Question 4

What elements of this play make it a timeless masterpiece?

4. The main things that make the play a masterpiece are the elements of a tragedy. Only being able to use descriptive words rather than actual scenery makes this play well written. Not having to tell the story with lots of characters helps keep people focused on the storyline. Also, creating a somewhat common situation helps the people relate to their own lives at any point.

Having great scenery is sometimes very difficult and can be bad for telling the story if there is no scenery. Only using words in the replacement of scenery means that the play is very descriptive, and that the story can be relayed in many different ways. Scenery degrades from a play’s timelessness when it becomes more about the scenery, or focus on the scenery because something may be big at one point, but when it is read a century later that object might not even be known as to what it is. This would also mean that the era might not understand the play as it was meant to be and might not get the full message out of it.

The second factor to this is the idea that is being used of making characters who can be related to. Or by putting the characters in positions where the audience can relate to. Even though everyone was not from some royal house it did not mean that the characters in Romeo and Juliet could not be related to. People are always going to be able to relate to a lack of integrity, and to getting married. Most will not have such extreme cases, but almost all will have the opportunity to take advantage of others, or to scheme about something in order to get out of it. This alone is something that is in people and not in time. People do change, but not in the way they act as far as this these values. There will always be the temptation to take the selfish or easy way out of things.

Some movies or plays have lots and lots of characters and are not very easy to follow. Many times most of the characters in a modern movie are not really important and are somewhat just used to add to the timeline and not to the plot. The problem of too many characters is that the people may not always remember completely what the characters were all supposed to represent or help promote. When there are fewer characters people tend to remember more about each character and do not focus on the base ideas that may only apply to that era, and often miss the big picture.