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How Is Marc Antony Used In His Speech

Decent Essays

William Shakespeare
(from Julius Caesar, spoken by Marc Antony)

This speech was a spoken dialogue written by William Shakespeare, from Julius Caesar and spoken by Marc Antony. The speech was performed at Caesar’s funeral in Ancient Rome after Brutus already performed his and spoke to show the reasons of Caesar’s death. Brutus had previously been Caesar’s close friend but ended up murdering after his rule became tyrannical. The audience for this speech are the people of Ancient Rome, previously Caesar’s “subjects”, and especially Brutus. The audience are very important to his speech, as one of the main reasons Antony is speaking is to revenge Caesar’s death by causing mutiny. He uses persuasion in his words, and it may be inferred that his paralinguistic cues follow those of his words, being sharp, persuasive and confident, but of course this is not stated explicitly. He wants to wrong the people who killed Caesar, his beloved friend. Secondary functions of this discourse could be simply to mock Brutus in front of the audience, humiliating him and giving him the face of the wrong-doer. As the mode of the transcript is spoken, it is very formal (with elements of informality), and the setting being at a funeral further enhances this fact.

The discourse features many lines of repetition, using parallelisms which help Antony to further show his point. The phrase “Brutus is an honourable man” was repeated five times (Line 10, 11, 15, 22 and 27) and these lines are very

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