Political Acts and Political Acting: Roman Gesture and Julius Caesar.

The article examines the manipulative power of gesture in the context of the play "Julius Caesar," by William Shakespeare. Topics covered include the connection between the gesture of hand-shaking with the quality of constancy, ways rhetorical gestures is used to convince a crowd of people and the connection between Shakespeare's self-conscious theatricality of action with concerns about the performative nature in politics in the play and in the Elizabethan England.