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Loading... Julius Caesarby William Shakespeare
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. rebeccareid | Jul 7, 2009 |   Because Antony is a bad mamma-jamma whose speeches kick ass. (  )snat | Mar 23, 2009 | I read this play during my Sophomore year of high school. I loved it! "Et tu, Brute!" I thought of it again because I'm reading "A Long Way Gone", and this play is referenced frequently. (  )rfewell | Jan 27, 2009 | http://nhw.livejournal.com/1129384.ht... I probably know this best of all the Shakespeare plays - I'm pretty sure it was the one I did for O-level. It is very good. It is unusual in that the title character is killed off before the halfway point; the play is really about the fall of Brutus, and his relations with his ally Cassius, his enemy Antony, his wife Portia and of course his victim Caesar. The dramatic climax is very early, in Act 3, with the murder of Caesar and then Mark Antony's funeral oration. The rest of the play is really mopping up the aftermath. Brutus' sense of honour is insufficient to see him through, as he bickers with Cassius and makes a series of strategic and tactical blunders; meanwhile, Antony swallows his dislike of Octavian in order to take power. Like Henry V, it's difficult not to read this in the context of what was happening in 1599; in which case this is the more Essex-sceptic play, of people grasping for power and not quite making it (while the righteous dynastic heir, off in the fringes, takes the power which is his due when the time is right). The character of Mark Antony doesn't fit terribly well into that analysis - which perhaps means that it is not terribly well founded! Having whined about the Arkangel productions of the last three plays, I was glad to see a return to form here, especially from the three leads - Adrian Lester as Antony, John Bowe as Brutus and Michael Feast as a rather young-sounding Caesar. It's also good to hear, for once in this series, a black actor cast in a part that is usually "white". This is solid stuff, and very enjoyable. (  )nwhyte | Dec 11, 2008 | Condition good with pencil markings throughout; spine good jnajack | Oct 1, 2008 |  0.048 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0671722719, Mass Market Paperback)The Boynton/Cook editions of four of Shakespeare's most popular plays have been reissued with attractive new cover designs and printed on more opaque, easy-to-read paper. This series is specifically designed for high school classes.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I found that most of the characters were despicable. They were politicians with a certain level of power and they took advantage of the masses.
But, to me, Brutus’s intentions made him honorable. Out of all the characters, his was the most likable because he wasn’t acting simply for himself. I wanted Brutus to be able to succeed.
I think part of his downfall was choosing to join with others who lacked honor in every sense of the word. While he acted for Rome, they did not. Therefore, the cause was hopeless from the beginning. In a sense, his tragedy was having the wrong friends. Honorable Brutus’s fall was then the true tragedy.
I think Brutus was a tragic hero, or, as Antony says, “This was a man” (V.v.75). For don’t we all, as humans, face tragedy in our lives, despite our best intentions?
More thoughts on my blog