Midterm Blog Post

Throughout the blogging assignment, my posts have not generally been on the same topic, idea, or theme. My posts were based, mainly, on whatever struck me the strongest in the plays. My first post was regarding whether or not A Midsummer Night's Dream would be a worthwhile play to choose for teaching to high school students. In this post, I discussed the idea of strong female characters which are so rarely seen in a high school curriculum; everything we are taught to cover either has a weak female lead or is a male protagonist. In a time when the self-esteem for girls is at an all time low, and high school is the time they develop this self-esteem, it does become increasingly important to be aware of what examples are given to these impressionable girls. For this reason, I feel this is a very important topic and one that should be explored further not just with the plays we are reading, but with all literary works that are going to be used in the classroom.

One idea that I did focus on in two of my posts was the idea of villainy and what makes someone a villain. I questioned whether or not Don John and his cronies were the only villains in Much Ado About Nothing, or if other characters should be considered villains, primarily Claudio, for their treatment of other characters. Claudio and Don Pedro ruined an innocent girl's life, and while they showed remorse, does that really make what they did "better?" Doubtful, but maybe villainy is a strong word for what they are. This is also a topic that I would like to explore further if I had the time to do so. In Othello, I also focused on the wretch, Iago. I thought he was one of the most despicable characters ever until Richard III. I'd like to think that the Iago's and Richard's of the world only exist in the plays, but it is a sad truth that they do exist in real life. I wonder if Shakespeare had that in mind, or if he simply wanted to create someone so wretched it's hard to feel bad for that character?

I'm still not sure where I stand on the idea of sympathy, though I have posted about it in comments to other bloggers. Are we meant to feel sorry for Iago or Ricahrd III? I admit, there are times where I wonder if I should feel bad for either character, but then I remember that there are plenty of people with worse childhoods and lives than either of these two characters, and they don't cause the deaths of innocent people. How much sympathy can you really feel for them? It's not like when you're reading Frankenstein and the monster tells you all about his "life" from creation to the death of Victor and you are meant to sympathize with the monster...Richard III says he is incapable of being loved, yet finds "love" with the wife of the man he just killed! How much sympathy can you feel for him? And Iago is a liar by omission. There must be a reason to why he was passed over. This idea of sympathy also brings up the idea of truth and honesty. How honest are these characters? What is the real story if we only get their side of it? How truthful can writing or words be? Are Shakespeare's depictions accurate of his time, are they over the top, or are they simply the way he viewed things? Were things changed from how they really were to keep the royal court happy? I guess these are answers that I'll never know, but I would love to explore them further as well to see if I come up with any answer.

Overall, I love the blog because it gives me a chance to discuss something that maybe we didn't cover in class because of time constraints or because I just didn't think of it until class was over. The blog is a great place to put down my own ideas and just try to work through some of the more difficult pieces. Sometimes, though, I have a million papers due all at the same time (yay for English majors!), and I almost forget to do my blog posts, and they don't always come out being my best work because I couldn't put in the amount of time on the post that I would like. Still, I'd rather have assigned weeks for posting and responding because it allows for better planning. If we were allowed to just post say 8 blogs by the end of the semester, I have a feeling everyone would put it off until the last 8 weeks and it would be a disaster. I also like the blogs because I get a chance to see what other people are thinking, and how they are interpreting, the plays maybe differently than I am. I'm not sure how it really shows up in my posts, except by saying that in my posts there is generally an idea from class (like unruly women; villains) that I take further in my post to explore in a different way than we discussed.