The tragic glass of Part I involves no defeat for its hero. He does not suffer and does not experience any disaster. On the contrary, Tamburlaine’s enemies are the ones suffering disaster. Marlowe was setting a tone here, establishing a claim for the superiority of his style above the low quality of other plays. The playwright uses the rhetoric to represent his aggressive subject to be on the same line with its grandeur and with the overwhelming eloquence of its hero. Marlowe’s treatment of Tamburlaine is different from other tragedies in the use of imaginative energy in the portrayal of Tamburlaine, the tyrannical protagonist. To state that Tamburlaine is an ambitious tyrant is somehow an understatement. Even when such labelling takes place “Tamburlaine is the great drama of primary will, and nearly all its characters are caught up in the same pattern as the hero, so that nearly all speak alike…” In order to understand the treatment of the set speech in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine it is necessary to consider the play as a whole. In most of Marlowe’s plays there is a central issue to which all subsidiary issue are related. In Tamburlaine the central issue of the play is an idea. The representative of this idea is the hero himself round whom the whole action and all the other characters revolve. The characters of the plays written before Marlowe’s time gave the impression that they would take every opportunity for turning a given situation into an occasion for long and lively declamation and the delivery of set speech. Yet, for Tamburlaine, the set speech is a condition of his existence. This means that in what Tamburlaine is concerned there is a close relationship between the speaker and his First, the reader/audience is faced with the question of the way individual sentences of a speech relate to one another. Whether they are connected in a strictly logical way, whether they form a more associative series, they always emphasize the structure of a character’s level of awareness. All significant deviations from the normal frequencies in the areas of syntactic and lexical selection and combination can also serve to delineate a character: the frequency of certain sentence types (such as statements or questions), the predominance of active or passive forms, the use of parallelisms and antitheses, an abstract or concrete vocabulary, figurative speech, the emphasis on certain semantic groups and the frequency of idiomatic or clichéd expressions. Another aspect is the one that is concerned with the way in which the speeches of different characters interact. These relationships allow the reader to add the verbal behaviour of a particular character to the list of characteristic features. According to this, the character is defined by the way he responds to the preceding speech and reacts to the conversation as a whole: a character that is “bound up in his own idiosyncrasies and interests will tend to ignore the preceding speech and continue in his own vein and frequently change to monological
Before reading Peter S. Donaldson’s article, "Cinema and the Kingdom of Death: Loncraine’s Richard III," I slept eight hours, ate a well-balanced breakfast, and ran a mile to warm up. I knew from reading "In Fair Verona," that Donaldson writes for fit athletes of an intense analytical and intellectual field. Focus, pacing, and especially composure are essential to navigating his intricate and challenging course of connections, allusions, Shakespeare, media, history, past, present, future and beyond. I was prepared, though, and began slowly, but confidently, on another one of Donaldson’s awesome paths. And this time, I just may have created some of my own.
Murphy, B. & Shirley J. The Literary Encyclopedia. [nl], August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2326. Access on: 22 Aug 2010.
In Tennessee William's play, The Glass Menagerie, the character of Laura is like a fragile piece of glass. The play is based around a fragile family and their difficulties coping with life.
Characterization is the mere act of giving a character a personality or exposition on their insight or reaction. Some people say “Less is more” well that is a stupid phrase used by a toilet paper commercial and it shows, the real quote that people should use is “Quality over quantity”. I am saying is that when you have to do a report on an eight lined poem with four stanzas there is a lot of characterization in that poem, with the line “We real cool, We Left school (Lines 1-2)” says a lot about the characters of the story, the “we” means that there is more than one and they are all delinquents because they “left school” to be cool. The fact that they speak so highly of their actions mean that they have lots of pride, arrogance, and so self-absorbed that it makes the reader either relate or can make the understand their point.
Joseph, Bertram. Rev. of The Twelfth Night of Shakespeare’s Audience, by John W. Draper. Review of English Studies 3.10 (1952): 170-71. Print.
Lately, it would be difficult to find a person who speaks in the elaborate way that nearly all of Shakespeare’s characters do; we do not describe “fortune” as “outrageous” or describe our obstacles as “slings and arrows,” neither in an outward soliloquy or even in our heads. Lately, people do not declare their goals in the grandiose fashion that members of royal family of Thebes proclaim their opposing intentions: Antigone’s to honor her brother and Kreon’s to uphold his decree. Lately, people do not all speak in one unified dialect, especially not one that belongs specifically to the British upper class; Jack and Algernon’s dialogue is virtually identical, excepting content. Unlike the indistinguishably grandiose, elaborate, fancy way characters speak in Shakespeare’s plays, Antigone, The Importance of Being Earnest, and other plays written before the turn of the twentieth century, more recently written plays contain dialogue that is more unique to its speaker. This unique dialogue indicates a change in the sort of characters which drama focuses on which came with a newly developed openness to those who are different from us. Moving away from recounting tales of nobility, royalty or deities brought the lives of a common, heterogeneous populace to the stage and, with these everyday stories, more varied speech patterns.
Authors develop characters’ personalities in order to add depth to their story and allow readers to feel more connected to the characters. Beyond this, characterization also allows authors to develop the themes of their stories in a more clear manner. A prime example of this would be in the poem Judith, where the author contrasts Judith and Holofernes’ personalities in order to develop the major themes of heroism and having faith in God.
Schneider, Gary. “The Public, the Private, and the Shaming of the Shrew.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42.2 (2002): 235-258. Project Muse. Westfield State College Library, MA. 15 April 2005.
Written during a time of peace immediately following the conclusion of the War of the Roses between the Yorks and the Lancasters, William Shakespeare’s play Richard III showcases a multi-faceted master of linguistic eloquence, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a character who simultaneously manages to be droll, revolting, deadly, yet fascinating. Richard's villainy works in a keen, detestable manner, manifesting itself in his specific use or, rather, abuse of rhetoric. He spends a substantial amount of time directly interacting and therefore breaking the fourth wall and orating to the audience in order to forge a relationship with them, to make members not only his confidants of murderous intentions, but also his accomplices and powerless, unwilling cohorts to his wrongdoings. Through the reader’s exploration of stylistic and rhetorical stratagem in the opening and final soliloquies delivered by Richard, readers are able to identify numerous devices which provide for a dramatic effect that make evident the psychological deterioration and progression of Richard as a character and villain.
The archetypal tragedy of two star-crossed lovers, separated by familial hate, is a recurring theme, which never fails to capture the minds of the audience. It is only at great cost, through the death of the central characters that these feuding families finally find peace. This is an intriguing idea, one antithetical. I have chosen to analyze both Shakespeare 's Romeo and Juliet and Laurent 's West Side Story. The purpose of this essay is showing how the spoken language is utilized in these different plays to meet differing objectives. The chosen scenes to further aid comparison and contrast are the balcony scenes.
Tamburlaine has retained the fascination of audiences over the centuries due to his ability to hold his self-perception nearly constant through a meteoric rise to regional and then global power. What makes this possible, and which might contribut...
Carmen Sternwood is described with profoundness but in a different (less sexual) sense than her sister is. Marlowe encounters her on many occasions and is thorough in describing her--from her first flirtations to her continuous irritations. In t...
Characterization: Most of the characterization is indirect. We learn about these characters mostly by their action and their dialogue. However, there is some direct characterization when the narrator tells us of what has shaped the mother into what she is today.
The universal nature of the themes in The Taming of the Shrew, beg analysis and social critique. This comedic farce, by William Shakespeare, creates an elegant depiction of a modern life and romantic love with all of its masks and pretensions. It is easy to assume the perspective of a psychotherapist while witnessing the drama of Katherine and Petruchio’s love affair unfolding. Concepts like “emotional repression” and “therapeutic catharsis” neatly fit the “taming” scenario. In fact, this play offers many new insights into what it takes to create an enduring, viable marriage—if one understands it from a very contemporary, psychotherapeutic or even spiritual point of view. If one is distracted by the recent feminist perspectives of this play, it is easy to miss the integrity and practicality expressed in Katherine’s final exhortation to women on how to love their men:
Logan, Thad Jenkins. "Twelfth Night: The Limits of Festivity." Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. N.p.: Rice University, 1982. 223-38. Vol. 22 of Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. Rpt. in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.