Foreshadowing in Julius Caesar

Cassius makes reference here to Virgil’s Aeneid. He portrays himself as Aeneas, the Trojan hero, and Caesar as Anchises, the crippled father. This comparison tells us two things. First, Cassius thinks of himself as superior to Caesar and thus deserving of political leadership. Second, by alluding to one of Rome’s founding fathers, Cassius foreshadows his intentions to overthrow Caesar and rebuild Rome anew.

Shakespeare makes dramatic use of the Roman tradition of augury: reading the future in the patterns of nature. Shakespeare has begun to toy with the play’s sense of realism. Casca claims to have seen supernatural figures around Rome: lions, “ghastly women,” “men all in fire.” The audience cannot tell whether these things exist in the world of the play or in Casca’s mind. The question of realism reaches a peak in Act IV, when both Brutus and the audience confront the ghost of Caesar.

Brutus’s estimation of Antony’s power proves to be pivotal in the ensuing acts. Brutus fails to see Antony as a potential catalyst. Indeed, thus far the audience has had little reason to doubt this opinion. Shakespeare limits Antony’s appearances in the first two acts, making it tempting to believe Brutus’s opinion that Antony is no more than Caesar’s puppet.

In another illustration of how subjective the readings of the heavens are in the play, Cinna sees the clouds as brows lined with worry over the events of the coming day.

Shakespeare’s use of “whet” is a beautifully subtle choice that serves as both metaphor and metonymy. To whet a knife is to sharpen its blade. In this characterization of Brutus as a knife, we understand both the nature of his potential role in the assassination, as well as a more literal foreshadowing of the knife he will wield in the fateful event.

In a fascinating address to the Fates themselves, Brutus speaks of the inevitability of death. On one level, he is justifying the murder of Caesar by pointing out how death comes to everyone. To kill a man is to free him of the dread of death. On another level, Brutus is foreshadowing his own death, as well as the deaths of his fellow conspirators. After all, he says, “That we shall die, we know.”

Here is another brilliant rhetorical move by Antony. What he wishes to do is stir the hearts and minds of the public to mutiny and rage. By framing the possibility of mutiny as a hypothetical condition, he plants the seed in the mind of the public. He then deftly backs away, citing the nobility of Brutus and Cassius once more.

This is a clever reversal. To say the conspirators names are “prick’d” means they are marked by the pen for death, but specifically in a way that calls to mind Caesar’s stabbing.

Despite the tensions in the friendship of Brutus and Cassius, these characters part on touching terms. The audience gets the sense that this will indeed be their final encounter.