Passage Analysis  

Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Taming of the Shrew had insults within many of their prominent scenes. 

LYSANDER: (to HERMIA)        Get you gone, you dwarf,

You minimus of hindering knotgrass made,

You bead, you acorn! (III.ii)

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Both Lysander and Demitrius are very mean to Helena after they are made to fall in love with Hermia. One of their favorite subjects to comment on is her height, which is bought up several times throughout the play. She is much shorter than Hermia, and once the two men fall in love with her, they play on Helena’s size a lot, using hyperbole and over-exaggerating in order to make her feel worse and worse about herself. 

KATHARINA: "Asses are made to bear, and so are you."

PETRUCHIO: "Women are made to bear, and so are you."

KATHARINA: "No such jade as you, if me you mean."

PETRUCHIO: "Alas, good Kate, I will not burden thee,/For knowing thee to be but young and light."

KATHARINA: "Too light for such a swain as you to catch,/And yet as heavy as my weight should be."

PETRUCHIO: "Should be? Should-buzz!"

KATHARINA: "Well ta'en, and like a buzzard." 

PETRUCHIO: “O slow-winged turtle, shall a buzzard take thee?”

KATHARINA: “ Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard” (II.i)

Much of the insults in The Taming of the Shrew come about in scenes with Kate in them. In this scene, Kate is very insulting to Petruchio, who is quick and thoughtful enough to come back at Kate whenever she verbally attacks him. Petruchio, however, does not usually insult Kate back, he turns her abuse into implication. 

Genre Commentary

Magic is a common theme in both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in The Tempest. Within Midsummer, magic came in the form of fairies and the love potion, which also tied together because Puck (a fairy) was the one who put the potion on the four lovers eyes while they were asleep. This magic is the catalyst for the whole plot of the play, the lovers turning against one another, but then, in the end, the potion restores order so Lysander ends up loving Hermia, and vice versa, and Demitrius ends up loving Helena, who she was in love with all along. 

Bottom is also greatly affected by magic in two ways. Firstly, Puck turns Bottom’s head into that of a donkey, though Bottom doesn’t realize it, which makes him the character that he is: ridiculous and completely oblivious to his own stupidity. The other way that Bottom is affected is that Titania, the Queen of the fairies falls in love with him through use of the love potion, and this serves to boost his ego even more and make him feel like he is even more loved and admired. 

The Tempest uses magic in a different way, such that fairies are still seen, but a type that is different than those such as Puck, Titania, and Oberon. Ariel is considered a type of fairy spirit, but she is enslaved by Prospero and can only use his magic for Prospero’s own uses. Prospero also uses his magic to create the circumstances that all of the characters in the play must live under, from Alonso and Ferdinand to Ariel and Caliban to his daughter Miranda. 

Personal Reflection

Overall, I enjoyed reading these two of Shakespeare’s comedies, along with The Tempest. The Taming of the Shrew, while it was slightly harder to read, was very entertaining, with all of the physical and verbal comedy used, especially between Kate and Petruchio and Petruchio and Grumio. While I did like Kate as a character at first, it was good to watch her become a domesticated wife to Petruchio throughout her travels back and forth from Padua to Petruchio’s home in the country. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was interesting to read in class because it was easier to keep track of which character was in love with whom and when. I also liked that it was a play within a play, and that there was a play within the second play, though it did confuse me as to why Shakespeare never showed the scene at the inn again where the play was being performed. 

The Tempest was by far my favorite, mostly for the fact that Caliban was my favorite of the characters out of these three plays. Although he was meant to be an antagonist, I almost felt bad for him for the way that Prospero took his island and enslaved him. Caliban was never even given a choice about anything, even though he appeared to be the only real inhabitant of the island before Prospero’s ship wrecked there. 

Shakespeare's Histories

Passage Analysis 

Both Richard and Henry give lengthy speeches within their respective plays, but they are used in very different manners. 

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remember'd;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. (Henry V. IV. iii.)

Henry, while his main goal is to become heir the the throne of France, does great things to help the soldiers that are fighting for his cause through their battles. This St. Crispin’s Day speech is one of Shakespeare’s most famous, and it is used by Henry to rouse his troops and give them courage and strength to fight against the French army who greatly outnumbered the English. Everything that Henry does while in France is for his troops, and that makes them feel like they really belong where they are and that they should be proud to be there, like calling them his “band of brothers” or sitting around a fire with them, even though the soldiers don’t know who Henry really is.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair well-spoken days, 

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the king

In deadly hate the one against the other:

And if King Edward be as true and just

As I am subtle, false and treacherous,

This day should Clarence closely be mewed up,

About a prophecy, which says that 'G'

Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be. (Richard III.  I. i.)

It is almost as if Richard has given up on himself; if he “cannot prove a lover” then what better things does he have to do than plot against and kill off the majority of his family and friends to become king? Richard does things only for himself (the complete opposite of Henry) and for his name to be immortalized. 

Richard uses this speech at the opening of the play to give background, but also to warn them about what a treacherous person he is. Richard knows that he is a villain, and he wouldn’t have it any other way if he couldn’t be manipulative and antagonistic. He has no conscience to get in the way of his well laid plans and how they will ruin the lives of everyone around him, Richard never does anything for the good of his country, only for the good of himself. Who knows what would have become of England if he had become the king like he had planned to do? There is only so much that he could have attained at that point, especially considering the fact that there was no longer anyone that he could confide in, there were only those left who either hated him or whom he could hire to carry out his bidding.  

Commentary on Histories

 If these histories did not have the action and entertainment factor that Shakespeare added to them, they would be fairly dull and uninteresting. The way that Shakespeare romanticizes both Henry V and Richard III to both extremes, though, keeps the audiences interested and kept the current monarch of England happy, depending on their ancestry and the house that they belonged to, such as Queen Elizabeth the Tudor House. 

During his time, Richard was cruel and did kill people to get closer to the throne, but he was not nearly as horribly deformed as Shakespeare made him out to be and, while he did kill quite a few people, not as many as in the play. He has absolutely no conscience and has people killed only for his own good, which makes it that much easier to hate him. Buckingham, for instance, was the person who was the closest to Richard, but he, too, ended up executed for the smallest thing, hesitation to kill the two young princes. The thing that makes it the easiest to hate Richard is the fact that he knows how antagonistic and manipulative that he is, and he knows he is ruining the lives of everyone around him.

Henry was a good, fair king who always looked out for his people, and he was depicted that way. The bonds that he had with those around him were very strong and he always held them high above his own concerns. People like Falstaff, who Henry was friends with during his wilder days, Henry cut ties off with because he wasn’t a good person for a king to be friends with. Henry was very kind about this, he didn’t have Falstaff executed like Richard would have done. Henry was also much more easy to relate to in the sense that he wanted to know what it was like to be a common man and to be able to walk down the street unrecognizable.

Personal Reflection 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading both histories, and both for different reasons. Henry V was a good story about a noble king fighting for his right to a throne. Henry had a frivolous youth, but now that he had to take on the responsibilities of a king, he took them very seriously and did all that he could for his countrymen. 

Through reading Richard in class, I think that I took a lot more away from it than reading on my own. Being able to hear different voices when reading a play make it much easier to understand how Shakespeare intended each character to act and think and recognize the devices used to make that character who they are. It was great watching Richard become less and less interested in who he was murdering and becoming more and more focused on his goal of becoming king of England. It was also great to finally figure out where the famous line “my kingdom for a horse!” came from.