MEG – 02: BRITISH DRAMA
MEG – 02: BRITISH DRAMA
Ans. The Play-within-the Play: This play within a play is therefore used by Shakespeare to make
a subtle point about theatre, namely the fact that it is only acting. The Mechanicals like to perform a play at Theseus' wedding. Theseus is an enlightened ruler, notable for his wise judgement but there is a limit to his abilities: the problem Egeus gives him seems incapable of solution, so he tries to buy time and work on Egeus and Demetrius. But there seems little hope that the "harsh Athenian law"
will produce a solution acceptable to all parties.
In this play the apparently anarchic tendencies of the young lovers, of the mechanicals-as-actors, and of Puck are restrained by the "Sharp Athenian Law" and the law of the Palace Wood, by Theseus and Oberon, and their respective consorts. This tension within the world of the play is matched in its construction: in performance it can at times seem riotous and out of control, and yet the structure of the play shows a clear interest in symmetry and patterning.
exploring tensions between art and ordinary life and demonstrating how, through an imaginative alchemy, the raw materials of life can be formed into something enduring. In "Sailing to Byzantium," the speaker transforms himself into a work of art, and, in so doing, obscures the distinction between form and content and the artist and his work. "Sailing to Byzantium" is widely admired for its inventive, evocative imagery and masterfully interwoven phrases. Literary critic Frank Kermode calls the poem "a marvellously contrived emblem of what Yeats took the work of art to be.
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