Julius Caesar Essay
Julius Caesar provided a unique opportunity for Shakespeare to represent a well-known story of a public figure whose life and death enormously affected the future of his nation and it citizens. Caesar's life could serve as a reflection on the prevailing worries about monarchal leadership, while dipping into questions of public and private life of leaders and studying the famously conflicted rationales of Caesar's murderers.From the moment the conspirators pulled their swords from Caesar's body, their reasons for killing him were debated and documented with various spins, some accounts portraying Caesar's killers as heroes and others, like Dante, damning them to the deepest pit of hell. Shakespeare's account focuses largely on Brutus' internal conflicts between his loyalty to Caesar and to Rome, between his belief about what Rome should be and what it had become. He struggles to decide whether the demands of civic responsibility prevail over the ties of personal loyalty.Caesar focuses on the lives of the great men, circulating among several characters, with the title character playing a smaller role than might be imagined. Brutus is most fully drawn of them. Unlike other characters, he appears in severa
Brutus' painful conflicts come from this overlap of roles -- his role in the assassination of Caesar seems more wrenching because of his intimacy with the man. Cassius thinks he has been defeated when actually he has won, and kills himself. Cassius urges Brutus to consider fate doesn't control so much as does free will: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings" (I. Fate plays a curious role in the play. The public world is an all-male milieu of competition, rivalry, and bonds. Bibliography Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare; Dover Publications, Inc. Yet fate seems to play a stronger role than Cassius would like to admit. The great leader Caesar is easily murdered steps from his door after decades of successful and dangerous military campaigns, Cassius' suicide is incomprehensible except as an accident or a twist of fate, and Brutus is defeated even though his armies were winning. Cassius is much more alert to the workings of the world; he knows he can fool Brutus with a faked letter, whereas Brutus would never imagine that a letter could not be real. And omens and portents are never heeded or understood at the right time, only after the fact. The continued accuracy of omens seems to indicate that individuals are trapped in a pattern of fate that they cannot control.
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