Midterm Blog!

                I found reflecting on my three blog posts from this semester to be an interesting and beneficial task.  While not everything thrilled me about my writing, I did discover some proper usage of quotations and appealing, contextual themes.  My example of antitheses in the Merchant post made me cheerful as I enjoy when Shakespeare utilizes this literary tool, and I am happy I picked up on it.  A quote from this blog reveals an example of opposites: “[Portia’s] weariness stems from her father’s ‘cold decree’ and her ‘hot temper’ clashing.” This jumped out at me as I reread.  Antitheses are something I would like to focus on more when I read different works of Shakespeare.  He truly captures the duality of Portia’s feelings in act one, scene two of Merchant, and reading my post again helped me to see this clearly.  As with all rereading of any old writing, it helps to see how we can improve with our grammar and sentence structure.  My post on Merchant contained awkward sentences that I hope I can improve on. 

As for the thematic quality of my blogs, I noticed that two of the three dealt with sympathies towards female characters, while my most frequent post focused on divine right and Christianity.  Merchant and Taming have an extra emphasis on the female compared to Richard II, so this is most likely why all three posts did not focus on women characters in Shakespeare.  As I revisited, I realized how much I enjoy studying and writing on the female players.  In works that generally are male dominated, I find it important to not forget the female characters who often lead to major insights and themes. Christian symbolism is another interest of mine, which is why this was my blog’s theme for Richard II.  I suppose I could have focused on the garden scene with the queen to have all three posts female-centered.  I did find the characters of Portia and Katherine much more fascinating compared to the queen’s character.  These women felt more dynamic and explored compared to Richard’s wife.  I would definitely choose to write on Katherine and Taming if forced to pick out of my three posts for an assignment.  Even with her complexity and brashness, I find Kate extremely sympathetic.  A quote from my Taming post sums up how I feel about poor Katherine:  “… I still consider [Kate] to be misunderstood and an emotive woman that should not be ignored by anyone, including the audience, Baptista, or potential suitors.”  My compassionate view towards her could definitely lend itself to a feminist reading of Taming, which has been done numerous times, but is something I would consider exploring further. 

These blogs are useful tools for close reading of the play’s text and are great practices for writing on Shakespeare.  What I valued most about these blogs was the ability to write solely on what was of interest to me.  My main area of concentration ended up being on the women of the Shakespeare we have read in class thus far.  The blog is a great start for thinking of paper topics and for simply diving into a theme we have not fully covered in class but desire to explore in more depth.  I enjoyed the process of analyzing the text and rereading my posts and comments for this midterm blog.