Midterm Review

As I read through my blog posts, I realized that I usually write about the characters in Shakespeare’s plays and their relation to others. I guess this is fitting for me since I am a psychology major. I certainly didn’t plan on writing about these things, but I guess the psyche of people is what naturally interests me in stories.

In the first post, I wrote about the relationships between the couples in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and if love is what eventually stops the quarrels between them; focusing on love as the main theme of my writing. In the second post I also wrote about the characters, but focused on truth as the main theme in my analysis. Specifically, I looked at Leonato and Don Pedro’s intentions and whether or not they are telling the truth when they talk to the others about Beatrice and Hero. Finally, in the third post, I wrote about Richard III’s motivation for his villainy, his strategy, and predicted whether or not it would actually work; focusing mainly on the theme of power.

Although I consistently wrote about characters in my posts, the nature of my writing did change from post to post.  In my first post I asked a few questions and then answered them with an idea but didn’t give enough evidence for my reasoning. In my second post I tried to remedy this problem by explaining my thoughts using more quotations and evidence for my ideas. As a result, I lost the depth of my analysis in this post. In my last post, I attempted to bring both depth in my analysis and depth in my evidence into my writing and I think it turned out much more successfully.

Though I do feel that I have improved in my writing, I think that if I revisited my posts and attempted to revise them that there would be a lot of things I would change. Because I wrote about the plays before we actually discussed them in class, my understanding of them was not nearly as developed as it is now. Even things as simple as plot lines were hard for me to keep strait, but now that I have cleared some of those things up in my mind, I think that both my analysis and my evidence in support of my analysis would be much stronger if I attempted to rewrite my posts.  Specifically, if I had the chance I would like to revisit my last post and revise my analysis of power in the play and Richard’s use of it now that I know the ending to the play. In addition, I would also like to revise my analysis of Much Ado about Nothing as about half of my post was based on the false notion that Leonato could be telling the truth when talking about Beatrice’s secret love for Benedick. Lastly, if I had the chance, I would go back and fill in some of the evidence gaps in my analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as I still believe that it could be an interesting take on the play as opposed to the “oppression of women” view that would claim that all the problems in the play are resolved because the women are “shut up” through the rule of a man in their marriages.

                Overall, I think that blogging was a good exercise for me. It forced me to think critically about each play and made me motivated to read the plays more carefully. Shakespeare can be confusing and I think it would be easy for me to scan the stories and then wait until the test to actually attempt understand them if it weren’t for this blog.