem for the conspirators and Brutus is to calculate what their actions will lead to. Thus the play is full of references to various techniques of divination. Soothsayers predict disaster 2 different times, augurs read the entrails of sacrificed animals, and characters try to interpret changes in the weather and the stars as signs of political events or deaths. Other characters try to discern the future with less crazy and more rational kinds of calculation. Brutus in the soliloquy in act 2, tries to anticipate whether or not Caesar will try to make himself king. he decides to “think (of) him as a serpent's egg...” Which “hatch'd, would, as his kind (do), grow mischievous,” And that the only way to fix the problem of Caesar was to “kill him in the shell.” Each of these different schemes to see the future are faulty. Brutus personally see’s the consequences to trying to see the near future.

Shakespeare uses a large motif of light vs. darkness throughout the play to present moral choices and religious ideas. When the play opens, there is thunder rolling around and the witches on stage. The thunder is symbolic of darkness and gives the audience the first impression that the play will not be ordinary. The witches who only appear in darkness, elements of the supernatural, are one of Shakespeare's classic ways of catching the audience's attention and of also setting the mood for the play.

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare illuminates the themes of human motivation and manipulation. He examines the relationship between actions and motivations, cause and effect, and word and deed, using the symbols of hands and hearts. Throughout the play, the characters Brutus and Marc Antony express their different understandings of this relationship rhetorically. In his 1953 film interpretation, Joseph L. Mankiewicz demonstrates these characters’ understanding through both the play’s original dialogue and his own interpolated action. It is interesting to see the different effects of spoken rhetoric, as we experience it in the play, and the visual rhetoric of the film. The play itself complicates matters of motivation and therefore does not

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar presents a variety of themes that deal with human nature throughout the narrative. However, the most out-standing characteristics portrayed within would very easily be that of deceit and manipulation. The prevalence of these aspects allows the reader to have a deeper insight, not only on the nature of humanity, but within each individual's perspective. Deception is a key factor in the character’s’ plans throughout this book, as Cassius states in referring to Brutus, “thou art noble, yet I see the honorable mettle may be wrought” (I.ii. 169-170). To truly understand the significance of Shakespeare’s intentions, we must analyze what deception really is.

To Will, Or Not To Will, That Is The Question? As the revered philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once declared, “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” This relates to many things in the world. A paragon of which are the two pieces of writing: Mary Hooper’s Newes From The Dead and William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet, begins with the appearance of a ghost, an apparition, possibly a hallucination. Thus, from the beginning, Shakespeare presents the air of uncertainty, of the unnatural, which drives the action of the play and develops in the protagonist as a struggle to clarify what only seems to be absolute and what is actually reality. Hamlet's mind, therefore, becomes the central force of the play, choosing the direction of the conflict by his decisions regarding his revenge and defining the outcome.

In Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, fate drove the lives of many. Prophets, omens, and natural phenomenons hinted towards the paths that fate may or may not have chosen for Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius. They may have had a choice to choose how they would have lived on, but their fate may have already been predetermined because of who they were. While the triangle between Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius may have been tied together by betrayal despite who they were, the outcomes may have been different.

A friend of Caesar. Antony claims allegiance to Brutus and the conspirators after Caesar’s death in order to save his own life. Later, however, when speaking a funeral oration over Caesar’s body, he spectacularly persuades the audience to withdraw its support of Brutus and instead condemn him as a traitor. With tears on his cheeks and Caesar’s will in his hand, Antony engages masterful rhetoric to stir the crowd to revolt against the conspirators. Antony’s desire to exclude Lepidus from the power that Antony and Octavius intend to share hints at his own ambitious nature.

It is said that – in essence – what one believes is what they will become. Throughout the play, Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare explores the controversial topic of destiny and the extent of how fate and free will work together in one’s life. Early in the play, Caius Cassius, one of the conspirators, persuades Brutus into joining the conspiracy in saying, “Men at sometimes were masters of their fates/The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves that we are underlings,” (Shakespeare. Julius Caesar 1.2.140). Cassius argues that there is no such thing as fate, but by overcoming the odds with determination, one has the power to control their own destiny.

There are many omens and supernatural events that add up in the play Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, but the most important was the death of Caesar on the Ides of March. While the conspirators and Cassius are planning on the assassination of Caesar, the weather was very supernatural. Cassius then again bumps into another supernatural event leading up to his death. Along with this there are ghost present within the play Julius Caesar, Brutus is visited twice by a ghost which he believes to be Caesar. The omens and supernatural events that are shown in the play Julius Caesar tend to be misinterpreted and lost within the character before anything can be done about the downfalls of Caesar, Cassius and Brutus.

As Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once suggested “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth”; embodying the notion that conflicting perspectives are held by different people towards both events and individuals. I believe that this common idea is held true in William Shakespeare’s production ‘Julius Caesar’, discussing the conflict between Brutus, Cassius and Antony, Richard Glover’s Sydney Morning Herald article ‘Take a Moment to Mourn the Mainstream’, debating against the depreciation of the respect over radio stations between generations, and Frank Capra’s classic film ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’, which expresses the triumph of American ideals