This category is dedicated to the English 431: Shakespeare course.
Back when we read Othello using the Folger’s edition, our group encountered a peculiar word: “Zounds.” We found that this word was omitted from our Norton. After some research on the Oxford English Dictionary, we found that the origin of zounds comes from the phrase “By God’s Wounds,” a biblical phrase. The purpose of the […]
In the 2000 version of Hamlet staring Ethan Hawke, Michael Almereyda chose to interpret Hamlet in New York City with a dystopia-like feel. The simple and minimalistic camera creates a world that seems two-dimensional and flat. The slightly awkward filming techniques combined with eerie silence and stillness created a sense of detachment and somberness. These […]
When Malvolio wears his cross-gartered stockings he makes the most hilarious and crazy scene in twelfth night (3.4). Malvolio is not usually as zany as he appears to Olivia, but by acting in such a smiley and presumptuous manner, and wearing the most ridiculous clothing that Maria could think up he seems to be crazy. The […]
Since madness is a common theme throughout many of Shakespeare’s plays, it is especially intriguing to examine the definition of madness within Twelfth Night. “Shakespeare uses such words as ‘mad’ and ‘madness’ more often in Twelfth Night than in any of his other plays” (Joost Daalder 105). Shakespeare never gives the audience an exact definition, […]
No, there’s no T.A.R.D.I.S. or aliens taking over Messina, just good old actors David Tennant and Catherine Tate. In Doctor Who they are known as The Doctor and Donna Noble, but in the 2011 stage version of Much Ado About Nothing, they are the comedically romantic pair Benedick and Beatrice. For the most part, […]
The picture attached to this post is a word cloud for Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing Act IV scene one. This is my favorite scene in the play. This is the scene where the big “oh no” moment occurs. Claudio and Hero are about to get married. At the altar, Claudio accuses Hero of […]
In act 4 scene 1 of Much Ado about Nothing, after Hero was just accused of having cheated on Claudio, there is a vast amount of discussion and accusations passed on whether Hero did do as they say and if she should be marrying Claudio if she has not been loyal to him. There was […]
For this post I took some time and explored the Royal Shakespeare Company’s education site. The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-Upon-Avon not only produces world-class adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, but also offers an education program in which they work with to bring Shakespeare to schools across the United Kingdom. They present Shakespeare to students in […]
In William Shakespeare’s Henry V, in the Prologue the reader is faced with just one Character, Chorus. In our modern age many of think of the word chorus as a part of song, in which is repeated over and over throughout the song. In many cases this gets the song trapped inside your head. This […]
My word cloud is composed of act 5 and scene 3 of Much Ado About Nothing. In this scene, Claudio is reading his epitaph aloud so that everyone can hear him clearing Hero’s name. My word cloud is a good visual for highlighting the main points in a reading. For example, some of the words […]
In Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, the characters find themselves caught in an intricately tangled web of love and deceit. “And bid her steal into the pleachèd bower/ Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun/ Forbid the sun to enter, like favorites/ Made proud by princes, that advance their pride/ Against that power that bred it” […]
Much Ado About Nothing was one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, written in 1598. This play takes place in Messina, Italy; the third largest city on the island of Sicily, and the 13th largest city in Italy with a total population of 252,000. One of the most noteworthy characteristics of this city is the large catholic […]
Shakespeare vocabulary can be fun to play around with, with its archaic words and abundance of thy’s and thee’s. There’s even a Shakespeare insult generator (burn thy enemies with insults like “mewling sheep-biting maggot-pie” or “yeasty urchin-snouted foot-licker,” among other Elizabethan Age zingers). Since Shakespeare can often seem like a another language, it’s interesting to […]
We cannot consider a history of the film productions of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing without spending considerable time on Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 adaption. It was heralded as a young, sexy adaption immediately after its release, and although it may not be the most faithful film adaption of the play, it raises era-appropriate questions about […]
TimeMapper Project Reflection: The element of Shakespearean drama chosen by my group as a focus for the TimeMapper project was the overall publication and production history of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We focused primarily on notable performances that provided examples of how the production of Romeo and Juliet has changed over time. Additionally, we included […]
My group and I chose to create a timeline of the various film adaptations of Much Ado about Nothing for two reasons: one, because it’s one of our favorite plays, and two because film is a very important medium for Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been filmed on and off since the invention of the video camera. […]
In the beginning stages of our research, we looked at performances of Othello from the nineteenth and twentieth century. With two centuries, we thought that our research topic was too broad and narrowed our focus to non-traditional performances since 1900. For our time/map project on non-traditional performances of Othello, I looked at the play Othello […]
By: Shelby Larson In the beginning we were thinking really broad. We wanted to make the topic choice something that was epic but looking back on it now we were trying to go too big. We narrowed the topic and that helped a lot but then we narrowed it even more and that helped immensely. […]
There was a major shift in the plays performance beginning around 1947. It went from an appealing love story to a darker interpretation. This struck me mostly because of the date. It was right after World War 2. It intrigued me that much of the reaction to this was not entirely pleasant by the audiences […]
My group conducted this Shakespearean research project that focused on the play Othello. There are many different avenues we could have taken with this topic; however, we decided to research the more non-traditional performances of Othello throughout history. At first, we wanted to narrow to a specific time frame when researching performances, like the 1900s, but […]
For this project, I originally had three films picked out: a high school version, Joss Whedon’s version, and an East German film. After searching and searching on the library’s website, JSTOR, EBSCO, Youtube, Amazon, and so many more places I couldn’t find anything about this film besides the fact that it exists somewhere in the […]
In their book Shakespeare On Screen, Kenneth Rothwell and Annabelle Henkin Melzer provide information about performances of Shakespeare’s work. The film performance list of the comedy, Much Ado About Nothing is brief and briefer still is the list of silent films. A 1909 version by director Sigmund Lubin is not even a representation of Shakespeare’s […]
For our group’s Shakespeare time/map project, we chose to research and examine specific events that occurred surrounding a single play. Specifically, we chose to look at events in history, primarily in Europe, that were ongoing or occurred prior to the first stage performance of Othello by the King’s Men on the first of November, 1964. […]
After reading Henry IV: Part 1 and discussing the drama of what happened in the past, my group decided to look at Shakespeare’s representation of history and compare it to what historians have found. We had originally intended to focus on historical happenings and plot-related things, but after running into a road block when we […]
Timeline Project Reflection paper
For the group project, my group and I created a timeline looking at what was going on in history during 1602-1603, which was when Shakespeare was said to have written Othello. My group each took an important event during the time and then proceeded to look into the event to see if it could have […]
Timeline Reflection: Henry IV Part 1 Completing a timeline project for the play Henry IV Part I and its historical background was an interesting learning experience. While there were a number of barrier points and challenges to completing it, the process of researching the real and fictional characters and the choices Shakespeare made when adapting […]
At first when we began our project it was very tough to narrow down what exactly we would be doing and researching. After a little bit of trying our original topic out, and pushing through the technical difficulties, we began to input our data onto the spreadsheet. Plays, dates, where Shakespeare set the plays, and […]
Through mapping out the series of Shakespeare’s many plays, their locations, dates written and other such information I learned, at first glance, very little. The approach our group took to the project was to map out all of the general information we could about Shakespeare’s work in Time Mapper. From there we went on looking […]
For the TimeMapper project, my group decided to look at events in the year(s) a play was written. We chose to focus on Othello for this project. We found various events in Europe that occurred between 1602 and 1603, when Shakespeare wrote Othello. We all found at least one event. If we could only find […]
Shakespeare’s Tendencies – Timemapper This project started out potentially more difficult than it needed to for our group, yet I feel that our end result made it more gratifying upon completing due to the difficult position we placed ourselves in. We made the decision to branch away from focusing on one specific play, and instead […]
After examining multiple plays written my William Shakespeare, a common theme of heirs, succession, father and son relationships and the culture in England behind succession, is seen in a multitude of these plays. More specifically, readers can see how Hamnet’s death affected his writing. Just from The Tempest, and King John as examples, it is […]
When you look at William Shakespeare’s play Othello, and one looks at when it was written and what was going on at the time a few major things come up. I helped create a timeline that shows the major events of the years that Othello was being written to try and find out what influenced […]