Who Knew Shakespeare Could be Used As Therapy

Admittedly I have read William Shakespeare’s, The Tempest this semester in no other than ENGL324, where the play was ingrained into my mind theme wise and plot wise. After reading and analyzing The Tempest with Professor Brock I understood the humor and really began to enjoy the play, as soon as I was able to surge past the language barrier that sometimes hinders my understanding when it comes to Shakespeare.

With that being said, I viewed The Tempest as a form of entertainment, until I watched Shakespeare Behind Bars, in which the play is used as a lesson plan for life. Personally, I find it impossible to be able to relate to any of Shakespeare’s characters. Maybe it is because I am not a love struck teenager who has fallen in love with my family’s enemy and that I am not a crazed power hungry King who is being influenced by his wife, but maybe I can consent to finding myself to be the beautiful, witty and vivacious Viola or maybe even that’s a stretch ( and mildly conceited) ? In other words, the excellent subjects that William Shakespeare has created for his audience are just characters who are entertaining me for the moment that I am watching or reading the play. I feel no connection to them unlike the prisoners in Shakespeare Behind Bars.

In the movie dissecting the role of each character is a huge step of their acting process. Like the warden said, education prepares his prisoners for the real world, but this program does so much more than just educate the men, as can be seen through Red’s performance in The Tempest and his on camera interviews. For me, Red’s experience was the most touching because he seemed to be thoroughly genuine when attempting to find a connection between himself, and the role of Miranda. It shocked me to find that Red could possibly find similarities between himself and a girl who was written in the sixteenth century. I myself, as a female found it impossible to make a connection between any of Shakespeare’s characters, but then again I am young, innocent and most likely naïve when it comes to life, unlike hardened criminals who we can assume have stripped life to its rawest form.

On the other hand, I do see all of the aspects of the Shakespeare Program at the Luther Lucket Correctional Complex. I realize that some of the men there use the program to pass the time without taking advantage of the therapeutic resource at their fingertips, but when taken advantage of Shakespeare Behind Bars is therapy and it is a way to occupy the prisoners, so that they cannot be involved in illicit activities in jail. I see this program like the many YMCA programs that reach out to their nearby communities, but in this case the program only extends to the Luther Lucket island and maybe some other penitentiaries if they go on tour like Broadway.

Utopia: The Next Broadway Hit

Is it possible for Sir Thomas More’s Utopia to be made into a play?

Today, it is almost possible for any piece of literature or any form of entertainment to be performed on stage. If Broadway can turn the motion pictures Spiderman and Titanic into plays, anything is possible. There are just a few elements of drama that are missed when translating one form of literature to another, and from one form of performance to another, but since this is English class, I’ll stick to the literature!

It is safe to say that Sir Thomas More’s description provided in Utopia is intriguing, intricate and thorough, but does it possess the elements needed to make an entertaining play that audiences would want to attend? At the moment, as it is written, Utopia would be the most boring play to ever exist. This is because it would subsist of Sir Thomas Moore reading his letter to Peter Giles. If the director is truly create, he may include some action of the utopian descriptions being acted out to provide something for the audience to look at, but overall, as written this piece would be the driest play that has ever hit the stage.

Utopia is definitely not the best screenplay, although it does provide a creative basis for a script. Even though, there are two named characters (Thomas More and Peter Giles), there is no character development or interaction. This is a huge problem because this, along with a conflict, drives a play from its start to its finish. With that being said, Utopia does not offer very many details about these elements of the story, but Sir Thomas More provides his audience with enough background information to create what he did not. Pages of description about the land, the people, the costumes, the traditions ect all provide an elaborate image that can be tweaked to assume the standards of a well-written piece of drama.

This conglomeration of the details originally provided by Sir Thomas More can be compared to novels that are turned into movies today. What the audience does not see between the first stage of the novel and the final stage of the film is the creation of the script. Today, almost every movie is taken from a popular novel or vise versa. It seems like these forms of media can be thought of as interchangeable. This can also be applied to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. With an extraction of information from the narrative a detailed script containing characters, a plot, a conflict and a resolution can be written by an author who possesses the initiative and the creativity to take on such a project.

I am by no means saying that trying to write Utopia: The Play would be an easy project, but it certainly would be an interesting play to see.

For a creative engagement, I had the idea that, we, as a class could start to write the script, by adding to it piece by piece and little by little. But to be honest, I have no idea where I would even start Utopia: The Play. If anyone is ambitious enough to do so, I would love to read what you write and from there I would love to join in. For me, starting any form of writing is the most difficult, so here’s an opportunity for a class project that could turn out great or a disaster (kind of like those group essays some professors love to assign).

Creative Engagement: Insectopia Is the New Utopia

In an effort to connect to what Professor Calhoun started on the bloffice, I started thinking about Utopia's that we see in popular culture today. The first one that came to mind was insectopia from the movie Antz. As a child, I had to ask my mom during the movie what a utopia was because this was the first time that I had ever heard of the word and of its concept. With that in mind, here is the clip from the movie in which the most pleasurable land is described for insects.

Now for my classmates, what examples first popped into your head at the mention of a utopia? Because not all of us can be eight years and recite cartoon movies by heart.

Can Writing Ever Not be Biased?

From Sir Thomas More’s title I was expecting something…different about the reading, I guess? My understanding of Utopia, mainly stemming from the movie, Antz, was the idea of a place on Earth where EVERY human being (or insect) could find happiness. Although, the Utopians and our speaker More lived contentedly in Utopia, the judgmental tone that slips into the reading is quite apparent.

From a certain standpoint Utopia Book 2 appears to be describing the most perfectly run society, in which everyone shares the work, everyone has an opportunity for education, everyone is taught to be skilled in a craft, everyone is fed well, everyone wears the same clothing and the list of these identical characteristics of the Utopians everyday life could go on, and on, and on. More provides his audience with a perfect description of this wonderful and flawless new life, or does he? After finishing the reading I took another look at some of the lines that are sneakily placed within his narration. Statements such as, “I believe we surpass them in natural intelligence, but they leave us far behind in their diligence and zeal to learn” (545), “{…}, “ This willingness to learn, I think, is the really important reason for their being better governed and living more happily than we do, though we are not inferior to them in brains or resources” (545), and “I suspect they picked up Greek more easily because it was somewhat related to their own tongue” (569) demean the society that More is so passionately describing to his audience, yet there are clearly mixed feelings between the author More and the speaker More on this subject. Therefore, it is obvious that Sir Thomas More is not the speaker who shares his same name. It seems that More was not entirely able to remove himself from his writing because his biases slip into his book concerning the supremacy of the British Empire. Thus, the question becomes can writing ever not be biased?

I would think that a narration such as Utopia Book 2 would not be used as propaganda for Great Britain? Sir Thomas More does not overly praise his homeland, but he does grant certain “natural” instincts of civilization and intelligence to Europeans in general, over the Utopians who seem from the description provided, to be far more advanced than the Europeans at the time (and to admit even our society in some ways). I see this narration in a kind of contradiction. Sir Thomas More praises all of the characteristics of the Utopian society, but there still exists tiny ignorant jabs at their culture, which demean everything that More just described about them.

In all, I think that I assumed too much from the title because I was expecting Utopia Book 2 to be a Utopia, when in fact it just acquired that name from ‘Utopus, who conquered the country and gave it his name’ (547).

Creative Engagement: My favorite Fake Letters

First off, I realize that we are studying British Literature up until the eighteenth century, but my favorite author is Jane Austen. With that being said, her novel, Pride and Prejudice from the nineteenth century, although fictional, can be used as a historical source of the political and social life at the time. My favorite letter from this novel is Mr. Darcy's to Elizabeth Bennett. This is the turning point in the novel in which Eliza realizes that Mr. Darcy is not nearly as proud as she once believed. Here's the link if you wish to read the letter since it is quite lengthy.

http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/ppv2n35.html#letter6

My reasoning for this creative engagement comes from our concentration this week on letter writing and I thought that it would be appropriate to introduce the other side of this form of literature. In the past it was not uncommon for fake letters to be written to create a book. By no means were they forms of communication that existed between people, but they were used as entertainment. You can compare these letter books from the past to one's that we have today that are a composition of emails, text messages or ims. I guess I just thought that it was interesting how this tradition of documenting everyday communications has carried over into our literature today.

Creative Engagement: A Letter to My Grandmother

Well since we had to write a letter I decided to kill two birds with one stone and make my letter writing apply to this assignment. Although, my grandmother's version is not in green marker, yet its still in cursive. For some reason, second grade drilled into me that letters should be written in cursive. Weird, yet traditional I presume?

Creative Engagement: Don't We Have the Same Kind of Propaganda Today?

After completing the assignment this week I noticed that there was a disconnect between the reading and our views today. I just wanted to shrink this gap because today's society is also being inundated with the same kind of propaganda that was occurring in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Although, today our propaganda may reach us through different mediums that did not exist during that time period, such as the internet, newspapers, magazines, cartoons ect. Obviously, we as Americans can also not escape our own Imperialism. This age is not yet over. Take a look at the War in Iraq.

In fact, in 2002 the American Government mounted a propaganda campaign to mobilize US support and World support against Iraq. Here are a few images, which were circulated.

So maybe these are not the most subtle advertizements ever, but here's Bush's address on the subject. If anyone is going to advocate something its most likely going to be the head of the country or people who are devoted to their leader. Here is the link for the moment, I'll embed the video asap.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkOCIfNQXP0

Anyways, my point of all of this was to show that, yes we can point out the propaganda that comes from other generations, but can we see what we are subliminally being fed each and every day? I thought making this connection between the two kinds of propaganda might help us as a class to better understand the Imperialism of the age both now and during the time period that we are studying.