Comparing Brutus' and Mark Antony's Funeral Speeches in Julius Caeser by William Shakespeare

Comparing Brutus' and Mark Antony's Funeral Speeches in Julius Caeser by William Shakespeare

Julius Caeser is a well known play written by William Shakespeare. It

is based on the life and after life of the great roman leader, Caeser.

One of the most important and memorable scenes in the play is when

Brutus and Mark Antony give their speeches at Caeser's funeral. In

this essay I will be comparing to two, noting the key speech writing

elements, and finally concluding which I think is most effective.

The first speech we hear is that of Brutus. In his speech he aims to

justify his reasons for killing Caeser, and also hopefully gain the

backing of his fellow Romans.

In Antony's speech he is trying to prove that the conspirators are

wrong to have killed Caeser, but he has the harder job because he is

speaking by permission of Brutus, therefore has to discretely drop

hints that this is the case.

A speech writing element that both Brutus and Antony use is emotive

language. The difference is that Antony genuinely feels emotion for

Caeser's death, whereas Brutus is merely pretending. Brutus refers to

himself as 'a dear friend of Caeser's'. This makes Brutus seem

honourable, because he killed a good friend of his 'for the good of

Rome'. Since Antony is actually upset about Caeser's death, I find his

emotive language to be more effective. He says 'my heart is in the

coffin there with Caeser.' This demonstrates just how much of a friend

Caeser was to Antony.

In both speeches we see elements of hyperbole. This exaggeration of

language shocks the listener. Brutus says 'had you rather Caeser was

living and die all slaves?' Of course t...

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...ny was hoping for. The long term effect is the attack

of the people of Rome on the conspirators and their army.

Overall I think that Antony's speech is more effective. I have come to

this conclusion because I think he uses a good combination of

rhetorical devices and also tension devices. He also has the hard job

of changing the crowd minds, as they had already decided to side with

Brutus, and he was speaking under Brutus' restrictions, so he couldn't

say what he felt directly.

Although Brutus' speech was well written and well spoken, I think he

made the mistake of reading his speech first, as this gave Antony the

chance to contradict and to argue with his sayings. Also Antony's

speech would have had a longer lasting effect on the crowd as it was

the last thing that they heard, and in the end he did win the battle!