Frailty, Thy Name is Wo(Man): Crowd Dynamics and the Psychology of Persuasion in Julius Caesar
Keywords:
Denomination, manipulators, psychologicalAbstract
Shakespeare, in all his complexity, was a psychoanalyst par excellence. Many of his characters are victims - neither by choice, nor by chance- but by ‘being persuaded’ to bring to fruition the buried desires in their unconscious. Good men do incalculable harm from the best possible motive, as seen in many Shakespearean plays. This leads to the important question of who is to be blamed for the tragic flaw; the ones who are being persuaded or the ones who persuade. In this context, by an analysis of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I would like to argue that frailty, irrespective of being a man or woman, is inherent in its different manifestations in all human beings. There are excellent ‘manipulators of frailty’ who makes others lend their ears in order to get things done according to their whims, be it Caesar, Brutus, Mark Antony, Casca, Cassius or the tribunes. The role of the hulking inefficiency of the mob which sways easily in their judgments is superbly portrayed by Shakespeare. We cannot, but agree with Gustave Le Bon’s theory of crowd dynamics which conceptualizes how crowd participation extinguishes the normal psychological capacities and reduces men to the lowest common denominator.
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