7 Dramatic Monologues by Greek Playwright Sophocles

7 Dramatic Monologues by Greek Playwright Sophocles Here is a collection of ancient yet profound dramatic speeches from The Oedipus Plays by Greek playwright Sophocles. Each dramatic monologue is ideal as a classical audition piece. Also, English students can use them as study resources for analyzing the characters. Antigone’s Defiant Monologue: This scene is a favorite from Antigone and is an excellent exercise for a young female performer. Antigone delivers this commanding speech, defying the laws of the king in order to follow her conscience. Shes a stubborn young woman, intent on civil disobedience in order to fulfill her family obligations and what she believes is a higher law of the gods. She will risk punishment rather than settle for a noble life without honoring her dead brother.Creon from Antigone:  At the beginning of the  play,  Creon sets up the conflict that will lead to Antigones defiance. His two nephews, Antigones brothers, died in a duel over the throne. Creon inherits the throne by default and gives one a hero’s funeral while determining the other was a traitor whose body should rot unburied. Antigone rebels against this and buries her brother, resulting in her punishment. Besides this monologue, there is another at the end of the play  that is also worth y. In the play’s finale, the antagonistic Creon realizes that his stubbornness has led to his family’s demise. That is an  intense, gut-wrenching monologue. The Chorus from Oedipus at Colonus: Greek Drama isn’t always dark and depressing. The Chorus monologue is a peaceful and poetic monologue describing the mythic beauty of Athens.Jocasta from Oedipus the King: Here, the mother/wife of Oedipus Rex offers some psychiatric advice. She tries to allay his anxiety over the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, unaware that both have already occurred. Freud must have loved this speech.Antigone’s End: Towards the end of her young life, Antigone contemplates her actions and her fate. She is sentenced to be walled up in a cave and die a slow death for her defiance of the kings edict. She maintains that she made the correct choice, yet she wonders why the gods have not yet intervened to bring justice in her situation.Ismene from Antigone: Antigone’s sister, Ismene, is often overlooked in student essays, which makes her a terrific topic to analyze. This dramatic monologue reveals the duplicitous nature o f her character. She is the beautiful, dutiful, outwardly obedient and diplomatic counter to her stubborn and defiant sister. Yet, they have lost both of their parents and their two brothers to suicide and duels. She counsels a safer course of obedience to the law, to live another day. Oedipus the King: This monologue is a classic cathartic moment. Here, Oedipus realizes the wretched truth about himself, his parents, and the terrible power of fate. He has not escaped what fate foretold, he has killed his father and married his mother. Now, his wife/mother has committed suicide and has blinded himself, determined to become an outcast until he dies.

Education and Social Mobility Aspects in Dickens's Nicholas Nickelby Essay

Education and Social Mobility Aspects in Dickens's Nicholas Nickelby - Essay Example Dickens obviously was happy that his attack on the kind of schoolmasters of the time typified by Squeers had hit its mark, and here we have an instance of an author who has found social authority. After the success of Pickwick Papers, Dickens was secure in the knowledge that he could become an established writer, but that he wanted to become a novelist was decided at the time of Nicholas Nickleby, as Chesterton so eloquently points out: 'It must be remembered that before this issue of Nicholas Nickleby his work, successful as it was, had not been such as to dedicate him seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels. He had already written three books; and at least two of them are classed among the novels under his name..... the Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist......Had he continued along this line all his books might very well have been note-books......We might have lost all Dickens's novels; we might have lost altogether Dickens the novelist....All his books might have been Sketches by Boz. But he did turn away from this, and the turning-point is Nicholas Nickleby'. (Chesterton, 1911) Thus, Nicholas Nickleby became the ... struggle he had to make to reach eminence as a writer, his work also became a voice that decried all that was ill with education and the issues involving social mobility during his time, and from his public activities in both these areas, we can see that he realises that power and authority, and wields it consciously in his writing. As Cairns says of Dickens and his contemporaries in his work Figures of Finance Capitalism: Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens : 'Professional novelists became not only providers of relatively lucrative cultural products, but also voices of great social authority, and representatives of that middle-class wisdom and success ..... The novel became a locus of middle-class symbolic power....'(Cain, 2003) 2.1 Personal Background To understand Dickens's treatment of the issues involving education and social mobility in Victorian society, one needs to understand the influences on him at various periods of his life, and the environment which made him what he was. Born to a genteel family lineage, Dickens had an early encounter with poverty, and simultaneous fall in social status. In 1824, when barely twelve, he was taken away from school, separated from his family and packed off to labour in a North London shoe-dye factory as a consequence of his father's financial incompetence. Even though he could escape the squalor within a year owing to a windfall inheritance, the experience he went through during this time was to become a life-defining moment for him. The trials he went through at this factory had a profoundly psychological effect on him: 'In the entire district there was not a single boy whom the sensitive Charles could have accepted as a playmate. His own room was a miserable garret overlooking a damp, malodorous court.