Superstition is considered a myth to most people, but for the ancient Romans, this was a historical belief. For the Romans, believing in superstition was a very ordinary thing. To them superstition explained the supernatural and strengthened their relationships with the gods (The Roman Empire). In the play Julius Caesar, the author William Shakespeare uses superstition repeatedly to affect the plot as well as the characters. Superstition in the play is used to foreshadow Caesar’s death, impact Brutus’ actions in the battlefield and to emphasize the Roman’s connection to superstition and fate.
One of the biggest superstitious beliefs in Rome at that time was the power to see the future; which Caesar’s future was to die. Julius Caesar was one of Rome’s greatest leaders and even he could not escape the superstitions of his death. Many signs of superstition were shown such as the appearance of the soothsayer, who is a person with the ability to see the future. When the soothsayer came up to Caesar he said, “Beware the ides of March” (1.2.28); and by the ides of March, the soothsayer means a day in the Roman calendar that marks the 15th of March. The effect of this quote was to foreshadow the death of Caesar through the superstitious act of seeing the future. Caesar’s death was also foreshadowed in Calphurnia’s dream where she saw the conspirators bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood (2.2.80-84). The Romans at that time widely believed in ghosts, so Calphurnia seeing ghosts in her dream coming out of their graves was also superstition. Not only was it superstition, but it was also a bad omen and a sign that something bad was going to occur. The lioness roaming the street and everything else Calphurnia dreamt about was superstition that...
... middle of paper ...
...in sorrow because of superstition and suffered painful deaths for both ignoring and accepting it. William Shakespeare was a great author and writer and hopefully we can continue to learn from his writing for years to come; because that is every school student’s undeniable fate.
Word Count: 1238 words
Works Cited
Alchin, Linda. "Elizabethan Theatre." ELIZABETHAN THEATRE. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.
Crowther, John, ed. “No Fear Julius Caesar.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2005. Web. 5 Mar. 2014.
"LitCharts | Julius Caesar: Act 1, Scene 2 Summary, Analysis & Themes." LitCharts | Julius Caesar: Act 1, Scene 2 Summary, Analysis & Themes. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2014.
Shakespeare, William, Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. New York: Washington Square, 1992. Print.
"The Roman Empire." The Roman Empire. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Mar. 2014.
Shakespeare’s complex play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar contains several tragic heroes; a tragic hero holds high political or social esteem yet possesses an obvious character flaw. This discernible hubris undoubtedly causes the character’s demise or a severe forfeiture, which forces the character to undergo an unfeigned moment of enlightenment and shear reconciliation. Brutus, one of these tragic heroes, is a devout friend of the great Julius Caesar, that is, until he makes many execrable decisions he will soon regret; he becomes involved in a plot to kill the omniscient ruler of Rome during 44 B.C. After committing the crime, Mark Antony, an avid, passionate follower of Caesar, is left alive under Brutus’s orders to take his revenge on the villains who killed his beloved Caesar. After Antony turns a rioting Rome on him and wages war against him and the conspirators, Brutus falls by his own hand, turning the very sword he slaughtered Caesar with against himself. Brutus is unquestionably the tragic hero in this play because he has an innumerable amount of character flaws, he falls because of these flaws, and then comes to grips with them as he bleeds on the planes of Philippi.
The play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare showcases many characters and events that go through many significant changes. One particular character that went through unique changes was Julius Caesar. The 16th century work is a lengthy tragedy about the antagonists Brutus and Cassius fighting with the protagonists Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus over the murder of Julius Caesar. Although the play’s main pushing conflict was the murder of Julius Caesar, he is considered a secondary character, but a protagonist. Throughout the theatrical work Julius Caesar’s actions, alliances, character developments, and internal and external conflicts display his diverse changes.
The Web. The Web. 25 Nov. 2013. http://school.eb.com/levels/high/article/273442>. The "Julius Caesar."
McManus, Barbara F. "Julius Caesar: Historical Background." Vroma. N.p., Mar. 2011. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.
As one of the most well known authors of the Elizabethan Era, Shakespeare had written numerous sonnets and plays reflecting the values of people of the time period. Shakespeare often display themes of love and death, fate and free will, and power and weaknesses throughout his works of literature. The play "The Tragedy of Julius” truly highlight the impact of fate and free will in the development of the plot, of the assassination of Caesar’s death. Some may argue that fate is actually the one responsible for the act, but they fail to recognize that it is the acts of men leading to the death. It is the free will at fault for this occurrence, that the Roman senators consciously killed Caesar and Caesar himself facing his mortality.
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. N.d. Print.
Throughout the play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare both fate and free will is demonstrated. Cassius argued that everyone has the power to change their future in what they do when Casca came to him frightened by omens. Though, omens have seemed to prove correct throughout the play, therefore it dominates the argument of Fate versus Free Will. All major events had an omen foreshadowing it. The first five were seen by Casca throughout the day.
McManus, Barbara F. "Julius Caesar: Historical Background." Vroma. N.p., Mar. 2011. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.
Shakespeare, William. “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.” Elements of Literature: Kylene Beers. Austin: Holt, 2009. 842-963. Print.
Alvin B. Kernan. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Print.
Bloom, Harold. William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Chelsea House Publisher; Connecticut, New York, & Pennsylvania. 1988, Pg. #33 - 36
Superstition has been around almost since people first inhabited the earth. For this reason, it has played a main role in many classical pieces of literature. One of Shakespeare’s tragedies, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, is full of superstition and the supernatural. It contained so much superstition in order to foreshadow key events in the plot, to further develop characters, and to thrill and relate to the Elizabethan audience for whom the play was written.
Shakespeare, William. "The Tragedy of Julius Caesar." Houghton Mifflin Company. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston, 1994.
In the famed author William Shakespeare’s playwright Julius Caesar, we are introduced to an extraordinary plot of a powerful ruler, Julius Caesar, who gained power through astonishing victories and remarkable strategies but fell victim to betrayal. The betrayal that led to his demise was led by some of the very people that surrounded him the most, even some people that he considered as friends. The theme of betrayal and the notion of friendship and its validity are both topics that are worth examining but perhaps the most prevalent topic that drives this plot is the image of Caesar. Caesar ascended into power after a long period in Rome where the rise of tyranny had been fought systematically and physically. He had to not only be a powerful leader but also a wise politician when it came to his decisions. His image tarnishes more and more as his power increases and he too chases after it. He becomes so ambitious over power that he begins to feel immortal and free from danger. His conspirators do not just want him out of power for the simple sake of it but because some of them, either persuaded or not, earnestly believed that Julius Caesar’s death would save Rome not hurt it. What makes this playwright’s so extraordinary is not the dynamic drama alone, but also the depiction of Julius Caesar and how even in the monstrosity of his murder, his image was still arguable causing division amongst men. Although William Shakespeare has, for a very long time now, been known for his great writings it is clear that he himself depicted a ruler that would win favor in the eyes of the great Italian political philosopher and writer Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli but not the profound Italian writer Baldassare Castiglione. Both writers wrote ab...
Cambridge UP, 1994. Palmer, D. J. & Co., Inc. The "Tragic Error in Julius Caesar." Shakespeare Quarterly. 21-22 (1970): 399.