Michael Gow’s Away is a stage play about three socioeconomically varied families and their different holiday experiences. Throughout the play, Gow alludes to many of Shakespeare’s texts to deepen the audiences’ understanding of the performance. Distinct connections are shown between Gow’s Away and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and King Lear. These references feature through direct use of lines, characters, theatrical conventions and themes. This essay will explore each of these methods of allusion and explain how this use of intertextuality heightens audience comprehension. The first of the techniques Gow used throughout Away was the use of direct quotes from the Shakespearian plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and King Lear. The quote “If we shadows have offended/ Think but this and all is mended/ You have but slumbered here” spoken in Away by Tom (Away: Act 1, Scene 1/ A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Act 5, Scene 1), suggests …show more content…
Many kinds of love are displayed within Away, including parental love, matrimonial love and teenage infatuation. All of these kinds of love are also displayed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Examples of each kind include: Gwen and Meg/Titania and Indian Boy displaying parental love, Coral and Roy/Hermia and Demitrius displaying matrimonial love, and an infatuation is displayed between Meg and Tom/Bottom and Titania. The use of many kinds of love allows stronger connections between kinds of characters to be made, gaining depth of understanding through the relationship between Gow’s and Shakespeare’s works. Destruction is the other outstanding common theme displaying clear intertextuality. The use of a storm in Away allows the audience to make the connection to Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which the characters face environmental adversity as well as the adversities of others. This enhances the audiences’ awareness of social tensions throughout
Michael Gow’s play Away is the story of three different Australian families who go on holiday for Christmas in the sixties. By going away each family is hoping to resolve their issues. Although Away is set some time ago the themes and issues explored in the play are still relevant to a modern day audience, even one of a non-Australian background. Shakespearean plays that were written many hundreds of years ago and are still understandable and relevant to people all over the world today.
Shakespeare is well known for using stage managers to shape audience understanding or responses. As a playwright during the English Renaissance period, Shakespeare draws on literature models from two cultures Greek and medieval English plays. One example of Shakespeare’s use of these models is evident by examining the stage manager character type in Greek, English Medieval, and English Renaissance literary periods. Shakespeare appears to use the commentary quality of Greek chorus and the medieval English use of a single stage manager character to produce more sophisticated stage managers that integrate smoothly into plays but still shape audience understanding or response.
In conclusion, Michael Gow has used outsiders, family conflicts, and grief and loss to refer to the central ideas of the play, “Away”. Gow has used many literary devices such as allusion, juxtaposition, simile, flashbacks and tragedy to convey the message that he is
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as in many of Shakespeare's plays the main theme is love. Shakespeare presents many different aspects of love in the play. He shows how love can affect your vision of reality and make you behave in irrational ways. He presents many ways in which your behavior is affected by the different types and aspects of love. The main types of love he presents are; true love, unrequited love, sisterly love, jealous love, forced love, and parental love. Shakespeare tries to show what kinds of trouble, problems and confusion, love can get you into.
Love is a theme which reoccurs through many of Shakespeare’s Plays. In ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the theme ‘Love’ is presented from the very beginning in Act 1 Scene 1, through Shakespeare’s use of poetic language, structure and vivid imagery.
Both Gwen and Jim suffered during the Great Depression – Gwen fled her parents at the age of 18 (and she fears that meg will do the same) and jim was a swag man
The differences in styles of language truly brings alive the plays' various characters, from the lowliest drawer to the noblest knight. The playwright's audience would have been composed of a similarly diverse spectrum of society, from the groundlings at the foot of the stage, to the members of the court in attendance, and these disparate members of the audience might very well have come away from the plays with different interpretations of
The 1960’s were a time of drastic social change, with the next generation questioning their parent’s ideals and a cataclysm of political adjustment. Away, by Michael Gow, under the direction of Michael Beh and performed by heartBeast on the 12th of February 2015 at the Holy Trinity Anglican church, formed a powerful idea of the Australian identity during these turbulent times. Issues of the Australian identity were explored through symbol, and roles and relationships used examined the Australian stereotypes of the time. The character’s goals and intentions towards other characters accentuated the Australian identity at the time, especially those of Coral and Gwen.
Love is such an abstract and intangible thing, yet it is something that everyone longs for. In Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the difficulty of love is explored through the obstacles that characters have to face while pursuing their loved ones. Those characters that are in love in the play were conflicted with troubles; however, the obstacles of love do not seem to stop them from being infatuated with each other. The concept of true love is examined throughout this play. By creating obstacles using authority and a higher power, Shakespeare examines the power of love. Through Hermia and Lysander’s loving words, it is reasonable to conclude that love conquers all if you believe in it.
Marvin Carlson’s article argues about whether plays are better experienced purely through text or through performance. He discusses the conflict theorists dealt with when they wanted to perform Shakespeare’s plays. Some theorists believed that Shakespeare’s texts were a magnificent work on their own and that any performance needed to be as close to the text as possible. This caused theorists to regard performance as unnecessary since it had the potential to ruin the text. This type of theory carried on past the romantic period and some theorist continue to believe that plays should keep to the original script as much as possible. Carlson cites Charles Lamb commenting on how performances of Hamlet diminish the quality of Shakespeare’s work. Marvin then explains how
Artists employ appropriation techniques to convey contemporary ideologies through countless forms of texts. An integral aspect of all appropriated texts is their ability to modify the initial intention of the text and adapt it into a new context. Latter adaptions of original texts exert a new insight or perspective upon the audience and accentuate the contextual differences. Potentially, the alterations of underlying cultural, political and social concerns may influence wide spans of the audience. Contemporary film makers, more specifically American, frequently bring classic literature to the screen. Shakespeare’s constantly applicable plays are commonly reconstructed for a distinctly different range of audience allowing them to overcome prevalent barriers such as language differences (Elizabethan English and 21st Century English). Although Shakespeare’s implications are dependent on its context,
For William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’, the opening exposition scenes can be analysed for effect. Shakespeare opens the play ‘Macbeth’ by introducing the theme of the supernatural this creates tension and grips the audience of what is to come. Shakespeare uses pathetic fallacy in quotations such as ‘fog and filthy air’ we can interpret this as being almost a representative
William Shakespeare’s portrayal of romance has created an everlasting effect since the day his plays were performed on stage. His interpretation of romance While A Midsummer’s Night Dream and Shakespeare in Love both following the concept of Shakespearian romances and demonstrate it in different ways. A Midsummer Night’s Dream has the stronger concept of Shakespearian romance due to the fact it was written by William Shakespeare himself. Hollywood did a wonderful interpretation of Shakespearian romance in Shakespeare in Love considering there is no prior information how Shakespeare came on to the idea of Romeo and Juliet. On the other hand, A Midsummer Night’s Dream explicitly demonstrates the themes that recur in Shakespearian romance.
In William Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream" many symbols, imagery, allusions and dramatic irony are portrayed throughout the play. The collage helped to showcase the major idea's and connections to the play with the use of the dramatic elements.
Symbolism is highly apparent in the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is no exception. In some instances, symbols actually carry out the role of characters. Shakespeare often writes about love. The love he writes about in his plays take on different forms in each, including themes of love’s difficulty, the forcefulness of love, and the incompatibility of heroism and love, and also including a motif of contrast and symbols of the love potion. As Lysander said in the play, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”