Meta-Blogging!

In my last three posts on “New Paltz Shakespeare” I have looked at; “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Twelfth Night” and “Othello”.
In my first post about “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” I examined the text to stage aspect of the play, looking at performance through the lens of the NYC ballet, considering how the original text can be communicated in so many ways (ie through dance and without words). My second post “Everybody Plays the Fool” was a bit spacey; it attempted to focus on Feste and the true fools of the play. Shakespeare may name characters like Feste and other more bumbling men (like the Rude Mechanicals in Midsummer and the police in “Much Ado about Nothing”) as fools, but each set of characters seems to open a new commentary on people and their actions. Finally last week’s post was about tragedy in Othello and the pieces of the play that can classify it as so. I also focused on the opposing dimensions of the relationships before and after the classic happy ending.
Although each post seems quite different from one another I think they have a central focus on the duality that Shakespeare creates in his works. The collision of different characters and seamless questions the text presents keep me working to try and decode the plays even more. I am also working to understand Shakespeare’s works though the idea of opposites and parallel situations. How can his writings be presented without words? Who are the true fools in the plays? Why do the comedies have many aspects of tragedy? The opposing situations and different tasks certainly are very interesting to me!
I would like to revisit the idea of the happy endings and majority of unrealistic relationships in the comedies and the darker but sometimes more true character bonds in the tragedies, through the context of marriage and love.
I am enjoying this alternative/additional classroom space, the blog is a nice format to further explore our ideas and see what our classmates are thinking. It’s fun to write blog posts as opposed to mini essays or in class reflections because we can put in video clips, have as much space and time as needed to get into an idea and we can comment on one another’s work. I enjoy the more freestyle guidelines as it allows me to think about the ideas more thoroughly. It’s also a great exercise at writing for others and presenting my ideas in a clear and approachable way.