Friday, January 24, 2020

Responsibilities in William Shakespeares Merchant of Venice Essay

Responsibilities in William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice The small and seemingly insignificant details in a story often hold together an entire theme of the work. This phenomenon is recognizable in the plays of William Shakespeare, as a speech or incident with a minor character can point the audience to a much larger truth about the work as a whole. The Merchant of Venice contains such a minor character, Lancelot, whose story gives a clue to the reader about the roles of the other characters in the play. Lancelot abandons his servitude to Shylock, and thereby weakens his own value as a member of society fulfilling a role. Lancelot’s decision is noteworthy because it represents a conflict of responsibilities that can be found in some of the main characters. These other characters (with the exception of Portia) behave similarly to Lancelot, and Lancelot’s story helps to illuminate their shortcomings. Lancelot’s speech about running from Shylock captures the greater conflict between inconsistent responsibilities that is present throughout The Merchant of Venice. Every servant has a responsibility to his master before he is responsible to himself. Lancelot violates this basic principle of servitude, and thus brings shame upon himself. Not only is Lancelot under a contractual obligation to Shylock, he has both social and religious obligations to remain in Shylock’s service. It is no surprise that the one who counsels Lancelot to leave Shylock is â€Å"the fiend† himself. â€Å"To be ruled by my conscience I should stay with the Jew my master who, God bless the mark, is a kind of devil;† reasons Lancelot (2.2.17-19), thinking that it is probably a better idea to stay with Shylock. He also knows that â€Å"to run away fro... ... ones. Because The Merchant of Venice is a comedy, no real harm comes to Lancelot or Bassanio because of their poor choices, but they are all made out to be foolish in comparison to Portia. These characters are lucky—in comparison with some of Shakespeare’s other characters that are faced with inconsistent responsibilities (such as Hamlet or Juliet, who both die), the non-role-fulfillers of The Merchant of Venice have extraordinarily happy endings. It is interesting to note that most of Shakespeare’s plays that include conflicting roles or responsibilities are tragedies, while the happy resolution of The Merchant of Venice makes it a comedy. The mistakes in The Merchant of Venice are all fixable, so even though the characters neglect their roles on occasion, the quick thinking of Portia allows them to retire with their spouses safely as a new day is breaking.

Thursday, January 16, 2020

My Idiolect

Explore how and why your own language varies in different contexts and consider how others react to your speech. During the 14 years of my life, I have learnt to adjust and familiarise my dialect to suit diverse situations through the impact of media, family, music and social networking. Moreover, I have come to pay special attention to the context of where someone is talking and the mode of how they are communicating. I have also gained the awareness of how others respond to features of my idiolect and what to anticipate of them if I alter it.One aspect that stands out to be the utmost dominant in the means of varying my idiolect is social networking. Abbreviations like â€Å"LOL† and â€Å"ROFL† appear to be making their way into everyday teenager dialects around the world including mine. I have noticed that I currently use â€Å"LOL† often to let others recognise when I find something humorous. What I perceive from this is that I only use this abbreviation aro und my friends primarily because of the formal and informal parting of my idiolect between my friends and people like my teachers and parents.I think I do this because I consider using informal words with an audience I’m generally formal with, strange and unfamiliar. I also believe I do this because I expect an audience of that kind to object to it since teenage slang is most frequently thought as discourteous and lethargic. Music also impacts my idiolect as I am so exposed to it that it has come to be typical for me to pick up a few words and slang from certain lyrics. One example of how music has influenced me is a simple conversation between me and my sister in which she said: â€Å"You lost my earrings didn’t you? and I answered with â€Å"Oh whatever, YOLO! † The origin of this acronym came from the Canadian rapper, Drake’s bonus track from his album ‘Take care’. It has since been popularized all over the world and people have now start ed using this term to define when someone is about to do something idiotic. I used this word because I knew my sister would be acquainted with it since the majority of teenagers have basic understanding of slang and abbreviations being used at the moment.I regularly speak to my mother in a more official and basic way thus the variation in spoken language between my sister and my mother is due to me wanting to adapt to the way my friends and the younger generation of my family use the aspects of music to express their feelings. I also used â€Å"YOLO† to strengthen the connection between me and my sister so that she would know that we have a lot of things in common in terms of understanding general teenage knowledge.I do not use slang when conversing with my parents because I know that they will criticize this way of communicating as most parents believe slang makes teenagers sound unintelligent and incompetent including mine. My parents think I should use try to use Standard English in everyday life as practice for when I do specific English exams. They also consider that media in terms of TV shows and the dialectal manner of celebrities have triggered an adverse effect on people my age because they believe that the poor grammar of people from this region is promoted to sound cool and trendy.My parents have confidence in the idea that my vocal language has been substituted with words like â€Å"Totes† and â€Å"amazeballs†. Nevertheless when I indicate to them that I have adapted to using proper and apparently ‘posh’ words from classical books, my parents react positively and praise the use of my language. This goes to show that certain factors have certain outcomes to the way a person speaks and how a person responds to this.

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Young Goodman Brown Versus the Fall of the House of Usher...

Angela Higgerson Dr. Lewis ENGL 2041 3 March 2010 In both, Nathanial Hawthorne’s â€Å"Young Goodman Brown† and Edgar Allen Poe’s â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† the protagonists, Young Goodman Brown and the narrator experience a journey into the subconscious. Both stories have an overlap that blurs the boundaries of reality and fantasy. It is truly the supernatural aspects of these two stories that force the protagonists and the reader to delve into the realm of the subconscious and to scrutinize good versus evil and real versus imaginary. Both stories have a setting of gloom and foreboding that alludes to where the stories are heading. In Young Goodman Brown, his wife Faith pleads with him to postpone†¦show more content†¦In â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† the story starts with the narrator saying that he is overcome with a feeling of gloom upon first seeing the house. He compares the windows to vacant eyes. The narrator goes on to tell how the house appears to him but then tries to explain it away as his overactive imagination. Both stories tell of supernatural occurances. Hawthorne’s story has many examples of the supernatural. One of the examples, the serpent staff the traveler has seems to come alive however, he reasons it away as the way the light or lack thereof making it appear alive. Another example is Hawthorne’s use of Salem, Massachusetts which was infamous for the Salem witch trials. Hawthorne also uses Goody Cloyse’s recipe of all plants associated with witchcraft and her talking of her missing broomstick that she accuses Goody Cory of stealing to suggest witchcraft. In reality, Sarah Cloyse was accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials and Martha Cory was hanged for witchcraft. When the traveler took a maple branch to serve as a walking cane, the twigs seemed to wither at his touch. All of these, Hawthorne uses to weave a tale seemingly of supernatural happenings while also suggesting it is actually Goodman Brown’s subconscious creating the wh ole event. When BrownShow MoreRelatedDifferent Colors Of Darkness By Nathaniel Hawthorne And Edgar Allen Poe995 Words   |  4 Pagespath to hopelessness can take many different routes. These contrasting motivations first surface in the authors’ tones. Hawthorne’s solemn words hearken to the Puritan mantra of stringent moral standards and the belief of a wicked world. In â€Å"Young Goodman Brown,† the protagonist learns about the evil concealed in the hearts of people he reveres. In the same way Brown’s exposure robs him of hope and joy, Hawthorne’s themes of evil’s pervasiveness rob his stories of optimism. His disheartening opinion