All three articles address aspects of disorder, misrule, performance of alternative roles, madness, or foolishness in this play, and each has its own emphasis. Barber's essay, the oldest and most influential of the essays, emphasizes festivity in relation to carnival, Saturnalian rituals of reversal and license, and sees the movement toward clarification through release. His outlook is basically very conservative and humanistic as he sees the play endorsing, once the youthful characters have explored and exhausted alternative forms, a productive heterosexual economy and community ordered by marriages, proper social matches in terms of class, and a festive celebration of Renaissance humanist values on genteel courtesy and liberty.
Casey Charles uses the theories of Judith Butler regarding performative identity to examine the way characters realize and constitute their identities through performance of their parts, punning on parts as theatrical roles, gender roles, and body/genital parts. Taking a very different view than Barber, who sees the play finally contributing to a return to normative values and stability, Charles argues that the play destabilizes any notion of normal binary sexual or gender roles, or of simple heterosexuality, or any sense of a festive, united community organized in hopeful, ordered marriages.
Thad Logan emphasizes the lack of growth of the characters, but maintains the play enables the audience to grow as we watch the errors and excesses of the characters, who all evince various degrees and types of madness, foolishness, and orgiastic revelry. Seeing the play as related to a kind of Bacchic excursion or a Dionysian ritual, Logan sees the work as providing the audience with a ritualistic and sacrificial education, in which pain and sacrifice of others, in the dramatic work, enable us to form more stable, ordered, and contained lives.
For this position paper, please center on one significant scene in the play, and discuss different key performance choices that might bring out the theories of each writer. Discuss specific ways that lines would be performed, blocking, tone, other features of the scene that would help produce the overall thesis of each writer; you may certainly use what each writer says about the scene you choose.
Choose one of the following and illustrate or explain how particular performance choices could be made to support Barber's, Charles', and Logan's theories and interpretations (cite passages from each article to show the theories or interpretations that you are illustrating). Show three sets of choices that would produce scenes to support the arguments of Barber, Charles, and Logan. You don't have to exhaust every possibility in the passage -- just address some key choices for two-three pages.