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Julius Caesar Analytical Essay
The play ‘‘Julius Caesar’’ by William Shakespeare focuses on the resulting conflicts from the assassination of the Roman Empire Julius Caesar. The following essay analyzes the core conflict in the play by describing how the play builds and resolves the conflict using three scenes from the play to support the arguments. It also highlights my feelings concerning the effectiveness of the resolution.
The major conflict at work in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is the triumvirs vs. the conspirators. The play builds and resolves the battle from the scene where Caesar is killed, to his burial, and progresses throughout the play after the funeral until it is eventually resolved. The reason is that, after Julius Caesar is murdered, Octavius, Lepidus, and Antony take the rule of Rome as a triumvirate and seek to avenge the empire’s assassination. In the first scene of the play, the three plan to engage the conspirators, especially Brutus and Cassius. During the burial, the conspirators attempted to make the populace believe that the assignation was for the public good. They argue that Caesar had turned himself into a tyrant who would harm Rome. However, when it is Antony’s time to speak in the final scene of Act III, he asserts that Caesar’s spirit would take revenge by invoking a war involving the entire nation against his murders. Here, Antony’s purpose is to gather support against his enemies. Once the triumvirs garner the support it needed from the crowd, it unleashes a brutal civil war against the conspirators to get the assassins to justice. During the conflict, the armies of the conspirators fall into vulnerability a lot of times, and so their side does poorly (Shakespeare full plays). It loses many men, while thousands from its side are injured. When Cassius hears mistakenly that one of his prominent soldiers has been captured, he loses hope and commits suicide. Afterward, Brutus runs onto another man’s sword and dies. As a result, Antony calls off the battle in Act 5, scene 5. With the victory over the conspirators, Caesar’s murder is avenged, and power in Rome passes into the hands of the triumvirate, and order is restored.
I feel that the resolution is ineffective because it employs a conquest approach. The competitive strategy is characterized by each side, resulting in what it believes and in what it wants. For this, the triumvirs are proving that they are right to avenge Caesar’s death while the conspirators are showing that they are right to kill him because he has destroyed the nation. The debilitating powerless position of the triumvirs believing that they are right to avenge the death of Caesar’s leads to the continuous attempts of belittling the conspirators to undermine them further. Often, the conspirators do the same to the triumvirs, and so, the approach fails to provide the antagonizing parties with the chance to repair their relationship. As a result, the competitiveness of the process creates the notion that the resolution to the disagreement can only be forced by one party on the other encouraging coercive tactics such as violence. With violence, the process becomes a power struggle as both sides aim at winning outright. Thus, the escalation increases to motivation, both parties making to prefer facing a mutual disaster rather than a compromise. Eventually, the triumvirs win by conquest, and the conspirators feel bitter and disempowered. The conquest approach to conflict resolution employed in the play is not practical because it only solves the conflict for the short-term given the conspirators are prone to be uncooperative with the government leading to future disputes.
Work Cited
Shakespeare full plays .”Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare. Starring Robert Stephens and Edward Woodward (1969).” YouTube, 28, November 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JInTNKLaEI4&=&list=PLuvZQl2EViQlym8_rQw_WsFAiVn1eVCfC&=&index=2