Romance: A Dramatic Convention from Shakespeare to 'My Fair Lady' Anonymous 12th Grade

Most writers find it extremely difficult to convey the feeling of love via the written word. In fact, many people feel inspired to write by that challenge alone. Love cannot be summed up in a sentence or a paragraph, let alone a song or a poem. Nobly, a few writers choose to write plays and musicals trying to sum up those elusive feelings of love, lust, and everything in between. Through the ages, a few dramatic conventions came into being in order to try to assist writers in their quest for describing love. In Broadway musicals, such as My Fair Lady, for instance, the plot must include a primary and secondary love story to keep the audience in rapture. The idea of the love triangle (or, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a more extended love square) has also helped a lot of writers track their characters’ desires. Some plots, such as that of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, attempt to describe love in a more simple way by simply focusing on the relationship between two complex and infinitely human characters. When tracing all of these narratives, a metamorphoses occurs: the narrative structure that authors use has varied over time, and no form seems to be better than the other, as they all exist in their own...