Essay on Compare and Contrast Comedy and Tragedy

Although many Shakespearean plays are very similar to one another, two stand out from the rest as sharing a great deal in common. Specific, solid parallels can be drawn between Shakespeare's plays "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet." The themes and characters are remarkably similar in many aspects. Firstly, both plays highlight the stereotypical young lovers - Hermia and Lysander in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Romeo and Juliet in "Romeo and Juliet." Secondly, both plays are very ambiguously categorized. By this I mean that each could have been a tragedy just as easily as a drama (with a few minor modifications). By definition, a tragic play is a play in which the main character has a fatal flaw that leads to

Richard Rodriguez and Amy Tan are two bilingual writers. Rodriguez comes from a Latin background where both his parents speak Spanish. Tan is a child of Chinese parents. Though they share some of the same situations; each has a different way of portraying it. This gives the readers two different aspects of being bilingual. Rodriguez told his story in Aria: a Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood. Tan told hers in Mother Tongue. In spite of the fact that they both wrote about their experiences of being bilingual, they told their stories were for very different reasons.

In I Henry IV and II Henry IV, William Shakespeare brings together drama and comedy to create two of the most compelling history plays ever written. Many of Shakespeare's other works are nearly absolute in their adherence to either the comic or tragic traditions, but in the two Henry IV plays Shakespeare combines comedy and drama in ways that seem to bring a certain realism to his characters, and thus the plays. The present essay is an examination of the various and significant effects that Shakespeare's comedic scenes have on I Henry IV and II Henry IV. The Diversity of Society

details. One example of this is in the beginning of the story. In the play,

A tragic hero can be described as a great or virtuous character in a dramatic tragedy who is

The act of being habitually and carefully neat and clean can make for an interesting topic in a comparison and contrast essay. Dave Barry compares the differences of how women and men clean in his compare and contrast essay, Batting Clean- Up and Striking out. In Suzanne Britt's compare and contrast essay, Neat People vs. Sloppy People she compares the differences of personalities between Sloppy people and neat people. Both essays compare cleanliness in one way or another however they both have differences regarding their use of humor, examples, and points made in their thesis.

“Good comedy is tragedy narrowly averted”: these words were spoken by Jonathon Bate and Eric Rasmussen in their publishing of ‘William Shakespeare: Complete Works’. They show how many elements of comedy could be interpreted as almost tragic. The comedy in Much Ado About Nothing is often created when the audience can see that something could go horribly wrong, however it is saved in the nick of time. A sense of relief and light-heartedness is created, as customarily comedy is known to end in a meeting of characters at a gleeful point in time or occasion; most frequently with a wedding.

A comedic work of literature is often just one that was meant as pure enjoyment for the reader. Other times, comedy is meant to shed light on a serious situation or instance the public refuses or is uncomfortable talking about in a non-comedic setting. However, the greatest type of comedy is one that makes the reader think, one that provokes “thoughtful laughter” from them. “The Importance of Being Earnest”, a satirical play written during Victorian Era Britain by Oscar Wilde, is such a piece literature. By poking fun at the time period in which his characters live in during one particular scene, as well as illustrating the unsubdued hilarity of a character during that scene, Wilde is able to elicit thoughtful laughter from his audience, ultimately showing them that life is far too serious and needs to be taken more lightly.

When Henry returns, he has no desire to ride in the red convertible, no desire to wear the bright colored clothes he used to dawn-- instead Henry just liked to sit around and sob about the war. The quote from the middle of the story, speaking about the television, and how Henry just sat “in front of it, watching it, and that was the only time he

Playwrights during the Elizabethan era explored characters with imbalanced humours – Shakespeare presented the melancholy Ophelia in Hamlet, and the sanguine Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, the choleric Kate in Taming of the Shrew and phlegmatic Hermione in Winter’s

In the case of a comedy, which I have chosen to compare, it must make

A tragedy is beginning with a problem that affects everyone, for example, the whole town or all the characters involved, the tragic hero must solve this problem and this results in his banishment or death. A comedy is defined as also beginning with a problem, but one of less significant importance. The characters try to solve the problem and the story ends with all the characters uniting in either a marriage of a party. Although these two genres are seen as being complete opposites of each other, through further analysis one can gather that though they are different certain similarities can also be seen.

Eric Bentley said that a Tragedy is dependent on comedy. Comic relief is used in tragedies to change the atmosphere of the reader, who is constantly focusing on the death and corruption of a tragedy. If a play were full of the death and sorrow, as in tragedies, it would make the reader very depressed and not like the play. Some examples of this in Hamlet, are in the Gravedigger Scene, Talking to the Skull and the Throwing of the book.

A literary comedy is defined as a story with the themes of a new society, overcoming the old society, marriage or rebirth, and criticism in the form of irony or satire. It usually includes couples who cannot get married because they are blocked by multiple problems. Moreover, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Williams Shakespeare a classic example of a literary comedy it is about two couples who cannot be together. One of these couples is Hermia and Lysander, who are forbidden to marry while, the other couple Helena and Demetrius has one-sided love as Demetrius does not love Helena. It displays how old society does not want Hermia and Lysander to get married as the old society does not marry for love but, for beneficial reasons. It also displays marriage as in the end the resolution was a joint marriage. Making it a great example to compare it to other stories like “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” by D. H. Lawrence which could be interpreted as many different genres. “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” is about the life of the Pervin family whom live in poverty as their father’s business went bankrupt and mother has died so the Pervin siblings have to find new lives as they pay off their father’s debt. The story is specifically about Mabel Pervin as she finds out she is in love with Jack Fergusson, but there are many images that suggest that the story is not quite romance. By comparing the play to the story the reader might

Comedy was a popular type of play in Ancient Greece, only second to Tragedy. These types were described in many details in Poetics, by Aristotle. He expressed that a comedy is “an imitation of inferior people - not, however, with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful. The laughable is an error or disgrace that does not involve pain or destruction” (Aristotle 9). In plainer words, Aristotle is saying that as long as no one becomes hurt, it can be funny, and that everyday misfortune is, or can be humorous. Comedies are also plays that deal with common folk, and common events. (Simpson). Tragedy is almost the exact opposite.