The Brothers Menaechmus Analysis

  The ploy of mistaken identity as a plot device in writing comedies dates back at least to the times of the Greeks and Romans in the writings of Menander and Plautus. Shakespeare borrowed the device they introduced and developed it into a fine art as a means of expressing theme as well as furthering comic relief in his works. Shakespeare's artistic development is clearly shown in the four comedies The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Measure for Measure where he manages to take the germinal idea of mistaken identity and expand it to peaks its originators never fathomed.

What is a comedy? According to a famous filmmaker, Woody Allen, thinks “Comedy is rather like a dessert, a bit like meringue.” A Midsummer Night’s Dream - a play written by William Shakespeare, is a comedy which talks about a love story between four lovers that live in Athens. Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia and Helena are all fighting for each other. The play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” written by Shakespeare, consisted of a lot of humorous situations, for example: When Titania fell in love with Bottom who had an ass; when Lysander suddenly fell in love with Helena, when Demetrius suddenly fell in love with Hermia. This essay is considered as a comedy, as it consists of exaggeration, irony, funny characters,

Blindness was another dramatic irony in the play, and relates to the entire play at large.

Susan Snyder once said that comedy is “the ground from which, or against which, tragedy develops… comedy and tragedy function as polar opposites, or as two sides of the same coin.” (Snyder. Print). The prototypical comic clash between blocking father and youthful beaus, which underlies the activities of numerous Shakespearean comedies, illuminates one strand of the activity of Hamlet: the relationship between Polonius, Ophelia and the Prince. Also unmistakable in different tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet and

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare circa 1595. The play consists of two love-struck protagonists who become star-crossed due to belonging to two rival families who are constantly at each other’s throats. It begins with the prologue which states that the play will finish with a double suicide between Romeo and Juliet. This causes the whole play to be dramatically ironic as we, the readers, know the fate

If you were an uneducated person watching a play that you didn’t understand for hours, you would very easily become uninterested and bored very quickly. To make sure that didn’t happen Shakespeare put those humorous scenes in his play to catch the attention of those audience members. Humor is also used to heighten the sense of the major theme in the play. Death is the major theme in hamlet, with main characters dying at every turn. One of the funniest scenes in the drama is the gravedigger scene where they’re making fun of death. He had different types of comedy in this drama to fit the different type of people in his audience. It was already mentioned that his audiences contained anywhere from royalty to the highly educated to the uneducated peasants. So his jokes needed to vary, he had these super sophisticated jokes that you only understood if you were educated enough. He also would throw in sex jokes and double entendres for his lower class audience members. Example of these comedic scenes takes place all over the play. Act 2 scene 2 is where we see our first example of outright comedy, Polonius approaches hamlet and asks him if he recognizes him, and hamlet replies “Excellent well sir. You are a

Many scholars classify William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark as a revenge tragedy, a genre popular during the Elizabethan era (Gainor 41). Shakespeare's tragedy focuses on three sons–Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras–seeking retribution for the unfortunate death of their fathers– King Hamlet, Polonius, and King Fortinbras respectively. In the play, the father-son relationship is the primary motivator for each son's revenge. Because Elizabethan society places a strong emphasis on the relationship between father and son, each son feels obligated to right his father's wrongs. According to Fredric B. Tromly, author of Fathers and Sons in Shakespeare: The Debt Never Promised, “A defining . . . feature of Shakespeare’s

One of Shakespeare's earliest plays (its first recorded performance in December 1594), The Comedy of Errors has frequently been dismissed as pure farce, unrepresentative of the playwright's later efforts. While Errors may very well contain farcical elements, it is a complex, layered work that draws upon and reinterprets Plautine comedy. Shakespeare combines aspects of these Latin plays with biblical source material, chiefly the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistle to the Ephesians. While Menaechmi is the most frequently cited classical source for Errors, Plautus' Amphitruo is just as relevant an influence; Shakespeare's treatment of identity and its

This scene in the movie poorly appropriates a very famous scene in the play and the movie continues thereafter to make clumsy and indiscreet representations of key events in the play; one has to wonder why he made a movie that hinges on so many poorly executed key scenes.

In the play Twelfth Night, Shakespeare uses dramatic irony to develop the comedic effect in the characters relationships. The use of dramatic irony produces most of the comedic effect by revealing situations and relationships to the audience, but not the cast. Developing the plot with this literary device provides comedic and ironic situations while engaging the audience.

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play that utilises comedy to convey complex ideas that are seen throughout the play, concepts like the jealousy Helena has towards Hermia, Egeus’s strong hostility towards Hermia and Lysander’s relationship and unrequited love. He uses comical tools like unconscious irony and hyperbole to turn rather difficult topics into humorous representations of them. Events like how Puck thinks Titania had fallen in love with him, not knowing he was bearing the head of an ass, are portrayed in a humorous way so the viewer understands the meaning, but sees it as a light- hearted narrative. Shakespeare carefully uses comedy that does not overpower the meaning of the play, but puts a completely different perspective on some of the themes.

How does humor factor into a tragedy? Shakespeare knew the answer to this question and acted upon it quite frequently. Shakespeare has been known to write comedies and tragedies both but this does not qualify him at to not incorporate a little of each into each other. In the work of Hamlet there are many occasions where Shakespeare uses it for different effects. The main reason for the presence of humor within a tragedy is to keep the reader interested. Shakespeare uses many forms of humor including but not limiting wit, pun’s, and casual jokes. In the work of Hamlet, Hamlet is usually the character that Shakespeare chooses to bring out the humor in anything. He becomes a very

    The myth of Oedipus’s incest and parricide has been retold many different times. The basic story line has remained the same. Oedipus leaves Corinth to try to escape a fate of incest and parricide. After he leaving the city, he ends up saving Thebes from the Sphinx, becoming king of the city and in the process fulfilling the prophecy. The character of Oedipus changes in each play to help support a different meaning to the entire myth. Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine and Sophocles’s Oedipus the King are both centered on the myth, yet their themes are different. By changing Oedipus’s personality, motive, relationship with Jocasta, his mother and wife, and his character

In a comparison of comedy and tragedy, I will begin by looking at narrative. The narration in a comedy often involves union and togetherness as we see in the marriage scene at the end of Midsummer's Night Dream. William Hazlitt tells us that one can also expect incongruities, misunderstandings, and contradictions. I am reminded of the play The Importance of Being Ernest and the humor by way of mistaken identity. Sigmund Freud tells us to expect excess and exaggeration in comedy. Chekhov's Marriage Proposal displays this excess both in language and in movements. Charles Darwin insists that in a comedy "circumstances must not be of a momentous nature;" whereas, Northop Frye identifies

The genre of William Shakespeare’s most performed play has been debated for a long time: is it a comedy or a tragedy? The play has elements of both genres, but one is clearly prevalent. While the story hits upon the tragic element of despair, The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, is a comedy because lovers are separated, characters are in disguise, and the story has a happy ending.