You shall, Marc Antony.
-Brutus
Julius Caesar Act III, scene i, Line 231
This is Brutus telling Antony that he, Antony, can speak at Caesar's funeral. Big mistake. Brutus and his crew have just killed Caesar, presumably because they felt that Caesar was getting too big for his britches and was about to become a threat to the republic of Rome. And they want the people to know this and to accept this. However, Marc Antony is going to have something slightly different to say at the funeral and it's all going to turn very bad for Brutus and his buddies. But Brutus doesn't realize this at the time. If he did he would take a page from that great current statesman and go back to Antony and say,
"Okay, hold up, I made a slight misstatement. I said 'shall' and I should have said 'shan't'. That's what I meant to say, 'shan't'. So the sentence that I misspoke should have been 'You shan't, Mark Antony'. So, there, that's good, right? We've got that settled?"
But of course Brutus didn't do this and well, you know what happened. Too bad.
And might I note (this is the part where you say, "You shall, Pete."), as I've noted many times before, just how relevant Shakespeare's stuff is to our modern times. I can't help but marvel at this, and it just never ceases to amaze me.
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