How Does Shakespeare Use Rhetoric In Julius Caesar

In class we have discussed numerous rhetoric’s from across Shakespeare’s plays. Within them, the characters are constantly trying to persuade other characters into doing certain things. Shakespeare gives many of his characters very different methods of persuasion. Sometimes it’s planting false information into someone’s mind like Iago in Othello, who manipulated the title character to kill his wife. Even so, there are times when the rhetoric fails and so did the characters that gave them. In the plays The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV Part One, and Julius Caesar, as each rhetoric tries to convince characters in the play to do things, Shakespeare shows how words used in rhetorics can change a person or thing entirely. In As You Like It, the play is centered on the beautiful Portia, the heiress to a vast fortune, whom marries Bassanio. …show more content…
However after Mark Antony comes out with Caesars corpse, and Brutus finishes, Antony delivers his own speech using Brutus’s words against him, Brutus spoke of his honor and how they Plebeians should listen to him because of it, Antony constantly says how honorable Brutus is “Brutus says he was Ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man-” (3.2 88-89) and counters Brutus argument, and turns the Plebeians against Brutus, recalling all the good Caesar did for Rome, how Caesar named the Plebeians his heirs in his will, where even the Plebeians speak in-between the speeches favoring Mark Antony over Brutus. Brutus’s rhetoric fails to convince the ones they’re speaking too, and like the previous ones the result is similar to Falstaff, Brutus’s failure leads to his