So I guess this is more of a confessional than a legitimate blog post, but I'll be straight up about it: I am really, really behind on these. Reading out of books has seemed to sucked up all my energy for the online variety. Today, as I have told myself for the past three weeks, today I will start posting something every day. The good news is, with my americano at my side, and a blog entry actually in the makings, I feel so smartI might even enjoy myself....Smart enough I might even be able to read the New Yorker and like it, too....maybe even do some of the sudoku.
Okay, so that might be overly ambitious.
Looking through the other blogs from the class, I have to say that overall I'm pretty impressed. One of the things that I have noticed is that several students have posted audio/ video clips of the plays, and I agree that that kind of experience of Shakespeare is a different and vital part of understanding his work. At this level, the emphasis is given to the action at hand. Perhaps it's easier to understand the interactions between the characters when they are visually and audibly presented to the audience. As when Bottom sees Titania in the woods during the play in the video taped production of MSND, the director is granted a certain amount of control, and another level of understanding shapes the playgoers. Yet at the same time, another level of understanding is perhaps lost (at least for me, usually). The nuances, the word play and the allusions all rely so heavily on one another (as we can see with the "heel and catastrophe of past-time") that for me it seems like I lose so much when I can't see it in neat little stanzas, the little printed patterns that we have become so adept at tearing apart.
They say that when you learn a new language you have to forget the paradigms of your native tongue and open yourself up to a whole new set of rules. Listening to Shakespeare is kindof the same way for me, it is a different way of experiencing language, like I can hear more music than I can meaning. We seem to do this in our own speech. How many times do I alter what I am going to say because it doesn't sound right? I think that just as Frye argues that Shakespeare is about poetry, so life is not so much about truth, but about music.
