Lysistrata's Ending Of The Play example essay topic

The world of comedy is fundamentally safe. Comedy provides a space that allows characters to take risks and play dangerously because the playwrights always provide a happy ending. The freedom to court some danger in the name of love can sometimes seems as though it has gone too far, in Midsummer's Night Dream, Oberon's cruel love games. However the reader is always on his way to a happy ending, to the love of a good woman.

The feminine romance is infinitely valuable. Lysistrata by Aristophanes and Midsummer's Night Dream by William Shakespeare have several common themes and characteristics. Both plays are ultimately love stories. Lysistrata is about women wanting their lovers to be at home and Midsummer's is about wanting and getting the one that you love. Both plays also reserve the idea of a celebration although, more prevalent in Midsummer's Night Dream because it is after all written for a wedding.

Lysistrata's ending of the play is a celebration with Bacchanalian music that induces dancing, poetry, and drinking of wine. The celebration of the feminine perspective is taken most seriously. Feminism is also addressed. Lysistrata portrays women as being too unfeminine and Midsummer's Night Dream depicts women as being irrational. Most importantly both plays have similarities because they are both centered around the power and control of romance and the parody of the conventions of love.

Lysistrata is about marital love and fantasy The women of Athens love their husbands so much they need them close to home. Therefore the women of Sparta join with the women of Athens to create the plan to seduce the men from war. The fantasy is that the women can actually accomplish their goals. In the beginning of Lysistrata the old women's chorus states that the women have little worth without their husbands beside them. The women are taught that they need the men in order to have fulfilled lives. Women are to serve men and to be loyal to them.

In this story the men are going off to fight the Peloponnesian war. The women of the city of Athens do not want their husbands to be off at war because then they feel unfulfilled without a man to serve (this part of the story is ridiculous for a 21st. c woman but let's not get into that). Lysistrata, the main character of this play, has a discovery, a 'good idea;' that benefits her as well as mankind. She does this, of course, in the prolog us, as any well-crafted Old Comedy does. Lysistrata has the idea to use what power she has to over-ride the power of the men.

Lysistrata explains what and how the women of Athens are going to use their power... Act I Lysistrata (L) and Kalonika (K) " (L) Kalonika, I tell you if Greece is to be saved, it is the women who must do it. (K) The women? Why, then, Greece will be a long time being saved. (L) It will be saved by us or forever be ruined. (K) But Lysistrata, even so, what makes you think that women can do what our great statesmen have failed to do?

They always try for peace. (L) They say they try... They make us believe they do. (K) And when their great peace conferences fail, they can go to war. But we, Lysistrata, we know nothing about great affairs. We sit there, waiting for the men to come to tell us what they have done, dressed in transparent gowns of yellow silk, flowering about so that we can hardly walk, with flowers in our hair and embroidered slippers.

(L) You have just recited the catalogue of our most powerful weapons. (K) Weapons? ... (L) These are the weapons by which every woman can make the men of Greece lay down their arms... I ask you now, if we have such power, should we not use it? (K) We should indeed...

". . Aristophanes' comedies appeal to all audiences because of his use of slapstick and sexual innuendo. It creates an environment that reflects the general thought of the people.

The type of humor that Aristophanes uses is from the ritual origins of ancient Athens. Humor celebrates the vital forces of nature. The force of nature that controls the human condition is power. The power of a feminine woman can be dangerous. The importance's of the rules of the day are important. All of the women in Lysistrata are married and sex is only permitted in the unity of marriage.

Aristophanes leaves out that the husbands can look for sexual gratification outside the intuition of marriage. Marriage is assumed to be the natural state and any interruption of family life's order is intolerable.