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Brutus is an Honorable Man

  • Geoffrey Clarfield
  • Jan 30
  • 2 min read

I have always felt that Dylan and Shakespeare need to get together, so I did it for them. The lyrics are from the play Julius Caesar.


Music by Geoffrey Clarfield, copyright © 2025. Lyrics by William Shakespeare (AKA The Earl of Oxford).


Brutus is an Honorable Man


Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

And the good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar.

The noble Brutus hath told you that Caesar was ambitious:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.


Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–

They say Brutus is an honorable man;

So are they all honorable men –

Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.

He was my best friend, faithful and just to me:

But Brutus says he's ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome

Whose ransoms did the coffers fill:

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?


But when the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept,

And when the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.


Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.

You all did see that on the Lupercal

I thrice presented him a kingly crown,

Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honorable man.


I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause:

What withholds you then, to mourn for him?

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

And my heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

And I must pause till it come back to me.

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