Year 11 Power Play Speech

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Power play Speech What is power play? In order to understand power play we must understand power itself. Power is the ability to control or influence the behaviors or thoughts of one self or others or the events happening around you. Power play is the way this power is exerted or maintained and the different ways people who seem to be in a powerless position can still have power over these people/events vice/versa. This is a common theme in the texts Exam Day and V for Vendetta, both showing various elements of power play at what could be called “stages” of power play. In V for vendetta the government holds an extremely rigid control over the people of England, and this was achieved and is maintained through fear. The main character V acts upon this to dismantle the power of the government. His form of power is a lot less direct. He holds power as a man of great intelligence and a devious nature, but his plans to destroy the government’s power are not to do it himself, but to empower the people of England to do it for themselves. Showing that the power was always in the people to remove their oppressors, had they just had the right push. Although this could of happened without V’s plotting, it is fair to say that the people of England, with the oppressed state they live in, would not of acted upon this “power in numbers” they possessed, a notion that the government had relied upon to keep their power. In contrast, we are never introduced to the way in which the government gained the power it holds over the people, but it is maintained through the people’s submissiveness and there willingness to simply go along with whatever the government tells them to do. This is shown in Exam Day by the dialogue, the parents of the boy seem semi-distraught yet they do nothing to stop it. This comes into contrast with the power play in V for Vendetta where the
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