Desires : An Analysis Of Phaedra's 'Hippolytus'

Both characters in the stories made bad choices. Phaethon was a liar and tried to live up to his lie. Arachne was a boastful girl who was disrespectful to others. They are both prideful and that makes them make bad choices which lead to their destruction. Phaethon was a liar because he lied to the other boy about driving the sun chariot and Arachne was very competitive; both of the characters's traits lead to their destruction.

True love is shown in various places in the play. One of the earliest couples that demonstrate this is Theseus and Hippolyta. They stay true and loyal to each other, showing their desires and passion for each other. The way Theseus has portray his love to Hippolyta is by his eagerness to be wedded to her, “Another moon – but O methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!” By the end of the play, they are happily married.

This brings us to their interaction in Act 5. Hippolyta and Theseus begin the scene, where Hippolyta states that the lovers are speaking of strange things. This leads Theseus to go on and on about how people in love are crazy. He states that, “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact”- basically comparing lovers to madman and how they hallucinate and are ruled by their

Throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while the story involving Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, Helena, Oberon and Titania is developing, the rustic gentlemen (Bottom and his friends) are shown rehearsing for a play that they will perform in honor of the upcoming wedding of Theseus (the Duke of Athens) and Hippolyta. The play, “Pyramus and Thisby,” is based on a story that was told by the ancient Roman writer Ovid and retold by Chaucer. The “Pyramus and Thisby” play is not performed until the fifth and final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By then, as Barton points out, the major problems of Lysander, Demetrius and the rest have all been neatly resolved. As such, the “Pyramus and Thisby” play-within-a-play “seems, in effect, to take place beyond the normal, plot-defined boundaries of comedy” (Barton 110).

Early on in the play, Phaedra does not yet fit the model of the deceitful

Another love that is classified in the play is romantic love in which Hippolyta voices a desire for, or at least an attraction to, the romantic love which Hermia and Helena experience. In response to Theseus’ comment concerning his disbelief in the lovers’ stories, Hippolyta argues, “But all the story of the night told over, / And all their minds transfigured so together, / More witnesseth than fancy’s image, / And grows to something of great constancy” (5.1.23-26). Hippolyta seems to want to believe the lover’s tales; she wants to trust in their romantic notions. In an attempt to persuade Theseus, she uses the rational argument that because all the lovers experience the same transforming power, their experiences do not represent mere figments

“I have revealed enough. Spare me the rest. / I die, and my grim secret dies with me.” (Racine 193) Phaedra has a huge secret: she is in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. She has reoccurring thoughts of suicide, and a desire for this burden to be lifted. Her forbidden passion has a gigantic affect on her mental capability and her ability to be independent. She does not want anyone to know about her repugnant desires for Hippolytus and her mental health slowly begins to weaken as she maintains this information to herself. As we look closer into the life of Phaedra, we find she exhibits a lustful, weak-minded, guilty, gullible, and reliant personality.

Euripides’ Hippolytus shows three key themes that are significant to the play, by showing the theme of lust, honour and betrayal which are shown from the lines 490-512, they set up the flow of the play and relates directly to the dramatic conflict between the lust and continence of Phaedra and Hippolytus, this scene shows Phaedra to be the true central character of the play since her actions are pivotal to the fate Hippolytus and herself.

The Phaedrus is a dialogue written by Plato about love and its effects on the soul. Briefly he writes about the mortality of written works explaining that they lose their immortality as soon as they are written. Through reading the Phaedrus and coming to my own conclusion and then comparing Plato’s conclusion and my own, I discovered that Plato is right, words are not immortal without their authors to explain them or support them and that we will always wonder at the meaning of their work without them to explain it.

Racine's departure from Euripides is evident. His play is named Phaedra and her suffering dominates the production from beginning to end. However what is not fully disclosed to readers and likewise to our own understanding of the human situation, is morality’s agency as the spawn of doom. This all too human reality is embodied in the character of Phaedra, as the progression of her fluctuating sanity, yet moral desire for deliverance from her frustrated passions depicts a world that is not governed by a merciful God of the gospels, but rather a malevolent force that ensnares the mind and the spirit; a human situation

When Phaedra and the man do try to resolve their problems, they each put their fates yet again into the hands of others rather than take control of their situations, revealing how when outside forces threaten the autonomy of a person that one cannot simply expect others to fix the problems on one’s behalf. Phaedra’s initial entrance in the play begins with her commanding her nurses to “take this veil,” a symbol of modesty, “from [her] head” (Euripides 223), reflecting Phaedra’s inability to take control of her life. Even in a mad state in which she loses her inhibitions and is willing to shed her humility, she cannot do so herself but rather depends on others to do it for her. This further reveals how Phaedra has lost control of her situation

Phillpotts analyzes the different influences that mermaids have on a culture, including: the first mermaids, mermaids and their relations to sex and religion, mermaid marriages, sea sightings, historical hoaxes, folk heroine and creative muse, and the modern interpretation of mermaids. The earliest record of a mermaid is Atargatis, a Semitic mood goddess, worshipped by the Philistines, Syrians and Israelites. She was represented as the fertility goddess who also personified a darker aspect: love as a destructive force. This is an element integral to the mermaid legend throughout history. Phillpotts connects the ancient goddess to Aphrodite and the Greek culture. I will be using this connection to analyze the connection between mermaids as goddess

I think that mostly the main characters in Greek tragedies don’t deserve what happens to them, as their fortunes have already been told by the Gods, but for some of their own actions condemned themselves. Firstly Phaedra’s feelings where controlled by a powerful and vengeful God, Phaedra had no choice in the feelings she felt for Hippolytus, and the God had made them so strong that she could almost not control them. She had started to starve herself out to protect her name, and the name of her children. She would rather die and keep her name intact than succumb to her feeling and have her name be worth less than dirt.

Phaedra emotions are ultimately unstable and erratic. She can no longer suppress her huge infatuation for Hippolytus. She finds Hippolytus very lustrous. She is galvanized at the core to release her feelings, because the build-up of these intense emotions would become too onerous for her to cope with. Her confession becomes a conduit in her trying save her son, this is to assure that he will be crown king of Athens. If she don’t declare her love for him then she will forever regret it and feel trap. She has made the executive decision to utter out how she feels regardless of what her mother and the nurse thinks. As she vehemently declares her love for Hippolytus, her confession becomes an ultimate tragedy because Hippolytus rejects her love for him. She becomes an emotional wreck seeking to take her own life. But the love that Phaedra feels for Hippolytus is too immense that her emotions pulsate through her veins like a river. For love is indeed destructive and this is what Oenone admonishes to Phaedra. There is a sense of isolation that comes with the declaration because she knows that what she is doing very atrocious. Her passion becomes too monstrous turning her ill emotionally and physically. She has become a slave to her emotions. She is in a constant battle with love and sin. Phaedra vows to take this chance and in the end she committed suicide from this tragedy. Phaedra’s ultimate quest to confess her love for Hippolytus

The play “ Antigone” by Sophocles is about a young woman wanting to bury her brother and she was sentenced to death. She was sentenced to death because the king had made a law that no one is aloud to bury him, and she decided to do it anyway because it was her brother and it was a respectful thing to bury him and not just let him rot and get picked over by animals. At the end of the story her fiancé ends up killing himself so he can be with Antigone in the after life. After Antigone and the son were dead the mother found out and committed suicide. There are three main themes presented in the play “Antigone,” which are femininity, power, and pride.