Act 3: The Assassination & the Speeches
The Murder of Caesar
Act 3 is the turning point of the entire play. In Scene 1, the conspirators surround Caesar in the Senate and stab him to death. Shakespeare choreographs the murder with terrifying precision. Each conspirator strikes in turn — Casca first (‘Speak, hands, for me!’), then the others. Caesar fights back initially, but when he sees Brutus among his attackers, he stops resisting.
Caesar’s final words are among the most famous in all literature: ‘Et tu, Brute? — Then fall, Caesar.’ The Latin phrase (‘And you, Brutus?’) expresses not just surprise but betrayal. Caesar can endure being attacked by political enemies, but discovering that his trusted friend Brutus has joined them is the wound that truly kills him. The shift from Latin to English (‘Then fall, Caesar’) is significant: Caesar refers to himself in the third person, as if watching his own death from outside. He accepts his fate in a single, dignified sentence.
‘Et tu, Brute?’ The Latin signals the formality of a public, political act. ‘Then fall, Caesar’ — spoken in the third person — suggests Caesar sees his own death as a historical event, not just a personal tragedy. It also shows his acceptance: once Brutus has betrayed him, Caesar has nothing left to fight for.
Blood as Political Theatre
Immediately after the murder, Brutus instructs the conspirators to wash their hands in Caesar’s blood: ‘Stoop, Romans, stoop, / And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood / Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords.’ This is a ritualistic act — Brutus wants to transform a violent murder into a ritual sacrifice for the republic. Cassius then imagines future audiences re-enacting the scene: ‘How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!’
This is a stunning moment of metatheatre — Cassius is describing exactly what is happening in the Globe Theatre at that moment. Shakespeare’s audience is the ‘states unborn’ watching the scene ‘acted over.’ The effect is to blur the line between the Roman world and the Elizabethan audience, forcing viewers to consider their own relationship to political violence.
Mark Antony arrives and finds Caesar’s body. His immediate reaction is grief: ‘O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low?’ But Antony is also a political operator. He shakes each conspirator’s bloody hand, calling them ‘gentlemen’ — an act that appears to signal acceptance but is actually calculated. Alone with the body, Antony drops the mask: ‘O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!’ The word ‘butchers’ reveals his true view. Cassius was right to fear Antony — Brutus’s decision to spare him is a catastrophic error.
Antony’s soliloquy over the body prophesies civil war: ‘Domestic fury and fierce civil strife / Shall cumber all the parts of Italy.’ He predicts that Caesar’s spirit, ‘ranging for revenge,’ will unleash destruction. This prophecy comes true in Acts 4 and 5. Shakespeare uses Antony’s grief to shift audience sympathy decisively away from the conspirators.
Brutus’s Funeral Speech
In Act 3, Scene 2, Brutus speaks first at Caesar’s funeral. His speech is in prose, not verse — a deliberate choice. Prose is the language of everyday speech, of rational argument. Brutus appeals to logic and patriotism: ‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.’ He uses balanced, symmetrical phrases: ‘As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him; but, as he was ambitious, I slew him.’
The speech is technically competent but emotionally cold. Brutus treats the crowd as rational adults who will understand his reasoning. He even offers his own life: ‘Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended.’ The crowd responds with cheers — but their support is shallow and based on Brutus’s reputation, not genuine understanding of his argument.
‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’
Antony’s speech is one of the greatest examples of rhetoric in English literature. He begins: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’ Unlike Brutus’s prose, Antony speaks in blank verse — the elevated language of Shakespeare’s noble characters. The rhythm gives his words weight and authority.
Antony’s genius lies in his use of irony. He repeatedly calls the conspirators ‘honourable men’ while listing Caesar’s generous deeds: bringing captives home, weeping with the poor, refusing the crown three times. Each repetition of ‘honourable’ becomes more sarcastic, until the word means its opposite. The crowd begins to murmur; by the end, they are calling for the conspirators’ blood.
Antony uses at least four key techniques: ironic repetition (‘honourable men’), rhetorical questions (‘Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?’), emotional appeals (weeping mid-speech, showing Caesar’s wounds), and physical props (Caesar’s bloodied mantle and his will leaving money to every citizen). Each technique builds on the last to transform the crowd from supporters of Brutus into a violent mob.
The crowd’s transformation is terrifying. Before Antony speaks, they cheer Brutus. After his speech, they scream: ‘We’ll burn the house of Brutus!’ and ‘Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!’ The short, violent verbs show the mob has abandoned reason entirely. In Act 3, Scene 3, the crowd encounters Cinna the Poet — a man with the same name as one of the conspirators. When he protests that he is ‘Cinna the poet’, they kill him anyway: ‘Tear him for his bad verses!’ This darkly comic moment shows how mob violence becomes mindless and indiscriminate.
Shakespeare uses the mob to warn about the dangers of demagoguery. Antony’s rhetoric is brilliant but irresponsible — he unleashes violence he cannot control. For an Elizabethan audience, mob rule was a genuine fear. The killing of Cinna the Poet shows that once the crowd is weaponised, innocent people die alongside the guilty.