The play's abrasively harsh humour and its depiction of social relationships that involve a denial of personal relationships are Middletonian traits

* In 1873, controversy over the depiction of William Ewart Gladstone, Robert Lowe, 1st Viscount Sherbrooke, and Acton Smee Ayrton in W. S. Gilbert and Gilbert Arthur à Beckett's The Happy Land led to the play's licence being revoked by the Lord Chamberlain.

In the case of Brimstone and Treacle it was due to concerns over the play's depiction of a disabled woman's rape at the hands of a man who may or may not be the devil, and with Scum the worry was its supposed sensationalism of life in a young offenders ' institution ( then still known as a borstal ).

Much of the play's Protestantism derives from its location in Denmark — both then and now a predominantly Protestant country, though it is unclear whether the fictional Denmark of the play is intended to mirror this fact.

Some feminist psychoanalytic critics, such as Janet Adelman, have connected the play's treatment of gender roles to its larger theme of inverted natural order.

The play's brevity and certain aspects of its staging ( for instance, the large proportion of night-time scenes and the unusually large number of off-stage sounds ) have been taken as suggesting that the text now extant was revised for production indoors, perhaps at the Blackfriars Theatre, which the King's Men acquired in 1608.

The play's preface says that while the trial was its " genesis ," it is " not history.

Contemporary reviews all praised the play's humour, though some were cautious about its explicit lack of social messages, while others foresaw the modern consensus that it was the culmination of Wilde's artistic career so far.

The play's very title, with its mocking paradox ( serious people are so because they do not see trivial comedies ), introduces the theme, it continues in the drawing room discussion, " Yes, but you must be serious about it.

the play's strongly patriotic themes were credited by the Conservative Party for helping them secure a large percentage of the middle class votes, despite the fact Coward had conceived the project a full year before the election was held, and the playwright strenuously denied having any motivation to influence its outcome.

The play's line " the fault dear Brutus lies not in our stars but in ourselves " gave its name to the J. M.

Efforts to establish the play's date of composition and genesis have been complicated by its uncertain relationship with another Elizabethan play with an almost identical plot but different wording and character names, A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called the taming of a Shrew, which is often theorised to be a reported text of a performance of The Shrew, a source for The Shrew, or an early draft ( possibly reported ) of The Shrew.

Dana Aspinall also suggests that an Elizabethan audience would have been similarly taken aback by the play's harsh, misogynistic language: " Since its first appearance, some time between 1588 and 1594, Shrew has elicited a panoply of heartily supportive, ethically uneasy, or altogether disgusted responses to its rough-and-tumble treatment of the ' taming ' of the ' curst shrew ' Katherina, and obviously, of all potentially unruly wives.

Indeed, the play's situation was almost bound to be better than its resolution, which by comparison seemed trite and anticlimactic.

The play's theme is a demonstration of Ronceverte's importance in the turn of the 20th century, when its St. Lawrence Boom and Lumber Company was the largest softwood mill in the country, and traces of its industry have sculpted Ronceverte's portion of the Greenbrier River to the shape it is today.

Wycherley's The Plain Dealer ( 1676 ), a variation on the theme of Molière's Le Misanthrope, was highly regarded for its uncompromising satire and earned Wycherley the appellation " Plain Dealer " Wycherley or " Manly " Wycherley, after the play's main character Manly.

James ( or Jimmy ) Christie, at 15 years old, began playing Whitney ( the third son ) in 1939 on Broadway at the Empire Theatre and remained during most of its 7-year run, playing both Whitney and John ( the next to eldest son ) as he aged through the play's run.

The play's dual significance as a satire / allegory leads to an ambivalence in its characters that isn't easily resolved.

In the years between the play's composition and its first performance, Athens underwent many changes.

Hawke said that he was drawn to the play's take on " the nature of reality ", and its " weird juxtaposition of humor and mysticism ".

On the whole, everything Catholic is represented as bad, everything Protestant is represented as good: " The play's popularity 1592 has to be seen against the backdrop of an extraordinary efflorescence of interest in political history in the last two decades of the sixteenth century fed by self-conscious patriotic Protestantism's fascination with its own biography in history.

As such, all of the play's problems can be attributed to its co-authors rather than Shakespeare himself, who may have had a limited hand its composition.

And, while the play's textual critics have sharply disagreed about editorial methodology in the last half-century, almost all of them, beginning with F. D. Hoeniger with his 1963 Arden 2 edition, have been enthusiastic about Pericles ( Other, more recent, critics have been Stephen Orgel ( Pelican Shakespeare ), Suzanne Gossett ( Arden 3 ), Roger Warren ( Reconstructed Oxford ), Harold Bloom said that the play works well on the stage despite its problems.

" As such, the final scene " stages the play's ultimate collaboration of male friendship and its incorporation of the plot we would label " heterosexual.

There are no contemporary allusions to the play by which its date of composition may be determined ; nor is there an agreed means of explaining the play's " loose ends and inconsistencies ".

He outwits a ghost, a crocodile and a doctor, convinces the hangman to be hanged in his place and, at the play's end, even defeats the devil himself.

The purpose of the organization is to further the interest of women students in recreational activities as a means of promoting physical efficiency, sportsmanship, and `` play for play's sake ''.

perhaps that is the Comedie's equivalent for thrusting this play's characters into our own time.

The play's device is to explore society's obsession with disaster and violence through the eyes of a group of artist's models who remain part of someone else's painting rather than just be themselves.

Michael Meyer argues that the play's theme is not women's rights, but rather " the need of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person.

Banquo is in a third of the play's scenes, as both a human and a ghost.

This and Ophelia's burial ceremony, which is characteristically Catholic, make up most of the play's Catholic connections.

Although many of these play's titles are known, only The Uplift of Lucifer is known to survive ( it was published in a limited edition in the 1960s ).

Toward the play's end, he is in a kind of boastful madness.

Macbeth's generally accepted indebtedness to medieval tragedy is often seen as significant in the play's treatment of moral order.

" For example, the play's Verona is situated on a tidal river and has a duke, and none of the characters have distinctly Italian names like in the later plays.

However, the play's principal source, the Spanish Diana Enamorada, would not be translated into French or English until 1578, meaning that someone basing a play on it that early could only have read it in the original Spanish, and there is no evidence that Oxford spoke this language.

The play's king ( never seen ) is only marginally related to the " Old Man of the Sea " and should not be confused with the sea god Proteus.

" The theme is hinted at in the play's ironic title, and " earnestness " is repeatedly alluded to in the dialogue, Algernon says in Act II, " one has to be serious about something if one is to have any amusement in life " but goes on to reproach Jack for ' being serious about everything '".

Act II opens with Vladimir singing a recursive round about a dog, which could illustrate the cyclical nature of the play's universe, and also point toward the play's debt to the carnivalesque, music hall traditions, and vaudeville comedy ( this is only one of a number of canine references and allusions in the play ).

The play's title, which alludes to the English novelist Virginia Woolf, is a parody of the song " Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

The film is described, by scholar Tony Howard, as the first adaptation to confront the play's disturbing sexual dimensions.

The play's set features a large table, which is used by the characters in both past and present.

The play's single set is the dingy Press Room of Chicago's Criminal Courts Building, overlooking the gallows behind the Cook County Jail.