Tema della violenza in Shakespeare, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Tema della violenza in Shakespeare e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The theme of violence The role of violence is used in literatures to improve people’s situation in life, which leads to creating heroic characters. It is needed to advance the plot and strengthen the symbolic meaning of work. Violence is used as a means of creating and maintaining people's world. Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences consistently packed the theatres to see treacheries, revenges, and murders. Scenes of bloodshed were staged with maximum realism. We all know that Shakespeare loved to indulge in violent imagery and audience-traumatising scenes in many of his plays. He was born on April 26, 1564 and died in 1616. English playwright and poet, he is one of the main exponents of the English Renaissance and one of the greatest authors in the history of theater. The three main genres he wrote were comedy, romance and tragedy — and the tragedies definitely did not fall short of violence. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare offers a perspective of the unfair and overpowering nature of violence in the world. In Macbeth he utilises violence as a device to propel the graphic action forward. Violence in Shakespeare's Works Violence is the behavior that involves physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something, and also the strength of emotion or of a destructive natural force. Violence takes many forms in Shakespeare’s works, including warfare, murder, suicide, rape, and mutilation, and it appears to serve a variety of purposes. Shakespeare's use of violence has been both attacked and defended by modern analysts. While some scholars study the ways in which Shakespeare's use of violence reflects the attitudes of his time, others focus on the reaction to violence in Shakespeare's works by modern audiences. Some critics claim that, actually, unlike his predecessors, Shakespeare did not seem to be "addicted" to violence. Rather, we observe in Shakespeare a gradual decline of violence. Only in Titus Andronicus, which features both cannibalism and an excess of sexual violence in the rape and grotesque mutilation of Lavinia, Shakespeare seem to "wallow" in violence. Other critics focus more on the violence perpetrated against women in Shakespeare's plays. All this violence can be widely regarded as a reflection of the nature of man. Macbeth Plot: On a bleak Scottish moorland, Macbeth and Banquo, two of King Duncan's generals, discover three strange women (witches). The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be promoted twice: to Thane of Cawdor (a rank of the aristocracy bestowed by grateful kings) and King of Scotland. Banquo's descendants will be kings, but Banquo isn't promised any kingdom himself. The generals want to hear more, but the "weird sisters" disappear. Soon afterwards, King Duncan names Macbeth Thane of Cawdor as a reward for his success in the recent battles. The promotion seems to support the prophecy. The King then proposes to make a brief visit that night to Macbeth's castle at Inverness. Lady Macbeth receives news from her husband about the prophecy and his new title. She vows to help him become king by whatever means are necessary. Macbeth returns to his castle, followed almost immediately by King Duncan. The Macbeths plot together to kill Duncan and wait until everyone is asleep. At the appointed time, Lady Macbeth gives the guards drugged wine so Macbeth can enter and kill the King. He regrets this almost immediately, but his wife reassures him. She leaves the bloody daggers by the dead king just before Macduff, a nobleman, arrives. When Macduff discovers the murder, Macbeth kills the drunken guards. Duncan's sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee, fearing for their own lives; but they are, nevertheless, blamed for the murder. Macbeth becomes King of Scotland but is plagued by feelings of insecurity. He remembers the prophecy that Banquo's descendants will inherit the throne and arranges for Banquo and his son Fleance to be killed. In the darkness, Banquo is murdered, but his son escapes the assassin. At his state banquet that night, Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo and worries the courtiers with his mad response. Lady Macbeth dismisses the court and unsuccessfully tries to calm her husband. Macbeth seeks out the witches who say that he will be safe until a local wood, Birnam Wood, marches into battle against him. They also prophesy that the Scottish succession will still come from Banquo's son. Macbeth embarks on a reign of terror, slaughtering many, including Macduff's family. Macduff had gone to seek Malcolm (one of Duncan's sons who fled) at the court of the English king. Malcolm is young and unsure of himself, but Macduff persuades him to lead an army against Macbeth. Macbeth feels safe in his remote castle until he is told that Birnam Wood is moving towards him. Malcolm's army is carrying branches from the forest as camouflage for their assault on Macbeth's stronghold. Meanwhile, an overwrought and conscience-ridden Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep and tells her secrets to her doctor. She commits suicide. As the final battle commences, Macbeth hears of Lady Macbeth's suicide and mourns. In the midst of a losing battle, Macduff challenges Macbeth. Macbeth learns Macduff is the child of a caesarean birth, realises he is doomed, and submits to his enemy. Macduff triumphs and brings the head of the traitor Macbeth to Malcolm. Malcolm declares peace and goes to Scone to be crowned king. Macbeth is a play supposedly composed between 1605 and 1608, and it is considered the last of William Shakespeare's four great tragedies. Two characteristics that distinguish it from the others are: brevity and extremely gloomy atmosphere, at times apocalyptic. The main theme of the tragedy is the evil nature of man or in any case the destructive drive that lives in each of us. We can say that in summary, the work tells the desperate rise of a nobleman who turns into a cruel monster who does not stop in front of any obstacle and eliminates all potential enemies, including friends and relatives. The spiral of blood and violence, however, ends up destroying himself and his wife who always supports him in plots. This female figure, Lady Macbeth, represents the psychically ill part of the hero, in fact she uses her husband as a tool to achieve power and satisfy her greed. Macbeth's central theme - total destruction - finds its greatest expression in the two protagonists of the work. Macbeth craves power and fame. He kills his enemies and later tears himself from guilt. Lady Macbeth is one of the most extreme Shakespearean characters: she does everything to convince her husband to commit murders; however the atrocities committed by Macbeth will weigh so much on his consciousness that his psychic balance will be compromised. The theory of the whole work consists in the fact that when you decide to use violence to achieve your goals, stopping becomes a superhuman undertaking. Shakespeare makes it clear to the public that those who, blinded by the thirst for power, harm others end up destroying themselves and their loved ones. Blood pervades the work: when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth start their bloody undertaking, blood becomes a symbol of their guilt, and they begin to feel that the crimes committed have thrown an indelible stain on them. The story of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde explores the concept of good and evil as principles present in the human soul. Although both coexist, usually one of the two prevails over the other. Macbeth also addresses this issue. Throughout the drama, we observe Macbeth and his wife engaged in a constant inner struggle between "good" and "evil". Hamlet Plot: The place is set in Denmark at Elsinore castle where the king, Prince Hamlet’s father, has recently died. In the opening scene we are informed that a ghost, who is very similar to the dead king, has repeatedly appeared to two sentinels on the platform of the king’s castle. The two sentinels decide to go to Hamlet to inform him of what they have seen. Hamlet is deeply upset by his father’s death and his mother hasty marriage to his dead father’s brother, Claudius, who has become the new king. After hearing of the ghost, Hamlet agrees to go onto the platform at night and try to meet the ghost. Here the spectre appears again and and conflicts. In fact, love is the cause of violence because both Romeo and Juliet were so deeply in love that they would rather sacrifice their own lives than to be separated from each other. After Lord Capulet decided that Juliet would have married Paris, she says: “If alle ver fails, myself have power to die”. This shows that she is not afraid to take her life in honor of keeping her promise of love for Romeo. Since love causes violence, it can be seen as an amoral feeling, leading as much to destruction as to happiness. However, Romeo was the light in her life and she says: “Take Romeo and cut him out into stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no attention to the garish sun." This contrast of the light to darkness shows that their love is going smooth at the moment but it will soon be faced with violence. If Romeo and Juliet didn’t love each other as much as they did, they would have seen no reason to sacrifice their lives. So love is the cause of violence. Deaths Shakespeare’s plays are full of death and the exploration of death. Almost every way of dying imaginable occurs in the plays and, as usual with Shakespeare, it is almost never gratuitous but always an integral part of the plot and ideas of the play. The deaths may be tragic, many are gruesome and violent, and others are just creative but they all move the play along towards the resolution of the play’s conflict. The many plagues which decimated England and Europe in Shakespeare’s time helped shape a culture in which death was an ever-present force in daily life: images of corpses and skeletons abound in the art of the 14th and 15th centuries. In an era with high mortality rates, mass deaths due to disease, and little knowledge of medicine and hygiene, death was a mystery. Whole towns could be wiped out for no reason that anyone could understand and so death was considered the punishment of God.The prevalence of incidences of death and the imagery of death in Renaissance art was a vital part of society’s attempt to comprehend a very real danger, to work through it, to explore it. And, of course, the playwrights made it exciting by exploring ways of dying as well, and in doing so, pandering to the audience’s taste for violence by presenting dying in gruesome ways. Elizabethan drama and Jacobean drama was especially gruesome, notorious for on-stage deaths. However the number of violent deaths in William Shakespeare's works is one of the least considered aspects of his plays. But actually they make his works unique. For example, Hamlet has eight murders while in Macbeth it becomes almost difficult to calculate the number of deaths. Someone tried to stage them all in one single work, called The Complete Deaths, counting 74 dead. And it turns out that one character died of indigestion, two were cooked alive, one was hanged, one died because of sleep, one blinded, one dismembered by an angry mob. And then the great classic, death by stabbing, which affected 35 people. Game of Thrones is more violent than Shakespeare? Game of thrones is the most watched English language television series of our time. Its creator is George R.R. Martin (we can see a strong connection between this writer and Shakespeare). Since its 2011 debut, Game of Thrones has sparked controversy over its graphic depictions of violence.The show is notorious for killing off characters in savagely medieval ways — by sword, lance, knife, poison, molten gold, rats, dogs, crossbow, defenestration — while leaving little to imagination. Some critics have condemned the show’s violence, particularly the scenes involving rape. But others have praised the show for accurately portraying the brutal realities of medieval life. But this kind of violence is nothing new. As seen above, Shakespeare wrote a lot of graphic plays which contain brutal scenes. In fact Martin bases his novels on a lot of Shakespeare’s works. It’s not surprising that several characters and their situations are similar to some of the most famous characters in Shakespeare’s plays. But how exactly does Shakespeare's violence stack up to Game of Thrones? The answer depends on how you measure it: qualitatively or quantitatively.Examining body count alone, Game of Thrones is far and away more violent. Qualitatively, deciding which set of stories is more violent is a matter of opinion.