Rhetorical Magnificence In William Shakespeare's Play

“Beware of your stereotypes and prejudices, they can trap you in a box and make you miss what life has to offer you”─Med Yones. One has to see past the stereotypes in life, just as one should do for A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. This literature masterpiece entails a quarrel of a pair of lovers caught entangled in a treacherous web of tainted love and magic. This comedy, viewed through the archetypal literary criticism lens─which focuses on the stereotypical aspects─, makes the audience wonder and push beyond the boundaries of the stereotypes with the tale. Combined with its other elements, A Midsummer Night's Dream is more entertaining and meaningful when viewed through the archetypal literary criticism lens; such as in Act 1: scene 1; Act 3: scene 2; and Act 5: scene 1 in both the printed text and the 1999 film versions.

When you hear the word Shakespeare, you probably think that it is meant for the people that use intellectual language, the literary types, or even the people who have a higher reading level than the average person. Well, a college professor named Michael Mack argues that Shakespeare can be for everyone once you understand it and it can relate to the real world or be a reflection of it. Mack produces an effective argument that although Shakespeare is difficult, it is worth the effort. Through his use of rhetorical devices and counterclaims.

The effort and the input are sometimes not deserved or appropriate with reward in the future. In this play, the use of violent and brutal language helps the playwright and the characters to reveal people’s effort to achieve things that are not so much important or needed. That form of language is used to heighten the tension and create the impression that whatever is at stake is crucial, whereas in reality they are talking about love and marriage based on cheating and cunning. Shakespeare manages to reveal the hypocritical nature of the society where people will fight and defend their positions only to end up losing everything or having not gained anything in the first place. The use of brutal language is also tactical in the sense that Shakespeare is able to attract attention of the audience while convey his message of a brutal, insensitive

Rhetoric is a word that when said many understand what you are talking about but not necessarily what the word truly means. Rhetoric is simply defined as the art of speech to persuade. Using the three fold process of rhetoric, you can easily sway someone to think something is right even though it may not be. As well, using rhetoric can cause people to act upon something you say. This three headed dragon is ethos, logos, and pathos. All ingeniously thought up by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle. William Shakespeare took Aristotle’s idea and put it in a form that today we can cipher through his famous play Julius Caesar. Shakespeare intelligently used the speeches of both Brutus and Mark Anthony to better explain ethos, logos, and pathos to the modern world.

Furthermore, many significant techniques are found in the play. Irony is an important technique, which engages the reader in the process of linking the actions to each other. Irony can be seen in Ann and

views of equal rights for both sexes which are vital. At the time the play was written, it was known for being negative towards women as they did not dare to stand for themselves. The play

Do you think Shakespeare intended a speech for his audience that exalted humanity or was this speech cynical and sarcastic.

I watched this production on Thursday, March 9th, at 7:30 p.m. In this paper, I will address three topics of interest to me after seeing this play. My personal reaction to how seeing this play was different from watching movies, television, or videos, the major strengths and how this play is responding to life today.

This play deals with the idea that

When I first read the excerpt from this play, my immediate reaction was “wow that was it?” After my first reading of the play, I thought that it was just a simple play made for fun. But I realized after rereading it a few more times that it actually has a deeper meaning than what it appears to have.

Throughout the play, these characters present many emotions and personalities that change as the play progresses. Many of these emotions and personalities can relate to modern society

“...there are characters in it that can always recognize a fool. The laughter that the witty young bucks of the older comedy share with the audience at the expense of a fool or fop unites the "real" world and the world of the play by showing that the same criteria for reason and unreason are valid in both”(Foster, 19).

I will look at what I have determined to be the three most predominant interpretations of the play, including anti-Christianity, existentialism, and nihilism. By also examining Beckett’s life and influences, I believe

The play’s characters seem commonplace. So are their activities. These include talk, jokes, smells, food, strangers, and even boots. By themselves, they offer no special meaning or fulfillment. What the

"Satire and Romance, rather than dramatizing the dominant patterns of human experience, embody the essential qualities and potentialities of human nature. Romance bears witness to what humanity can be at its best, Satire to what it can be at its worst. Romance offers us an idealized vision of human potentiality, Satire a spectacle of inferior human conduct. Satire and romance are intended ultimately to produce clear-cut images of good or evil, virtue or vice, wisdom or folly; and those images may be embodied most vividly in characters that are boldly outlined rather than finely detailed. Such qualities may also be highlighted through contrast. Thus, the plots of satire and romance often bring together characters from both extremes, using their interactions to create emphatic contrasts. In defining the emphasis of any play, we can ask ourselves whether the dramatist has focused on the beautiful or the ugly, on the orderly or the chaotic, on what is best or on what is worst in the world. A play that emphasizes the beautiful and the orderly tends toward an idealized vision of the world, which is the mode we call 'romance'. A play focusing on the ugly and chaotic tends toward a debased view of the world, and this we call 'satire'. Both these emphasis depend for their effect upon extreme views of human nature and existence. In contrast to