building an empire brian carruthers summary

It is these actions, performed via gesture, that I explore within Julius Caesar, and in doing so connect Shakespeare's self-conscious theatricality of action with concerns about the increasingly performative nature of politics, both in Caesar's Rome and in Elizabethan England. Whether using a handshake to wordlessly seal conspiracy, rearing a knife in an assassination, or being emotionally and politically manipulative through gesticulation, Shakespeare's play reveals not only how hands can alter the course of history, but how such theatrical practices themselves aid and abet such a diversion. The very deniability of gesture ensures the continuance of misdeeds and malpractices. The agency of gesture is all the more potent for its ephemerality: hands continually write and rewrite the script of the political moment on air that leaves no trace of itself. It is my contention in this piece that gestures are embodied social metaphors: they are the epitome of the political as personal, and vice versa. I look at the gesture of hand-shaking and its supposed connections with the quality of constancy, and the use of hands in the assassination of Caesar the use of reported gestures and what it means in terms of both performance and sincerity and the ways that rhetorical gesture is used to convince a crowd of people, with consideration given to the Puritan fears of theatricality. This article explores the manipulative power of gesture and the parallels Shakespeare draws with the performance of politics within the Roman society he presents in Julius Caesar, as well as its application to Elizabethan England.

Building an empire brian carruthers summary