question: What Shakespeare play features contrast and mockery?
answer: Sonnet 130
context: Title: The Taming of the Shrew in performance
  Passage: "The Taming of the Shrew" in performance has had an uneven history.  Popular in Shakespeare's day, the play fell out of favour during the seventeenth century, when it was replaced on the stage by John Lacy's "Sauny the Scott".  The original Shakespearean text was not performed at all during the eighteenth century, with David Garrick's adaptation "Catharine and Petruchio" dominating the stage.  After over two hundred years without a performance, the play returned to the British stage in 1844, the last Shakespeare play restored to the repertory.  However, it was only in the 1890s that the dominance of "Catharine and Petruchio" began to wain, and productions of "The Shrew" become more regular.  Moving into the twentieth century, the play's popularity increased considerably, and it became one of Shakespeare's most frequently staged plays, with productions taking place all over the world.  This trend has continued into the twenty-first century, with the play as popular now as it was when first written.
  Title: Khoon Ka Khoon
  Passage: Khoon Ka Khoon (Blood for Blood) also called Hamlet is the first Hindi/Urdu 1935 sound film adaptation of a Shakespeare play.  Directed by Sohrab Modi under his Stage Film Company banner, it is cited as one of the earliest talkie versions of this play.  Credited as "the man who brought Shakespeare to the Indian screen", it was Modi's debut feature film as a director.  The story and script were by Mehdi Hassan Ahsan from his Urdu adaptation of Shakespeare's "Hamlet".  Starring Sohrab Modi, "Khoon Ka Khoon" was also the debut in films of Naseem Banu who played Ophelia.  The other star cast included Shamshadbai, Ghulam Hussain, Obali Mai, Fazal Karim and Eruch Tarapore.
  Title: Thomas J. King Jr.
  Passage: Professor Thomas J. King Jr. (July 25, 1925 – 1994) was an educator, and an early user of word processing and sequence analysis to compare available early versions of William Shakespeare's plays for identification of variant texts and their analysis.  Dr. King's historical work also researched original prompt copies of Elizabethan Era and Jacobean Era plays contemporary to Shakespeare, along with their marginalia, in order to identify stage directions and infer physical staging of Shakespeare's plays at the Globe and other London venues, as well as at provincial halls and inns where Elizabethan troupes performed on tour.  In his extensive studies, Prof. King created databases of every Shakespeare play and other extant Elizabethan contemporary playhouse documents, by scene and character, to determine number of lines, and therefore the roles that could be doubled with sufficient time between for costume change, thus enabling him to determine the size of a working Elizabethan theater company.
  Title: Fugitive Kind
  Passage: Fugitive Kind is a 1937 play written by Tennessee Williams.  The play is evocative of a Clifford Odets Depression era play.  The action takes place in a flophouse in Two Rivers, Mississippi during the waning days of 1936, as the New Year 1937 is imminent.  The play features a lonesome clerk, who oversees a hotel that houses a collection of alcoholic losers and a rebellious college student.  The owner of the hotel is an obsessive Jew.  The clerk is befriended by an on-the-run gangster, Terry Meighan, who claims to be a victim of the corrupt social system.  He represents hope to the hotel clerk.
  Title: Sonnet 130
  Passage: William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 mocks the conventions of the showy and flowery courtly sonnets in its realistic portrayal of his mistress.
  Title: The Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival
  Passage: The Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival is an annual Shakespearean theatre festival in Philadelphia.  Every year, The Festival produces two or three productions of Shakespeare's plays.  Starting out as the Red Heel Theatre in 1989, and changing name and purpose in 1993, The Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival is now the region’s only theatre devoted entirely to Shakespeare’s works.  In 2008/9, they engaged in intensive planning with the board of directors and cultural and community leaders and decided to re-brand and rename the company to better reflect their programming.  The Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre now has several programs for adults and students including a lecture series featuring world-renowned Shakespeare scholars, Shakespeare School Tour which also tours in schools, and a Classical Acting Academy providing early career actors with intense classical training culminating in a free summer Shakespeare play for the public.
  Title: Contrast (literary)
  Passage: In literature, an author uses contrast when he or she describes the difference(s) between two or more entities.  For example, in the first four lines of William Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130", Shakespeare contrasts a mistress to the sun, coral, snow, and wire.
  Title: Tybalt
  Passage: Tybalt is the main antagonist in William Shakespeare's play "Romeo and Juliet".  He is the son of Lady Capulet's brother, Juliet's short-tempered first cousin, and Romeo's rival.  Tybalt shares the same name as the character Tibert/Tybalt the "Prince of Cats" in "Reynard the Fox", a point of mockery in the play.  Mercutio repeatedly calls Tybalt "Prince of Cats" (perhaps referring not only to Reynard but to the Italian word cazzo as well).  Luigi da Porto adapted the story as "Giulietta e Romeo" and included it in his "Historia novellamente ritrovata di due Nobili Amanti" published in 1530.  Da Porto drew on "Pyramus and Thisbe" and Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron".  He gave it much of its modern form, including the lovers' names, the rival families of Montecchi and Capuleti, and the location in Verona.  He also introduces characters corresponding to Shakespeare's Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris.  Da Porto presents his tale as historically true and claims it took place in the days of Bartolomeo II della Scala (a century earlier than Salernitano).  Montague and Capulet were actual 13th-century political factions, but the only connection between them is a mention in Dante's" Purgatorio" as an example of civil dissension.
  Title: Ying and Yan
  Passage: Ying and Yan (Инь и Ян) is a play by Boris Akunin written for the director Alexey Borodin, edited by Zaharov in 2006.  This play features Akunin's character, the Russian detective Erast Fandorin, along with his Japanese manservant Masahiro "Masa" Sibata and is placed shortly after Fandorin's return from Japan.  The printed edition features two versions of the play, the "White Version" and the "Black Version".  As Boris Akunin writes in the editorial by which the book begins, these versions have the same plot, but belong to two different worlds.
  Title: He and She (play)
  Passage: He and She is a play written by Rachel Crothers in 1920, who wrote a majority of her plays during amidst the first wave of feminism.  It specifically tackles topics concerning masculinity and femininity, such as gender roles within a marriage and what it means to be a female artist in a patriarchal atmosphere.  The play was first introduced in 1911, but failed to survive through production.  Thankfully, she did not then abandon the project.  In 1920, there was another attempt to resurrect the play’s production with Rachel herself playing the female lead, though it too was ultimately unsuccessful (Shafer 20).  Finally, after over half a century, "He and She" was revived by the Washington Area Feminist Theatre in 1973 (Grottlieb 14).  In accordance with the opinion of many dramaturgical scholars, it is “Crothers’ most complex and pessimistic exploration of feminism’s impact on society” (Grottlieb 50).  The play features a married couple, Anne and Tom Herford, who are both sculptors.  In the beginning, both characters encompass the progressive ideals for which Crothers advocated.  However, when Anne wins in a competition over Tom, she is met with hostility and negativity from almost every other character (Crothers 90-98).  Despite showing initial support, Tom becomes increasingly agitated and says to Ann that because she is a woman, “you’re not free in the same way that I am” and that if she refuses to stop and take responsibility of their home, Tom will command her to do so (Crothers 98).  Tom was never supportive of Ann’s art, only tolerant of it so long as it did not outshine his own.  The argument is put to rest abruptly when their underage daughter announces that she is pregnant and Anne makes the choice, albeit reluctantly, to care for her.  Because it lacks a sense of poetic justice and the woman does not ultimately succeed, Crothers was heavily criticized for this play’s ending.  However, it sparked debate and discussion about what it means to be a woman or a wife.
citations: Contrast (literary) Sonnet 130