blog review

I’ve blogged in several of my classes over the past few semesters, but this is the first blog I’ve participated in that had open-ended blogs. At first I was a little skeptical about not having a starting point for the blog subject and wasn’t sure how I would handle it. Over the course of the semester, however, I’ve found it quite helpful to have a place where I can get my thoughts down, no matter how incomplete, and not only work on them on my own, but also get feedback from classmates.

One of the things that I noticed after reading over my previous posts was that I seem to focus on aspects of the play which turn out to be minor, if not all together insignificant. The most obvious example of this comes in my first blog post (Merchant of Venice), when I discuss the relationships of Antonio and Bassanio with their other friends. Even in my most recent blog post (Richard II), towards the end, I focused in on Shakespeare’s choices in creating characters which, in the end, wasn’t as confusing as I made it out to be. After getting used to the names, it was relatively easy to follow, and I came to realize that characters without an official name are obviously less significant than those who are and appear infrequently.

So far, I feel that my second blog post (Liars, Pimps and Prostitutes) has been my best and most focused work. I focused on corruption and sin/vice in Measure for Measure and noted that there was much more of it than was previously in The Merchant of Venice. This topic is something I’d like to come back to in future blog posts, especially since we have now read a few history plays and corruption has run wild through all of them. I’d also like to come back to a topic I brought up briefly in my third blog post about the portrayal of women in Shakespeare. Now that we’ve read several of Shakespeare’s plays I think it would be interesting to compare their portrayal throughout the different plays and see how it changes in different genres and different years, etc.

I feel that the most beneficial part of these blogs is having a place to compose your thoughts after reading without worrying too much about incomplete thoughts/questions. The blogs are also a good way to find out what our other classmates are thinking about the material and to get feedback from them about our own posts. This can help provide a better understanding of the material we are covering and also create new, helpful questions about it.