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Character, character, character. That is the most common discussion point from my blogging this semester. For The Rape of Lucrece blogging what did I wrote about? Tarquin’s relationship to Cymbeline’s Iachimo. For Richard II I shared my interest in the misreadings of two characters: Duchess of Gloucester and King Richard. But my blogging for Measure for Measure was the loner of the bunch. For that blogging I was more interested in looking at how the plot’s chaos was representative of the ambiguous and shifting nature of morality in the Duke’s Vienna.

When I started this class, the two plays that I felt most comfortable with were Hamlet and Cymbeline, an odd couple considering that Hamlet is widely known and Cymbeline is widely not. So it would make sense then that The Rape of Lucrece would spark me to connect the dots between the two plays and lead to an impulse toward looking outside the week’s readings and sometimes too outside of Shakespeare’s writings. Now I am decently versed in just under a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays. My interests have shifted further outside of Shakespeare. My final project is a comparative study of Shakespeare and Calderon’s clowns and the historical contexts in which they were written.