Love is Patriotic... Wider Reading 16: Henry V

It is a commonly held belief that Shakespeare's Henry V was the first to be performed at the new Globe Theatre in the spring of 1599. Since then, the story of the victor of Agincourt has been performed and adapted many times, with the dashing king as a prominent historical figure. Many types of love are explored within the play, the most obvious of which is patriotism and love of one's country. When Henry calls for his army to "Follow [their] spirit, and upon this charge / Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!" they are portraying their strength in terms of their love for England and its king. During the play Henry also experiences the loss of many of his friends and family members, who he remembers gratefully as loving him as a man despite his high status.

Henry's wooing of Katherine - or as he calls her, Kate - at first superficially appears to be the charming comical awkwardness of a soldier talkinh to an aristocratic lady. But Katherine knows that "the tongues of men are full of deceits", and for all his insistences on lacking eloquence Henry's speech is lengthy and highbrow. Katherine asks, "Is it possible dat I sould love de enemie of France?". To the king, and probably most others, the match with Katherine is a marriage of national conquest, not of human love. Henry is obliged to answer that he is not the enemy of France - quite the opposite. That this marriage is about rapacity for land rather than love is clear from Henry's rhapsodizing about France itself. At best, after some banter about the language barrier, "I love thee cruelly", he protests, letting slip a Janus-faced adjective. He believes calling her "a good soldier-breeder" is an appeal to maternal instincts.

After substantially more dissertation from Henry, Katherine punctures the hypocrisy of all this - the pretense that any fate is in her hands - by noting that the match is entirely up to her father. Although the Princess and Alice insist it is not French custom for ladies to kiss before marriage, Henry kisses her. The French nobles return, and Burgundy explains Katherine's resistence as maidens' natural modesty regarding Cupid. Henry declares, "Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and enforces". Historically, Henry married Catherine de Valois on 2 June 1420. Here, it may not be so much a marriage as a rape dressed up in ceremony. With the French conceding all, the "conquest" is achieved and all look forward, incorrectly as the audience knows, to a lasting peace.

Henry v - Quotations

Love is Unrequited... Wider Reading 14: The Seagull

By now, you will have ascertained my love of Russia and Russian literature. I am trying to wean myself off it by taking a few doses of Les Miserables, so look out for that sometime soon. In the meantime however, let us see how far we can push Mr Chekhov and his play-within-a-play. "The Seagull" is the first of his quartet of major theatrical works written between 1895 and 1902. It's disastrous opening night caused the writer to renounce the theatre, only to return in 1898 with "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters", and his most famous work, "The Cherry Orchard". "The Seagull" dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev. The character of Trigorin is often considered to be Chekhov's greatest male role, though as with the rest of Chekhov's full-length plays, this one relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully developed characters. In contrast to the melodrama of the mainstream theatre of the 19th century, lurid actions (such as Konstantin's suicide attempts) are not shown onstage. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt around issues rather than addressing them directly; in other words, their lines are full of subtext, and many important things are not said aloud.

Part of Chekhov's genius is that he does not simply write about artists and love, he creates the embodiment of art and love on stage, and entwines the two. Through his characters' particular personalities, Chekhov portrays the various manners of being an artist and particularly, an artist in love. All four protagonists find themselves this way. Arkadina, Trigorin, Treplev, and Nina have divergent relationships with their craft and their lovers. Arkadina and Nina romanticize acting, placing it on a pedestal higher than the everyday affairs of life. Arkadina places herself on this same pedestal using her identity as an actress to excuse her vanity. Nina exalts acting as well, but, contrary to Arkadina, she endows acting with nobility, sacrifice, and privilege. In writing, Treplev compulsively paralyzes himself in the pursuit of perfection, while Trigorin obsessively gathers details from his life and the lives around him for his work without allowing the work to affect his life.

The playwright's setting of a stage upon a stage lets us know from the outset that "The Seagull" is no ordinary play. Treplev creates a situation in which the play characters become increasingly similar to their own audience, because they themselves watch and are aware of the illusion of the theater. This is a tradition in the theater, presented repeatedly in Shakespeare's plays, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is emblematic of the exploration of the self that the play will examine, and foreshadows major themes of the play such as the role of theater, art, and love in a person's life as well as self-evaluation and reinvention of one's purpose in life. There are specific allusions to Hamlet: in the first act a son stages a play to impress his mother, a professional actress, and her new lover; the mother responds by comparing her son to Hamlet. Later he tries to come between them, as Hamlet had done with his mother and her new husband. The tragic developments in the plot follow in part from the scorn the mother shows for her son's play.

The Seagull - Quotations

Love is Important... Wider Reading 11: A Woman of No Importance

A Woman of No Importance" is witty Victorian writer Oscar Wilde doing what he does best - portraying gatherings of 19th Century high socialites delivering egocentric quips on the trivialities of their daily lives, with an omnipresent underlying commentary on society's often dubious morals and ethics. The members of the party accumulate to engage in frivolous commentary on themselves and each other, determined to outwit one another while maintaining an air of boredom at all times. Sometimes described as Wilde's weakest, yet unfailingly most famous dramatic works, the play is bursting with dramatic irony, rhetoric strategies and humorous witticisms. Oscar Wilde produces a great play with subtle sentiment and an underlying theme of good triumphing over bad.

The main theme is obviously that of the "fallen" woman who becomes, in the eyes of society, "a woman of no importance." It is a subject which often occupied other Victorian writers and artists, such as Christina Rossetti and Mary Gaskell. They were acutely aware that the men who seduced and abandoned often naïve girls were still welcomed into society, while for the woman it meant social and often financial ruin. If she was pregnant, her child would be illegitimate, and she herself disgraced. Wilde felt strongly that men and women should be treated equally when it came to sexual matters. It is a main topic of "Lady Windermere’s Fan" as well as here. As several writers have suggested, it is not difficult to see that a concealed sin and a plea for forgiveness might well reflect Wilde’s own situation in a society where his homosexuality ultimately made him an outcast.

There has been criticism levelled at Wilde about this play which suggests that the witty, clever repartee of the society characters sits very uneasily with the impassioned rhetoric of the ‘moral’ characters, and that either the drama drives out the wit or the epigrams are somehow passing the time for the audience in between the dramatic episodes. Some modern critics, however, have shown that because Wilde’s dialogue is both clever and enjoyable, it is possible to miss the underlying satirical implications that fit in very well with the more serious themes of the play. For example, Lord Illingworth’s apparently trivial comments, if analysed, contain echoes of the situation in which he left Gerald’s mother – out of society – but there is also a foreshadowing of the ending of the play in which the power of women and the need for their backing is amply demonstrated. This careful crafting so that moral and social comment are masked by seemingly trivial cleverness, is true of much of this type of dialogue, which is used to reveal characters and attitudes.

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A Woman of No Importance - Quotations

Love is Scandalous... Wider Reading 7: The School for Scandal

Richard Sheridan's comedy was first performed in 1777 and focuses on the superficial intrigues and scandals of the overfed, underworked upper classes of Georgian England, centring around two young brothers. Joseph Surface is hypocritical, "a sentimental knave," but popular in society. His brother Charles is considered to be a wastrel, who squanders his uncle's fortune in gambling, but is morally decent and generous, and greatly desired by the duplicitous Lady Sneerwell. Both men want to marry Maria, an heiress and ward of Sir Peter Teazle. Maria, however, prefers Charles over Joseph. In order to detach the couple, Lady Sneerwell and Joseph spread rumors about an affair between Charles and Lady Teazle, Sir Peter's extravagant new wife. Meanwhile, Sir Oliver Surface, newly returned from the East Indies, assumes various disguises in a vanity project to test his nephews' characters. Misunderstandings, mistaken identities, gossip, and bad behaviour abound in this comedy of manners.

One of Sheridan's most famous plays, The School for Scandal disparages the behaviour and customs of the upper classes through witty dialogue and an intricate plot, with comic, farcical situations which expose the shortcomings of the individuals involved. These C=characters consist almost entirely of stock types — the bore, the flirt, the gossip, the wastrel, the rich uncle, etc.—rather than individuals with unique qualities. Comedies of manners in Sheridan's time typically avoided the romantic sentimentality that characterized many other stage dramas of the eighteenth century. The author mainly satirizes malicious gossip and hypocrisy in the fashionable society of 1770s London. Underlying the comedy, however, is a serious theme: condemnation of the odious practice of slander and, in the case of the written letters, libel. Spreading scandal was commonplace in London's high society at this time, when conversation in drawing rooms, at balls, in spas, and across card tables was a form of entertainment.

Amid all the wrongdoing in the play, it is it is worth commenting upon the moral resolve of Maria, and, to a lesser extent, Charles. She refuses to gossip and repeatedly denounces the practice. She tells Mrs. Candour, "'Tis strangely impertinent for people to busy themselves so [with gossip]." Maria also steadfastly refuses to become involved with Joseph Surface even though her legal guardian, St. Peter Teazle, pressures her to do so. For his part, Charles Surface, despite his extravagance and devil-may-care lifestyle, refuses to compromise the basic goodness that defines his character. In particular, he refuses to sell the portrait of his benefactor and uncle even though the bidder, Sir Oliver in the guise of Mr. Premium, offers him a large sum of money. Moreover, even though he has little money left to support his wastrel ways, he contributes a generous sum to the destitute Mr. Stanley.

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