In 1847 Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights; a novel as eccentric as it is unsettling, its themes including the oppositional natures of horror and beauty, dreams and reality, hate and adoration, fused into one strange and dark novel. This essay is a comparative analysis of two film adaptations of Brontë’s novel; the thesis being the 1939 film adaptation, titled Wuthering Heights and directed by William Wyler, presents the story within the romance genre. By comparison the 2011 adaptation…
Star-Crossed Lovers The Shakespearean play, Romeo and Juliet, is one of the worlds most known tragedies. Rather than the use of a bright setting, director Franco Zeffirelli uses techniques using music to support their love in the scene, while another director by the name of Baz Luhrmann primarily uses setting rather than the film’s music. Both cinematic versions of the same play are different from each other in the way they are directed. Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann use cinematic…
Although, as Richard the Third, both Laurence Olivier and Benedict Cumberbatch speak straight to the camera in a fashion that makes the viewer feel as if they are complicit in their plots and schemes, and although both costumes show physical indications of Richard’s deformity, the two portrayals tell a considerably different story about Richard’s wicked origins. Laurence Olivier’s Richard is an infamous legend; the film does its best to tell a story about one of many in search of the English…
Historically, it is evident that masculine and feminine authorities display their power in contrasting ways. Three recent studies have concluded that only eighteen percent of men share similar personality traits with women, supporting the common standard that women are more “sensitive, attentive to others and apprehensive, while males are more forceful and aggressive.” (Rettner) While looking at the tragedy King Lear by William Shakespeare, the theme of gender division is outlined throughout the…
Rithvik Asani Mrs. Miller English 1, Period 1 28 February 2017 Act II In Act 2 Scene 2, Juliet wants to slow things in the relationship between her and Romeo and wants to take things at a steady and unhurried pace, displaying her more reasonable nature, as seen through the use of a simile. In this part of the scene, Juliet starts to show her more rational character and nature, as Romeo starts to swear and makes many ignorant promises to always love and adore Juliet, because he is unaware of the…
Shakespeare’s King Lear is one of the most identifiable works of tragedy, since its storyline is one in which the audience can visualize how great Lear’s downfall truly is. On the subject of this, Aristotle’s definition of a tragedy is “the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself” directly relating to the plot of King Lear. Being as it may, play writers have attempted to create their own film adaptations based on King Lear. While the film…
In class we have discussed numerous rhetoric’s from across Shakespeare’s plays. Within them, the characters are constantly trying to persuade other characters into doing certain things. Shakespeare gives many of his characters very different methods of persuasion. Sometimes it’s planting false information into someone’s mind like Iago in Othello, who manipulated the title character to kill his wife. Even so, there are times when the rhetoric fails and so did the characters that gave them. In the…
What’s Behind the Mask? In a world full of so much injustice and hurt, it is no wonder we put on fronts and wear masks that ensure no one sees beyond the pretty smiles. In his poem, We Wear the Mask, Paul Laurence Dunbar uses powerful descriptions to deliver the message that people hide their pain and suffering from those around them. The use of “we” in the opening stanza of the poem, “We wear the mask that grins and lies” (stanza 1), proposes this a universal problem and that all humans are…
In poems “Sympathy” and “Caged Bird” by the altruistic and erudite Paul Laurence Dunbar and Maya Angelou, they constantly talk about the lives of a caged bird. This is due to the birds symbolizing a hardship. The meaning of the poems are to show how hard African-Americans had to fight for their rights because of how many limitations they we given. There are many things that make the two poems similar. The first quote that supports this is “... I know what the caged bird feels” (Sympathy, Stanza…
When ones hope is taken away it serves as a conflict and it makes one feel as if they are worthless.In “Sympathy” Paul Laurence Dunbar talks about a bird that is isolated in a cage from its habitat and makes an effort in trying to escape the cage. In “Caged Bird” Maya Angelou compares a free bird to a caged bird and their how different their lives can be when in two different scenarios. In both of these poems the birds are alike in many ways and also very different. In “Sympathy” and “Caged…