How Shakespeare presents Brutus, and how the character develops across the text: from an honourable Roman troubled by Caesar's power, through the assassination and his funeral speech, to defeat and a noble death.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Vexed I am / Of late with passions of some difference', 'I know no personal cause to spurn at him, / But for the general', 'Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar, / I have not slept', 'Our course will seem too bloody', 'Believe me for mine honour', 'as he was ambitious, I slew him', 'I have as much of this in art as you, / But yet my nature could not bear it so', 'Night hangs upon mine eyes; my bones would rest', 'He only, in a general honest thought / And common good to all, made one of them'.
Context: the ancestor who drove out Rome's last king, and Brutus as a tragic hero brought down by his idealism and misjudgements.
