However, in the early and mid-twentieth century, many people criticized that it was barely a play to amuse the audience, but without any meaningful inspiration. In order to overturn this comment, it is necessary to have an analysis of the play. “… He developed a set of attitudes and postures for which he would eventually become famous. Chief among these were his flamboyant style of dress, his contempt for conventional values, and his belief in aestheticism…” (SparkNotes Editors), Wilde was dissatisfied with the Victorian social values. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde satirized the ideas of the Victorian upper class society through a few aspects.
`How does Chekhov attempt to develop the play as a tragedy in spite of having comic characters and dialogues? The play “The Cherry Orchard” by Anton Chekhov most of the time viewed as a tragedy, although Chekhov himself stated that it was meant as a comedy. The play was written during Chekhov’s last years, when he was fatally ill. He was continuously thinking of Russia and how it was changing in a negative way. The overtaking of bourgeoisie and inequalities between the rich and the poor affected Chekhov greatly and it caused him to include these points in his play.
Old Times was written by Harold Pinter and its first performance were on 1st June 1971 at the Aldwych Theatre, London, and was directed by Peter Hall and presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Its first publication was also in 1971. Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008) was an expert playwright in his aim of creating questions that are not resolved or explained. He was influenced by Samuel Beckett, Kafka and Dostoevsky and, at the same time, his ‘uncomfortable’ theatre influenced playwrights such as Sarah Kane, Steven Berkoff, David Mamet… He grew up in contrasting situations: while his family were from the working class, his father’s relatives were from upper classes and they gave him the chance to be interested in culture. During the Second World War, the
It was during this time that theatres were brought back which was once barred by the Puritans. The literature back then painted about the life of Restoration period. From many literature works, William Congreve’s The Way of the World is one of those satire works where the social life is mirrored. Drabble (2008) said “In these Congreve shows himself the master of Restoration comedy, studying the social pressures on love and marriage with wit and subtlety” (p.228). The play depicts the life styles of high society and the fashion.
Thus, Greene 's criticism of his fellow play-writers tells a lot about the social circumstances which drove 16th century writers to write for the stage. It also expresses his view that for a great writer, the theater is a compromise, and a dangerous one at that. Actors and theater owners exploit his genius to make profits while he himself becomes debauched by the company he keeps, and writes blasphemous and sinful works which distance him from God 's mercy. A seemingly opposite view of the theater is presented in Thomas Nashe 's Pierce Penniless, his supplication to the Divell. Interestingly, the hero of this tale is once again a scholar who is frustrated by his economic situation and envious of those who are more prosperous, albeit inferior to him in his own eyes.
Bertolt Brecht is revolutionary playwright and brilliant poet of the 20th century. He is notorious for exhibiting socio-economic issues through his art (Gorshein). “Theater of War” is a documentary about the reconstruction of Brecht’s play, “Mother Courage and Her Children”, as imagined by Tony Kushner. Although it manages to encapsulate the genius of Brecht as a playwright, it fails to convey Brecht’s ideas the way he intended. The documentary does
Asif Ali Ruperdra Guha Majumdar, Associate Professor, DU IA Term Paper Semester - IV 19th April 2016 Tragedy of a common man in Mother Courage and Her Children: From the spectacle of Realism In the essay "Tragedy and the Common Man," the author Arthur Miller puts forward a very strong argument in the favor of a common man’s suitability for being the hero of a tragedy. And this argument was based on some common points like, such plays can influence us greatly for they contain various elements like the fear of displacement, the tragedy of the difference between who we are and who we wish to be in this world. “Among us today this fear is strong, and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it is the common man who knows this fears the best.” According to Miller a common layman is well aware of fear and understands it well hence qualifies for the tragedy. A man’s quest for morality which is moreover a subjective matter, the point of concern over here is the extent to which he would go to reach that point of morality.
ABSTRACT The topic for my term paper is 'Radical criticism of English society in Charles Dickens 's Great Expectations. ' As Victorian era was full of topics related to middle-class people, this was one the main theme as well as the problem that people were often countered with. Charles Dickens 's works were mostly based on the cut-throat problems of the Victorian era. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, published in 1860, is another attempt to show the same satire through his excellent of the plot, characters and his narrative techniques. Through the protagonist, that is, Pip he shows the desire of a common village boy to do exceptionally well in his life and put himself up in social status.
He then set out to impose himself upon the theatre–less out of special liking for the theatre than out of a moral passion for the establishment of righteousness in social relationships. Therefore when he dragged Life into the theatre, it began at once to talk about housing conditions, religion, finance, prostitution about everything that Shaw thought to be muddled and mismanaged and pernicious.... The interval between Widowers’ Houses (1892) on the one hand and Candida (1894) and You Never Can Tell (1896) on the other, was a matter of only two or three years, but in the interval Shaw developed from a propagandist to a playwright dealing with real problems and nearly-real people. In Man and Superman (1903) he presented his philosophic idea of the Life Force–an animating spirit instilled into man with the purpose of energizing him to produce a higher type of creature, the Superman, as God’s coadjutor on earth. Faced by man’s inertia and unreadiness to co-operate in the divine plan, the Life Force is made in Man and Superman to select woman as the more willing instrument in the devisal of means for evolving the Superman.
And, at the time, it broke the mould when talking about opening the doors of theatres for all the succeeding generations of writers – it was the foundational work of the genre for which the term “kitchen¬ sink drama” was coined. Although the play describes 1950s life in an East Midlands bedsitting room among the underemployed graduate classes, that environment can still be visualized in our era and the central character can be found in any place of our society. But I think it is not just the play that shocks us, or how it is presented. It is the language and the relationships between the characters, especially Jimmy and Alison’s relationship. Jimmy has been described as a