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.

Creative Engagement: Just A Little History

This week I entitled my rumination I Keep Calling John Donne, Don Juan. I apologize if this has caused any confusion. This title made complete sense in my head because I can't seem to say this author's name without first stuttering Don Juan. Weird, I know, but this name is seriously a tongue twister for me.

Anyways, I decided to clear up this problem because as Professor Calhoun has remarked on my rumination John Donne and Don Juan cannot possibly be confused with one another. This is because Don Juan is a fictional character who can be compared to Casanova. The plot of his stories are ones in which he seduces women and then takes the pleasure in fighting the men that they are betrothed or married to. John Donne's story is much different. In fact, at the age of 29 he married Anne Moore who bore him twelve children in their sixteen years of marriage. Anne Moore died during the birth of her last child, so John Donne was left to tend and take care of his children. He never remarried to help him do so. As far as I can tell John Donne was not a womanizer like the fabled Don Juan.

Rumination #3: I keep calling John Donne, Don Juan

I admit that after reading Norton’s introduction to John Donne I was intrigued by this rebellious, religious and sexual poet. The introduction makes a note, well many notes, about how revolutionary and fresh this author’s writing was; yet other than that I could have told you almost nothing about why John Donne was important. Thus, I consulted my best friend Google. Every once and a while we all need to accept a minor literary defeat and use our crutch, Google, to help us get started. Here is what I found and have used for my own interpretations of John Donne’s poetry.

John Donne is a metaphysical poet, but what exactly does this mean? My handy dandy dictionary describes a metaphysical poet as someone whose work is characterized by the use of complex and elaborate images or conceits, typically written in an intellectual form of argumentation to express emotional states. As if this wasn’t a little mind twist right here, I decided to find an alternative definition to help my analysis of John Donne’s poetry, which is that metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborate imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas. Now I have to apologize for the mini vocabulary lesson that I took all of 60 seconds to read, but understanding the core of what we are reading really helped me to dissect this collection of poems.

With that being said, the first poem on our checklist for this week, “The Flea”, can be thought of as the most blatant form of metaphysical poetry. Following the definitions that I provided above, “The Flea” is an example of the most insignificant thing being turned into an elaborate symbol of love also known as sex. Can these lines be any more explicit? “Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, And in this our two bloods mingled be” (1263). Let’s be honest, John Donne just created the best pick-up line ever by romanticizing a disgusting insect and its eventual death by smushing. He was able to tweak the symbolism of a flea from a bloodsucker and nuisance into a reason for connection between two people. If this is not an example of metaphysical poetry, I’m not really sure what is?

Besides, maybe another one of his poems entitled, “The Sun Rising”. This poem is more charming than the “The Flea”, although it is not at all more conservative than it. In “The Sun Rising” the lovers are in bed being awoken by the bright sun, who is hyperbolized into an old fool who has nothing better to do than to torment lover’s who wish to keep the dark moment in bed. The playful nature of this play furthermore helps to convey its genre. By the speaker insulting the sun and poking fun at daytime the speaker is referencing the Truths of the Age of Reason. Although, John Donne wrote during the Elizabethan era with such authors as Shakespeare and Ben Johnson before the Age of Enlightenment of the 18^th century, his keen interest in the sciences such as Alchemy and Cosmology mimic undertones of the future century. The last stanza, which states, “She is all states, and all prince I, Nothing else is. Princes do but play us; compared to this, All honor’s mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world’s contracted thus; Thine ages asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that’s done in warming us .Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere; This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere” (1266). This stanza specifically encompasses these two writing structures, with some overlap. It is a metaphysical poem because of its structure and the way the subject is approached and changed to fit John Donne’s will, but it also possesses a strong scientific tone, in which things can only be proven through experimentation and knowledge.

I realize that I only dissected two of John Donne’s poems this week, so I am leaving this as a topic for class discussion: What other poems that we read from this collection can be clearly categorized as metaphysical?

And random side note, every time I say this character’s name, I cannot help but to mispronounce it as “Don Juan”. Maybe it’s just me?

WILDCARD: Florence + The Machine

The Introduction

Recently, I have become obsessed with Florence + The Machine. My German roommate in Paris actually introduced me to this artist in the fall and it seems she is starting to become pretty well known here in the states as well.

Why Florence + The Machine?

The songs written and performed by this woman are some of my favorites. Depending on whatever kind of mood I’m in I can always listen to this album and enjoy it. In fact, it is one of those albums that I can click on and use as inspiration while writing or background noise for studying. It’s beautiful. In general, I always find it hard to find an entire album that I can truly admit that I love, but this time I can honestly say that I am addicted to her sound.

So I did Some Research

This album has a very strong underlying theme. LOVE. What else would I be talking about here? Throughout the album it is apparent that Florence Welch is pulling from her personal experiences. It sounds as if she is detailing her life’s lovers and breakups. I cannot help but feel like this artist has a broken heart, although she takes a more angry approach to her songs than many of our poets did this week. Additionally, many of the songs actually have a very strong melancholy tone that sound as if the artist’s heart was crushed. And when Florence Welch was asked to interpret some of her songs she told reporters, “A lot of the songs are based on what keeps me up at night, that state between waking and dreaming. I guess the things that keep me up at night aren’t exactly nice things. I’m not naturally an aggressive or angry person, so I think it’s kind of a thrill for me to explore these themes. It’s exciting to push it as far as I can, to see how dark you can get.’’ This is true: The album is not the happiest you could ever listen to, but I like how it expresses emotions that we have all felt at some time or another. It’s a great combination of somberness, calmness, anger, lust and frustration. In comparison to the lyrical poems that we read this week, I really enjoy how broad Florence’s emotional spectrum is. I love reading or listening to something that can take you from one stage to the next in a fluid movement. I am clearly a child of my generation, as can be seen with my difficulty to make a connection, other than to respect, the works that we read this week.

The Album

Lungs by Florence + The Machine

• Dog Days Are Over
• Rabbit Heart
• I’m Not Calling You a Liar
• Howl
• Kiss With A Fist
• Girl With One Eye
• Drumming Song
• Between Two Lungs
• Cosmic Love
• My Boy Builds Coffins
• Hurricane Drunk
• Blinding
• You’ve Got the Love

Here is the music video to Cosmic Love. It is one of my favorite songs and I think works perfectly with this weeks lesson.

Rumination #2: If I were Elizabeth Boyle I Would Have Been Wooed Too

There seems to be a trend when looking at literature, which is that as time progresses, so does the literature of the time. To point out the obvious, writing has to evolve. As we move through this course we can slowly start to see the changes made to certain styles, rhetorics and literary genres. Edmund Spenser is one of those authors that dabbled in poetry and played with the preconceived notions about what sonnets and songs should represent, although he stayed true to their natural form. His sonnet Amoretti and his song Epithalamion hold true to these standards.

First of all, Amoretti was written as a petrarchan sonnet, which means that it follows a pattern of writing, including an octave and a sestet. Sticking to tradition, Edmund Spenser followed the typical sonnet’s form, but his topic was generally not discussed. Amoretti is a poem for his beloved wife Elizabeth Boyle, instead of the sonnet in which we hear the speaker yearn almost pathetically for love. In Edmund’s case he already has his lover’s affection and he is detailing their courtship, their romance and eventually in his song, he expresses their everlasting love. Edmund Spenser took a chance as a writer veering away from the norms of accepted literature at the time. Although the selected works we were assigned were not written about taboo topics, he attempted to do something different with what people knew, which was risky. As an artist taking a chance like that can be suicide to a career, example, Mary Wollenstonecraft, but if you do not offend society or insight revolution within the society, the literature will obviously be more whole-heartedly accepted. Amoretti and Epithalamion, although, different pieces, were beautifully written and have clearly been adored by generations as Norton has so nicely stated, “The greatest threat is the force over which the poem exercises its greatest power: time” (903).

The song Epithalamion that is included in this excerpt purposefully differs from his sonnets, which it is meant to, but it also differs from the traditional wedding songs that were sung before entering the bedchamber. In sonnets it is not uncommon to read a lot of pronouns referring to the speaker, but it is uncommon to hear them in an epithalamion. Through this song Edmund Spenser veers away from the tradition of the wedding song, by making himself, the groom, the speaker. He refers to himself in numerous stanzas in the song transforming another part of the wedding ceremony into a declaration of love for his wife. Thus, he revolutionized his Epithalamion to be even more personal and romantic because he combined it with the traditions of ceremony, but placed himself at the heart of its truths.

Rumination # 1: The Exaggerated Beowulf

I love the exaggerations that embody the epic of Beowulf. It is these tales that make Beowulf the hero that the people believe in. It is the hype behind Beowulf that gives him his power and his confidence on his escapades because it is this one particular brave, courageous, daring and inhumanely strong image of Beowulf that is the basis of the epic.

The first of these high tales is Beowulf’s seven-day swim challenge. He explains that he lost the battle because he was attacked by nine sea monsters, which he had to defeat to save himself and to make the seas a safer place. Additionally, after slaying these monsters Beowulf ended up in Finland. Geographically and physically this is impossible, but what was our poet trying to accomplish here by adding this fictitious and mysterious element about what really happened? What is our poet’s purpose in creating a Beowulf that is superhuman?

Another aspect of this story that I found interesting was that Beowulf himself took the time in the mead hall to embellish the tale and to make it more impressive. He even contradicted a son of Ecglaf by stating that he was the strongest swimmer and then began to recount his battle with the nine monsters. In Beowulf there are two extravagant versions of this event, but Beowulf himself took his conquest to a completely different level. It then becomes clear at this point that other stories of Beowulf’s might be embellished as well to enhance his own image.

In fact, there are countless examples throughout the epic where Beowulf’s legend precedes him. He is constantly winning battles against unlikely monsters with hardly any weapons or protection. Beowulf is definitely portrayed as inhumane, which is also seen in another final act when Beowulf survived the Frisian War. He should not have survived because he only had thirty men with him and he had a long swim. According to legend,

“But Beowulf’s prodigious

Gifts as a swimmer guaranteed his safety:

He arrived at the shore, shouldering thirty

Battle-dresses, the booty he had won{…}

Across the wide sea, desolate and alone,

The son of Esgtheow swam back to his people.

There Hygd offered him throne and authority

As lord of the ring-hoard” (83).

This story is told as if no one would question the greatness of Beowulf. Of course after everything that the audience has learned about him this final act seems no more ridiculous than when he ripped off Grendel’s arm. Beowulf is the hero of this epic, but after examining all of the lies behind his actions can we still find his heroism to be true?

Testing 101

Here is my shout out to everyone in English 205. It should be an interesting semester and I am excited to get started!