Mark Antony's Speech in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar Essay

This attempt quickly failed when she said that his hubris just took over. “I knew that Caesar should have stayed away from the Senate house yesterday, but I guess his pride just took over his mind, it was just all too much,” Calpurnia sobbed. “This has turned out to be the most tragic moment in my life and I hope those conspirators kneel to the gods, for they have upset the heavens with the killing of the mightiest leader Rome has ever seen.”

William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is a tragic story of the dog and the manger.  After Caesar is killed Mark Antony, a good friend of Caesar, plots to revenge his bloody death.  He knows there is strength in numbers, and through a speech at Caesar's funeral, Antony plans to win the crowd of Rome and turn them against Brutus and the other conspirators.  Cassius is one of the leading conspirators and is weary of Antony; Brutus is confident that there is nothing to fear, but he speaks before Antony at the funeral just to be safe.  These two speeches, vastly different in message but similar in delivery, move the emotions of the people.  Brutus's and Antony's

       In William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, although Marc Antony is allowed to make a speech at Caesar's funeral, he must not speak ill of either the conspirators or Caesar.  Antony was infuriated with Caesar's assassination, and wants to seek revenge on his killers as well as gain power for himself in Rome's government.  He must persuade the crowd that has gathered that Caesar's murder was unjust, and turn them against Brutus and Cassius.  He tries to stir his listeners' anger, rousing them into action and yet say nothing bad about his enemies.  Marc Antony uses several persuasive devices in his speech, which allows him to successfully convince the citizens of Rome to turn

In the Tragedy Of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Anthony both presented a speech to the citizens of Rome. Brutus argued why his actions to kill Julius were acceptable while Antony contradicted Brutus’s views, arguing why Caesar should not have been murdered. Both speakers used ethos, logos, and pathos to persuade the people of Rome. Brutus’s speech was mainly based on logic, while Antony’s speech took more of an emotional approach . Overall, Antony had a sophistic style, he was much more artful and cunning than Brutus. He reeled in the crowd like a fish and captured them with his compelling diction.

Both Mark Antony and Marcus Brutus are great at using people’s emotions to grab their attention. In Brutus’s speech, he used the feeling of slavery: “Would you rather have Caesar alive and all die slaves, than Caesar dead to all live free men?” Nobody wants to be a slave and would feel angry if they were. Brutus is using this feeling to make it sound like Caesar would have made them all into slaves but because he is dead, they are all free. If one thinks about it some more, the people were like slaves under Caesar’s power. They weren’t free to do as they liked due to the fact that if it upset Caesar, you’d be executed. After Caesar was dead, the people were free to do as they pleased. Brutus used the emotion of anger to show that he killed Caesar so the people could be free of his controlling power.

king. Brutus believed that one man should not rule the country. He feared that if Caesar became

The topic of leadership in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has been discussed and argued ever since the play was written. The most prevalent discussion of leadership in the play revolves around Shakespeare’s tragic hero, Marcus Brutus, and the cause of his downfall. According to Shakespeare critic James Bundy, “Brutus... is a man whose affections sway more than his reason, in whom there is this tragic confederacy of passion and imagination against reason” (qtd. in Palmer 402). Ernest Shanzer, however, says that Brutus is “by no means devoid of political shrewdness and practical wisdom”, but he is a “bad judge of character” (Shanzer 1). Although both critics’ descriptions of Brutus have merit, Brutus’ shortcoming, as well as the success of the opposing leader, Mark Antony, is more accurately explained using the observations of Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince. In this book Machiavelli outlines the characteristics of a successful leader. When using The Prince as a lens to read Julius Caesar, the correlation between a leader’s Machiavellianism and their success becomes very apparent. Marcus Brutus is undoubtedly an honorable and respectable man, but his morality prevents him from adhering to Machiavelli’s principles. Due to his lack of princely virtues, Brutus is doomed to fail, while Antony, a much more Machiavellian prince, successfully seizes power.

Antony and Caesar were good friends, and when Antony learned of Caesar’s murder, he began plotting to dethrone the conspirators who had planned his death. He sent a citizen to the palace where the traitors were and told him to relay a message; “If Brutus will vouchsafe that Antony may safely come to him and be resolved how Caesar hath deserved to lie in death, Mark Antony shall not love Caesar dead so well as Brutus living, but will follow the fortunes and affairs of noble Brutus through the hazards of this untrod state with all true faith.” What Antony is saying to Brutus is that if

Mark Antony, in the play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, was a brave, intelligent, pleasure-loving, and cunning man. He was loyal to his friend, Caesar, whom he considered a true friend. He looked at life as a game in which he had a signified part to play, and played that part with excellent refinement and skill.

Firstly, Cassius’s plan to persuade Brutus shows that peer influence can sway the decisions of

Caesar spoke these lines, explaining why he denied the conspirators’ wish to pardon the banishment of Metellus’ brother (Cimber). He explained, confidently, how if he was anyone else, he would’ve accepted their wish. Nonetheless, since he was way better, nothing could’ve changed his mind. However, every point he had made in this paragraph of his was false. William Shakespeare- writer of the play- used certain diction and metaphors to assist us to an understanding of Caesar’s selfish personality. This scene is the key to mastering the type of personality that Caesar held.

Dear diary, my name is Brutus who is a close friend and a servant of Caesar, whom Caesar trusts and believes to be honorable. In Julius Caesar, I am known as a tragic man because I face a major conflict that is a loyalty between my friend – Caesar and my country. Although I love Caesar as a friend, but I love Rome more. I really love Caesar, but I don’t want a dictator controls Rome with much

In Act II of the play, Julius Caesar, the character says “ You came just in time to convey my greetings to the senators and to tell them that I will not come today” (II, ii, 60-61). Caesar says this to Decius and commands him to go tell this to the senate. Caesar is not going to the senate, even though he knows its because they want to crown him king. He is not going because his wife has had terrible dreams about it but Decius talks him into going anyway. Caesar ends up getting killed at the senate by the conspirators, who are the group of men who want Caesar dead. The lead man in the group, Brutus, is one of Caesar’s close friends and Caesar is heartbroken when he turns and Brutus puts the final dagger into his side. Marc Antony is Caesar's right hand man and he is very upset and angry about Caesar's death. Marc Antony and Brutus both give speeches at Caesar’s funeral about their sides of the story. Marc Antony gave a more outstanding speech compared to the one Brutus gave and he gained the most followers from it.

The speeches given by both Brutus and Mark Antony in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar are very persuasive to the audience that they are given to, but rhetorical devices were used in different ways in order for each to have an effect on the people of Rome. In Brutus’s speech, he uses devices such as rhetorical question and antithesis to convince the Romans that he and the conpirators did a good deed by killing Caesar. In Mark Antony’s speech, he sways them to believe that Caesar did not deserve to die, and that the conpirators were the real enemies by using rhetorical devices like rhetorical question and apostrophe. Both speeches were very

Mark Antony’s funeral speech incorporates the rhetorical devices of sarcasm, irony, and repetition to turn the people of Rome. The ironic use of repetition slowly displaced the conspirators. To exemplify, Mark Antony repeatedly calls the conspirators, “ honorable men” (3.2.79). The habit of repeating the word ‘honorable’ is extremely sarcastic, and Antony is purposefully overusing the word on account that it makes the citizens question the legitimacy of the murder. As a result, the crowd wonders if the conspirators are allowed to get away with the crime solely based on