Thoughts on Hamlet

 I discovered in class the other day that I must have been the only one who didn't read Hamlet in high school. Apparently both high schools I went to had a different idea of what Shakespeare plays we should read. Anyway, I was asked to give a summary of what Hamlet was. I gave my best go at it and then I was asked where I had gotten my information since I hadn't read the book before. I said my junior high had put on a collaboration of Shakespeare's plays from Romeo and Juliet to Julius Caesar. In it they performed Hamlet both forward incredibly fast and backward incredibly fast. It was very entertaining and creative. I don't think many people can say they've seen one of Shakespeare's plays backwards.
When I read Hamlet I found it very entertaining and intriguing. Hamlet is on a level that none of his peers seem to comprehend. His puns reminded me a great deal of my friend Ammon who is the pun master. If the opportunity arises, Ammon will pun for all it's worth. Hamlet does this too I've noticed and it was incredibly fun to read the conversation between Hamlet and the gravedigger.
Having watched The Royal Shakespeare Company do a fantastic production of King Lear for my other literature class, I decided to look up their production of Hamlet. I knew that one of my favorite actors, David Tennent, was in it. He played Hamlet alongside Sir Patrick Stewart who played both Hamlet senior and Claudius. It was fabulous performance. David Tennent has played many a crazy character in his acting career from the slightly mad Doctor to the completely insane Barty Crouch Jr. (shame on you if you don't know these characters). His theatrics, especially with how dramatic Hamlet gets, were brilliant and Sir Patrick Stewart certainly knows how to command the stage when he is present. Beware, Gertrude has major hair extensions and she pulls them off quite dramatically.
I did not want to hold this back for anyone so here is a link to the play. I hope you enjoy it as much as me!
Hamlet-Royal Shakespeare Company

Just a Quick Thought on Insults

Thought it would be fun to put some insults on here that I will most certainly use on my mom...because she'll use them back.
"Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty to make thy riches pleasant."
"Thou calumnious toad-spotted malcontent!"
"Thy lips rot off!"
"Thou bawdy knotty-pated whey-face!"
"Thou cockered weather-bitten boar-pig!"

This next one has got to be my favorite. I read King Lear in the other literature class I am taking and when I read this insult I burst out laughing. It is spoken my Kent to Oswald when Oswald asks if Kent knows him:
"A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats, a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave, a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superservicable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composittion of a knave , beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whinning if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition."

I think the best part of that whole insult is that Kent is in disguise so to Oswald, a complete stranger just dished it to him.

Dreams

     As we are reading A Midsummer's Night DREAM, it only makes sense to be talking about dreams. I am one of hose people who tends to remember a good deal of my dreams. I know I dreams quite a bit and many of my dreams are extremely realistic. Sometimes when I wake up I can't tell if I was actually asleep or not. One dream in particular that I had was of a close friend of mine. It was quite terrifying because something incredibly horrible had happened to him and dream me saw him in a hospital, his face smashed up and in critical condition. When I woke from that dream I had to shake myself a few times to say that he was fine and it was just a nightmare. I went about my day as usual, going to work and so on. When I got back from work, I got on Facebook and low and behold there were tons of posts on how this friend I had dreamed about had been hit in the face with a rock while hiking and was in the hospital. Talk about freaky.
       Most of my dreams don't actually come true like that. Last month I had a very vivid dream that I had gone to France with some friends. I remember that we had decided to check out Notre Dame which is on an island in the middle of the Seine River in Paris. Then, a few days ago, I had a similar dream. This time I was in London with my family. It started out with us in line with our luggage getting our passports checked and my sister was being a pain and making everything difficult because for some reason she didn't have a real ID. While I was waiting, my friends Matthew (the one hit by the rock) and Myra showed up and we got to talking. The next thing I know, my family is gone as if they hadn't come with me and Matthew and I were discussing dinosaurs as we walked along the Thames River. Then a London cop came up to us and showed us a picture of Myra asking if we knew her because she was wreaking some serious havoc in downtown London. We promptly told him we didn't and that just because we were American didn't mean we knew every other visiting American in the city. Then I woke up.
       I feel I can say I know exactly how Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, and Helena felt when they woke up. Sometimes it is really difficult to tell dream from reality especially if there aren't dancing unicorns and such floating in and out of your dreams. I can't say I have had any dreams that weren't realistic. It gets very hard to tell what is dream and what is not unless I ask those who were in my dream if they even recall the events of the dream. I have a friend, Tessa, who has very vivid, very odd dreams. She had one last year where our group of friends was running from a hoard of zombies and that we escaped into a house. I was the last one in and I locked the door...apparently locking out Myra and getting her devoured by zombies.  Now, to me, this is a very unrealistic dream because zombies aren't realistic but for Tessa, it was so real she had to come by Myra's dorm room to make sure she was still alive. Dreams are very exciting, aren't they?

A Midsummer's Night clip

I was originally going to put the 1935 version of Titania and Oberon arguing over the changling boy but Samantha had already posted it and after watching it, I was a bit creeped out. The giggling and the music and the weird way they half sang their lines just didn't cut it for me. It felt like a horror movie not a comedy.
Instead I found a clip I rather enjoyed. It was the same scene plus a little more done by the Cork Arts Theater:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpWfPLwVXrw

I hope everyone else enjoys it too!

My Thoughts on Some Classmates Thoughts

      As I was reading through some of my classmates blogs tonight several thoughts bombarded me. First was Cassidy saying how she wanted to teach Shakespeare at a high school level. I remember how my classmates groaned every time we were told we were going to read a Shakespeare play. I wondered what was so terrible about it. Many of my classmates said it was hard to read, something I had never had trouble doing. I always loved reading Shakespeare. It was a hell of a lot better than any American literature we were giving to read. In fact, when I was in my junior year of high school my English class read Julius Caesar. This play is still one of my favorites, first, because I love the history of ancient Rome and two because my teacher made it fun. She assigned everyone a part (I was Brutus) and we essentially acted it out in class. She even gave us some Halloween knives to stab Julius with. I think that was the first time many of my classmates had enjoyed Shakespeare.
     The second blog post that stood out to me was Tristan's. Tristan explained the importance of books for business, books that weren't text books. Most of our classmates are English majors of some sort. I myself am a Paleontology major as I have stated before. A literature minor is an odd combination with that. In another literature class I am currently in, we talked about a paper explaining the importance of liberal arts majors. The main point involved creativity. I couldn't help but think how effective that would be in the paleontological world. We spend much of our time trying to piece together an extinct world. What better way to be creative in the sciences? I can't help but think how creativity would help in explaining a world we have never seen. An example would be a Midnight Summer's Dream. None of us have been to Fairyland but Shakespeare has given us just a peek at what it might be like. This works with any literature and in my mind particularly well for fantasy and science fiction as most of the settings in those stories were entirely made up.
      The third blog post that caught my interest was Sonja's comment about how physicists don't speak in the "language of commerce" or chaos. I think that's true for a lot of sciences. Paleontologists, like physicists, talk about how the earth and everything on it came to be. I agree with her that there is nothing more exciting and exhilarating than learning something new about the world around you. I feel that was part of Shakespeare's attraction to new words, just as it was for much of the nobility. This brings me to the other blog that caught my eye. I believe it was Jill who wrote this particular blog about how Shakespeare was a master of words and how he made up quite a few. This got me thinking of a conversation we had in my high school French class. My teacher had a poster explaining that the language we speak (English) is far harder to learn than any other. Well no wonder! If people like Shakespeare could just make up words at their own whim it's no wonder our language is so complicated and without much sense! Even today I see words being made up. Look at the internet, tumblr for a really good example. When someone is effected emotionally by something (usually upsetting) they exclaim "Right in the feels!" If a foreigner heard that they would be utterly perplexed. Hell, my mother was perplexed when I used it.