Retrospective Blog

As I look back at my previous blog posts (although they are only two in number) I am struck by their differences. In my first post, I explored the victimization of Shylock in Merchant of Venice.

I looked at how he was stripped of all that he possessed in the world, stripped of any power he might have had and reduced to essentially nothing at the end of the play. Because of his religion, he is treated as sub-human, and just when he feels he might be able to exercise some margin of power over his Christian oppressors, the rug is yanked out from beneath him. He's shown that once again he is the weak one and the Christians are the ones holding all of the power.

I think that my analysis of Shylock here was much stronger than I realized it was when I was writing it. I looked at Shylock's actions, which were meant to be condemned and jeered at by Shakespearean play goers, and I tried to understand why Shylock behaved the way that he did. I tried to understand what it meant to be abused and victimized all your life, to have no power over anything in your life, and what that might mean for the evolution of a character. I tried to understand how that might shape a man as he grew older. The result was, in my opinion a pretty fair and in depth analysis of a character that is easily overlooked and easily hated because the other characters in the play dislike him so strongly.

My next post, I feel was a bit less analytical than my first. I looked at Henry IV and Prince Hal and the ways in which they resemble one another. I focused on the qualities of Prince Hal that would be deemed undesirable by most and how they might prove to make him an even more effective ruler than the Kings who have gone before him. I examined the political climate briefly and Hal's knack for adapting his patterns of speech to fit whatever situation he finds himself in. However I wish I had followed this analysis a little further. My first post explored the reasons that I felt Shylock was the man that he was, where in this post I look more at facts that we know about Prince Hal and not the rationale behind them. Rather than more deeply analyzing the character of Prince Hal, and looking at more of his interactions in both the tavern and the court, I hypothesized what kind of leader I thought he might evolve into. And while we do see Hal's rhetoric and his different patterns of speech become key elements in his success as a leader, I wish I had gone into more detail in my initial analysis of them. After countless discussions I should know at this point that no character in any of Shakespeare's plays can be judged at face value. They are all complex characters that are worth studying, and upon deeper analysis, as I have learned in ensuing classes, Henry V or Prince Hal is not just someone who knows how to talk to people of different backgrounds. He has a great many fears and apprehensions that all weigh upon him and color his actions. I could have gone into much greater detail in my second posting and analysis of Prince Hal, and whether it was for lack of understanding of my initial reading, or inability to express myself, I simply did not.

Overall, I think I made good points with my blog posts. Although, looking back on them I wish I had done some things differently, I suppose hindsight is 20/20. For a 500 word blog post, I suppose I went into as much detail as I was capable of at the time. I do think these blog posts help us, as a class, flesh out ideas that we have been thinking about. I think most people express themselves a bit better when they have time to think about what they want to say and write it down exactly as they want it to be said. And I think in that way we can understand one another better, respond with as much thought and attention as the writer deserves, and I think we can better help one another to understand the text through different lenses. I know for me personally, seeing how others have interpreted the text has helped me to approach it from angles I never would have thought of before. The approaches others have taken in their blog posts, often times have helped me understand the text better than I did through my own initial reading and analysis of it; in that regard, I think this blog is an invaluable resource.