King Lear has been subjected to various interpretations throughout history, depending upon the social and cultural contexts which exist at the time of performance. ... Miller's 1988 interpretation of King Lear can be contrasted to that of a contemporary student. ... "King Lear- uses the plainest language compared to other Shakespearean plays, where the character of Lear is reserved the finest words. ... The magnificence of Lear's language is that all authority is quickly replaced with servitude and hysterical rage. ... In the student's interpretation however, all the Fool's...

• Word Count: 2146
• Approx Pages: 9

Pride, blindness and filial ingratitude are all great tragedies peformed in the play, neither being more tragic than the other. ... "Doth my senses take all feeling else/ Save what beats there" (3.4.13-14) is King Lear expressing that he is severly suffering from emotional pain and heart ache. ... King Lear is thinking through all the issues that would concern a king, although he no longer has custody of the kingdom, and proclaims that the storm has characteristics of a beating. ... The poweful storm in which King Lear gets caught up in is a dramatic demonstration of the fact that al...

• Word Count: 1964
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: High School

In order to understand the King's redemption, if at all one exists, one must determine what the King needs redeeming of. ... When Lear cries "why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life / And thou no breath at all?" ... The crucial realisation that it was he, who had the folly for all this evil to turn, appears in Act 3 Scene 4, "O I have ta"en too little care of this" where he realises he is a self-centred, neglectful king, and it was he who did Cordelia wrong. ... Gonerill, Regan and Edmund are all destroyed by their pursuit of self-interest. ... I now ask you all again, what is your ...

• Word Count: 1659
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

In the play Antigone the playwright Sophocles presents Aristotle's definition of a tragic hero in the character King Creon. ... The State is the King!." ... The vulnerability of a king who is pleading for his death after his demise due to his loyalty to the State makes the reader "melt with pity at what takes place" " (Poetics 212). ... I look for comfort; my comfort lies here dead Fate has brought all my pride to a thought of dust (line 1035). ... However the downfall of a strong noble king to an insecure tyrant due to his rash thinking mak ges Creon a true tragic hero. ...

• Word Count: 1315
• Approx Pages: 5

The tragic hero's character illustrates violent outbursts, all the while attaining the love of his audience. ... With the disapproval of his uncle comes the disobedience of Hamlet towards his uncle, "I shall in all my best obey you, madam (I ii 124)." ... When Hamlet states, "Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar (IV iii 34-35)." he is essentially telling Claudius that when he dies no one will care that he was a King, he will rot just like anyone else. ... The Prince's disbelief that his mother might have loved King Hamlet distresses him. ...

• Word Count: 1315
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

A Great Tragedy: The good misunderstood and the evil accepted Shakespeare's King Lear and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is a detailed description of the consequences of one mans decisions that ends in a tragedy. ... In the opening of Shakespeare's King Lear the first error in judgement is introduced in scene 1.1 lines 95-98, where Cordelia confesses her love for her father. ... It is through these experiences that he discovers his wrongs and makes all attempts to mend them. ... All the suffering and pain traces back to the one fatal error in judgement that Lear and Faust...

• Word Count: 1747
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

All tragic heroes possess one characteristic, or flaw, that causes suffering in their personal lives. ... Hamlet expresses this fear,: "Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wanned, Tears in his eyes...And all for nothing! ... Can say nothing, not for a king Upon whose property and most dear life A damned defeat was made. ... Hamlet suggests that by calling Claudius his father, Gertrude is offending his true father, King Hamlet. ... His dilemma is not o...

• Word Count: 1299
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

Medea is married to Jason, who has decided to leave her to marry King Creons daughter. ... "But you women Have reached a state where, if all's well with your sex life You've everything yo wished for; but when that goes wrong At once all that is the best and noblest turns to gall. ... Polyneices however, at the orders of king Creon, was to remain unburied as Creon saw him as a traitor. ... She is captured and is brought in front of the king. ... Antigone challenges him saying that she obeying the unwritten law of the gods, to give all dead a burial. ...

• Word Count: 1759
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: High School

As in Oedipus the King, a major theme in Othello is man's inability to reliably distinguish between what seems to be and what; however, this shared theme of "uncertain vision" is treated somewhat differently in Othello than it is in Oedipus the King. Namely, first of all the reason behind the "uncertain visions" and the tragedy that ensue from one another is different in the two plays. ... Oedipus on the other hand is being utterly objective and is doing all that he can to bring the investigation to an end even though it may have disastrous consequences for him. ... Unfortunately, and i...

• Word Count: 1353
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Therefore I am drawing upon the conclusion that what becomes the center of a tragedy depends upon its time, for if Agamemnon or Oedipus the King was to be staged today (modernized) the audience would witness the violence in all its glory because we are not use to it and such violence is obscene to us. ... It's all chance, chance rules our lives. ... Take such things for shadows, nothing at all" Live, Oedipus, as if there's no tomorrow! ... Also what she says contradicts all of her beliefs and the beliefs of Oedipus. In looking closely at Oedipus the King and the violent acts ...

• Word Count: 1654
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

This leaves the audience feeling cleansed of all those initial emotions. ... Macbeth's tragic flaws are the cause of why he followed through with his plot to commit regicide against Duncan, the king. Once he has killed the king he begins to lose control and is overwhelmed with the immense amount of guilt he feels. ... All Aristotilean tragic heroes" made this moral choice, which was the main cause of their downfall. ... In the play Macbeth the King was the ultimate ruler and had authority over everyone is the country. ...

• Word Count: 1371
• Approx Pages: 5

Horatio was there when the ghost of the King bid Hamlet to follow. ... How easily the pious King Claudius dismisses the death of his brother. ... All this and the ghostly sire beckoning him to right the wrong have forced him from his senses. ... In the closing act, all who died are deserved. ... Although he is successful in his attempt, Hamlet lives long enough to see all who have conspired against his father die before he himself perishes. ...

• Word Count: 1514
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

When no one stepped forward to give information or confess, Oedipus said that if anyone who is involved in the crime in any way does not step forward, they will be banished from the city and all those around the city of Thebes forever. From that point on, Oedipus began a tireless search for the murderer of king in order to save the city of Thebes; a city that he, as its ruler, held dear to his heart. Oedipus knew that is was his duty as king to be the one who avenged the murder of King Laios and cleanse the city of Thebes of its retched plague. ... At first, Oedipus accused Creon of being in...

• Word Count: 1488
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

As theatre developed, undefined rules came into practice, and the process through which a playwright produced a play as well as the distinguishing traits characteristic of a successful play became in-depth and understood by all involved parties. ... In context and in performance, the tragic heroine of Antigone is in fact Antigone, niece of King Kreon, sister of Ismene, and fiancé of Haimon. ... At the end of the play, Antigone hangs herself in her cell, Haimon stabs himself in his own misery, and King Kreon is left alone. ... She believes she can commit any act and experience no con...

• Word Count: 1410
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

However, he is very ambitious to be king. At the beginning of the play, he was loyal to the king. ... He wanted to protect his ambition, by killing the king, and now he killed Banquo, due to the prediction of what the witches said about Banquo's son becoming the king. ... She died because of all this pressure and her guilt about the murder. ... Realizing that he wishes the kingdom, they prophesy that he shall be king. ...

• Word Count: 2254
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In Oedipus the King, Iocasta says that Laius was slain at a place where three roads meet. ... In Oedipus the king, the crossroads is part of the distant past, dimly remembered, and Oedipus was not aware at the time that he was making a fateful decision (Murray 59). ... That mighty king, who knew the riddle's mystery, whom the entire city envied, fortune's favorite. Behold, in the event, the storm of his calamities, and, being mortal, think on that last day of death, which all must see, and speak of no man's happiness till, without sorrow, he hath passed the goal of life" (Sophoc...

• Word Count: 1264
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

The actors - all men - wore theatricalized versions of everyday dress, but, most important, they wore larger-than-life masks, which aided visibility and indicated the nature of the character to the audience. ... Of the more than 1000 tragedies written during that century, only 31 remain, all by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. ... The Persians, presented in 472 BC, is a historical tragedy about the Battle of Salam as, the scene being laid in Persia at the court of the mother of King Xerxes I. ... In Agamemnon, one of the greatest works of dramatic literature, King Agamemnon returns h...

• Word Count: 2321
• Approx Pages: 9

These three witches proceed in the third scene of Act I to tell Macbeth of three prophecies: He will become the Thane of Cawdor, the King, and already is the Thane of Glamis.   Macbeth is astonished by the prophecies the witches tell him about and wonders if all of them will come true.   When Macbeth firsts hears the prophecies he believes he will become the Thane of Glamis and King by chance since this is how he became the Thane of Cawdor. ... The Thane of Glamis, Macbeth, consistently contemplates on these three prophecies since he wants them to become true and then goes and kills King Du...

• Word Count: 1350
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

The variances of emotion, although shown from a character, are all based on human responses. ... Jason fell in love with the daughter of Kreon, the king of Corinth, and left Medea in order to wed the princess. ... Kreon can see that she has plans to make life miserable for all who are around Jason. ... He was given to the king and queen of Corinth where he was raised to adulthood. ... It comes to light that Oedipus was not the son of the king of Corinth but had been found with his ankles bound as an infant. ...

• Word Count: 2458
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

In the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Oedipus is a classic tragic hero.According to Aristotle's definition, Oedipus is a tragic hero because he is a king whose life falls apart when he finds out his life story. ... All of the above characteristics make Oedipus a tragic hero according to Aristotle's ideas about tragedy, and a narcissist. ... I have been born where I should not be born, I have been married where I should not marry, I have killed whom I should not kill; now all is clear" (Sophocles 1144). ... If he hadn't been so judgmental or narcissistic, as Miller wou...

• Word Count: 1311
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

In the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Oedipus is a classic tragic hero.According to Aristotle's definition, Oedipus is a tragic hero because he is a king whose life falls apart when he finds out his life story. ... All of the above characteristics make Oedipus a tragic hero according to Aristotle's ideas about tragedy, and a narcissist. ... I have been born where I should not be born, I have been married where I should not marry, I have killed whom I should not kill; now all is clear" (Sophocles 1144). ... If he hadn't been so judgmental or narcissistic, as Miller wou...

• Word Count: 1309
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: High School

Sophocles' Antigone and Arthur Miller's All My Sons both fit into this category. ... According to Aristotle's Poetics, a tragic hero is someone not all good or all bad, and whose downfall is caused by a tragic flaw or "hamartia". ... He feared that any pardoning of Antigone would detract from his power as king. ... Don't let greed eat away at your heart, and be humane and respectful to all. ... As for Creon, he cannot not put his pride down and pardon Antigone because if he the king issues an edict, then it must be obeyed. ...

• Word Count: 1587
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

Similarly, Macbeth's ambition to become king eventually leads to his demise. ... Macbeth for one murders his best friend Banquo in fear that his children will overthrow his position as king. ... In many, if not all of Shakespeare's tragedies, fate is a common theme. ... Finally, the most common theme in all of Shakespeare's tragedies is death. ... Not all ends well in the tragedies, but the comedies end as you like it. ...

• Word Count: 1601
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School

All of these aspects nevertheless intertwine to produce Hamlet. ... With Ophelia he changes from the lover to the cruel abuser, "Get thee to a nunnery" With Gertrude he is the loving son, "I shall in all my best obey you, madam." and with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern he is the joker. ... The final line, "The play's the thing wherein I"ll catch the conscience of the king." ... His role playing is genuinely part of his true nature and is a major aspect to his complexity because to fully describe and understand him, all the characters within him must be acknowledged. ... For Hamlet this i...

• Word Count: 1574
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Creon finally realizes after two lives have been taken that his own actions have caused all of this chaos. ... Creon, in my opinion, would respond in a positive way to this statement because his only interests as a King are in political and social order. Creon is all about the happiness of everyday life. ... Creon rejects the rational side to law and goes against the gods constantly, which led to his downfall as king. ... Antigone's beliefs are so strong that she completely disregards all law and state. ...

• Word Count: 1944
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: High School