Bravo!

(I want to preface this by saying that this blog is and has been a work in progress...and thus, I apologize beforehand for any and all incongruities of time and space, sorry. )

Yesterday's group projects were really outstanding. I'm always impressed by the things this class comes up with when they work together, how incredibly diverse our presentations were, all plays written by the same person...crazy. I really loved the presentation of King Henry IV, and I must say, whoever played Falstaff..(don't know your name, sorry!) you did a really great job. Some people are just natural actors, and I think that parts like that are really challenging to begin with. However, just to put it out there, I think that everyone in this class who performed did really well, and THAT, I think, speaks to the natural human affinity for stage acting, for role-playing, (me-ow!), and for putting on masks. This reminds me of the Judith Butler article that we read in Lit Crit...it's the one where she discusses gender as a "performance". While I'm going to save any feminist/social tangents for another class, I think that the idea of "performance" of assigned roles really speaks to our ease not only in assuming "characters" different than our own, but also in our readiness to play along with that staged assumption (pardon all the scare quotes, but you get the point, right?...) It's too bad I'm not reading the Bloom Invention of the Human book right now, because I feel like some of this is similar to what was mentioned in class. Shakespeare's characters perhaps feel so rich and dynamic because, they, like us are caught up in this tangle of assumed identities, of expectations, etc., AND they know how to manipulate those expectations to get results...just as we do. Because I'm  in the Othello group, it's one of the first plays to come to mind, and I think my observation here could help explain (to me at least) why Othello the character is so weird...since Othello finds himself in an alien sociological situation, not to mention any potential language barrier, essentially, he suffers the same communication gap that I do when I try to tell a joke in Spanish. Though the basic communication is there, the subtleties, the formalities, come across translated. Thus, his "role" that he strives to fulfill in society comes off as aggressively resolute.

(AND, briefly, I just learned that there is an old proverb that goes, in Spanish: " El traducir es traicionar" or, to translate is to betray. For Othello, it's these misinterpretations, or "over interpretations" that drive his jealousy, and, essentially the tragedy in the play.)

Of course, this is just speculation. Maybe even the wild and unfounded kind. Othello is incredibly eloquent throughout the play, he is certainly not stupid, or in anyway less intelligent than the other characters, but still Cassio manipulates him by playing on his overly mythic interpretation of love, perhaps spawned from a translated understanding of language and culture. Obviously, any claim in this direction is bound to ruffle some feathers, but my emphasis here is on the interpretation, and subsequent "performance" of the expectations in a society, which are often outlined in the basic mythology of that culture (though perhaps not entirely or obviously congruent with it). The introduction to the play in our Pelican text outlines this really well. Othello seems to believe in the ideal of love, (and to paraphrase from there) a love where wives never lose keepsakes given them by their husbands. Other male characters make the same mistake. Postumous. Leontes. Maybe Shakespeare is trying to demonstrate the inherent fallibility of characters who are incapable of adjusting the role that they play.

FEAR SHAKESPEARE, and teaching majors...

IN doing some catch up work on my much neglected blog, I am kicking myself for multiple reasons, not just for screwing myself out of the lovely spring weather, but also for not reading some of the more thoughtful blogs out there (jealous....).  Amanda Jones, you were one of the subjects of my adoration today.  The series of blogs Amanda has written are really well done, and seem to indicate her ease with using the medium (though she claims to be uncomfortable blogging herself).  One of the more interesting things she brought up was in the beginning of her posts, where she wrote about some of the competition between English Lit and teaching majors. Being a Lit major myself, I can totally substantiate the claim that theyre a bunch of snobby brats, but I think that in relation to Shakespeare, teaching majors may have an upper hand in some departments. I think that drama in general is meant to inspire a diverse audience, from the rude mechanicals to the parents and originals, Shakespeare speaks to all of us in our own individual ways...but it is the ability to connect and value those multiple perspectives that makes Shakespeare move the most.  Here, the teaching majors are able to find that common ground, and encourage others to do the same. If shakespeare can be understood on multiple levels, then our ability to navigate its many faces gives us a bigger, richer understanding and appreciation. This is in keeping with Hughe's notion of the Cabbalistic (is that a word? James?)  influences in Shakespeare's writing, the idea that any one belief is inherited from a series of others, all surging together to create a holistic ideal...This, to me, is the way to think about Shakespeare, and our own dogmas as well..as the offspring of generations of ideas, all layered and superimposed....
Ive had people suggest NO FEAR SHAKESPEARE to me, and I gotta say, that's just lazy. Amanda makes an awesome lesson plan about understanding the language of WS, and that's it. By making those connections with students, she revitalizes the importance of multiple interpretations, and opens the language up, Nietzche style, for interpretation. It's important to BE AFRAID of Shakespeare, if you don't have a healthy fear of that kind of brilliance, then you've missed the point all together.
They say that teaching something is the best way to learn about it, and on this subject especially, I couldn't agree any more. Fear not, teaching majors, all those arguments about whether WS actually existed, those stupid, one sided arguments that have nothing to do with actual Shakespeare are leading us further into the cave. Keep the conversation going, I say.

...alls well that ends well?

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.

Only the sun has a right to its spots

The first assignment we have been given for this blog is to talk about our experience with Shakespeare, but as I began writing this entry everything I put down came out contrived, fake. We’d all love to dazzle the world wide web with some fantastic insight on WS, but where to begin? And anyway, how does one really talk about their relationship to a book?

A friend lent me a short novel a while back that I actually just got around to finishing last night—it’s called Too Loud a Solitude, by the Czech author Bohumil Hrabal, (a name which I would love to know the correct pronunciation of). In short, the story is about a wastepaper compacter who is obsessed with the cast away pieces of literature that he finds. It’s contrived, too, as I think all narratives are, but it does slay me with these occasional truths about the way that writing gets under our skin.

One gem on the first page:

“Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”

Okay, okay so maybe it’s a little cute.  Still, in some cases it’s true, I think, and it makes for a better way to talk about something as vast as “Shakespeare” without all the posturing and BS.  In some way, the strength of a work of literature isn’t measured holistically as much as it is page by page, sentence by sentence.

My own knowledge of Shakespeare is limited in volume, I’ve seen a few performances, read a few plays, that’s a lot of why I signed up for this course.
My relationship with Shakespeare, then, is:

A stormy evening outside the duck pond,

“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind”

some awkward moments performing in Linda Karrel’s class during my freshman year.

My twin sister’s ballet performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.