Passion and Worship in Peter Shaffer's Equus Essay

The essay goes into great detail of his relationship with his father. He describes his father as cruel (65), bitter (65), and beautiful (64). He does mention the bad in length. On the flip side, he tells us some of the good as well. Throughout his storytelling, the reader gets a glimpse into his life and the way he feels. His feelings evolve during the extent of the essay.

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.

    The meaningful term “love” can be applied to differing relationships in Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello. In this essay let us examine under a microscope the “love” that we find throughout the play.

Theseus can be described as faithful but with elements of fickle, character within A Midsummer Nights dream. It has been said by Shirley Nelson Garner, a critic that “Theseus remains a ‘lover-and-leaver of women’, who having abducted Hippolyta, naturally sympathises with Egues’ desire to force Hermia into marriage with Demetrius”. It is clear to the audience that Theseus wishes to love and respect Hippolyta, “I wooed thee with my sword, and won thy love doing thee injuries, but will wed thee in another key”. He switches from being a man in battle who defeated Hippolyta, to loving her and on the verge of marrying her. However, feminists may argue that this shows his fickle side, as ‘Theseus is the ruler of Athens and therefore a domineering male who thinks that he can legitimise his violence with a display of love and companionship’.

As the psychiatrist encounter the boy’s imaginary world, his own life is exposed as passionless and frozen. The play then tells the story of a boy, who because of his repressed sexuality, his religious mother and his hypocrite father, makes his own religion based on horses, the bible, and sex. The psychiatrist, who is not able to imagine anything like that, who has lost his passion for his wife and who walks around carrying an unfulfilled dream about passion, ends up envying the boy the ability to create and believe in a religion.”

He believes that there must be something else creating the lust that his daughter now feels. Throughout the entire play, all of the characters are sexually attracted to one another due to mysterious circumstances. It seems as though Egeus has a point, suggesting that an outside force can evoke sexual desire. The moon (the external force) can now represent the image of sexual desire. Egeus sees the moon as a tool of sorcery. Finally, through the experience of Demetrius, the moon jokingly corresponds to sex. For example: “This lanthorn doth the horned moon present/ He should have worn the horns on his head.” (5,1,253-254). Demetrius cannot help but poke fun at the joke that is the mechanicals’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe,. As the character moonshine introduces himself to the audience, the goofy image of the moon is introduced as well. The new moon that rises is “horned”. The comedy brought on by Demetrius (“horns”) is actually a double-entendre with sexual overtones. The moon, for Demetrius, is just a joke. Surely, this moon warps the image of sex.

“Worship is… our response, both personal and corporate, to God – for who He is! And what He has done! Expressed in and by the things we say and the way we live.” There are many definitions of worship out there. I have found that this one seems to best fit my heart when praying through the topic of worship. Worship is something that begins in the heart, privately, and then flows out during times of public and corporate gathering. Worship however, is something far deeper than music, dance, art, or drama. Worship is more than fine arts. Worship is more than Sunday morning gatherings or Wednesday night small groups. Worship is life. Worship is something you do. “Worship isn’t something you attend like a movie or a concert. Worship is something you enter into with all of your might. Worship is a participation sport in a spectator culture.” “True worship is a whole-life response to God’s greatness and glory. A response that taps our mind, our soul, out heart of passion and all our strength.”

Set in Athens, the play is shown with the Greek gods and goddesses also mythical creatures. Most people think the play is about the difficulties of love, how great love is and how it’s filled with dancing and singing, fairies and enchantment. In Act 1 scene 1, for example, opens with Theseus and Hippolyta planning their upcoming wedding in four days. Love itself is shown with fantasy and magic, according

When you look up the word passion there happens to be two completely different definitions. One definition, the most common one, says that passion is a “strong and barely controllable emotion.” However when you look right below it there is another definition that reads, passion is “the suffering and death of Jesus.” In the play Equus by Peter Shaffer, you see how intertwined the ideas of passion, worship and religion are. A schizophrenic 17 year old boy named Alan lives his life in the grey area between these two definitions and ultimately combines them to make one. Dysart, a psychologist, tries to help Alan distinguish the differences between these two separate ideas. But, by helping him to become what many people would call “normal,” he could destroy the passion that he so envies in Alan. Dysart sees the beauty in the disease that allows Alan to feel something special even if it is for the wrong reasons, and he ultimately feels that he is the one to blame for squashing the passion.

The Passion, an explicitly religious tale that found its place in an increasingly secular age of cinema and resonated with believers and unbelievers alike, is an unparalleled work in the realm of Christian culture in terms of its popularity. While believers may have watched the film for religious purposes, many nonbelievers simply viewed it for its value as a cinematic masterpiece. However, regardless of the intent of the viewer, the film conveys Christian messages throughout that may not be immediately recognizable.

The play expresses the idea of virtue and C’s hope of avoiding the fate of A, which in turn shows that there exists a strong desire to maintain a life that consists in pleasing an authoritative figure or higher power (such as God). It may be discovered, with the help of the analytical mind of Carl Jung, that the “study of religious experience [can] be regarded…as the study of the fundamental, natural and therapeutic psychic process, in which the individual seeks self-knowledge, self-regulation, and self-fulfillment” (Palmer 109).

The millennia-old observations of man’s connection to God we see within the Old Testament, Oresteia, and The Iliad, present a similar theological backdrop yet include striking differences. It can be surmised that these contrasts are due to the natural evolution and growth of religion across time and culture, as well as the role of God within society. However, it should be noted that man approaches God in similar ways between each of these texts; he assumes the role of devotee regardless of his own personal beliefs towards the deity. People demonstrate their righteous connection to God through worship, piety, or a combination of both. Although we often see gods arbitrarily determining what is good and bad, throughout various ancient texts the most consistent method of reaching God’s grace is by displaying reverence.

Literature throughout world history contains many of the same themes and motifs. The works that will be discussed in this paper: Homer’s The Iliad, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, and Ovid’s Metamophoses, all contain common themes. The first theme is love, whether it is the love between a man and a woman, parent and child, or the love of siblings. Love is a driving force for many of the characters in these works. The second theme is sex, whether it is symbolic or literal, forceful or complaisant. Sex is not always the main theme of a story, but the sexual overtures are dominant in many of these works. Finally this paper will discuss the intervention of the gods. The gods play a major role in

C: Camus believes that the ‘pursuit of inexplicable happiness’ is a series of extremely high and fragile expectations that are clung to in desperation for fear of losing this desire. Camus represents this negative connotation of ‘happiness’ in the over-zealous and desperate attempts of both the examining magistrate, and chaplain to convert Meursault to Christianity, during the process of his trial and in the hours leading to his death, a construct that Meursault and Camus view as pointless.

manifestations of the passion - even the more innocent ones. There are not too many