Ballads

Throughout history, people have used song and music to convey their messages. Older than the written word, storytelling has always held an important role in society. Stories were meant to entertain as well as to tell and immortalize historic events. They were cautionary tales, and family histories passed down orally from one generation to the next. One of the ways this was done was through song. Harpists and poets would travel the countryside, telling their tales and singing their songs to…

Written in 1594, the historically significant play by William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, has been adapted numerously throughout the years, including a traditional film version directed by Franco Zeffirelli in 1968 and a modern edition by Baz Luhrmann in 1996. As in the play, the meeting between Juliet and Romeo instigates the tragedy, with both directors utilising mise-en-scene and sound differently in this scene. Zeffirelli, however, provides an enhanced portrayal of the original piece with…

changes because it actually showed a meaningful change. Changing times caused for the demand of a more realistic portrayal of women in the form of Maid Marian. She goes from merely just Robin’s wife to holding her own in the tales. Marian in classic ballads is not very strong, she portrayed mostly as the love interest to Robin Hood and his enemy the Sheriff of Nottingham. As the tale progressed to the movie Robin Hood Prince of Thieves she was a lot more outspoken and strong as compared to her…

seen. Berthold Brecht is the German born playwright, theatre director and father of “epic theatre” (Gradesaver.com, 2015). In this essay I will be observing how Brecht has influenced other playwrights over the years, to do this I have a play (The ballad of the burning star) and a musical (1998 Broadway version of caberet) as case studies. I will then compare the examples I find to Brecht’s own work. Brecht gave future generations many methods to incorporate into their performances such as;…

not easy, but a complicated situation. The poet in “I Hid My Love” compares his beloved to the beauty of nature. The rhyme scheme is (AA, BB, CC, DD) except the first stanza, which is (AA, BB, CC, AA). The poem, “I Hid My Love”, was written in a ballad form with an iambic tetrameter. It consists of three stanzas with eight lines each. In the first stanza, the author explains how difficult it is trying to forget his beloved and love someone else, because he is reminded of her everywhere he goes.…

Billy Collins was an American writer whose phenomenally open verse—portrayed by plain dialect, delicate silliness, and a ready thankfulness for the everyday—made him a standout amongst the most well-known artists in the United States. Collins grew up predominantly in Queens, New York. He composed his first lyric at age 12 and later joined his secondary school artistic magazine. In 1963 Collins got a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, and he went ahead to procure…

The history of modern policing in the United States is deeply intertwined with the issues of race, power, and dissent. The Chicano Movement of the 1960s, a pivotal moment in the struggle for civil rights and social justice, provides a compelling lens through which to examine these complexities. The policing of dissent within the Chicano Movement is often unexplored; therefore, I want to focus on how law enforcement agencies target and criminalize chicano activists. By examining the historical…

On the other hand, is he really admiring the woods or is he contemplating suicide? This poem seems so pleasant, but I believe it indicates a deeper concern to the theme of suicide. While analyzing the text, in the first stanza, the speaker in the ballad, locates us to where…

Current popular culture trends are often highly deliberated in America - see the rapid rise and deflation of the hoverboard, the long-awaited unveiling of Pokemon Go, and the debated relevance of the Kardashian empire as examples. Rarely has the subject at hand been a smash hip-hop Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda about a lesser-known founding father obsessed with his financial system. Dubbed Hamilton after its main character, said show deserves the praise it garners; in a larger scope, it…

limited the occasions when the most elaborate church music can be performed (Rice 202). Since Joseph II had ties with the church, he exposed Europeans to the idea that Turkish people were horrible people. Emperor Joseph II dismissed the opera buffa and ballad troupes… all that remained were a troupe for the performances of spoken dramas in German and the Burgtheater orchestra, to play overtures and incidental music (Rice 202). This was just one example of how much power joseph II had and how he…