Jay Hitherton's Blog

In the play Coriolanus, Shakespeare has used the theme of Power as one of its main themes of the play. Being a political play, This underlying theme parallels to the situation that the people of England faced during the time Coriolanus was published. The power dynamics between characters shifts from on side to another as the play progresses.One evident example of this happening in the play is with Coriolanus' Character. Coriolanus lives in two worlds, Rome and the Battlefield. Shakespeare presents his powers differently in these two places. This leaves Coriolanus with the greatest power from all of the characters. As you go down the scale of the importance of the character, the least important character, Plebeians, has the least amount of power. Women in this play were also portrayed as a powerful figure with Volumnia trying to convince her son to make peace with Rome. Another notable example for the theme of power can also be found in Act 1 when the Plebeians were rioting about th...

What is Shakespeare’s larger purpose in his characterisation of Coriolanus in Act I? Shakespeare has used characterisation to build up the main (and supporting) characters' characteristics which have helped shape the plot of the entire play. Shakespeare’s use of characterisation in the play Coriolanus in Act 1 have played a major role into shaping the characters’ characteristics. Coriolanus is classed as one of Shakespeare’s Tragedy Plays which is mainly centered on the political moves of people in the governmental level. Coriolanus being a political play would also mean that the play can portray politically controversial concepts in the play to show awareness. A political unrest was presented when Caius Martius (later titled as Coriolanus), a Roman General, was firstly presented as an inhumane person who were against the idea of treating the plebeians well. This idea was starkly presented in Act 1 Scene 1 where commoners riot against the augmentation of the price of corn (as i...

"I imagine them hearing spoken English as the oppressor’s language, yet I imagine them also realizing that this language would need to be possessed, taken, claimed as a space of resistance. I imagine that the moment they realized the oppressor’s language, seized and spoken by the tongues of the colonized, could be a space of bonding was joyous.” From this quote found in her essay, bell hooks is trying to explain the advantages of having to speak multilingually in a daily basis based on her experiences of being a black person needing to speak a ‘foreign’ language as a way to speak to other people in different communities. Some texts regarding this issue agree with what bell hooks have quoted. One of those texts is a text written by Garry Engkent named “Why My Mother Can’t Speak English”. This text explains the difficulties of his mother obtaining a Canadian Citizenship due to the fact that she has limited English proficiency. In this case English can be seen as the oppress...

We have made a podcast on Endangered Languages across the world and my group have decided to do the Romansh Language of Switzerland. Please listen to our podcast!

What did medieval linguist Antonio de Nebrija mean when he told Queen Isabella that: “language is the perfect instrument of empire?” How has language contributed to colonial power? Focus on a specific example. Language has taken a huge role into spreading an empire's wings to the corners of the world. When the colonists first step foot on foreign soil, there was quite some problems communicating with the natives. Despite trying to learn the natives' language, the colonists have instead marginalised the natives by labeling themselves as the dominant group.  As language is used to communicate to one another, the natives find it hard to try to adapt to the situation where the newcomers have tried to overtake their status as the prominent power by utilising their language with the natives. The natives have limited to no access of using their own language thus seeing the extinction of languages due to colonialism and also the so-called "globalisation". This means that ...