Orsino depicts love as an “appetite” that he cannot feed. At another point of the play he names his desires for love “fell and cruel hounds”. In act 1, scene 5 Olivia says “Even so quickly may one catch the plague?” She’s using this metaphor to relate love to a disease saying if you have too much of it, it can make you sick. Love throws the characters and the play out of order, however that order is quickly put back into place when Shakespeare creates a Deus Ex Machina by making the character Sebastian turn up and fix everything. This reflects the times in Elizabethan society when they had divine order and a strict hierarchy.
Of course MAAN follows Shakespeare’s traditional comedy structure but modern critics have their own agenda that a comedy, being such a complex genre, should conform to. Since the time of the ancient Greeks critics have struggled to define it, Plato described it as a series of events you would ‘blush to practice yourself’. Susan Snyder who writes for the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Company, states that - ‘Comedy involves men of middling estate, its perils are small scale, its outcomes peaceful’. This is an excellent summary for the majority of Shakespeare’s plays; however it is not necessarily accurate in relation to MAAN. It is true to say that a comedy involves ‘men of a middling estate’, in MAAN the protagonists share the company of the Prince Don Pedro, and are socially superior to the watchmen such as Dogberry and Verges.
In a scholarly journal by Hugh Madean, ‘In disguise in Elizabethan drama’, disguise is described as ‘the substitution, overlaying or metamorphosis of dramatic identity, whereby one character sustains two roles, this may involve deliberate or involuntary masquerade, mistaken or concealed identity, madness or possession’. This is an important idea since Shakespeare takes this technique and uses it to add another dimension to the play, in the sense that it helps to distinguish what the characters are going through. Many say that this Shakespeare giving a social criticism of the nobility, illustrating how finery and expensive garments do not make a different to the inert nature of a person, instead it is portrayed throughout actions and sentiments. Clothing in King Lear can be contrasted with nakedness as much as pretence of appearances can be contrasted with truth or reality. For Lear, Kent and Edgar clothing is of great significance as they have all had to add an element of disguise into their lives for different reasons as clothing is the simplest to change.
His comedy is so great that he is able to transcend normal societal rules; Elizabethan England was an incredibly hierarchal society in which absolute respect ought to be shown to those in power, and yet although he is a servant, the Fool’s humorous nature seems to exempt him from the expectation of respectfulness. The Fool is not present after Act 3, and his absence removes the comic relief of the play and plunges it into more serious,
Compare and contrast the presentation of women in contemporary society in Wilde’s ‘A Woman of No Importance’ and Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’. Consider alternate viewpoints of both presentations in your answer. Both Wilde and Ibsen present Woman in contemporary society to be of lower importance to men. In both plays the main female characters are shown to be weak and rely solely on a man to look after them. However as both plays progress we begin to see that Nora and Mrs Arbuthnot are not like the stereotypical woman of this society when they begin to show courage and independence.
Mean Girls is sending a message to say take responsibility for your before it gets worse. In Mean Girls Cady acts like an innocent bystander and doesn’t own up to anything she has done. When she keeps ditching her real friends Janice and Damian and then denies doing it. When Cady was at Regina’s house and writing stuff in the burn book and talking about people behind their backs and says “ I know it may seem like I’ve become a bitch, but that’s only because I was acting like a bitch” She was in denial of doing anything wrong and she was just acting. In the office after the ‘burn book’ was spread across the school Cady denied she had taken any part in it, But after all the denying and lying everyone saw her for the backstabber she is and Janice saw us way before everyone.
Though she does not hide her insecurities as much as Amanda does. She does not put on an act because she is very shy and can be best understood through her body language. Mama observes this behavior in the beginning of the text by explaining “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners homely and ashamed” (297). Maggie is ashamed because of the “burn scars down her arms and legs” (297) from a house fire years ago. The insecurities of Maggie’s character are not just skin deep, much like my own.
As a result, she remains quiet instead of speaking out, which prevents her from being fully in control of situations when she confronts people, especially Lucy; Elinor is often dominated by the other characters. However, despite her passive disposition, Elinor keeps her relationships with other characters so stable that she earns herself the title of the one with sense throughout the book. One of Elinor’s greatest strengths is affection. Upon hearing people’s despair and anxiety, she is easily attached to the story she hears and shows a great concern in people. Elinor’s attitude is well portrayed throughout the novel, especially when Marianne is involved.
The seriousness of their love results from the lovers’ disrepudance (?) of artificial language of ‘love’ and superficial code they had tired by at the beginning of the play. This is seen through the development of language form beginning with rhyme (Levin- “Comedy set the pattern of courtship embodied in dance (rhyme)) heavily used in the first act to its replacement of Blank verse which representative of a for more logical and realistic tone. This also reflects a common Shakespearean comment on Appearance versus Reality which is often a deeper theme discussed in tragedy. Tragedy is said to be further represented in Shakespeare’s use of opposites or antithesis.
It is evident that these differing values in Elizabethan and modern society are reflected in the character's relationships within each text. Inequality among genders is a theme that is conveyed in Shakespeare's play, ' The Taming of the Shrew.' In the play, the characters portray a comedic battle of the sexes where the tradition of marriage serves as the battleground. The men strive for marital harmony where the wife must conform to society's ideals of female obedience under male authority to achieve peace and love. This notion is best exemplified through Petruchio's 'taming' of Katherina.