Two equally flawed notions of love are presented in Shakespeare's plays Titus Andronicus (TA) and The Winter's Tale (TWT). Both are rooted in different degrees of misogyny, but diverge significantly in their overarching focus. The model of love described in TA is an end in itself; the play does not necessarily condemn Lavinia's treatment and fate – rather it accepts her predicament and displays her prolonged disappearance with a detachment reminiscent of Titus's temperament. On the contrary, if the marriage of Leontes and Hermione is tainted by jealousy and paranoia, it is visibly condemned on all fronts. The chauvinistic king is ultimately penitent – ​​his nature disapproved of by all the characters around him and implicitly by the author himself – and a model of love in the form of Florizel and Perdita is presented as a counterpoint, providing an ideal standard for the purpose of contrast. with and highlighting the shortcomings of the older relationship. In this sense, TA poses a problem (or a series of problems), and TWT offers a similar set, but with an approved solution. One could say that this distinction is the main component of their respective identities: a nihilistic tragedy and a romantic tragicomedy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The female leads in both plays are ironically well-spoken and eloquent. Lavinia is educated, well-educated, and a paradigmatic example of a refined noble woman. Hermione proves herself worthy and capable of presenting a valid argument against her influential husband. They are credible status symbols. They are great women to tear down, break down and hold together – female equivalents of the tragic hero. The pieces therefore proceed in this way with a dark and paranoid zeal. TA initiates this process by opening with conquests of land and women as spoils; from the start, it's a testosterone-driven action plot with an emphasis on revenge and father-son relationships, with the women playing off the men in their lives. The plot is less concerned with listing an ideal definition of love; rather, it puts the story on the table without making a strong statement in any particular direction. Women are objectified without authorial judgment, and the desire for Tamora and Lavinia does not distinguish between the individual themselves and what they represent as a status symbol. This blurred line in the concept – or acquisition – of "love" is seen in the conversation between Chiron, Aaron and Demetrius (II.1.79-86): CHIRON Aaron, a thousand deaths Would I propose to reach the one I love. AARON To make it happen! How? DEMETRIUS Why does this seem so strange to you? She is a woman, so she can be courted; She's a woman, so she can be won; She is Lavinia, so she must be loved. Demetrius' rhetoric and conclusion are presented neutrally and explicitly; there is no shortage of effort to bridge the connection between femininity and the corollary processes of wooing, winning, and loving. His tone is pedantic and the rhythm creates the strange sensation that he is reciting something as logical and basic as a catechism or a set of grammar rules in high school; a syllogism. Aaron's response to Chiron is so full of pretense and naivety that he seems to mock the readers' thoughts. This patriarchal system extends through Lavinia's predicament, which sheds chilling light on the role and plight of women as perceived in TA. Her passionate plea for death rather than rape and disfigurement illuminates several beliefs andvalue systems of her time (II.3.173-178): LAVINIA It is the present death, I beg you, and one more thing: let femininity refuse my tongue to say it O, prevent me from saying it say. their desire worse than to kill, and to throw me into a loathsome pit, where the eye of man will never be able to see my body. Do this, and be a charitable murderer. In this passage alone, the princess's words reveal her dark awareness of the limited extent of her role as a woman in life. By his standards, actual death is more welcome than the death sentence for mutilation and rape, which is a strong statement about the value of a woman in the play. “…Their lust (or more precisely, the resulting rape),” she asserts, is “worse than murder.” The oxymoronic of the “charitable murderer” parallels the apparently paradoxical choice of death rather than life, however diminished the quality of the latter. Some strongly suggest that without her beauty and chastity, Lavinia loses all value to society – a concept of which she is all too painfully aware. The single life is not worth living. Indeed, Titus only keeps her alive for his own purposes – for the attack on her is an equivalent attack on his own honor, so for him she serves as a living memento mori; a human wants to achieve his vengeful end. If we consider eventual marriage, her existence as a mutilated daughter no longer has any function, because a woman's usefulness does not extend beyond the roles of mother and wife. Lavinia symbolizes the extreme example of the woman who must be seen and not heard: she is literally deprived of her linguistic powers of communication and physically deprived of her body language (or at least of an important component of it, the hands being one of the most expressive instruments). after the face). As a result, Lavinia is quickly and dispassionately written off in cold blood once her father's vengeance is enacted in her name. TA thus shows the public, without comment, a world of detached men and dehumanized women, whose value of the latter is as great as their service in matters of reproduction and status. Unlike Lavinia's impersonal dismissal, TWT has more method behind its initial misogynistic madness. . The marriage of Leontes and Hermione in TWT directly contrasts with the ideal relationship between Perdita and Florizel to illustrate good and evil. Where the prior is lacking, the latter compensates with abundance. To begin with, Leontes is written to be easily criticized due to the novel's unsympathetic portrayal of his actions: the audience is expected to quickly side against him. His language is excessively harsh and, apart from Paulina, his most virulent adversary, no male character will maintain his decisions. This lack of support from virtually the entire kingdom makes him the scapegoat of the piece, even though he is placed on a social pedestal. One of the most biting and brilliant passages in Leontes is downright misogynistic and obsessively convinced of Hermione's infidelity. He generalizes all women and continues to make pessimistic hypotheses about the universal order: "If all despaired, those who have rebellious wives, a tenth of humanity would hang themselves... (1.2.198-200)" He complains of having played the role of a cuckold – “… your mother plays, and I play too – but such a dishonored role, whose problems will whistle me to my grave… (1.2.186-187)” For Leontes, the Marriage is essentially a sham, an arrangement based on deception and lies to maintain social order for most of humanity, with men the presumed victims of female trickery. Shakespeare bases this royal marriage on masculine possessiveness and.