When people think of, or discuss, the play Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, love probably first comes to their mind and surfaces in their discussion. Love, however, can represent different things to different people. Love, like fire, can be either purifying or destructive. In this play, ...

What is love? Love is a strong bond of friendship between two people. Love is something that can not be seen, only felt, but there are ways to see love. In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, love is amplified through the use of imagery. In this play, William Shakespeare uses many types of...

Loving ourselves is sometimes seen as an impossible barrier to loving others, others see it as a necessary step towards being able to love others, as in the popular saying, "You have to love yourself before you can love others." Clearly both excessive self-love and self-scorn can kill romance. . Hum...

Throughout the entire play, Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare repeatedly shows a theme of friendship. Living in Rome during 44 B.C., Brutus, an honorable man who starts out friends with both Cassius and Caesar, ends up joining along with Cassius to betray Caesar with assassination. After the...

Critical Lens: "Loyalty is the test of a true friendship" A true friendship is filled with though times, during these times loyalty is expressed and you learn who your true friends are. Life is all about ups and downs, the highs are high but the lows are even lower. Friends are the...

Everyone behaves differently in one place than they would in another. A teenager acts differently among their peers at school than they would in a pew at church. A teacher speaks differently to her young students in the classroom than she would at a PTO board meeting with parents. A lawyer's for...

The Villain When an outsider comes to a city like Venice, as portrayed in the play Othello, by William Shakespeare, he has to "win" the love of others in order to fit in. Othello takes the audience into a whirlwind perspective of love, friendship, and betrayal. Love for Desdemona leads...

In William Shakespeare's poem "When My Love Swears That She Is Made of Truth", the speaker uses several key lines and words that particularly enhance the meaning and images of the poem. The following lines illustrate this: I do believe her, though I know she lies, ..............

I found the first act of King Lear to be interesting, unexpectedly so. In reading the introduction, I was under the impression that this story would be dull and slow to develop. Imagine my shock when the main event happened within a few moments. I found three major events in the first act: Kin...

The motivation behind all of our actions has been a topic of debate for centuries. Reasons for war, intolerance, deception, crime and yet, most importantly, love, have always been questioned and analyzed. How can we equate Hitler's motivation for slaughtering millions of people to Mother Teresa's be...

"The protagonist of a tragedy should be a person who is not eminently good or just, yet whose fortune is brought by some error or frailty" (Jacobus IIV). This error could be ignorance, flaw or weakness in his character or the act may have been committed in anger or passion such is the cas...

Hamlet a hardy man, courageous, and worthy of eternal commendation, who arming himself with a crafty, dissembling, and strange show of being distract out of his mind, under that pretense deceived the wise, and crafty, thereby not only preserving his life from the reasons and wicked practices of the ...

Erik Irre April 26, 1999 "Fools and Kings" Shakespeare's dynamic use of irony in King Lear aids the microcosmic illustration of not only 16th century Britain, but of all times and places. The theme that best develops this illustration is the discussion of fools and their foolishness. Th...

What insights does the program offer in relation to Lear's character and what are the implications for how we see the play as a whole? Shakespeare intended his plays to be viewed, and it is only on stage or in film that the subtleties of gesture, emotion and tone can be discovered to illu...