Midterm Blog

   Over the past semester I have written three blogs about some of the plays that we have read for this class, these plays include The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, and the first part of Henry IV. As the semester has progressed I have written these blogs based on aspects of these plays that I have either found very interesting and/or were central to the play overall. After re-reading and analyzing all of my blogs I have come to see that there are several very good parts to all of them, and some weaker parts to them. There is also a recurring theme in all of my writing, mainly that of looking beyond what something outwardly appears as.
   Throughout all of the blogs that I have written there have been strengths and weaknesses, the first of which is "Logic in the Coffins" which I wrote about the scenes of choosing the coffins for Portia's hand in marriage in The Merchant of Venice. In my blog I paid special attention to the main suitors that vied for Portia's hand and their specific reasoning for choosing the coffin that they chose. I made sure to write about the way that each of the coffins would have been seen by these suitors and use the fact that they all had varying levels of value and how that would have played into their decision making. That being said I did spend a little too much time discussing the gold coffin, whereas I could have been discussing the other two coffins in greater detail. This is something that I was able to fix in my next post, "Clothes Make the Man" which I wrote about the use of clothing in The Taming of the Shrew. In this blog I made sure to give an appropriate amount of time discussing the way that clothes in this time period were used to identify social status and wealth, also indirectly giving them a certain degree of power based solely on the clothes that they were wearing. This is one of my better posts in terms of detail and evidence for my claims, though I could have used more explanation of the evidence I used. Finally there is the blog "Appearances vs Reality" that I wrote about the first part of Henry IV, in which I discuss the various ways that what something appears to be can be very different from what is real. I do this mainly through the way that several characters use false appearances in their political machinations. As I looked at this blog and past ones I have come to realize that a common theme in all of them is that the initial appearance of something may be, and is in fact probably, very different from what it really is. This is seen in the use of the coffins in which the coffin with the lowest value had the greatest reward, the clothes a person wears may signal something that is quite different, and that appearances are willing changed from reality to aid someone in their political games.
   Throughout this semester I have written a few blogs in which I have discussed the themes that I found important to each play. All of the blogs I have written dealt in one way or the other how something that may appear to be one way can be completely different, whether it is something that appears to be worth a great deal or completely worthless. All of my blogs have been written in a way that is able to convey my arguments using evidence that supports them.