https://www.absolutecigars.com
The students reviewed the plots of the plays discussed in class in order to go beyond the actual story and delve deeper into the context, meaning and relevance of the scenarios presented by English playwright William Shakespeare.
Main Points Discussed
The profound antisemitic connotation of The Merchant of Venice is seen in the way Jews are portrait.
Shylock plays the stereotypical greedy Jew, who is spat upon by his Christian enemies, and constantly insulted by them.
His daughter runs away with a Christian and abandons her Jewish heritage.
After being outsmarted by the gentiles, Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity— at which point, he simply disappears from the play, never to be heard of again.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream fits into four acts all of the material that would normally occupy a five-act play; the main story, climax, and even a period of falling action are capped by a happy turn of events that would seem to mark the play’s end.
Shakespeare includes a fifth act. Since he has already resolved the tensions of the main plot, he treats Act V as a joyful comic epilogue.
Except for a short closing scene, the act is committed wholly to the craftsmen’s performance of Pyramus and Thisbe.
In wrapping up the conflict before the last act, Shakespeare affords himself the opportunity to give the audience one act of pure, uncomplicated comedy.
He offers a play-within-a-play whose comical rendition caps the cheerful mood of the Athenians watching the play.
Taming of the Shrew
Disguise in The Taming of the Shrew enables characters to temporarily change their social positions.
By donning a disguise, Lucentio transforms himself in the eyes of everyone around him from a young gentleman into a scholar, and Tranio transforms himself from a servant into an aristocrat.
Clothing facilitates this effect because outward appearance controls the perceptions of others: because Tranio appears to be a gentleman, people treat him as a gentleman. However, as Petruchio says, no matter what a person wears, his inner self will eventually shine through—Lucentio, for instance, may appear to be a tutor, but as soon as the courtship with Bianca develops, he must revert to himself again.
Additionally, one cannot escape one’s past simply by changing one’s clothes.
People are bound together in intricate webs and, interwoven as such, cannot escape their identity.
The webs tend to reveal true selves regardless of attire or intent—a point that Shakespeare illustrates when Vincentio encounters Tranio in disguise.
Tracing the evolution of the Caliban’s symbolism, Retamar argues that even as European colonizers have sought to degrade America by assigning it the negative identity of the Caliban, American culture must be derived from its Caliban [cannibalistic] characteristics, which basically means resistance to European colonizing views of the American subject.
Source:
Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America / Roberto Fernández. Retamarhttps://icaadocs.mfah.org/icaadocs/THEARCHIVE/FullRecord/tabid/88/doc/1056617/language/en-US/Default.aspx
Twelfth Night
Twelfth Night, the holiday after which the play is named, was celebrated as a festival in which everything was turned topsy-turvy, with traditional social roles and behavior temporarily suspended. Are things similarly turned upside down in Illyria?
Normal situations are turned upside down in Illyria in several ways:
First, there is the prevalence of disguise and the ambiguity of gender roles. The central character in this regard is the protagonist, Viola.
After she arrives on Illyrian shores, she takes on the disguise of a young man, thus at once concealing her identity and reversing her normal gender role.
This reversal leads to a most confusing love life, in which she winds up loving a man and being loved by a woman who do not realize that she is a woman.
Meanwhile, the play also depicts attempts to alter the established systems of class and authority. Malvolio, for instance, dreams of marrying Olivia and gaining authority over his social superiors, such as Sir Toby.
The servants, whom Malvolio does command, get authority over Malvolio himself by being able to lock him in the dark room as a madman.
Meanwhile, Malvolio’s antagonist, Maria, succeeds where he fails by managing to marry Sir Toby and thereby rising from her common birth to a noble rank. Indeed, Malvolio’s difficulties seem to stem from his unwillingness to be abnormal enough. He dreams of escaping the rigid class system that makes him a servant, but otherwise he is a paragon of respectability and proper behavior.
These qualities, in the topsy-turvy world of the play, cause his downfall, because they earn him the enmity of Sir Toby and Maria.
Finally, all these events take place within a setting in which madness and anarchy are everywhere—Sir Toby’s drunkenness and disruptive behavior, Malvolio’s supposed insanity, Feste’s clowning, and the general perplexity caused by the doubling of Viola and Sebastian.
All in all, the play is permeated with a sense of joyful confusion, in which nothing can be taken for granted. Thus, Twelfth Night is about self-deception
The Winter's Tale
The abrupt shift in mood after Time announces the passage of sixteen years, and the action shifts to Bohemia.
Winter comes to an end, and spring enters, bringing with it the promise of rebirth—and as the seasons change, so the story shifts away from tragedy and into the realm of fairy tale and romantic comedy.
The imagery of Act IV is dominated by the flowers that Perdita wears and dispenses as hostess of the sheep shearing, and the mood of the act is found in the cheerful songs of Autolycus.
This spirit is eventually brought back to Sicilia, where Act V undoes much of what seemed so tragic in Act III—Perdita is restored to her rightful home, Hermione is restored to life, and even Paulina is given a new husband.
The Winter's Tale, then, ends the way all winters end—by giving its characters the promise of forgiveness and a fresh start.
Fate restored Leontes' and Polixenes' fridneship, and brought Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and Paulina together.
Shakespeare provides us with plenty of clues that Henry is self-consciously performing the part of the good king, but he doesn’t necessarily give us the sense that Henry is in fact bad.
Henry V, explores the idea that the qualities that make one a great king are not necessarily morally admirable ones—what makes a good king is not what makes a good person.
Henry is willing to kill his former friends coldly and slaughter thousands of French people in the heat of battle to satisfy the demands of his throne; he must put his personal feelings second to the requirements of rulership and achieve the result he desires at any cost.
Henry’s act of placing responsibility for the war on others helps him to achieve his goals, as it burdens others with the moral pressure of stopping the war.
This behavior may make Henry seem unlikable, but it also makes him a great leader and leads directly to the triumph at Agincourt in Act IV.
Ultimately, the answer to the question may be that there are no good kings—just effective ones.
Richard II
Most of the characters in the play agree that Richard is a bad leader, and we can see why: he mismanages his country's budget, is out of touch with the common people, creates friction among his relatives, and leaves the country at exactly the wrong moment.
On the other hand, Bolingbroke succeeds in returning from exile, building good foreign relations, obtaining the loyalty of Richard's noblemen, and winning the love of the common folk.
He is also a plain-spoken man of action, in comparison to Richard's poetic virtuosity and ineffectiveness in practical matters.
We see them explicitly contrasted in several scenes: for example, when York recounts the ride into the city of London, during which the people cheered Bolingbroke but dumped dust and rubbish on Richard's head (V.ii.4-40).
It is, of course, ironic that the two are first cousins.
The conspirators manage to kill Caesar, the physically infirm man, who is deaf in one ear, probably epileptic, and aging; indeed, it may be Caesar’s delusions about his own immortality as a man that allow the conspirators to catch him off guard and bring about his death.
In many ways, however, Caesar’s faith in his permanence proves valid: the conspirators fail to destroy Caesar’s public image, and Antony's words to the crowd serve to burnish Caesar’s image.
Additionally, the conspirators fail to annihilate the idea that Caesar incarnated: that of a single supreme leader of Rome.
Death does not diminish Caesar’s influence on matters or his presence in the minds of those who loved him.
Caesar seems to speak from the grave when Antony reads his will, stirring the people to rebellion. Cassius and Brutus attribute their deaths to Caesar when they fall in battle.
Perhaps most important, Antony begins to call Octavius “Caesar” when Octavius starts to display an undeniable authority in military strategizing.
This appellation has a double significance: it reveals both Octavius’s future as the bearer of Caesar’s personal legacy and the metamorphosis of Caesar the man into Caesar the institution.
Even with his death, Caesar has initiated a line of Roman emperors, ending the era of Brutus’s beloved republic
The attraction between Romeo and Juliet is immediate and overwhelming, and neither of the young lovers comments on or pretends to understand its cause.
Each mentions the other’s beauty, but it seems that destiny, rather than any particular character trait, has drawn them together.
Their love for one another is so undeniable that neither they nor the audience feels the need to question or explain it.
As Alessandro D'Avina would say, the heart in not controllable....
Comments
Post a Comment