For instance, Constance's supervisor, Professor Claude Knight, frequently plagiarizes her carefully researched and written work. Later, after stealing from her, Knight runs off with a more attractive graduate student, very unlike the Shakespearean heroes Constance is so enamored of, such as Romeo. But because of the heightened absurdity of the pun-ridden scholarship of Constance, and the ugly nature of Knight, the audience does not necessarily see these events as tragic, like Romeo and Juliet's separation. Also, when Ledbelly enters the world of Shakespeare's dramas and makes them 'right,' such as when she exposes Iago's treachery, although she interrupts delicate causal chain of events that make up the plot of the play, she does not create a perfect world. In "Othello," rather than a tragedy of two good spouses subject to misunderstandings, the two characters must now understand one another on a deeper level, after the first flush of first love. Desdemona is angry, and wishes to revenge herself upon Iago, upsetting the audience and Othello's conception of his innocent wife as a pure victim, almost as much as the accusation of Desdemona's adultery. Later, Ledbelly discloses to Tybalt that he and Romeo are now joined as cousins, because of Romeo's marriage to Juliet -- but clearing up consequences...
Mistakes may be tragic, but this sense of tragic inevitability and 'if only' is wrong -- really, the fault lies within the characters and within society, not within the tales' plots. When Ledbelly sees this, she begins to understand her own marginalized place in the academic world and community, and realize that many of her own assumptions about men, such as her supervisor, are misguided. Thus, by taking a comedic rather than a tragic view of mistakes, she realizes that it is mistaken to view the plotline of Shakespeare or one's own life as inevitable. She learns to laugh along with, the audience at her own foibles. MacDonald's play ultimately becomes a life-affirming document, unlike the romantic tragedies of unintended consequence that inspired them.
This echoes life. To others we present as a simple person, perhaps even shallow and one-dimensional. Yet inside we are a mass of interminable twists and turns of plots and subplots. The story must reflect positive morality or, as Aristotle warned, when storytelling goes bad, the result is decadence. As stories become more extravagant and violent, and all the areas of storytelling - acting, stage settings or environments, music,
REFERENCES Brown, G. Movie Time: A Chronology of Hollywod. New York: McMillan, 1995. Byrge, D. The Screwball Comedy Films. New York: McFarland, 1991. "Censored Films and Television." January 2000. University of Virginia. September 2010 . Dale, A. Comedy is a Man in Trouble. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Ebert, R. "Some Like It Hot." 9 January 2000. Roger Ebert.com. 12 September 2010 . Engleking, A. "A Barbed But Generous Comedy of Manners." 17 June 2010.
Tragedy & Comedy One popular method of distinguishing between a comedy and a tragedy has always been by virtue of whether a play or film has a happy or tragic ending. Today, however, it is largely considered that a tragedy can be comic in parts, and need not necessarily result in an unhappy ending or death (Thorndike, p.2-3) Similarly, although comedies are widely defined as humorous entertainment, evoking a great deal
Taming Comedy is a vehicle for satire, and satire is a means by which to convey social commentary. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare uses the medium of comedy to transmit potent yet socially subversive ideas related to gender roles and norms. Cloaked in the ascription to patriarchy, The Taming of the Shrew instead describes the ridiculousness of gender inequity. Shakespeare's commitment to farce and satire are evident in the
As Beauvoir said, these plays tend to deal with restoring a sense of value and choice to a world that has been largely stripped of these features by modern critical, literary, and dramatic trends. Character is created with a greater sense of agency in these plays, and identity -- especially feminine identity -- ironically emerges as more of an actively created and self-determined construct through its interactions within and
Aristophanes Acharnians, Knights, and Clouds are three of the most revered works by Aristophanes. These works are of particular interest to this discourse because they have clear political and social nuances which affected the manner in which they were received in Ancient Athens. The discussion posits that Aristophanes had concrete political concerns and he utilized his craft as a dramatist to expose these matters with the purpose of affecting change in
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