Few of Shakespeare’s works offer such a sharp contrast between two generations. The older characters in the play are haunted by death–the Countess has lost a husband and is aging herself; Helena’s father has passed away; Lafew is infirm; Diana’s mother is, appropriately enough, a Widow; and the King is near death as the play […]
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Bertram, the son of a widowed countess sets off from Roussilon with his friend, Parolles, and the Lord Lafeu, to the French court. He is the ward of the French king. He is unaware that Helena, orphan daughter of the countess’ physician, raised in the household of the countess, is in love with him. The countess
Summary of All’s Well That Ends Well | William Shakespeare Read More »
Answer: Macbeth is restrained from the murder of Duncan by the power of a sensitive conscience, working through imaginary terrors. Notwithstanding the assuring prophecy of the Weird Sisters, he is still haunted by the dreadful fear of the unknown, possible consequence. Immediately after the murder, conscience is still more active, and he cannot bring himself to
The play takes the form of a litany, repeating the phrases “Tell her”, “Don’t tell her” to reflect an ostensible tension within Israel and the Jewish community over how to describe events in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: “Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands of their own/Tell her again this is our
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Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine of the novel, is an intriguing character from the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s novel, “Far From the Madding Crowd.” Bathsheba is introduced in the first chapter along with Gabriel Oak. Though the two marry at the very end of the novel, their relationship at this stage as well as throughout most
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Morality Plays The morality play is a fusion of the medieval allegory and the religious drama of the miracle plays. It developed at the end of the fourteenth century and gained much popularity in the fifteenth century. In these plays the characters were generally personified abstractions of vice or virtues such as Good Deeds, Faith,
Doctor Faustus as a Morality Play | Christopher Marlowe Read More »
The Renaissance Few historical concepts have such powerful resonance as the Renaissance. Usually used to describe the rediscovery of classical Roman and Greek culture in the late 1300s and 1400s and the great pan-European flowering in art, architecture, literature, science, music, philosophy and politics that this inspired, it has been interpreted as the epoch that
Important features of Renaissance period. Read More »
Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” is famous for its biblical context, although it is technically a political poem. More specifically, Dryden uses biblical allegory and reference in order to make a statement about the politics and politicians of his time (i.e Charles II). Because of the Bible’s far reaching influence in the Christian European world, it
Absalom and Achitophel as a biblical allegory | John Dryden Read More »
At end of Act I, Macbeth declares, “I am settled, and bend up/Each corporal agent to this terrible feat” (I, vii, ll.79-80). Given the witches’ prediction that he will become Scotland’s king, we have ample reason to believe that Macbeth and his partner in regicide, Lady Macbeth, will succeed in their enterprise of murdering Duncan.
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Shakespeare’s handling of the three witches or “weird sisters” of Macbeth is in itself equivocal. He assigns them the first dozen lines of the play their proclamation that “fair is foul, and foul is fair” (I, i., .11) setting the tone for the horrid events ahead. When their prediction of Act I, scene iii that
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