Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

Let it be who it is: for Romans now Have thews and limbs like to their ancestors; But, woe the while! Our fathers’ minds are dead, And we are governed with our mother’s spirits; Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion all the interim is Like a phantasma or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council, and the state of man The nature of an insurrection.

To cut the head off and then hack the limbs, Like wrath in death and envy afterwards; For Antony is but a limb of Caesar:

I grant I am a woman, but withal A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife. I grant I am a woman, but withal A woman well reputed, Cato’s daughter. Think you I am no stronger than my sex, Being so fathered and so husbanded?

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

Danger knows full well That Caesar is more dangerous than he. We are two lions littered in one day, And I the elder and more terrible: And Caesar shall go forth.

‘Break up the senate till another time, When Caesar’s wife shall meet with better dreams.’

O constancy, be strong upon my side! Set a huge mountain ’tween my heart and tongue! I have a man’s mind, but a woman’s might. How hard it is for women to keep counsel!

Ay me, how weak a thing The heart of woman is!

This wasth noblest Roman of them all. All the conspirators save only he Did that they did in envy of great Caesar; He only, in a general honest thought And common good to all, made one of them His life was gentle, and the elements So mixed in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world ‘This was a man!’