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Question: Contrast and compare how Shakespeare’s presentation of the theme Appearance and Reality in ”Twelfth Night” and ”As You Like It”, generates laughter and suspense, taking one text ( mention the main text you have chosen) as your main text and the other to support you’re your argument.
Edxecel AS Level Literature- Grade A
Answer: “I am not what I am”
Shakespeare, the great man of the theatre, was profoundly aware of the dichotomy between seeming and reality in role playing on stage, as expounded by the above utterance of Rosalind. That appearances can be deceptive in real life itself, was also a familiar concept to the Jacobean audiences who were witness to “Father Garnet’s equivocation during his trial for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot against James 1(1606)” Father Garnet, who” lied like the truth” though in tragedies the tragic protagonist’s inability to distinguish appearance from reality heightens the tragic potentialities of the play. In these romantic comedies on the other hand, suspense, much comic humour and [dramatic] irony are generated by such confusion of appearance and reality as the audience is privy to deceptions which [some of the]the characters themselves are unaware of.
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- Subject: English Literature
- Course: English Literature
- Level: A-Level
- Year: Not applicable
- Mark: 70%
- Words: 2079
- Date submitted: March 19, 2018
- Date written: Not available
- References: Yes
- Document type: Essay*
- Essay ID: 8335
