A study of imageries and figures of speech used by the important characters in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

Many readers of literary works cannot enjoy the activity. It is because they find difficulties in understanding and interpreting the works especially those which use poetic language such as imagery and figure of speech. The readers read a literary work in the same way they read a newspaper or a magazine. It makes them unable to catch the meaning of the unusual words which occurs in the work. The other reason why the reader cannot enjoy reading a literary work is that they consider the work boring and unimportant. One of Shakespeare's plays entitled Julius Caesar was chosen to be analyzed in this study because it used imageries and figures of speech in the conversation among the characters. It is important to analyze imageries and figures of speech in the speeches of the important characters and to interpret the meaning of figures of speech because by understanding their speeches the reader will be able to understand the whole story of the play. The analysis of imageries and figures of speech in Julius Caesar used certain methodology with Content Analysis as the design. The steps in Content Analysis were taken concerning the objective, data collection and data analysis. The results of the analysis then answered the objective of this study. The analysis of imageries and figures of speech in the play Julius Caesar gave the following results, i.e. the imageries and figures of speech which are used by the important characters such as Brutus, Cassius, Julius Caesar, Antony, Portia and Calpurnia in their speeches. The result is also about the meaning of each figure of speech in the speeches of the important characters. Since understanding literature as a part of language is very important, the writer had the following suggestion: First, it is necessary for the teacher to give a kind of literary work such as certain plays or poems which consist of imageries and figures of speech in literary class. Second, it is useful to encourage the students to make an analysis of certain poems or short plays for the imageries and figures of speech so that they can learn a lot about poetic language