Shakespeare's Tragedies and These Shining LIghts

                For extra credit we were asked to compare a play that was being performed at our school, These Shining Lights, to something we have discussed in our Shakespeare class. For me I considered These Shining Lights to be a tragedy that reminded me a lot of Shakespeare’s tragedies.  This semester we have discussed Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, all three which are considered Shakespearean tragedies. While watching These Shining Lights, bits and pieces of the play reminded me of these Shakespeare tragedies we had discussed in class. To begin with, each of these plays had an enlightening moment before all chaos erupted. For example, in Romeo and Juliet we see the happy marriage night Romeo and Juliet spend together, and in Othello at the beginning we see Othello and Desdemona declare and defend their love for each other to her father. Much like these two plays the beginning of These Shining Lights all the way up until the intermission was pretty happy. We saw woman beginning to get more rights, and the lead character Katherine enjoying her job and making three really good friends. After intermission this all goes downhill. We learn that all the woman were poisoned by radium and there is nothing they can do about it, which leads to Katherine’s death. This resemblance of the tragic ending I was talking about before is what I considered to link Shakespeare’s tragedies to These Shining Lights, but there is one main difference between the two. Unlike the woman in Shakespeare’s tragedies Katherine fights back. She is not dying for a man such as Juliet and Desdemona does, instead she fights the company trying to help the other woman who were affected by the radium, and were not brave enough to defend them. I really enjoyed Katherine’s character because of this. Although she was dying the tragic death that much of Shakespeare’s female characters had done, she was not just a character who was a back shadow to a man. Instead she was an inspirational character, a character who the audience knew meant much more to the play than just a backdrop to a man, or a character who took her life for a man. She fought for woman’s rights which distinguished her from Shakespeare’s female roles. These plays do relate to each other in the way that they both have very tragic endings. Although we do not see the other women’s deaths in These Shining Lights it is somewhat predicted.   In conclusion, I would say the comparison between the Shakespeare and These Shining Lights would be the tragic ending, but in contrast it is Katherine who is the stronger female which sticks out.