Blogs

In rereading my posts, I have discovered that the trend in my blogging tends to be the discussion of history, sociology, and Shakespeare’s audience. For instance, in my post regarding Measure for Measure, I talked about how Shakespeare’s primarily Protestant audience might have interpreted the Duke’s proposal to the nun Isabella as positive, whereas a Catholic viewer (and the modern audience) might see this as a complicated, if not negative, problem. In my post about Richard II, I talked about the question of whether or not the audience was expected to have a strong knowledge of national history.
My interest in this is sparked by the fact that Shakespeare is often interpreted in many different ways. This, of course, is not a criticism. I think the sign of a great playwright is the ability to leave the actors (and reader) room to bring their own experiences into the character and, therefore, story. Performing Shakespeare is something of a tradition; it seems as if an actor is not respected as a true actor until he performs in a Shakespeare play. I also feel that a lot of things are justified by time period that perhaps shouldn’t be. I generally find that to be the case with great older writing. For instance, Shakespeare was not a Catholic himself, but he received a Catholic education. So while he most likely understood the implications of the Duke’s proposal, the audience most likely did not. This suggests to me that he’s pandering. Also, while I didn’t actually write on this, I might point out that Merchant of Venice was always controversial for its portrayal of Jews. It’s not as if Shakespeare had never heard of anti-Semitism, even if they weren’t as politically correct a society as we are.
I guess that is a general interest to me as a writer myself, and that, logically, transfers over to my literary analysis. I know that most critics are opposed to judging a story by this, and perhaps for good reason, but for plays that have been performed over and over in numerous different interpretation, it is often hard not to wonder what it would have been like being at the first performance of any of these plays. All in all, I am satisfied with the content of my blogs because (at risk of sounding arrogant) I do feel that they add something to the discussion, and they do reflect my view on these topic.