The Semantics of Rhetoric in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

This paper examined the concern of the limitations of human language, which create a confusion of ideas and impairment of meaning, through a qualitative analysis of Willian Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The Ideational Theory of Meaning was adopted as a framework to investigate the semantic implicatures and problems of rhetoric used in the text. The data for this study was drawn from the funeral orations presented by Brutus and Antony during Caesar’s funeral in Act III, Sc. II. The analysis was divided into two segments: the first was on the speech of Brutus, the self-acclaimed patriotic citizen who is the first to present a funeral oration after the assassination of Caesar. Attention was paid to how the power of his speech is able to arrest the attention of the citizens to believe that he is just in killing Caesar who he claims was an ambitious traitor. The second was on the speech of Antony who is able to win back the citizens after Brutus’ speech; he stirs their emotions and sways them into mutiny against Brutus and the conspirators. It was revealed that at some points meaning eluded the internal audience of the text and at some other points, their emotions and logical senses were manipulated and influenced.