About the Big Ideas (English)

Part 1: The Power of Love
Part 2: Awkward Encounters

Part 1: The Power of Love

Love is one of the most popular themes in drama, from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to Jerome Robbins's and Arthur Laurents's West Side Story . No other subject matter seems to move audiences and readers alike, regardless of age, ethnicity, class, or religion. The dramatic selections in Part 1 illustrate the pleasures of falling in love for the first time and the tragedy that ensues when young love is not allowed to flourish.

While many plays about love end “happily ever after,” many dramas also illustrate the obstacles that tear lovers apart. Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, defined such plays, in which characters suffer a fall from fortune, as tragedies . The tragedy is often the result of character flaws, or tragic flaws, in the protagonist. At the end of most tragedies, the protagonist , or main character, realizes his or her shortcomings and meets his or her death honorably.

Web Sources

Outline of Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy in the Poetics
http://www.cnr.edu/home/bmcmanus/poetics.html
This site summarizes Aristotle's definition of tragedy and outlines its major features.

Folger Shakespeare Library
http://www.folger.edu/index.cfm
The Folger Shakespeare Library is a research center, home to the largest collection of Shakespeare materials in the world.

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Part 2: Awkward Encounters

Overview

Tragedies are not the only kind of dramas that teach us about the life and the human condition. The plays in Part 2 are comedies; though much lighter in subject manner and mood, they can illuminate life truths just as profoundly.

A comedy is a type of drama that is humorous and typically has a happy ending. In both comedies and tragedies, playwrights can create comical situations through the use of irony. Irony is a contrast between appearance and reality, or between what is expected and what actually happens. Situational irony occurs when the actual outcome of a situation is the opposite of what is expected. In dramatic irony, the audience or reader knows information that characters do not. In verbal irony, a person says one things and means another. Authors use each of these kinds of irony for comic effect.

Web Resources

The Comedy of Errors, by William Shakespeare
http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/comedy_errors/
This site contains the full, online text of Shakespeare's shortest play, The Comedy of Errors ; it is filled with wordplay, slapstick humor, and mistaken identity.

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