Throughout the entire play, Julius Caesar, many different themes played through my mind. This play is very complex, and I feel that each reader’s interpretation is quite different from the next. But generally speaking I believe that above all the themes in Julius Caesar, manhood/honor was the most well established and carried on through the course of the play. Some may argue that power, fate and free will, or even friendship stand out above all, but Shakespeare put much more emphasis on manhood/honor. The entire first and second scenes in Julius Caesar primarily deal with various characters battling with appearing “honorable”. Many of the decisions made by each character were greatly influenced by how they would appear, or if it showed them to be honorable to the public eye. Act I Scene II states, “Men at some time are masters of their fates: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Shakespeare is showing that it is often our own self destruction and downfalls that determine our true “fate”. This line, in a way, foreshadows the remainder of the play by its underlying meaning. Nearly each character …show more content…
The mindset of the characters in Julius Caesar mirrors that of the mindset in today’s politics,“Country before thyself”. This creates a sense of patriotism which relates back to being honorable. This mindset appears strongly in Act III Scene II when Brutus says, “If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” Brutus is saying that he loved Caesar and cared about him dearly as a friend, but for the good of the people and Rome, he put his own feelings aside and did what needed to be done. Again, he believed this showed him to be honorable, because he was loyal to his country despite his personal