Rhetoric and persuasion — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Rhetoric and persuasion
Themes
What you need to know
How Shakespeare explores rhetoric, persuasion and manipulation, from Cassius's flattery to the funeral speeches across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'And since you know you cannot see yourself / So well as by reflection, I, your glass, / Will modestly discover to yourself / That of yourself which you yet know not of', 'But when I tell him he hates flatterers, / He says he does, being then most flattered', 'Your statue spouting blood in many pipes', 'Romans, countrymen, and lovers!', 'Who is here so base that would be a bondman?', 'I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him', 'The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones', 'My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar', 'I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts', 'put a tongue / In every wound of Caesar'.
Context: rhetoric as the art of persuasion, and appeals to reason, character and emotion in the two funeral speeches.
