All You Need Is Love - Drama Blog 1 (As You Like It)

"The worst fault you have is to be in love."
"'T is a fault I will not change for your best virtue."

~ Jaques, Orlando, As You Like It


The biggest thematic element in As You Like It is love. Love in this play is positively connoted; often you will see modern stories and movies portraying love, but also incorporating a much more realistic perspective of it. In the play, love magically fixes everything. It turns evil people into positive, happy people (Oliver falls in love with Celia and suddenly stops his scheming). Love makes some others ridiculously optimistic and frankly, a little annoying (Orlando turns into a poet). As You Like It is very unrealistic and shallow, but not in a negative sense - it just doesn't have a whole lot to it. We discussed in class today that if Shakespeare's writings were essays that you wrote for class, As You Like It would be the religion essay: an overused theme composed of mostly BS with maybe an insightful thought or two.

Two songs today that could be related to the play and a more modern novel are "Poison and Wine" by the Civil Wars and "Love Story" by Taylor Swift. "Poison and Wine" would be more realistic because it examines poignancies in relationships, conflict of emotion for another person. "Love Story" would relate to the play because it describes a fairy tale-like situation in which everything magically turns out well in the end.

Modern Fairy Tales - Short Story Blog 3 (Once Upon a Time)

"Next day he pretended to be the Prince who braves the terrible thicket of thorns to enter the palace and kiss the Sleeping Beauty back to life: he dragged a ladder to the wall, the shining coiled tunnel was just wide enough for his little body to creep in..."

~ Nadine Gordimer, Once Upon a Time


At first, I wasn't really sure what to do for this blog. But, after realizing how popular fairy tales have been lately, I decided to write something about all the different adaptions of them.

The original Sleeping Beauty came out in 1959. This is the classic.

The Disney movie Enchanted came out in 2007. It follows Giselle, a fairy tale character who fell into a magic well and was then trapped in modern-day New York City. But be warned: in large quantities, this movie may induce cephalalgia and a strong hatred for pathological idealists.









A new series called Once Upon a Time recently came out on ABC. It follows the daughter of Snow White, who is imprisoned in reality with every other fairy tale character, all of whom are unaware of their identities and doomed to a fate of unhappiness.

A new movie Snow White and the Huntsman is coming out next year. I think it's like the Snow White story except it's supposed to be darker.