Love Suicides At Amijima Essay

Although dealing with similar topics of love, Love Suicides at Amijima and House of Trials use disguises and deceit in different ways. Love Suicides at Amijima uses disguises in a serious manner by focusing on social hierarchy. For instance, there is no cross dressing or outrageous disguise like there is in House of Trials. House of Trials uses a humorous approach to deceit and disguise by having stock characters and setting in one place makes it more clumpy and chaotic.
In most cases, disguises and deceit are typically used to protect the person being disguised or to gain laughs from the audience. In the case of Love Suicides at Amijima, the use of disguise is taken seriously. Characters do not cross dress, outside of the expected Japanese
The disguises were used as humorous elements to liven the mundane love stories told. For example, Castaño dresses as a woman in order to not get caught delivering a letter. The humor in this is that he gets mistaken as Doña Leonor by Don Pedro. Unlike Love Suicides at Amijima, House of Trials has a clown type character. This adds to the comic relief of the play lessening the severity of the deceit. In this play, everyone mistakes everyone for everyone. The pairs each have some hand in deceiving each other. Celia and Castaño are the deceiving middle men of the play because they are ordered by their masters’ to do specific things that help some characters and hinders others. For example, in Act one of House of Trials, Celia tells Doña Leonor that Don Carlos, the man Doña Leonor is to elope with, is in love with Doña Ana and wants to make her his wife. Also, Celia allows Don Juan into Doña Ana’s room, without Doña Ana permission. The chaos of the mistaken identities and the deceitful aspect of the play combined with the neutral and single room set adds to the comic effect of the play. It makes the play and characters seem more clumpy and chaotic. I imagined the characters almost stepping over each other and almost tripping over each