Spend the Night

“A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.” In comedy, the only characteristic shared between comedies is their want to make people laugh, and it can be difficult to pull off such a seemingly simple task. As defined by the New Oxford…

Investigation Describe and Analyze: Starry Night is one of Vincent Van Gogh, a French post-impressionist, many famous paintings and is also the most well-known. This painting was created in 1889 and is an oil on canvas landscape painting. According to Wikipedia Vincent Van Gogh painted this painting while in an asylum and is actually a view out of his window. Today, Starry Night is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York and has been since 1941. The night sky background was the…

A Midsummer’s Nightmare Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests that its relationships are happy ones, but this suggestion is complicated. In fact, the interplay between each of the couples indicates a nefarious quality present in all these relationships. This sinister quality can become even undeniably present in productions of this play. Brown writes that while scholars cannot consider any performance to be an authoritative adaptation, every performance brings interpretative…

Twelfth Night to She’s the Man In the comedy play Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare explores the key idea of Hidden Identity through his characterisation of Viola and Duke Orsino. He also explores how in some situations girls/boys have to dress or pretend to be someone they’re not to fit into society. This idea has been transformed into a modern day context in the Andy Fickmans film She’s the Man. She used the same characters that were in both texts but placed in a new setting and a new…

Shakespeare is known for his history in literature. In every book he has written, the drama that occurs engages the audience. In the play Twelfth Night, there are various parts where drama is created through the forms of betrayal . Throughout this play I, learned that honesty can prevent betrayal just like misunderstandings can create betrayal. Although there were many forms of betrayal demonstrated towards the end of the play, there was only one friendship in the form of betrayal between the…

Love is Overrated, Right? Saying one thing and doing another is a very common occurrence, and reveals one's true self. Though much of Shakespeare’s The Twelfth Night is focused and revolved around Countess Olivia and what she does, her thoughts and actions prove to be very jellylike, allowing some to believe she is the most self-indulgent, overrated character in the play. One weakness that makes her an overrated character is her erratic behavior. In the very first scenes of the play, we…

romantic comedies we see in present day. One of the prime examples of this is his play Twelfth Night, or What You Will. Shakespeare uses one of his ever-present techniques of crossdressing to create commotion, that eventually resolves itself and allows the characters to receive a happy ending (at least those who deserve it). A perfect example of this takes place in the third scene of act four of Twelfth Night. Prior to this scene, Olivia has given Sebastian a pearl as a token of her love.…

The protagonist of the play Twelfth Night is highly regarded as Shakespeare’s strongest and most developed female character by both critics and scholars. Viola is a cunning character who prompts a central issue in the play by disguising herself as a man; she provokes hetero- and homoerotic responses. Though Viola is a very intellectual woman, it is not her mind that stirs these emotions from Olivia and Orsino. Due to the soft and gentle features Viola has when in disguise, both males and females…

It was very late at night. I was not a hundred percent sure what time it was. If I were to guess, I would say that it was 11:30. As I was thinking to myself, I said "Wow it is really late I need to go to bed". As I was getting ready to lie down I heard a loud bang. I thought that maybe it was my neighbors, since they are always working on things at all hours of the day and night. When I heard another loud noise, a short time later I decided to go back downstairs to see for myself what it could…

The Three Stages of Madness: The Essence of Twelfth Night Throughout history, madness has been used as a scapegoat to blame people for attempting to break the social standards in a society. In fact, ones who break those social constructs can never achieve a happy ending, as society deems them mad. In Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare, after Viola has been shipwrecked in a violent storm off the coast of Illyria and disguises herself as a boy, she, thus disguised becomes a messenger in the…