Shakespeare and the Literary Heritage

 

How have extremes of emotion expressed in Titus Andronicus and selected WW1 poetry been effectively created by the writers’ craft and performance of the drama text on stage, on screen and in the classroom?

In this assessment I will be discussing how the writers’, Shakespeare and Wilfred Owen have expressed extremes of emotion within each of their respective texts. Both texts written by Shakespeare and the WWI poets express a number of different emotions throughout using a number different language devices which I will be discussing during this assessment.

Titus Andronicus is play written by Shakespeare during the Elizabethan era.Titus Andronicus is set during Roman times, it is about a Roman general who has returned from war and the troubles he experiences after his return. To express the emotion caused by these troubles (eg: despair, desperation and anger, grief and loss), Shakespeare used a range of language devices, such as metaphors, similes and personification.

Much like Shakespeare, Owen Wilson has used a number of language devices to express emotions within the two plays ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ and ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’ which he wrote during WWI expressing the horrors of war, 400 years after Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Wilfred Owen also uses a range of language devices such as metaphors, similes and personification.

In Titus Andronicus there are a number of instances where extremes of emotions are shown, the main one for me being in Act 3 Scene 1, where Titus is pleading to the Tribunes to spare his sons as they were to be executed for the murder of… In this scene there is a key simile where Titus compares the Tribunes to a stone, ‘A stone is a soft as wax, tribunes more harder than stones’. This quote said by Titus expresses how hard and stubborn the Tribunes are as they make a stone appear as ‘soft as wax’, implying that they are even harder than stone.

Another feature within Act 3 Scene 1 that shows extreme emotion is the stutter within the iambic pentameter where it falls on the word ‘tribunes’. This fall on the word ‘tribunes’ shows distress and that the tribunes are the cause for it as they have decided the death of Titus’ three sons.