Plot Summary Of The Play 'Much Ado About Nothing'

Chapter 20 demonstrated the importance and the beneficial of marriage; in addition, explained why couples do not marry. However, the article begins an anecdotal story of Renita Pitts and transitions to some of the financial benefits for marriage. Personally, the reading made me think about why people in society must be married. In my opinion, marriage should not have any financial benefits; alternatively, should only hold personal symbolic value. Society should not pressure anyone to marry, similarly to how Renita felt pressured to stay married.

Shakespeare’s prose demonstrates that during the Elizabethan era, weddings were the most important day in a person's life; they showed wealth and social status. In the upper class, marriage was seen as an opportunity to gain property and friends. For this reason, marriages among wealthy families were more likely to be arranged than those among the lower class. Occasionally, couples were first introduced to each other on the day of the wedding!

Lady Bracknell goes on to question Jack about his parents and housing. The people during this time were ignorant, they did not see that marriage was not only about money and social status, a marriage is also about love and care for one another. Lady Bracknell did not approve of Jack after questioning him, despite her knowing that her daughter and Jack were in love and they truly cared for each other. Later in the play, Algernon goes Bunburying to explore Jack's house in the country, and he meets Cecily Cardew, Jack's niece who he falls in love with instantly and asks for her to marry him. Even though Cecily agrees, Jack says that she can not marry without his consent and Lady Bracknell asks Cecily, “You are perfectly right in making some slight alteration.

However, in reality not every marriage is a functional one. Society plays a huge role on the repression that enforce in marriage. Individuals are more accepting of marriage now and understand that every person does not necessarily want to marry but unhappy and feel trapped. Perhaps the in the "The Story of an Hour" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" the husbands might of love their wives and the feeling might of being mutual, but since it all took place in a different time period where society harshly criticizes women for not being married or for leaving the marriage they were in. Both women in the stories directly have a problem with the institution of marriage and feel like society is the one in charge of trapping women into marriage.

Mark Twain, in 1888, stated that “both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.” Under the law during this time period, marriage was considered a completely different institution than what state it is known to be today. To have a marriage with several of the same controlling aspects during this day and age would be described as abusive. In Susan Glaspell’s play, Trifles, Glaspell demonstrates male dominance, female oppression as well as female insubordination during the early 1900’s effectively by revealing the unhealthy nature of the male and female character’s relationship.

In my opinion, I think that the movie version and the play version, of Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare, are not very different. They have a lot of similarities for example; Hero and Claudio met and thought they should be together, Claudio thinks he saw Hero cheating on him with another man. So therefore at their wedding he demanded for her to die because of her relations with another man. Claudio realizes he was wrong about what she did and he had to marry her cousin without seeing her at all till they’re married.

Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing, is a play about multiple relationships. Hero and Claudio are the first relationship, and Beatrice and Benedick are the other relationship. The play talks about the ideal traits of a couple in the Shakespearian time period. Times have changed, as couples have evolved and have generally become less “traditional”. Back in the day, the female would submit to the male.

In Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, the young couple gets married when Juliet is fourteen years old. In the fifteen century, during Romeo and Juliet’s time, marriage at a young age was extremely common, whereas in modern times many people get married close to thirty. Age is not the only wedding custom that differs today. Unlike the fifteenth century, in today’s society people are able to marry anyone they choose, people marry for much different reasons, and what is expected from the couple’s families have changed. Romeo and Juliet shows that marriage in the fifteenth century is between a man and women, and must be approved by the two families coming together in matrimony.

Love is a complicated affair, it involves the two lives of the couples and the lives of everyone around them. There are many factors that could break or make a relationship, for one to be successful they must be able to succeed in all of those factors. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest delves into these factors regarding love and marriage. Wilde stresses the importance of social status and gender expectations as a key guideline for a successful marriage. For Wilde, social status is defined as birth, wealth, and power.

According to William E. Mead ‘the evils of matrimony, […], were a favourite theme in the Middle Ages’ . This means that marriage was a recurring topic and especially marriages that had trials and problems to overcome. Indeed, in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer uses for some of his tales the setting of marriage. In this essay, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and the Franklin’s Tale will be used to demonstrate how Chaucer represented marriage and what possible functions could it have. With functions I mean in the texts as part of the plot as well as how marriage functions as a plot device.

Buvanasvari A/P Palakrisnan AEK140003 ACEA 1116 Elements of English Literature Dr. Nicholas Pagan Paper #3 From “Marriage” By Marianne Moore This institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for which one says one need not change one’s mind about a thing one has believed in, requiring public promises of one’s intention to fulfill a private obligation: I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time, this firegilt steel alive with goldenness; how bright it shows— “of circular traditions and impostures, committing many spoils,” requiring all one’s criminal ingenuity to avoid!

Oscar Wilde’s satirical play The Importance of Being Earnest, set in the late Victorian era, London, is a portrayal of British upper class society and its conventions surrounded by a strict code of conduct. In 1890’s class society, earnestness was desired; to follow the moral code and social obligations in order to keep up one’s appearance. Besides, there was a huge gender disparity between men and women. In the play, Wilde criticizes the social inequality and Victorian upper class standards. He characterizes Victorian personae making fun of their qualities; hypocrisy, arrogance and absurdism, ultimately the very vital state and lifeline of not being earnest at all in Victorian society.

One thinks more of how society views them more than thee other. This demonstrates that marriage may often be more a matter of economics than of love, the examples of Marianne and Elinor show that it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. And, insofar as marriage brings families together and creates new family units, it can create strong and lasting bonds of familial love. Elinor and Marianne ultimately do marry for love in the

For instance, Lady Bracknell’s hypocritical nature is exposed when the topic of marriage is brought up. “Lady Bracknell: But I do not approve of mercenary marriages. When I married Lord Bracknell, I had no fortune of any kind. But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way (Wilde 78).”

On several occasions, characters in the play express their indifference to matrimony: Lane, Algernon’s servant, mentions in conversation with Algernon that his marriage was “consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person”, undermining the importance of intimacy in marriage. Lady Bracknell backs up this idea in Act III, where she tells Cecily Cardew and Algernon that: “I am not in favor of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable”, displaying the belief that one does not actually need to be acquainted with the person they are to marry. Lady Bracknell also refers to another characteristic of Victorian marriages, which was their establishment as a predestined business transaction. In Victorian society, arranged marriages were more often a rule than an exception, and children had little to no say about these matters.