Marriage Critic Quotations Flashcards
James I Basilikon Doron - “especially a King must in good time marry for the weale [good] of his people”
James I Basilikon Doron - Marriage was ordained for “quenching the lust of youth”
Lisa Hopkins - “despite the traditional view that marriage provides comic closure, this is, in fact, very rarely achieved”
Fouassier - “In Vienna’s corrupt and sordid world, marriage cannot be a vehicle of fairy-tale transformation”
Melissa E Sanchez - “In ordering all of the major characters to marry, the Duke compels them to recognise the sinful humanity they share with the pimps, perverts and prostitutes of Vienna”
Hopkins - “Marriage is appropriate as a provider of closure for comedy because it focuses primarily on the experience of the group, as opposed to the individualist, isolationist emphasis of tragedy”
Hopkins - “In the comic universe, however, the world not only remains fundamentally the same, but is indeed reinforced by the reaffirmation of that most basic of all props and social and patriarchal order, marriage”
Wheeler - At the end of the play, in L and KK we see a “degraded relationship which is forced to take the stamp of official respectability”
Fouassier - the play “looks like a comedy, [but] it is devoid of celebration and its ending resolves none of the tension aroused by the action”
Shmoop Study Guide - the play is one of Shakespeare’s “most cynical plays about the nature of marriage”
Lisa Hopkins - The audience would expect the play to end in marriage but “these expectations are disappointed, or gratified in such a way that the spectator will be forced to question both the meaning of the event he or she has witnessed and also the assumptions underlying their response to these events”
Lisa Hopkins - “there was a growing tradition which established marriage as the goal at least of romantic comedy. That tradition Shakespeare habitually disrupts”
Emma Smith - the play is the closest Sh has ever come to writing a city comedy: “witty, bawdy plays that were blunt about sexual misconduct and cynical about love”
Hopkins - “the presence of marriages in their plots [Shakespearean comedy] which has problematised the genre classifications of the late romances and the two ‘dark comedies’ […] and which provides the main justification for whatever claim they are accorded to be treated as comedies”
