How Shakespeare Manipulates An Audience

0:00 Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

0:06 I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

0:09 Julius Caesar is dead,

0:11 stabbed by a group of Roman senators, including his friend Brutus,

0:15 who feared that Caesar had the ambition and the ability

0:18 to become a tyrant that would destroy the Roman Republic.

0:21 Mark Anthony, another friend of Caesars,

0:23 arrives after the murder and is shocked and saddened,

0:27 but ultimately plays along with the conspirators to save his own skin.

0:31 Brutus is going to go outside and justify the assassination

0:36 to the Roman crowd and agrees to let Anthony deliver a eulogy,

0:40 but only if he promises not to condemn the conspirators.

0:43 Anthony agrees and they all go outside to face the people.

0:47 Brutus speaks first, explaining that even though he loved Caesar,

0:52 Caesar had to die because he represented a danger to all free Roman citizens.

0:58 How you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves

1:01 THAN THAT CAESAR WERE DEAD TO LIVE, ALL FREE MEN?

1:05 He doesn't give specific examples of Caesar's tyrannical ambitions,

1:10 but appeals to the crowd's faith in his own honor and judgment,

1:14 and it seems to work.

1:15 At the end, the crowd cheers Brutus and condemns Caesar.

1:19 Then Anthony steps up.

1:22 Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

1:26 Antony's facing a hostile, rowdy crowd,

1:29 so he has to get their attention right away.

1:31 Instead of the typical amic rhythm of dum duum,

1:35 an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable,

1:38 Anthony hits us with a stressed syllable right away.

1:41 friends.

1:42 In fact, the first three words all begin with stressed syllables.

1:46 Boom.

1:47 Boom.

1:47 Boom.

1:48 Now we're listening.

1:49 That first word is important to note.

1:51 In his speech, Brutus began with Romans, appealing to the crowd's reason.

1:56 Anthony starts with friends.

1:58 He's aiming for an emotional connection,

2:00 and friendship will be a key theme in the speech.

2:03 I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

2:06 Yeah.

2:06 If Anthony were attached to a lie detector right now, it would be spiking.

2:11 Praising Caesar is exactly what he intends to do.

2:15 That and condemn the conspirators.

2:17 But the crowd doesn't want to hear praise of the would-be tyrant.

2:20 And Anthony vowed not to condemn the assassins.

2:23 His impossible rhetorical mission in this speech, should he choose to accept it,

2:27 is to praise Caesar and condemn

2:29 the conspirators while appearing to do the opposite.

2:32 The evil that men do lives after them.

2:36 The good is often turred with their bones, so let it be with Caesar.

2:41 These lines seem to follow on from Anony's promise not to praise Caesar,

2:45 but they throw up all kinds of red flags in the mind of the listener.

2:49 So, we remember the bad thing someone does, but often forget the good.

2:53 Is that supposed to be a good thing?

2:55 Shouldn't we seek to remember someone in all their complexity?

2:58 Subtly, Anthony gets the audience to start thinking

3:01 about the good Caesar did in his life.

3:04 In fact, he's associating good with the bones,

3:06 the corpse of Caesar that is right now in front of them,

3:09 while evil he associates with the men who still live.

3:13 Who exactly is asking the crowd to forget the good Caesar did?

3:16 The answer comes right away in the second part of that last line.

3:20 The noble Brutus had told you Caesar was ambitious.

3:23 If it were so, it was a grievous fault.

3:26 And grievously hath Caesar answered it.

3:29 Now, Antony's not saying Caesar was ambitious.

3:32 He's saying that Brutus is saying that Caesar was ambitious.

3:36 This is a trick he'll return to many times.

3:39 In the third line, he's opening up that door of doubt even further by saying,

3:43 "If it were so," suggesting that there's a chance it's not so,

3:47 that Brutus is mistaken or lying.

3:49 If Caesar was ambitious,

3:51 it's a criminal fault and the appropriate price is death.

3:54 If he wasn't ambitious, well, what does that make the killing

3:59 here under leave of Brutus and the rest?

4:01 For Brutus is an honorable man.

4:02 So are they all.

4:03 All honorable men.

4:05 Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.

4:07 Damen Lewis is so brilliant delivering this speech.

4:10 In this whole first part, he hasn't betrayed his true goals as Anthony.

4:15 He's been gently pulling the crowd, his friends, into his perspective.

4:19 And yet you can feel that there's something brewing in him here.

4:23 The way he delivers that word, another stressed syllable to start the line.

4:27 It's explosive, but his head barely moves.

4:30 Lewis fixes your attention like a general demanding obedience,

4:33 but before you have a chance to register

4:35 that, he shifts back into the friendly demeanor.

4:37 For this part of the sentence, which is really a parenthetical interruption,

4:41 Lewis's head loosens and moves around as if to communicate the fact

4:45 that Brutus and his conspirators are honorable is so obviously true,

4:49 it almost doesn't need mentioning.

4:51 But under the cover of this aside, Anthony has just laid his trap.

4:56 He was my friend, faithful and just to me.

5:03 But Brutus says he was ambitious.

5:06 And Brutus is an honorable man.

5:09 There's that word friend again.

5:11 What is a friend?

5:12 After all, faithful, just.

5:15 Notice how Lewis lights up at that word just.

5:18 It's an odd way to describe a friend, but it is how you describe a good ruler.

5:22 Here we have a repetition of the premise that he slipped in so casually before.

5:27 He ties Brutus's honor to Brutus's assertion that Caesar was ambitious.

5:32 Really, Brutus did this himself in his own speech,

5:34 but Anthony is making it plain.

5:36 He's creating a causal link between Brutus's

5:39 honor and the truth value of his assertions.

5:42 Now, he doesn't have to attack Brutus directly.

5:45 He can interrogate the truth of what he says and accomplish the same goal.

5:49 He hath brought many captives home to Rome

5:51 whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.

5:54 Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

5:56 When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.

6:01 Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

6:03 Yet Brutus says he was ambitious and Brutus is an honorable man.

6:09 Brutus didn't bother to give examples of Caesar's ambition,

6:12 but Anthony provides examples of ways in which he wasn't ambitious.

6:16 He increased public funds for Rome's welfare.

6:18 He cried for the poor like an empathetic friend.

6:21 That empathy is evoked by rhythmic association

6:24 between Caesar and the poor which Lewis emphasizes.

6:27 When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.

6:31 Anthony uses a rhetorical question to further engage the audience

6:35 and then encourages them to imagine ambition as something stern and cruel.

6:40 Of course, these examples are not really incompatible with ambition, but hey,

6:45 if the audience can't see through a populist leader's crocodile tears,

6:48 they're not going to see through Anony's manipulations either.

6:52 You all did see that on the loop,

6:54 I thrice presented him a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse.

6:59 Was this ambition?

7:01 Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, and sure, he is an honorable man.

7:07 Now, in a society that thinks of itself as a republic,

7:10 an ambitious autocrat would probably be smart to refuse a crown.

7:15 But Anthony knows that this crowd will read

7:17 Caesar's actions as the exact opposite of ambition.

7:20 And he helps the information go down easy

7:22 with three lines of nearly perfect amic pentameter.

7:25 By the time we get to the final refrain, Lewis's sarcasm is hard to miss.

7:30 But now it's inflected with rage.

7:32 There's so much contempt in that word, sure.

7:35 It's likely that Anthony is genuinely angered by Caesar's death.

7:39 But the emotional display is also a rhetorical tactic.

7:43 He's not instructing the audience to get angry.

7:46 He introduces a premise that they buy into without question.

7:49 And as the dissonance grows with each repetition

7:52 between that premise and the evidence he presents,

7:55 he gradually fills the gap with his own seemingly spontaneous authentic emotion.

8:01 Anthony worked to elicit a dramatic identification at the start and now

8:05 he's used that to trap the audience into mirroring his anger.

8:08 I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,

8:12 but here I am to speak what I do know.

8:17 You all did love him once, not without cause.

8:25 What cause withhold you then to mourn for him?

8:29 This is a risky move.

8:30 Not only is Anthony telling the audience how they felt about Caesar,

8:34 he's redirecting a little bit of that anger and frustration toward them.

8:39 So far, the speech has been all about creating identification with the audience.

8:43 Now, he's creating distance to suggest, like a parent might,

8:47 that maybe they should feel a little guilty

8:49 for cheering the murder of someone they once loved.

8:52 Maybe even a little complicit.

8:55 Oh judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason.

9:01 Here Anthony moves into a higher poetic register,

9:04 suggesting even more forcefully that the audience lost their reason

9:08 that just minutes ago they were acting like beasts.

9:12 He's even slightly comparing them to Brutus, whose honor has been discredited.

9:17 Why doesn't the audience get defensive here?

9:19 Well, if Anthony had started with these lines, they likely would have.

9:23 but he's earned their trust and now he's spending that coin.

9:27 And his challenges are softened by the way he says them.

9:30 Instead of a direct accusation, he uses a rhetorical question.

9:34 Instead of scolding the audience directly,

9:36 he's addressing the abstract concept of judgment.

9:39 But this section depends so deeply on the performance

9:42 and Lewis shows us why it really works.

9:45 His anger here is not the anger of condemnation

9:48 or revenge which he seems to have for Brutus.

9:52 The anger that spills out into the audience is the anger of grief.

9:56 And that kind of anger doesn't elicit anger in response.

10:00 It elicits pity.

10:01 Bear with me.

10:02 Miraculously, Anthony,

10:04 or really will Shakespeare achieves the best of all worlds here.

10:08 He simultaneously places Anthony below, with, and above the audience.

10:13 They feel sorry for him, sorry with him,

10:17 and sorry for their own thoughtless response

10:20 to the death of his friend and theirs.

10:23 Now all he needs to do is pause and let the audience

10:26 decide for themselves who deserves their sympathy and who deserves their fury.

10:31 I don't think the verdict will be a surprise for Mark Anthony.

10:35 My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar

10:42 and I must pause till it come back to me.

10:50 Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

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