A Comparison of Shakespearean and Modern Relationships based on the Shakespearean play 'A Mid-summer Nights Dream'

Good Morning everyone and welcome to the seminar 'Ensuring a Successful Relationship' and I am here to tell you just that. Today we will be discussing how young people establish a relationship, the roles men and women play in an ancient and modern relationships and obstacles they face in these scenarios. As my example for the 'ancient' relationship I will be using the Shakespearean play ' A Mid-summer Nights Dream' and for the 'Modern' relationship I will be drawing my conclusions from the portrayal of love and romance in popular culture. I choose these examples because they both show different ideals of 'love' and relationships.

The first topic of today's lecture is establishing a relationship. To begin with lets look back at our Shakespearean couples; the first of which being Thesus and Hippolyta.

Thesus was the Duke of Athens and Hippolyta the Queen of the Amazon's. They came to be a couple after Thesus defeated the amazons.

Mass-produced colour photolithography on paper for...

English: Title page of the second quarto edition (...

List of titles of works based on Shakespearean phr...

He says in Act one: "Hippolyta, I wooded thee with my sword, and won thy love doing thee injury." I don't know how all of you feel but I think that's a pretty lousy way to begin a relationship. Lets look at this in today's terms. Girls, if a guy walked up to you and punched you in the stomach would you fall ' head over heels' in love with him? I really doubt that you would but back in the 1600's if a guy beat up your friends and then flashed knife around the polite thing to do is to fall in love with him and accept his marriage proposal. I find it somewhat unbelievable that this type of relationship would occur in today's society unless you live in the amazon jungle in a straw hut.

The next Shakespearean lovers are Lysander...