My Blogs

I have never blogged before, so the idea took me a little while to get used to. Eventually, I realized that the blog actually allows me to sit down and analyze a particular portion of the play we’re reading. Typically after doing this type of reading, I put it down and essentially forget about it until class. Because of this, I tend to wait for what the professor has to say about the play before I begin to form my own opinions. The difference with blogging is that I must come up with my own conclusions and opinions about the action before it’s officially “taught”. I can then be prepared with questions about things that I really didn’t understand even after thinking about it for awhile. I also feel that being made to think about a play before it’s explained to me has given me a bit more of an ability to pick out the important aspects of the play as opposed to the more trivial ones.
My first blog is about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I focused primarily on Puck’s Epilogue, which explained to the audience that if they found the play offensive, they could think of it as a dream to make them feel better. I thought this was a really interesting and slightly odd way to end the play, and I was sure that it must hold even more importance in the play than I could figure out. Apparently it did not. I decided that next time I would try to concentrate on something a bit broader that would get more “air time” in class, and thus be a bit more important in the discussion and interpretation of the play.
For Much Ado About Nothing, I concentrated more on the relationship between two central characters, Beatrice and Benedick. I believed that based on evidence in the story, they would not have ended up together if they had not been persuaded into it. I was pleased because this seemed to be something that the class was able to get into a deeper discussion about, so it was nice that I was able to focus on something that was of greater importance.
My latest blog was regarding Richard III and his evil plot to woo Lady Anne. This was also something that seemed of greater importance not only to the class, but also to the play as a whole, so I was glad that I was able to begin the discussion of his evil ways in my blog. In future blogs for this class, I hope to be able to continue to zone in on important parts of our plays. Perhaps I’ll even be able to extract the less obvious ones at some point!