Compare and contrast the funeral speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony. Which is more effective and why?

He ends the speech by offering his own life for his country. This act of self-sacrifice is very emotional and echoes Casca’s description of Caesar offering his life to the crowd.  As Brutus leaves the stage he emphasizes that Antony will be speaking by “our permission”. By entrusting the crowd to Antony and naively believing that Antony will honour the spirit of their agreement Brutus makes a fatal error of judgement which costs him all of his power in Rome.

Without having to speak first, Antony manages to upstage Brutus simply by entering with Caesars’ body. Though he wasn’t present for Brutus’ stirring speech he shapes his own speech to complement it and to destroy all the effects that Brutus had so brilliantly achieved. While Brutus had appealed to the audience’s civic pride as romans and to its sense of logic, Antony works to undermine his grand ideas by controlling the crowds’ emotions. Where Brutus had begun with “Romans”, Antony begins with “Friends”. This makes him create the feeling that he, the crowd and the dead Caesar are all close friends. Having established the idea of a group of friends, he begins to separate his group from the other group, the conspirators. He does this by encouraging in the people a cynicism about Brutus. Brutus presented himself as an honourable man,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    however this backfires on him because Antony mocks him later by repeatedly reminding the people of this, “Brutus is an honourable man”, and he goes on reminding them until the very idea has become hollow. Each time we hear “And Brutus is an honourable man” the case for Brutus’ honour, which is what Brutus was relying on to make the people trust him, is weakened. Brutus had required that Antony not attack the conspirators in his speech but by using a term of praise Antony manages to keep the bargain whilst subtly breaking it as well.

 Then Antony holds up what he claims to be Caesar’s will and tempts the crowd with its contents. He pretends that he is reluctant to read it because it would wrong “the honourable men/ whose daggers have stabbed Caesar.” The crowd goes into rage upon this and cries out, “Honourable men!”  “villains, murderers!” Their greed has come to make them think that the conspirators would have cheated them of their inheritance. Antony takes immediate advantage of their self-interest:

You will compel me then to read the will?

Then make a ring about the corpse of Caesar,

And let me show you him that made the will.

Shall I ascend?

By descending to the level of the crowd, Antony manages to triumph both Brutus and Caesar. Caesar had swooned when he got close to them; Brutus had stayed aloft in the pulpit; but Antony enters their ring and draws us all, the Romans and theatre audience alike, into his intimate revelation of the bloody treason done to Caesar. He drops all pretence now and says that that when Caesar fell “Then I, and you, and all of us fell down.” The crowd starts weeping with Antony and transform into avengers. “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fore! Kill! Slay! They are intent on destroying anything (shown in the next scene) and Antony has unleashed a force which effectively sweeps him into power. The mood set is frightening enough but when Antony stops calling them “you” and refers cynically to “them” instead we in the audience are suddenly shocked and shamed. We had been drawn into We had been drawn into his conspiracy. We had been part of the crowd, listening to Antony with a mixture of awe and delight at the brilliance of his rhetoric and theatrical skill.