A very big help to my teaching English to adult learners, has been this website k12reader.com. God bless whoever runs it! It has been invaluable in providing lesson plans and stuff for my ‘students’. One of the assignments I gave yesterday, really interested me. It’s a bit of Mark Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It’s really cleaver, absolutely beautiful and is a heart-strings-tugger (violin optional).

In William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, Caesar has been assassinated in front of the Senate by a group of Roman officials, including his friend, Brutus. After the murder, Brutus speaks to the gathered crowd. He convinces them that the conspirators killed Caesar to save Rome. Mark Antony is another Roman official and friend to Caesar who did not participate in the murder. Antony promises Brutus that he will not blame the conspirators if he is allowed to make a speech also.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
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:
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault;
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,—
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honorable men,—
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fi ll:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you, then, to mourn for him?
O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason! Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.”

-Julius Caesar, Act III Scene II