Mark Antony

The English poet and playwright William Shakespeare is recognized in much of the world as the greatest of all dramatists.

Julius Caesar (1599) is one of his major tragedies. It is the tragic story of political rivalries in ancient Rome.

Fearing Julius Caesar will become a popular tyrant, Brutus and Cassius plot to assassinate him. On the day agreed for the assassination Caesar is nearly persuaded to stay at home by his wife Calphurnia s fateful dreams. He decides to go to the Senate, ignoring a soothsayer s warning and a letter that names all the conspirators, and is stabbed. Brutus calms the citizens attending Caesar s funeral and spares Mark Antony, Caesar s trusted companion and allows him to speak to the people.

Mark Antony starts talking to a crowd that is already convinced of the rightfulness of Brutus s cause. He addresses them by You gentle Romans to achieve what s called captatio benevolentiae, that is gaining the auditorium s sympathy. The term Romans has a good purpose: waking up the people s national consciousness and subconsciently reminding them To capture their attention, Mark Antony tells them to lend me your ears, a short phrase that show us that Mark Antony is a good orator who is not imperative, like Brutus. To calm the crowd, he tells them that he is not here to praise Caesar. He continues with an aphorism saying that after one dies people only remember the bad things about him and they forget all the good things he has done, a subtle allusion to Julius Caesar. He is ironic: he repeatedly calls Brutus noble and honorable. He says he doesn t deny that Brutus is an honorable man and that Brutus blames Caesar for ambition and then he expresses doubt about all that with an if: If it were so. We notice that, a great orator, he never says directly what he has to say; he only insinuates things and makes the auditorium put the pieces together. He continues by saying that only under the permission of Brutus he came to speak; he displays modesty, but it s a would-be modesty.

Mark Antony speaks about Caesar s successes, about the good and clever leader he was. He reminds Caesar s qualities and, knowing that the people are responsive to material interests, he tells them that Caesar would not take the crown, in order to inflame them against the conspirators. Then he uses a rhetorical question to cast doubt upon the blame put on Caesar: was this ambition? . Using the adversative conjunction yet, he is putting face to face the facts with Brutus s affirmations. We notice the emphatic use of do, a rhetorical device, in what I do know, to clear any doubt about the rightfulness of his words; and another emphatic word, did, in You all did love him. Antony makes a rhetorical invocation: O judgement! ; he is now histrionic; he acts, forcing the approval of the people: My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar / And I must pause till it come back to me. His words have the desired effect on the ...