We just finished reading Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar.” As we have discussed and experienced, the play deals with many issues of human nature, including: betrayal, trust, loyalty, justice, and leadership. There have been many instances in real life that reflect what happens in plays, one of the most famous is John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
Read this diary entry, which Booth wrote after he killed Lincoln, and compare it to Brutus’s decision to kill Caesar. Be sure to note his mention of Shakespeare’s character, Brutus, in his diary entry.
Once you have read the entry, answer 3 of 7 questions (you decide which 3!) listed below and post them as a comment. Use complete sentences and evidence from the text to support your answers.
1. Describe how Booth justifies the shooting of Abraham Lincoln in his diary entry. How does this compare to the way Shakespeare's character Brutus justifies the assassination of Julius Caesar?
2. Assess Booth's claims that his "action was purer than" that of Brutus and that he never sought any personal gain.
3. How do you think Brutus might respond to the claims made in Booth's diary? What might these two figures, Booth and Brutus, say to each other if they met?
4. Diary entries like Booth's give us access to a writer's innermost thoughts. How do we gain access the innermost thoughts of a dramatic character like Shakespeare's Brutus?
5. Why do you think Booth kept a diary after shooting Lincoln? (Do you think he ever anticipated that the diary would be read and/or published? If so, does this change the way we read and interpret the diary? In other words, is it possible that Booth's journal entries were crafted to sway his potential readers?)
6. Do you think there is ever any way to justify the assassination of a political leader? Why or why not?
7. Has reading Booth's diary changed your perception of Brutus's actions in the play?
1 comment:
i would say that they had the same intentions and for the same cause. booth killed lincoln thinking that he would turn out to be a bad leader and had another demeaner. brutus had killed caesar because he felt that caesar was going to ruin rome and be a bad leader. both of the leaders were good but their subbordanents werent. obviously a real big trust issue im just sayin. so they wuld have soul mates if in the same period of time. they are reincarnations lol.
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