English Notes

  GB Shaw was a great dramatist. He wrote 50 plays and his plays are full of wit and humour.  Show was a great critic. He shocked the society of his time by presenting the ideas that were quite opposite of popular belief. Dolly at the dentist is the opening scene of one of his plays " You Never Can Tell."                                       Dolly is a young lady who visits a dentist to have her tooth taken out. The dialogue between the dentist and Dolly are extremely witty and entirely enjoyable. Dolly is a young woman of eighteen. She visits a dentist named Valentine.  The dentist is known as five shillings dentist because he charges five shillings for each thing.  He has set up a clinic and he is a bachelor and has been in his clinic for six weeks.  He has had no patient ...

  The comedy of manners is a genre of comedy that flourished on the English stage during the Restoration period. Plays of this type are typically set in the world of the upper class and ridicule the pretensions of those who consider themselves socially superior deflating them with satire. With witty dialogues and cleverly constructed scenarios, comedies of manners comment on the standards and mores of society and explore the relationships of the genders. Marriage is a frequent subject. Typically, there is little depth of characterization; instead of that ,playwrights used stock character types—the fool, the schemer, the hypocrite, the jealous husband, the interfering old parents—and constructed plots with rapid twists in events, often precipitated by miscommunications among the group. The roots of the comedy of manners can be traced back to Molière's seventeenth-century French comedies and to the “humours” comedy of Ben Jonson; indeed, certain characteristics can be found as far ba...

Twelfth Night, is a romantic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written around 1601 to 1602 as a Twelfth Night's entertainment for the close of the Christmas season. The play centres on the twins Viola and Sebastian who are separated in a shipwreck. Viola falls in love with Duke Orsino, who in turn is in love with Countess Olivia. Upon meeting Viola, Countess Olivia falls in love with her thinking she is a man. The play expanded on the musical interludes and riotous disorder expected of the occasion, with plot elements drawn from the short story " Of Apollonius and Silla" by Barnabe Rich, based on a story by Matteo Bandello. The first recorded public performance was on 2 February 1602, at Candlemas, the formal end of Christmastide in the year's calendar. The play was not published until its inclusion in the 1623 First Folio. Viola is shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria and she comes ashore with the help of a Captain. She has lost contact with her tw...