OH MY GOODNESS.

       This week we focused on timed writings and how to improve them. I wrote one essay  and got a "see me" and then that day in class you asked us to write a paragraph on a new topic. When i got that one back i magically got a 7 something. I was amazed. So, i have been working on my actual essays re-write. I have been basically been doing the same thing as what i did when i rewrote a chunk of paragraph. If you focus on particular words and themes in that section only you begin to go further in depth. It is amazing! thank you so much for that activity we had to do.    
        Now, since i don't really have anything to talk about i will talk about my weekend. I went on a church retreat  and we played this game guys vs. girls about who knew more about the other. The guys were convinced they knew more about us girls and that they were superior. this of course, made me think of Hamlet. Hamlet thinks that men are superior to women. In the nunnery scene Hamlet treats Ophelia like a joke. He pushes her around and tells her lies that just mess with her head. This later drives her to madness. Also, during this game, the guys had a question to name three of the disney princesses and it made me remember the social commentaries and the psychological thingamajigs we studied in the beginning of the year. I thought it was funny that you have forever corrupted my brain with you AP Lit stuff. Now i have this dang AP Lit brain and people constantly think i am a weirdo.  oh well. I will live... I guess. maybe. hmm. I was not the only one on this retreat that kept quoting Hamlet. Harper and austin were quoting it like it was their job. haha. i am positive people wanted to punch us so badly. My friends kept yelling at me. I hope their are plenty of nerds in college.  
      I am really excited to learn about sonnets. I like how they can be structured but not feel structured at all. okay.... i quit. I have to tell you how thankful i am for the letter of recommendation you wrote me. Thanks to you i have gotten scholarships for two of three schools and i have not even heard from that third school. You must have written s great letter. So thank you. so much. I GOT INTO MY DREAM SCHOOL! Kansas City Art Institute likes me! they really really like me! :) eeeeek thank you so much.

potato

Today we watched the end of the play. You have sort of taught us to be directors so I’ve decided that I am going to blog about how differently I would have done the last scenes of the play. I think that even though that last parts of the play were meant to be dramatic that they shouldn’t have been “overdone” like they were. I mean when hamlet and Laertes are fighting each other I would have imagined only the people involved to actually be there. I would have put the rest of the cast or people or whatever outside the room spying since that seems to be how everyone is. Everyone is a follower and everyone likes to be a part of something they are not. Spying/ eavesdropping just seem to fit. Gertrude drinks the poison as a toast to Hamlets winning which seems to be played out perfectly in the Branau version. The looks on everyone’s faces were perfect and the emotion was just right.

The two more horrible parts of the end of the movie were the part were that chandelier acted as a wrecking ball. That was just completely too humorous and not right for the play at all. Then when Fortinbras’s army came in it was just funny because they just kind of stepped all over Hamlet and his all of the dead people. The army sort of walks all over all of the emotions that the director spends so long building up and I just think that the entrance and how he went about bringing them back in could have gone differently.

This play was not enjoyable at first. I think it is mostly because in the beginning it was really very hard to understand all of Shakespeare’s different styles and how they all come together. All of the words with many meanings and ideas made it overwhelming at times. I have been re reading the acts from the beginning more because I can now notice more themes and ideas that I could not catch onto before which is cool. I think I like the play more now that I’m reading it more clearly. I think my favorite scene was crazy singing Ophelia swcene because there is so much to analyze and so much is revealed in that scene. I think that the mad/madness theme really shows up clearly at this point. Also, the nunnery scence was great too. I think I just like it because I think Cammily and Reuben are really good at being Hamlet and Ophelia. Haha. When I typed in Cammily’s name it auto corrected to Clammily. Oh my, that’s great.

Something.

Hamlet is really, really repetitive. It is quite obvious that it is written like that for a reason though. As we discussed, one of the common motifs is seems vs. is. Shakespeare wants us to notice the issues that are brought up through conversation. Oftentimes Hamlets soliloquy’s show his feelings towards something but then is explained differently through the conversations he has with others, making seems vs is automatically pop into your head.

I think it is really interesting how Shakespeare wrote all of the lines to sort of have a double meaning. The characters say some things but the really mean another, for example, the part where Hamlet is talking to Gertrude about common. She says” Seek for thy noble father in the dust./ Thou know’st ’tis common. All that lives must die,/ Passing through nature to eternity.” Hamlet responds with “Ay, madam, it is common.” Like… sure it happens all of the time. Gertrude wonders why it “seems” so important to Hamlet. He does not know what she means by seems. He goes all crazy and freaks out and says Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”/ These indeed “seem,”/For they are actions that a man might play./ But I have that within which passeth show,/  These but the trappings and the suits of woe.”, basically saying that nothing is ever what you think. They are never really how they SEEM. Which leads me too my favorite lesson of the week….the plays we did. My group had the part where Hamlet finds out that the king and Polonius are there halfway through. I liked how you told us that the whole feeling you get from the play can be changed just by how the director interprets it. To me that entire lesson was about the different ways actors, actresses, directors, and the viewers interpret things and what impact different movements can make. It was interesting to see what everyone thought each scene was. In our class almost everyone guessed the scenes right. We liked the one where Hamlet never notices. I think that this way works the best with the idea of the scene and how Ophelia acts and feels towards Hamlet. In the first play, the group with noble and whoever else, Hamlet notices right away and they portrayed the scene perfectly. It just shows me that people have different ways of making different viewpoints work towards the play. The first group definitely did the scene justice.

I really loved the plays. It was so much fun to act out the scenes and it makes them a lot more memorable. It makes “close reading” a lot more entertaining. Plus, it was really cool to see how all of my classmates interpret things.