SHAKESPEARE'D

Hello, friends and readers. This is me, writing stuff.

So I have this Shakespeare class. English 382, if you go to BYU. This is the second of three classes where they tell me I have to write a super big important paper. The first one I wrote in English 295, in March and April of 2012. I remember that paper because it was ten pages. I did a freaking fantastic job on that paper. I mean, I don't even remember what grade I got. But I wrote that thing, and edited it, and did hours of research, and did a presentation in class, and I edited it some more, and took it to the writing center for help, and I edited some more, and had conferences with my teacher, and did two days worth of work on the MLA formatting, and then I edited some more and then I turned that thing in.

It was really fun. I hadn't expected writing an academic paper to be fun, because it was ten pages, not counting the works cited, and I had to make an annotated bibliography, and I had to do a ton of research when I would have far rather been at home watching Criminal Minds on my computer, or NCIS, or down in Superwholockmarauder and Smiley's apartment watching Doctor Who or Sherlock. (I don't really watch Criminal Minds anymore. I only watched it to stare at Matthew Gray Gubler's face, and frankly, there are people whose faces I would much rather stare at.)

But I digress. (I feel like I say that at least once every blog post.) I liked writing that paper. We were reading James Joyce's short story collection, entitled The Dubliners, and we had to write a ten-page paper on the very last story in the collection, entitled The Dead. Nice name, huh? It's not about zombies. It's about this dude who goes to a party with his wife and then after they get home he kind of wants to jump her bones but then she tells him about a boy she liked before they got married but then he died so she couldn't marry him.

Kind of depressing, huh? Well, my paper was about all of the symbolism and the references to Greek mythology that occurred throughout the story. James Joyce loved Greek mythology- he named one of his novels Ulysses, for heaven's sake. So it wasn't that hard for me to find the ideas I wanted to put into the paper. The story is littered with references. It's just putting them into super-academic terms that I have problems with. If you haven't noticed, the style of this blog, and of my writing in general, tends to be informal.
But I managed to pull it together.

But I'm gonna have to write one of those huge papers again this semester, for my Shakespeare class. I'm excited about it, because I got to know James Joyce, and I like his writing a lot, but I don't love him the way I love Jane Austen or Walt Whitman- or William Shakespeare.

"Really?" you might ask me dubiously. "Do you really love William Shakespeare? Because a lot of people say that." I really do love Shakespeare.

My favorite play is a hard thing to quantify, because I like a lot of the plays for different reasons. For sheer gut-rolling humor, it's really hard to beat The Taming of the Shrew. Kate and Petruchio's constant back-and-forth is just plain funny, and then you have Lucentio pretending to be Cambio and competing with Gremio and Hortensio for the hand of Bianca, and then it turns out (or doesn't really turn out, because you know at the beginning of the play) that the play is a play inside of a play. It's a "play" put on for Christopher Sly, who is this dude who just gets drunk a lot and some lord wants to play a practical joke on him by pretending that he's actually a lord and not a drunken commoner. It's just so FUNNY. When I'm depressed I like to read The Taming of the Shrew. I also like the movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and I also like Kiss Me Kate, which is The Taming of the Shrew turned musical. I just love it.

A lot of people are fond of Hamlet, but I just find the whole play a little morbid because Hamlet clearly had a thing for his mother, and Ophelia is not nearly as excellent a female character as you have in other plays such as Beatrice, of Much Ado About Nothing, or Portia, of The Merchant of Venice. I love the language of Hamlet though- the soliloquy speech, even though it's about suicide, which is a depressing topic, it's just written so well. Hamlet is my favorite just for the sheer linguistics of it, for the wordplay that results from Hamlet being bat-poop crazy, for the character of Polonius, who screws up his words and gets so confused, for the puns and the genitalia jokes, which we don't understand in this day and age because we don't understand that "nothing" used to mean vagina and so forth. (Forgive my frankness, but that is the proper name for female genitals and I will not euphemize it because I'm not afraid to talk about it.)

For the characters I love Much Ado About Nothing. On the one hand, you have a classical fairy tale, with Claudio and Hero and the way he left for the wars seeing her as a girl and came back and saw her as a woman. But more beautiful to me is Beatrice and Benedick, who used to be friends- maybe they were even more- but their quick tempers gave rise to a fight, and then they were so angry with each other, that they insulted each other every time they met. And then they fell in love all over again, partly because they were tricked into it but partly because they really did love each other still, after all that time, and they were just angry and raw and hurting. I just love Beatrice and I love how she's not afraid to stand up for herself and assert her ability and capability as much as the men do. I wish I could be Beatrice. I am generally more like Hero, though. Docile, accepting of fate, overset by anything that comes around to push me over.

And for the plot and the ideas you just can't beat The Tempest. A shipwreck, desert island survivors, the spawn of witches and demons, magic, spirits, government conspiracies, and the love story of an intellectual princess and a proud prince. It's just so beautiful. And Ariel is my favorite. I like him better than Puck. And you can quote me on that.

No matter what play it is, there's always some wisdom to be found in the works of the Bard. If you're reading this because I cross-post to Facebook, then you'll probably have noticed that I've been doing Facebook statuses with Shakespeare quotes. I've found them very fitting with my personal life and it comforts me to know that no matter what I'm going through, I can probably find a situation in any given play that echoes what's happening with me and my life. Equally good are the sonnets, which are awesome. Even if Shakespeare wrote most of them about a dude. Which is fine. (Some people are like HE WAS TOTALLY BISEXUAL AND HE WROTE THEM WITH HOMOEROTIC FEELINGS TOWARD THE YOUNG MAN and some people are like WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT IT WAS TOTALLY PLATONIC AND HE EVEN SAYS SO IN THAT ONE SONNET but really, either is fine. It's something I'll want to ask Mr. Shakespeare, if and when I eventually meet him.

And maybe only the Beauty and the Beast will get this reference, but Team Girl Squad. "SHAKESPEARE'D!" I would say that I have been thoroughly, and most wonderfully Shakespeare'd.