A Play of Two Speeches | A Play of Two Speeches

There happens to be a play that certain English classes read, a tragedy of a play. This play is called " The Tragedy of Julius Caesar." This play consists of a ruler, a murder, and two speeches about them. These speeches are a good argumentative topic for an essay because of the fact that they try to prove two completely opposite points and therefore are different.

In this play there are two speeches, one by Brutus, the murderer, and one by Antony, friend of Caesar. Brutus' speech has a certain purpose, which is to explain to the crowd his intentions for killing their beloved ruler Caesar. In his speech he said, "I honor him; but as he was ambitious, I slew him." So, to me, Brutus' reason for killing Caesar was that he thought Caesar was getting too powerful.

Antony tries to express totally different feelings than Brutus. Brutus tried to use the tactic of appealing to his audience's emotions while Antony uses his own emotion, a sort of longing for Caesar to return, to his advantage, and he did this well. Antony was, in a way, a friend of Caesar's. He was very distraught at the time of Caesar's untimely passing. Brutus, on the other hand was not; he did not love Caesar and care for Caesar the way that Antony had. He did, however, love him.

While Brutus and Antony's speeches did have some similarities they were also very different. An example of a similarity of the two would be the fact that they both share the purpose of trying to convince and audience of angry people why they did or did not kill Caesar. The differences include Brutus using emotion to soften them up, facts to keep them aware, and a prediction of what would have been to come to make them think. Antony used his own anger and disgruntled state to penetrate their one-way-thinking minds to get them to realize that you may be angry at, or have a problem, with your ruler but you have not right nor reason to viciously kill him. Also, he may have been trying to tell the crowd what he thought about Caesar's death, possibly being the reason for using his emotions as a sort of pry bar.

Although these speeches are quite different, one being out of love, and one being out of one's own selfish desires, they are still great mediums to combine and most would agree that Shakespeare was a very intelligent man for having done so. My opinion didn't change much throughout reading this play and writing this essay. Shakespeare, in the eyes of many is the world's greatest playwright in all of history. He has written such a good play in Julius Caesar that it kept my opinion strong throughout the course of the play, and I still believe in the theory of difference.