Much Ado About Nothing is a lighthearted play that Shakespeare wrote between 1598 and 1600. It has been described as one of his “more mature romantic comedies” (Bevington, 216). This play focuses on two different relationships, formed by two pairs of lovers. The comparison between how people went about getting married back then and how they do it now is similar in some ways. Much Ado About Nothing portrays the manner in which people fall in love, the way they interact with each other and how they manage to get through the rough times without changing their love for one another. The two couples include the young ladies, who are cousins, Beatrice and Hero, and the gentlemen, Claudio and Benedick. There is a lot of obvious love between Hero and Claudio and he has come to claim her as his own. However, there is some bad blood that runs between Benedick and his Beatrice. Little do they know that they are made for each other.
Messina, Italy, a small province facing the Straits of Messina, in northeastern Sicily, at the estate of the governor of Messina, Leonato is where this play is set. “Don Pedro of Aragon and his men are returning from a series of wars; stopping to visit Leonato, where they make plans to spend the next month. Among the group are Don John (Don Pedro’s bastard brother who once led an unsuccessful revolt against him), young Claudio, and Benedick. The young men are reacquainted with Leonato’s beautiful daughter Hero, and his spirited niece Beatrice…and once again, the verbal sparks fly between Beatrice and Benedick. Yet Claudio’s fascination with Hero is born out of love, not scorn”
(http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/1743/ado.html)…
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…d Beatrice decide to get married at the same time as Claudio and Hero. In the end, everyone is happy, as expected. Hero and Claudio get what they want, and so do the other two lovers. This is one of the more light-hearted of Shakespeare’s plays. It has all the elements of fun, family responsibility, and love. The main problem, the conflict between Beatrice and Benedick, is resolved.
Works Cited
Bevington, David. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 4th ed. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992.
Halliday, F.E. A Shakespeare Comparison. New York: Funk
Joseph Conrad: An Innovator in British Literature
Joseph Conrad: An Innovator in British Literature
Joseph Conrad’s innovative literature is influenced by his experiences in traveling to foreign countries around the world. Conrad’s literature consists of the various styles of techniques he uses to display his well-recognized work as British literature. “His prose style, varying from eloquently sensuous to bare and astringent, keeps the reader in constant touch with a mature, truth-seeking, creative mind” (Hutchinson 1). Conrad’s novels are basically based on having both a psychological and sociological plot within them. This is why Conrad’s work carries its own uniqueness from other novels when being compared to his.
Examples of Conrad’s literature include novels such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent. Heart of Darkness is basically based on his own experiences, but Conrad also adds fiction into this particular novel (Dintenfass 1). It has been said that Conrad’s style of writing is described as “…life as we actually live it…[is] to be blurred and messy and confusing– and the abstract ideas…[of] actual experiences can sometimes produce in us, or in that part of us, anyway, which tries to understand the world in some rational way.” Acquiring this from the novel gives the reader a psychological perspective in that they are receiving feedback in a conscious way such as a hallucination or a phantasm (Dintenfass 2). Readers have curiously questioned the purpose of his novels such as Heart of Darkness, but the answer is quite simple. “[The] purpose is to get the reader to re-live [any] experience in some [significant] and concrete way, with all its complexity and messiness, all its darkness and ambiguity, intact” (Dintenfass 3). An addi…
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…n, eds. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 1 Detroit: Hale Research Co., 1978.
Dintenfass, Mark. “Heart of Darkness: A Lawrence University Freshman Studies Lecture.” 14 Mar. 1996.
*http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~csicseri/dintenfass.htm* (2 Feb. 2000).
Draper, James P., ed. World Literature Criticism: 1500 to the Present. Vol. 2 Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992.
Hamblin, Stephen. “Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” *http://www.ductape.net/~steveh/secretagent/* (2 Feb. 2000).
The Hutchinson Encyclopedia. 1999. 2 Feb. 1999. *http://ukdb.web.aol.com/hutchinson/encyclopedia/72/M0013572.htm
Magill, Frank N., ed. 1,300 Critical Evaluations of Selected Novels and Plays. Vol. 2 Englewood Cliffs: Salem Press Inc., 1976.
Stein, Rita, and Martin Tucker, eds. Modern British Literature. Vol. 4 New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1975.