Language
The use of language in Metamorphoses is to set up the fantastic yet easy to relate to world that will be seen on stage by the audience. While all the myths are poetic in nature, Zimmerman "has a great vision and her sense of humor intrudes on a regular basis, often with clever visual or aural touches." The imaginative use of the pool in the play of course helps in the setting up of the fantasy element of the play but the comedy elements make the play easy to be able to relate in the world today. For when an audience hears or reads the clever set of words set forth by Zimmerman, they can easily take in the experience of a well written play but will also be able to relate the lessons learned and information presented to their immediate lives.
The rhythm with which Zimmerman chose to write Metamorphoses is also a very key concept to understand. The quick scenes and down-to-the point dialogue is easy to follow and does not leave a great deal of silence and or pauses within many of the conversations. This upbeat rhythm shows up within separate lines themselves. "HERMES: The god of speed and distant messages, a golden crown above his shining eyes, his slender staff held out in front of him, and little wings fluttering at his ankles: and on his left arm, barely touching it: she." A device called dissonance is used heavily in this one particular line. Dissonance is a subtle sense of disharmony, tension, or imbalance within the words chosen in the play. The short stressed sounds are the ones that are emphasized in dissonance and it is a way for the playwright to accentuate the up-tempo rhythm that is being used throughout the play.
Read more about this topic: Metamorphoses (play)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a ‘language acquisition device,’ an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)