Mark Antony’s Funeral Speech in Terms of Aristotle’s Rhetorical Devices & Persuasive Modes in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: A Stylistic Study

Abstract

Abstract
 This article concentrates on the skills of making the political as well as the social speech of Mark Antony at the funeral of Julius Caesar. Antony was one of the Roman strong leaders who had a strong personality in his own right. Thus, he manifested his ability of oration as a noble man to persuade, then, to manage the madding crowd about the righteous of his political and social steps. Mark Antony had shown this ability by the use of certain persuasive strategies and techniques such as Repetition, Rhetorical questions, Alliteration, Irony, Metaphor, Hyperbole and Diction. However, his use of persuasion differ dramatically throughout his speech, i.e. the contrast between the beginning stage of his speech and its end, is much the same as the distinction between the base of a mountain and its summit. The elegance of this speech is that Antony achieve his goal and made people perceived him without turning out and communicating it. The results show that, he uses the same techniques as being more persuasive techniques than others such as Alliteration, Rhetorical Questions, Repetition, Irony, Metaphor, Hyperbole and Diction. It can be said that persuasion is a social and a political situation based.