How is love presented and critiqued in the play? What will be ...

[BrownTown3]

How is love presented and critiqued in the play?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

How does the play exemplify the holiday spirit of revels?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[Ahernandez18]

Answer to Question 1

• Among the many varieties of love and relationship treated in the play (parent-child, ruler-ruled, god-mortal, friends, sexual lovers), there seems to be a distinction between right relationship and dangerous sexual obsession. The play implicitly recommends due proportion and balanced obligations as the proper order of our affective relations with others. Dotage, obsession, and fixation are important sources of the plays comedy. (Ask students to identify and discuss major instances.) The correction of mistaken or excessive attachment is an important part of the plays resolution.

Answer to Question 2

• In many of his early romantic comedies and late romances, Shakespeare uses an escape to a green world, the world of nature, or in this case magic and nature, as a release or h oliday revel. As C. L. Barber wrote, The clarification achieved by the festive comedies corresponds to the release they dramatize: a heightened awareness of the relation between man and naturea holiday in celebration of an elemental natural force like summer or harvest. In the alternative reality of the green world, essential human values are rediscovered and secured. Holiday rescues us from everyday.