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Comparing The Speeches In Mark Antony's The Ballot Or The Bullet

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From Romeo’s “What light through yonder window breaks?” to Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be,“ William Shakespeare is known for his works and the popular speeches embedded in them. To this day they, the strategies and rhetoric skills that the characters can also be used to examine more modern speeches. In one case, Malcolm X’s speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet” relates to Marc Antony’s speech in the forum in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar due to similar speech structures and appeal to pathos, yet contrast due to them appealing to different emotions. A strong similarity that is easily noticed in the first line of both speeches is the introduction. In Antony’s speech, he says, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” (III.ii.72). He first …show more content…

Another difference is how Malcolm X directly addresses the issue, which is racism being prevalent in the country, while Marc Antony does not directly state the issue he has with the conspirators. Instead, Antony uses irony to change the views of the citizens by repeating, “But Brutus says he’s ambitious; And Brutus is an honorable man,” (III.ii.85-86) after every evidence that Antony provides for Caesar being a vigorous leader and ruler. It may seem harmful to others because it is not directly insulting Brutus or the conspirators, but the citizens start to believe Antony because the evidence and emotions that he causes in them is stronger than Brutus’ credibility. Antony has provided evidence in which some of the citizens were actually part of it. For example, when Antony said, “When the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff” (III.ii.90-91). X does the opposite in his speech and addresses it multiple times, one of the times he said, “Those Honkies that just got off the boat, they 're already Americans; Polacks are already Americans; the Italian refugees are already Americans. Everything that came out of Europe, every blue-eyed thing, is already an American. And as long as you and I have been over here, we aren 't Americans yet.” The difference in this can mean plenty, especially the emotions that this appeals to. Antony’s speech appeals more to anger, due to the fact

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