Mimetic Desire of Cassius’ Rival in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Abstract

Desire is always produced by the imitation of the desire of other. Cassius' position and character has driven the present study which describes his desire to become the main rival in the political rivalry in Rome. The data are collected by heuristic reading of 773 dialogues in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Content analysis is applied to get the themes and contexts. The main discussion is to understand how mimetic desire theory performed by Cassius through the mimetic mechanism. The findings indicate that Julius Caesar becomes his model. Furthermore, there are ten ways of him to reach his goal through mimetic mechanism.