Coming to the definition of it, tragedy is a literary piece of work, usually written to be performed on stage, in which tragic hero withstands a good deal of misfortune. That misfortune is not happening by chance and it has a reason, usually in characters actions and rarely by god's intervention. That means that tragic action arouses as a result of characters deeds – the character himself has a choice, and his decision affects his future and causes any further acts. One of the tragedy theoreticians, Aristotle, wrote in his book Poetics that “the structure of the best tragedy should be not simple but complex and one that represents incidents arousing fear and pity – for that is peculiar to this form of art.”[1] Aristotle gave one of the main limitations to the tragedy in general. He stated that if a tragic event is triggered by a mystifying cause, than it is only a misfortune.
The Perception of Young Hamlet’s Final Soliloquy By the Elizabethan Audience One must essentially be wheeled back in time, to gain sense of what Shakespearean plays are all about. William Shakespeare’s plays happen to be creations of time and were explicitly meant to entertain and entice the audience of the mid-1500s to the early-1600s. The Elizabethan times were quite different from the present day, and to understand the underlying connotations in Shakespeare’s plays, his past, his performances, and the conditions he lived in must be looked upon. The particular play of interest Hamlet was a play he wrote in 1602 during the last few years of his life. This was the same time period in which he had penned many of his successful tragedies including Othello, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and King Lear.
This, in his opinion, would help each actor avoid the “fourth wall” and to communicate his “awareness of being watched” (Brecht 92). All of this meant that no one performance was identical and that was what Brecht wanted. He hated mundane, staged performances that did not teach a moral lesson or touch on socially and politically controversial topics. Stanislavski’s method of acting was more focused on
The story of Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles, is very different and more complex. He uses dramatic irony and close comparison to make the audience think and to try to figure out the meanings behind the words. By closely analyzing the plays of hippolytus and Oedipus Rex one can see that Oedipus Rex is the better of the these two Greek tragedies. The plot is the most important aspect of the tragedy. Aristotle tells us that a plot is a representation of an action and must be presented as a unified whole.
By this identification, they end up forming some sort of group of absent people who get involved in the events of the “real world” of the novel itself. In this sense Goethe uses in his novel the exact same method Shakespeare used in the play: he creates a “play inside a play” to make the plot deeper and more complex. In Book III, chapter VIII, Wilhelm Meister gets to know Shakespeare’s plays thanks to the character Jarno, and in chapter XI he says: “Wilhelm had scarcely read one or two of Shakespeare’s plays, till their effect on him became so strong that he could go no farther. His whole soul was in commotion” Shortly after Meister meets Jarno again and tells him that no other book or man has ever
What is dramatically most interesting about the opening scene of Hamlet? Within the opening scene of Hamlet (written in 1599-1600), the playwright William Shakespeare, incorporates numerous dramatic features to not only inform the audience of background information associated with the plot, but to also compel the audience as the scene progresses onto the next. The variety of forms in which the playwright creates in order to make the scene more dramatic, whether it be through the craft of words or the use of conflict, leave the audience feeling both ambivalent and certain about different characters from the opening scene, therefore allowing the playwright to manipulate the way the audience thinks further on throughout the play. The stylistic device of stichomythia is seen to be used throughout the beginning of the opening scene, a device that had commonly been used in ancient greek drama. The alternating, quick lines of verse exchanged between two characters had often been intended to preserve ambiguity in a play, an effect that Shakespeare commonly presents.
The play “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles is a wonderfully written Greek tradgedy based on folklore and mythology. There are almost as many interpretations of the meaning of this play as there are versions of it that have been rewritten by other authors. Francis Fergusson and David Wiles both comment on the political aspects of Oedipus Rex and spend some time commenting on the chorus in particular (183). I feel that although Fergusson and Wiles choose different words to describe was the chorus is trying to say, that if you get down to basics, they are both trying to say something extremely similar. Fergusson describes a Sophoclean chorus as an important character or group personality, like an old Parliament or a Prime Minister (237-238).
Persin, Avi English-11H 10/25/2009 Foils of Hamlet In William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Shakespeare puts the antagonist in situations similar to the main character or protagonist. Play writers and authors do this in order to compare and contrast differences between the characters. This type of literary analysis is known as a foil. In this specific play, Hamlet, the main character, is foiled by many other characters in the play. The major foil to Hamlet is Ophelia.
ANTIGONE: LESSONS IN FOLLOWING THE HEART. Antigone is a play written in 441 B.C. by the Greek playwright, Sophocles, who is probably one of the most well- known interpretations of a tragic drama. The two main characters are Antigone and Creon. There is a conflict between Antigone and Creon throughout the play; both of them having their own ideas and opinions regarding divine law represented by Creon versus human law obeyed by Antigone.
Indeed, in the critical reading of most dramatic literature, we face the added complication that though we can read a play as "literature," the play itself was conceived as a performance text. (1) Most of the studies on the language of Shakespeare's plays have been essentially textual ones, however, ones based not on the sound of the enacted spoken word, but rather on the contemplation of the printed word in the text. Yet drama, above all verse drama, is the spoken word, or, more accurately, heightened spoken language for acting. Madeleine Doran opens her book Shakespeare's Dramatic Language with the observation that "those of us who make our roomy home in Shakespeare never cease to wonder at his artistry" (3). A major part of this artistry, she asserts, is how each of the plays "has a distinctive quality, something peculiar to that play alone - a quality that is not altogether attributable to differences in plot, theme, character, and setting, but something that feels different, or that sounds different to our ears" (3).