Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to the Oak National Academy for English.

My name is Mr. James, and today we're looking at the final scene of the play "Julius Caesar," and we're going to see what happens to our tragic hero, Brutus.

But before we begin today's lesson, let's have a look at what we're going to learn.

Well, first of all, we're going to revisit this concept of the tragic hero.

Secondly, we're going to look at this phrase, to fall upon one's sword.

Number three, we're going to read the text.

Number four, we're going to answer some questions on the text and number five, while we're answering those questions, we're going to learn about something called hamartia.

But before we do any of that, we need to make sure you have the correct equipment.

So if you don't have a pen, a paper, or your brain, please pause the video now, go and get your equipment, and come back when you are ready.

Okay, welcome back.

So the first thing I would like you to do, now you have a pen and paper, is write down today's title.

So take your pen, write the title on today's paper, pause the video, come back when you are done.

Off you go.

Now let's have a look at how this plays out during the end of the play.

Well, Brutus and Cassius, as I said, gather an army against Antony.

They face Antony's army at place called Philippi.

Now, a heavy battle takes place, and initially, things look good for Brutus and Cassius.

However, ultimately, in the end, Antony's army wins the victory.

Now, Brutus is a tragic hero because he loses the war, and ultimately, he will choose to kill himself, to commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner.

And on that idea, we just want to have a look at this theme of falling upon one's sword.

Now, in ancient warfare, it was considered honourable to kill yourself rather than be taken prisoner.

It was considered like a final act of courage that would prevent warriors being captured by the enemy, because really, if you're in an army, you don't want your soldiers or your warriors to be captured by the enemy, because the enemy might talk to them, for example, or they might try and extract information from your warriors, from your soldiers about your battle plans.

So it was considered honourable to kill yourself rather than be captured, because that meant the opposition, the enemy couldn't take any information from you.

So let's have a look at a few questions based on the things we've talked about so far in this lesson.

Why does Brutus kill himself, first of all? Because he's honourable or because he scared? Five seconds to make your choice.

Well, hopefully you chose that Brutus kills himself because he is honourable.

Yes, he doesn't want to be captured by the enemy and give away any battle plans.

What does it mean to fall upon your sword? What does that mean, fall upon your sword? I want you to think of the answer in your head now, and then I will tell you in a moment.

So five seconds.

Think about what fall upon your sword means.

Okay, so what did you think? What did you choose? Well, hopefully you said something like suicide after a defeat.

It's suicide after a military defeat, is falling upon your sword.

Now, what action started Brutus' downfall? Was it assassinating Caesar, or was it falling on his sword? Five seconds.

Hopefully you chose assassinating Caesar.

Yes, it was when he chose to join a conspiracy and then assassinate Caesar that his downfall began, because that was the action that he took that locked him in to his destiny, if you like.

That was the action that started the civil war that would ultimately lead to his defeat in the civil war, and having to kill himself, the thing he believed was good, but was actually bad.

That's what makes it a tragedy.

So what action completed Brutus' downfall? What was the end of his downfall? Was that assassinating Caesar, or was it falling on his sword? Five seconds to make your choice.

And hopefully you chose falling on his sword.

Yes, that's the correct answer, because that's the end of his downfall.

That's the end of it.

When he dies, when he kills himself, that's the end of his story.

His downfall begins when he assassinates Caesar.

That starts his downfall, and then eventually he dies, and that is the end of his downfall, when he kills himself.

So why is Brutus' story tragic? What's tragic about Brutus' story? Think back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the lesson.

Is it because he believed he was doing something good? Does that make it tragic? Or is it because he believed he was doing something bad? Does that make it tragic? So five seconds.

Have a think, which of these two options make Brutus' story tragic? Well, and what have you chosen? Hopefully you went for because he believed he was doing something good.

Yes, if a bad person does something bad, we don't think it's tragic.

If someone deliberately does something bad and then something bad happens to them, we just say, well, that's fair, that's justice.

But if a good person does something they believe is good, if they're trying to do good, and it turns out that, actually, in fact it's bad, we say, oh, what a shame.

That's quite tragic.

So we've learned about the tragic hero, or we've revisited the tragic hero, and we've looked about falling upon one sword, so now we're going to look at the play, and just like last lesson, we're not going to do it in modern English.

We're going to go straight into Shakespeare's original version, so make sure you're paying really close attention to what I'm saying, so you understand everything in the scene.

So, as usual, the play begins with some stage directions, and this time it says, "Enter Brutus, Dardanius, Clitus, Strato, and Volumnius." Now, the only character we know of these is Brutus, but we don't need to worry too much about the others, because it is the final scene.

So Brutus says, "Come, poor remains of friends, rest on this rock." 'Cause remember, the conspirators are just about to be defeated in the war by Antony and his army.

So he says, "Come, poor remains of friends, rest on this rock." And here's an image of Brutus and the conspirators just at this moment before or after their defeat.

And you can see there in the battlefield, and they found a rock to sit and hide behind.

So Brutus says, "Come, poor friends, rest on this rock.

Our enemies have beat us.

Good Volumnius, thou know'st that we two went to school together; even for that our love of old, I prithee, hold thou my sword-hilts, whilst I run on it." So Brutus here is asking Volumnius to help him fall on his sword, because it's very difficult actually to stab yourself with a sword.

So he says, "Will you assist me in this?" And Volumnius says, "That is not an office for a friend, my lord." Volumnius says no, in fact.

He says, "No, I won't do it." And then there's this word at the bottom.

It says alarum.

Alarum.

That is an old Shakespearian way of spelling alarm.

So because the conspirators have lost and the opposing army is coming to get them, and into the camp, perhaps, alarms are going off and people are getting quite excited or quite scared.

So Clitus says, "Fly, fly," meaning, "Look, we need to go, we need to run." Brutus says, "Farewell to you, and to you." So he's saying goodbye to some of the people he's with.

"Farewell to you, Volumnius.

Farewell to thee too, Strato.

Countrymen, my heat doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me." So he's saying everyone has been honest and honourable with him.

He's only known people who were true and who were honest.

And then he continues.

"I shall have glory by losing this day, more than Octavius and Mark Antony by this vile conquest shall attain unto." So here Brutus is saying, "Even though I've been defeated and I have lost, I have more glory and honour than Antony," because what he believes, what Brutus believes is he still believes he did the right thing, and he thinks Antony did the wrong thing.

So even though he's lost, he believes he has more glory than Antony.

And what do we think about that? Because we know, ultimately, it was Brutus' actions that caused the civil war, which was bad for Rome.

Do we think he does have glory? Do we think he does have more honour than Antony? That's something that we might think about shortly, later.

And then we get another alarm and a cry from within, "Fly, fly." So people all around, so you know, the rest of the army are fleeing, they're trying to leave, and because the defeat is right just about to happen or happening now, people are trying to leave, and it says, "Exeunt Clitus, Dardanius, and Volmnius." So these characters leave the stage and Brutus is left here with a couple of others.

He says, "I prithee, Strato, stay by thy lord.

Thou art a fellow of good respect; thy lift hath had some smatch of honour to it.

Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face, while I do run upon it.

Wilt thou, Strato?" So here Brutus is saying, "I pray you, Strato.

Please stay by me.

You're a good man, and you have lots of respect and honour.

So will you be the one who will hold my sword while I run upon it, while I commit suicide?" That's what he's asking Strato to do.

And Strato says, "Give me your hand first.

Fare well, my lord." So Strato says, "I would like to shake your hand before we do this." Brutus does, and he says, "Farewell, good Strato," and then, as you can see from the stage direction underneath, he runs on his sword.

After he runs on the sword and before he dies, Brutus says, "Caesar, now be still.

I kill'd thee with half so good a will." So he addresses Caesar, who is dead, in his final moments, and he says, "Caesar, please now rest.

I killed you because I believed it was in the best interest of Rome.

I did it with a good will." He says, "So good a will." Not out of nastiness, not out of jealousy, not out of ambition, but with a good will that was good for Rome.

And then we can see in that bottom stage direction, it says, "Brutus dies," so our tragic hero is now dead, and he has reached his conclusion.

He's at the end of his arc as character.

His downfall is complete.

Then we get another alarm and people retreating, and it says, "Enter Octavius, Antony, Messala, Lucilius, and their Army." Now, Octavius is one of the people who Antony joined with when he formed his army.

So Antony and Octavius are leaders of the army, and what Octavius says, "What man is that?" pointing to Brutus.

And Antony says, "This was the noblest Roman of them all.

All the conspirators say only he did what they did in envy of great Caesar." Now, if you envy someone, you're jealous of them.

And notice the difference between how Antony speaks about Brutus and how Brutus spoke about Antony.

Brutus said, "You know, Antony has no glory.

What he did was vile.

I have much more glory than him." But Antony, even though they were at war with each other, when he sees Brutus dead, can still call him the noblest Roman of all.

And who do we think is being more honourable here? Was Brutus being honourable when he was being unkind about Antony, or is Antony being honourable when he's able to look at his enemy and call him noble, the noblest Roman of them all.

So maybe it makes us question a little bit just how honourable Brutus really is, because Antony is able to pay respect to him at the end.

So then Octavius ends by saying, "According to his virtue let us use him with all respect and rites of burial." So that he's saying, "Let's give him an honourable burial, an honourable funeral, if he is as noble as you say he is, Antony." Then he says, "Within my tent, his bones tonight shall lie, most like a soldier ordered honourably.

So call the field to rest, and let's away, to part the glories of this happy day." And it says, "Exeunt," which means they will leave the stage and that is the end of the play.

And notice how Shakespeare chooses to use some rhyme at the end of the play, to make it come to a nice end, to feel like it's coming to an end.

And Octavius says, "We'll give him an honourable death.

We'll treat him well, and we'll treat him like a noble person." So it almost ends on a happy note.

You wouldn't say it's a happy ending, because Brutus has died.

He's killed himself.

The tragic hero has faced his death, but Octavius does manage to end the play on a happy note by saying this was a noble person, and so we'll give him a noble death.

Antony describing him as the noblest Roman of all.

And here's some ways that Brutus' death has been depicted in art over the years.

Notice this is a very different scene from the first one we looked at.

He's not outside by a rock here.

He's inside, and you can see just out the door at the back, you've got the army closing in, and here he's just about to kill himself with a dagger.

He's not actually running onto a sword held by Strato.

And here again, it's different.

They seem to be in almost in some kind of a castle or home here, within the walls, and you can see he's just killed himself, and the people around him are trying to hold his body.

So again, a very different depiction.

Now, because this happened such a long time ago, no one actually knows exactly how it happened, and Shakespeare, when he writes his play, is imagining it in the same way that these artists imagine how it might have happened.

So let's have a look at a question based on what we've looked at.

Now, this question says, what faults does Brutus have that lead to his death? And we've got a couple of quotations at the top.

It says, "My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he that was true to me." And the other quotation says, "I shall have glory by losing this day, more than Octavius and Mark Antony by this vile conquest shall attain unto." And these two quotations give us an idea about the kind of faults Brutus might have had that have led to his death.

But we need to even think about why I'm asking this question.

Why all of a sudden am I saying, oh, what faults did Brutus have that lead to his death? Well, let's think about that.

So Brutus has a couple of faults.

Number one, he's what we might call self-righteous.

That means he's very convinced that his beliefs and morals are right or correct.

If you're self-righteous, you really believe in your own goodness, and you think that a lot of your goodness and your values and your morals are better than other people's.

Now, Brutus, all the way through the play, is very convinced that what he thinks is right is actually right.

But is it? Does he really stop to question, really, whether he should assassinate Caesar? He does take time making the decision, but does he think through the consequences? Does he think, "Well, maybe this is good for Rome, but if I did it, what might happen afterwards?" He never thought that other people perhaps would be so angry that they would start a civil war and raise an army against them.

So he's self-righteous and very convinced in his own beliefs.

He's also very idealistic.

Now, if you're idealistic, that means you only see the good in things, or you think things are always going to be good.

He can only see the honour in people, for example, and he overlooks the bad.

And we'll see in these two quotations how we can see these two traits coming through in Brutus.

So these are couple of his faults.

So fault one, self-righteous, and we have this quote here.

"I shall have glory by losing, by this losing day, more than Octavius and Mark Antony by this vile conquest shall attain unto." Now, is that correct? Will he have more glory? Because the Roman citizens did go against him, and then a war was fought against him, but Brutus still believes he was right and did the right thing.

Even after the Roman citizens said, "Actually, Brutus, we think what you did was wrong," even after the actions he got involved in and completed caused a civil war, he still can't look back and say, "Hmm, maybe, just maybe I was wrong when I assassinated Caesar." So in spite of everything that's happened, he still believes he was correct.

He still believes he was right.

So it's one thing not to be able to look into the future and not realise that what you did was going to be bad, but after you've done it and it's led to a civil war and no one supports you, to still think it's good, and to still not realise there might have been some bad about it suggests he's self-righteous.

Now, his second fault is idealistic, his idealism.

He says, "My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but he was true to me." So he says, "In all my life, I've only known honest men.

Everyone's been honest with me." But is that true? Brutus just thinks everyone was honest with him, even Cassius.

He overlooks the bad things that people do.

Now, we know that Brutus knows Cassius wasn't always honest, because he accused Cassius of being corrupt.

He said, "You have done corrupt things," and he told him, you know, "You've sold your offices of power to the highest bidder, for gold." You also said, "You defended Lucius Pella when he was being corrupt." So what Brutus says here isn't true.

He hasn't known only honest people.

So if you look at the underlined text on the screen, on the left, we can say, he believes in his own honour too strongly.

That's self-righteous.

He believes in his own goodness and his own morals, but he's idealistic, and he believes in other people's honour too strongly as well, because he manages to convince himself that Cassius isn't bad, when he knows, in fact, he is.

It's almost as if Brutus thinks, "Well, if I'm friends with Cassius, he can't be dishonest.

He can't be dishonourable.

He must be honourable if I'm friends with him." So he's top self-righteousness and he's too idealistic.

Now we're going to have a look at this word here, hamartia.

The correct way to describe a tragic hero's fault or their faults is as their hamartia.

Now, hamartia is sometimes explained as a fatal flaw or an error.

This is because it is the tragic hero's fault that leads to their downfall and destruction.

Therefore, we could say the following.

Brutus' hamartia is that he believes too strongly in his own honour and the honour of others.

Because he believes too strongly in the things he thinks that are correct are correct, that allows him to get involved in the conspiracy, in the assassination.

And because he doesn't see the bad in other people, such as Cassius, that means Cassius is able to manipulate him.

If he perhaps was more thoughtful, and thought maybe assassinating Caesar might have some bad consequences, or was able to see the bad in people and thought, "Hmm, perhaps Cassius is doing this for his own interest and his own ambition, rather than the good of Rome," he might not have assassinated Caesar, there might not have been a civil war, and he might not have had to kill himself at the end of the play.

So we could say his faults, his hamartia is that he believes too strongly in his honour and the honour of others, and that led to his downfall and his death.

So we're coming back to our question here.

It says, what faults does Brutus have that lead to his death? And we've got the two quotations we spoke about at the top.

Now we've learned the word hamartia, I can change that question, and I can say, actually, we're going to answer this question.

What is Brutus' hamartia and how does it cause his death? Now, there's some vocab for you here on the right, some words you might want to use when answering this question.

Now, this question is quite difficult, though, so I've also included underneath an opening couple of sentences that you might want to use.

Now, you don't have to use these, but if you find it easier to get started by using the opening that I put on screen, you can do.

It says Brutus's hamartia is his overly strong belief in his own honour and the honour of others.

This is what leads him to kill Caesar in the first place, and we can still see examples of his hamartia in the final scene.

For example.

And then I would go on to talk about these two quotations that's onscreen now, using as much of that vocabulary on the right as possible.

So pause the video now.

Have a go at answering this question.

What is Brutus's hamartia and how does it cause his death? When you're done, unpause the video, come back to me, and I'll go through the kind of thing you might have written.

Off you go.

Okay, welcome back.

So let's have a look at the kind of thing you might have written.

Well, here's an example of an answer.

It says, Brutus's hamartia is his overly strong belief in his own honour and the honour of others.

This is what causes him to kill Caesar in the first place, and we can still see examples of his hamartia in the final scene.

For example, shortly before he falls on his sword, he says that despite losing the war, he has more glory than Antony, which demonstrates his self-righteousness.

Even though the citizens of Rome sided with Antony and that his actions caused a civil war, he still completely believes that what he did was right, and Antony was in the wrong.

Furthermore, he cannot see that other people are dishonourable.

Another comment he makes shortly before his death is that he, "found no man but he was true to me." This means that everyone was honest and honourable with him.

It is idealistic, but it is not true.

Cassius has been manipulating Brutus throughout the play.

At the beginning of the play, Brutus mentioned that Cassius cannot always be trusted, but then chooses to ignore it.

At the end of the play, Brutus accuses Cassius of corruption.

Brutus chooses to ignore the bad things that Cassius has done so that he does not have to admit to himself that he was manipulated into killing his friend and causing a civil war.

And you can see that how we're using those quotations and other things we know about the play to talk about Brutus' hamartia, his faults, and how they led to his downfall.

It was his own fault in many ways.

So that's quite a complicated answer, and if you've got anything like that, that's absolutely brilliant, and I'll be really, really, really impressed.

If you've got some things in there, great.

I'm really impressed with that as well, because it is a difficult question.

Now, you might want to pause the video now and use some of the information I've got on screen here to help improve your answer.

If you do, pause the video, improve your answer, and then come back to me when you are done.

Okay.

Welcome back.

Now, the only thing left for me to remind you to do in today's lesson is complete the quiz.

So make sure you look down below and you find the button for the quiz and complete it so you can look at everything you have learned in today's lesson.

Guys, as always, I'm really proud to be able to teach you, and I feel really privileged.

We've got right to the end of the play.

We've seen how it ends.

We've just got one lesson left, and that lesson will be on writing about "Julius Caesar." So we're going to look at a question or a couple of questions, and we're going to see how we might write about the play.

So as always, guys, you've done really well.

I'm really pleased.

I'm really proud of you, and I'll see you next time for our final lesson on "Julius Caesar.".