Death and The Kings Horseman

Duty.... what is it really. In japan in the time of the samurai duty was everything. In this play duty means a lot. It is life and death in the context of this play. The father ( Elesin) has a duty to die and take his king to the afterlife. His son's (Olunde) duty was to become the next kings horseman after his father did his duty. But i do not go the way it was supposed to go. Duty and tradition is broken. The father does not die because he wanted to live. His son feels he has to take on the responsibility and restore the order of things by killing himself to lead the king on his way. Elesin ends up killing himself because he feels guilty because he did not fulfill his duty. Duty is everything and it takes to lives at the end.

Death and The Kings Horseman

My first impression on this play is that it is boring. The first couple of pages were hard to get through and i did not feel as if i was getting anything from reading this play. Then i read it a second time and i became more interested in the story of the tradition of the sacrificing one’s self for duty and tradition. Though in sometimes i found this story to drag on at first it became easier to read. I found some parts sort of poetic in the way her wrote this play. One part that stood out to me as poetic is when the women say “For a while we truly feared our hands had wrenched the world adrift in emptiness". I feel to get this play it must to read more than once.

Tri Jean and His Brothers

Tricksters when these words were spoken in class about this play the first thing I thought about was something evil. When you usually hear of tricksters in folklore or religion it is something or someone who plays tricks or disobeys normal rules or conventional behavior. I think of Loki who was malicious and  the trickster in the television show supernatural. He causes chaos and he kills people when causes urban legends to come to life.  So I could not first understand that the trickster can also be the good person.  But I can see now how Ti-Jean can be considered a trickster he does not play by normal rules and makes different clever ways to complete and defeat The Devil.

Ti-Jean and His Brothers - "The Devil"

The devil in this play is both the old man and the planter. The devil in this play is very smart to me he know exactly how to play both Gros-Jean and Mi-Jean so he can win. In this play the devil wants to eat Ti-Jean and His brothers. He gets over Gros-Jean by vexing him over his Strength which he was overly proud and relied on his strength only. The Devil then wins Mi-Jean by questioning his intelligence. He has two brothers when he then meets up with Ti-Jean he is outsmarted by Ti-Jean and he gets angry and loses his own game. He even tries to make a last attempt to make Ti-Jean angry by throwing salt in the wound about Ti-Jean mother dying. Ti-Jean then has to sing in order to win because the devils choose not to play fair. When Ti-Jean wins he brings back the devil’s helper the bolom back to life essentially replacing the brothers and mother that Ti-jean lost.

Kanjincho

Kanjincho a Japanese play. I was glad we read something from japan I think japan has great theater like Kabuki and Noh theater. This play is about a prince who wants to escape from the tyranny of his older brother and gets his protector Benkei to help him escape. But they are caught fleeing and the prince is taken by Togashi. Benkei then deceives Togashi and gets Prince Yoshitsune back. What got me was when Benkei beats the prince and even threatens to kill him. Though he was only trying to help his master. I know that it must have been hard to do that because that is a very big breech of decorum in japan. Then at the then of the play Benkei and Togashi are drinking and Benkei does a dance and the play ends. It was an interesting way to end this play with no words but a dance.

The Qing Ding Pearl

This play is very interesting it is about revenge and defeating evil in some way. The small "weak" fisherman kills the bad guys in this play which are Ting Wai and his henchmen. This play is very different from the other plays that we have read. One major and obvious difference is that this play is Chinese and is different in performance wise than any other play. This play is performed with dance and mask unlike other plays that we have read so far. Another difference that this play has to a play like hamlet is that in this play Hsiao En does not wait on contemplate about revenge he just does and he does not get killed after his revenge unlike Hamlet. This is a very good play and I really liked the ending where the “good” prevails “evil”.