The End

The Engaging Shakespeare event was excellent. I was really impressed with all of the groups, especially the music video group. Their project was very powerful. It was evident that everyone put a lot of time and effort into their projects. To be honest, originally I wasn't a fan of the whole event idea, but mostly just because I hate being in front of people. It turned out great though. We had a few issues with our audio a few hours before the event with overlapping and improper formatting, which was kind of really stressful, but we got everything worked out in time.

Learning Outcomes:
Shakespeare Literacy:
Of all the plays that I read this semester, I hadn't read any of them before, and I didn't know anything whatsoever about The Tempest, King Lear, or The Winter's Tale before this semester. I had seen productions of Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, and Love's Labour's Lost before but didn't really understand much about them until taking this class. It was so much easier for me to read and understand Shakespeare when I had people to talk about it with who read it the same time I did, and who were generally on the same level. I feel much more well versed in his works than I ever have before. It's nice to feel comfortable when it comes to Shakespeare. The plays that I feel most comfortable with now are Taming of the Shrew (because it was my individual play) and Hamlet. We did a lot with Hamlet this semester in class and for my group's project. I had to do the voices for Horatio and Laertes and since I had to distinguish between the two, I had to better understand their characters and where they were coming from. In the end I tried to give Horatio a more caring and light voice and with Laertes I tried to make him sound more gruff, masculine, and very angry after his father died.
 
Critically:
One of my favorite blog posts that I did this Semester was Tragedy, Comedy, Reality. This semester I have felt a lot of connections to my Shakespeare class and my Contemporary Anthropological Theory class. Shakespeare knew a lot about people and their motives and behaviors and while he set all of those into fiction and entertainment, they come out powerfully. It's been interesting to study human nature via modern theorists and Shakespeare at the same time. Man kind really hasn't changed much since the 1600s.

Creatively:
While our final project doesn't seem quite as creative as the other groups, we still had to act and be the characters in Hamlet. I talked a lot about the final project under Literacy, so I won't repeat myself, but it was kind of a challenge, at least for me, to act like two different people while only standing in front of a microphone in a tiny booth instead of on stage or something where I could also move around and interact with the other characters with more than just my voice. It was kind of hard to get the hang of, but as we recorded more and more it was evident that we were more comfortable with recording than we were the first few takes.

Shared Meaningfully:
Obviously the event and posting the audiobook online were pretty good sharing opportunities, as was blogging for most of the semester. I really don't have a whole lot more in this area. I've shared with my husband a lot of the connections I've made between Shakespeare and anthropological theory since he is also in the anthropology major. And like I said last time, I've talked a few times with my co-workers a few times, but with less than enthusiastic responses often times. I know it's sad, but I rarely ever see or spend time with anyone other than my husband and co-workers due to my tight schedule.

All in all, I was happy taking this class, and I got a lot out of it. I am much more aware of how Shakespeare and the issues he wrote about are still present today. I'm kind of sad the class is over. But I'm very glad the projects are finished.

Tragedy, Comedy, Reality

Warning: This might not make a lot of sense.

Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the concept of tragedy. I know in class we went over the basic elements to expect in a tragedy (death, sorrow, revenge, backstabbing, secret plots, etc.), but I've been trying to think of it more in a non-play setting.
In the movie "Stranger than Fiction", the main character, Harold Crick, is trying to decide whether is life is a comedy or a tragedy and starts keeping track of comedic moments during his day verses tragic ones. By the end of one day he has four marks under "Comedy" and at least a hundred under "Tragedy". At the end of that day he says, "I think I'm in a tragedy."

King Lear is definitely a tragedy. Everything about the play is tragic. But something that I've been thinking about and noticing is that even Comedic plays like "Love's Labour's Lost", "Taming of the Shrew", "Much Ado about Nothing", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" all have some tragic element. The plays are not one long string of happy events and funny jokes. There is still guile, death, and sorrow, it just ends in a happier way than a tragedy.

In my Contemporary Theory of Anthropology this semester we read a book called "Pandora's Hope" by Bruno Latour. In this book Latour addresses the idea of reality- what it is, if it really exists, and the elements that contribute to it. Life is full of tragic and comedic events. Some days we might very well feel like we are in a tragedy and that we've past the point of no return. Our eyes have been stomped out of our heads and we have been tricked by someone we thought was very close to us. But that's not usually the case. Most of our lives are not just a tragedy or just a comedy. I feel like most of our lives, in reality are probably more like "Winter's Tale" with very strong elements of both.

King Leontes and everyone else in the beginning of the play had different realities. As I called it in a previous post "Emerald City Syndrome" The king believed that reality was that his wife had cheated on him with his best friend. But everyone else had the reality that she hadn't and that the king had gone mad. Leontes couldn't be convinced that his reality wasn't real, because he believed it to be so. How many times in our lives do we think something is reality, when no one else does, or very few people do? How crazy was Leontes in his reality? How crazy is King Lear in his reality? How crazy was Hamlet in his reality? How crazy is Harold Crick in his reality? How crazy are you in your reality? How crazy do I sound to you right now?

Everything is connected and everything is relative. We will always have contrasts of tragedy and comedy in our lives. Every day, week, month, etc. there will be an imbalance of tragic and comedic elements that we have to go through, but I think what really matters is how we perceive it. Other people are rarely going to see the same event the same way you do. That doesn't make either of you crazy, it just means you live in slightly different, but connected realities.

Behind

I know I was supposed to do this on Friday, but this month has been a little crazy.
Anyways, I just wanted to give a brief rundown of what we've been doing in our final project group. First off, we won't be going through Librivox, because my group decided to cut the play down to about an hour. So I will be figuring out how to create our own podcast or find some other way to get it out online for people to access.
We did a trial run of recording and script reading on Thursday. It went well, and we discovered somethings we need to work on, such as microphone placement and how to work the program.
Something that I need to work on personally is my voices for the characters I'm reading (Horatio and Laertes). I tend to be fairly monotone in general, and breaking from that for this is something I'm working on, and will continue to do over Thanksgiving break along with getting my lines down. The others in the group don't seem to have the same issue, which is good for them.
Our plan is to have a long recording session the Saturday after break, December third I think, so we can start working on editing and all of that jazz.

Flibbertigibbet

I've had a harder time getting in to "King Lear" than the other plays read this semester, maybe it's just the time of year. I'm not sure.

Belle's sisters from 1946 production

Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril

There are a few things that I have found kind of interesting though. The beginning of the play with Lear and his daughters reminded me of the original "Beauty and the Beast" story. There are three daughters. One Cordelia, like Belle is the most beloved and the most "real". Goneril and Regan are like her sisters who are only interested in what their father's money can give them, and once they have it, like in "King Lear", or it disappears, like in "Beauty and the Beast", they abandon their fathers because he is no longer useful to them. The difference, one of the many, is that "King Lear" is a tragedy and "Beauty and the Beast" is not.

The next thing that caught my attention was the word "Flibbertigibbet". In Act III Scene IV Edgar says, "This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet." Now I've heard this word before, but I never really knew what it meant, so I decided to look it up. The regular definition usually means a flighty, frivolous, gossipy, babbling woman. But while looking at the history of the word, it was said that Edgar/Shakespeare's usage of it was to mean a demon or an imp. Personally, I feel like the two definitions are basically the same.  

Librivox: Final Project Proposal

For my final project I would like to do a Librivox recording of a Shakespeare play. As I have been using Librivox this semester to listen to the plays we've been reading, I've noticed the quality of the readers and of their recordings are really hit and miss. I'd like to get a group together to do a recording of a play, and hopefully make it so the audio is clear and the voice acting is at least decent. I'm not that particular on which one, but I thought a lesser know play might be more enjoyable, and we'd have another work of Shakespeare's to add to our repertoire of knowledge. The one I was leaning towards was "Titus Andronicus" because it has cannibalism in it, and being an archaeology major, I'm pretty interested in that kind of thing. But I am open for doing a different one too.
The cool thing about Librivox is that the sharing part of our project is more global. And I personally think it's a useful tool that I've used for a few classes besides our Shakespeare class.
I figure the group would do a basic reading of the play individually, then we'd read it together a few times after researching the story to better understand the characters we'd be recording for whoever to hear. One of the nice things about Librivox is that we wouldn't necessarily even need to record the whole thing together or all at once. Granted I think recording together would be helpful to make it feel a little more connected, and so we'd all have the same audio sound.

Tempest and Midterm Self Assessment

First off, I really enjoyed reading and seeing "The Tempest". I was disappointed that I missed the actual tempest part of the play, because of traffic, but what I did see of the play done up in Salt Lake City, I loved. I thought all of the actors did a great job, especially Caliban and Prospero. I enjoyed the youthful couple so much more than those who played in "The Winter's Tale". In general they seemed much more comfortable with each other, and it seemed more plausible that they could be in love then Perdita and her beau seemed on stage.
Something I found strange and what made me a little uncomfortable was the weird longing/love I sensed between Prospero and Ariel's characters. Especially the part when Ariel asks Prospero if he loves her. I guess when I read the play I didn't read it in a love-love sort of way, but in a friendly-love sort of way. Did anyone else feel that vibe, or was it just me?

Mid-Term Self Assessment:
1. How have I gained Shakespeare literacy?:
I have gained literacy by simply reading more of his plays and being able to talk about them with other people, who also read them, who have some genuine interest in them, and who come from different backgrounds and have different opinions about things than I do. Just being able to talk in depth about the plays we've read in class makes each play after easier and easier for me to comprehend because I'm looking for similar elements (themes, character traits, character relationships, language used, etc.) in Shakespeare's plays and because I was guided fairly heavily though one before I read others, I'm able to pick up on those things later, by myself before class discussions. 
2. How have I analyzed Shakespeare critically?:
I feel like the times I felt most analytically critical of Shakespeare was after seeing productions of his plays, whether on stage or on screen. It's easier to understand Shakespeare when it's being put on, like it was meant to be. It's better for me to make a judgment call on something that happens in the play when I see the characters in the midst of it all. Shakespeare was writing about people and their strengths and weaknesses and how they reacted to certain things. Being an Anthropology major, and constantly studying society myself, I've found Shakespeare's portrayal of people very curious and mostly true to form.
3. How have I engaged Shakespeare creatively?:
At the beginning of this blog I had great fun trying to tie in what I was learning in my anthropology classes to what I was learning in my Shakespeare class. As the semester went on it wasn't always possible for me to do things exactly the same as I had at the start due to specific things we were asked to do and include. But I think I enjoyed my first, although usually smaller, posts more than the later ones.
4. How have I shared Shakespeare meaningfully?:
Naturally I've shared my opinions on Shakespeare with my group in class, which I find has been the easiest of my sharing experiences and I've gotten the most out of it. I've talked to my husband and co-workers about what I've been learning, but it's not as rewarding to try and share with someone when they have little interest (like my co-workers) or haven't read the same plays (my husband). After watching "Taming of the Shrew" with my husband though, we did have a nice discussion on dominance and submissiveness in our relationship and in general.

Self Directed Learning:
This semester has been very busy for me, but I've always made sure that I've read every play for this class, even if that means listening to it via audio book at work because that's the only "free time" I have to do so. This was my "fun class" for the semester and I really want to get as much out of it as I could. At the beginning of the semester I'd look up a summary of the play first so I wouldn't be lost, but after "The Winter's Tale" I would try reading the play before I looked up a summary to test my comprehension skills. I liked sharing my ideas with my group to see how far off I seemed compared to them on how I interpreted the plays. I tried to keep as consistent as I could with my blogging to put down my ideas, although I was a little late one some of them, because I felt it determined how well I felt I knew what I thought I knew.

Collaborative and Social Learning:
I usually hate working in groups and was worried about it at the start of the semester because it doesn't always work out so nicely. This class was an exception though. I have really enjoyed communicating my thoughts with my group and I feel like they all have something to contribute to it. Everyone has been really helpful in contributing to conversations in class and online. Sometimes it's interesting to discuss things we have different opinions about (like morals or even an interpretation of a line in the text). Everyone is really polite about their different views when they do come up, which makes things a bit easier to share them the next time they come up. I often connect things that I read in my anthropology classes and situations in my life and the life of my friends and co-workers to Shakespeare and how he depicts similar situations.

Future:
My plans to accomplish the final outcomes for this semester are to help with the one act of "Love's Labor's Lost" for the performance, memorization and final project aspect. I'm still planning on writing a modern "Taming of the Shrew" for NaNoWriMo for the imitation.

Sharing Time

Unfortunately my Shakespeare sharing didn't go over as well as I had hoped.
For sharing locally, I was somewhat more successful than in my "global" efforts. I attempted to start a few conversations with co-workers about "Taming of the Shrew". The first time went over better than the others. A girl I work with was telling me about her past relationship problems and I was able to tie in "Taming of the Shrew" and how some people's personalities are better suited to be with certain people. As I mentioned in a previous post, Petruchio and Kate were a good couple because they are very similar personality types. We also talked about the amount of submissiveness that should be given to one's partner and if one member of the couple should be allowed to dominate.

The second attempt with other female co-workers was when one of them mentioned "10 Things I Hate About You". I thought, "What a convenient segway," but when I started comparing Heath Ledger's character to Petruchio (you know, the character his was based off of) I got blank stares and a "Who?"  I explained who Petruchio was, but they had become uncomfortable and moved on. I guess Shakespeare really does make some people awkward.

As for sharing globally, I didn't seem to get much luck. I found a page on Facebook about Shakespeare and posted a question about Petruchio and Kate's relationship and how other people perceived it. I linked back to this blog and my previous "Taming of the Shrew" posts. I looked around on the page for people talking about the play, but didn't find much. Mostly people were just posting their favorite quotes from plays. Unfortunately this page is probably much less popular than some of the others that exist, and probably doesn't get as much traffic. But maybe someday I'll get a response.

Pirates and Princes and Pa

If the only men I had around me for 12 years was my father and a rapist devil child, I'd probably fall in love with the first new, young, normal seeming man I saw too. Poor Miranda. I generally don't feel much sympathy for the younger Shakespeare women (and I might change my mind about Miranda as I continue to read this play) but what a terrible situation. Her situation reminds me of Frederic in Pirates of Penzance. The only woman he ever remembers being around is his nanny until he gets to leave his ship for a brief period of time and meets the beautiful Mabel.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, and I'm sure you're probably sick of hearing me say this, but how stable are these relationships that start out as love at first sight ordeals? I admire Prospero's desire to make things difficult for Ferdinand and Miranda so that they will have a more stable relationship. I'm not quite sure what he has in mind to do so, but at least it's put out with good intentions. I'm happy to know that Prospero loves his daughter and wants the best for her. In Pirates of Penzance Frederic has to go back out to sea for 63 years and asks Mabel to wait for him. That would definitely be a difficult test of love. 63 years is an awfully long time to wait for anything. "The Tempest" seems to have more labor for love than "Love's Labour's Lost".

If I be waspish, best beware my sting

As I've been going over "Taming of the Shrew" in my mind the past week or so I continue to be conflicted in my perception of Petruchio. As I was searching around to internet for what others thought of him I cam across an intriguing blog that has a few posts about Petruchio's character and Kate's as well. The first post from this blog that I read compared the Richard Burton portrayal and the John Cleese portrayal. The blogger also compares Kate's abusiveness to that of Petruchio's and makes the point that Kate's abuse is worse than Petruchio's ever was, and that in the end she wasn't a hollow person (like I see her), but says that she has transformed into a "dignified, self-controlled rock; half of the foundation of what will become a strong family unit." 

I myself am torn. I don't believe that Shakespeare meant Kate to become a sad, completely submissive to her husband's will, but I know she needed to change because she was very much out of control in her throwing apples, shoving midgets, tying up her sister, beating her music teacher over the head, slapping people, and verbally degrading everyone around her ways. I'm just trying to create a happy medium of Kate between crazy, enraged woman and an anything-you-say-my-lord female.

The one thing I enjoyed most about this play that I'm not conflicted on, is that Petruchio and Kate are definitely a good match. They are both very spicy characters and the banter between them is humorous and equally matched. One scene in particular I enjoyed thoroughly was the first meeting of the two. Instead of being insulted by all the harsh things Kate says to him, Petruchio turns everything into a joke which makes Kate made because she can't get a rise out of him. Petruchio was made to handle a "wild" woman. I feel as if he would have been terribly bored if he had been paired with Bianca instead. And if Bianca had been paired with him, she wouldn't have been able to keep up with his sense of humor and temperament. While she is portrayed as the more perfect and lovable sister, she's the more boring and petty.

Love's Labor

If the King of Navarre asked the Princess of France to pop a back zit for him, do you think she would have done it?

After reading "Love's Labour's Lost", I've been thinking about the actual labor of love. I personally don't feel like the characters in the play really labored for love, or that they really loved each other at all. What they were was infatuated. My sister had a religion professor once tell her that, "Infatuation is a guy who is as hot as Taylor Lautner, as smart as Albert Einstein, as funny as Jim Carrey, as noble as Winston Churchhill, and as athletic as Rocky Balboa. Love is a guy who is as noble as Jim Carrey, as smart as Rocky Balboa, as athletic as Albert Einstein, as funny as Winston Churchhill, looks nothing like Taylor Lautner, yet you adore him anyway."

What I really wanted to get at with this post it that love, being in love, staying love, showing your love, etc. is a lot of work, and it's a work that will never be over. It's more than writing love letters and swooning and sighing (although those things are nice). And playing tricks on someone just for spiteful fun, isn't the best way to nurture love for someone. I myself am by far no expert on love, only being married a little over three months, but you don't even have to be in love to see that the characters in "Love's Labour's Lost" aren't really in love.

From Shrew to Sock Puppet

Last night my husband and I watched the BBC production of "Taming of the Shrew" which stars John Cleese as Petruchio. When I read the play, I thought Petruchio seemed like a simple man, only looking for money. But Shakespeare is meant to be seen, and that's how his characters really come to life and develop. Petruchio's character is well educated, witty, and funny, but also mean spirited and manipulative.

It's true that Kate definitely needed to learn how to calm down and stop hating everyone and their dog. The first scene she's in, she pushes down a  midget and throws and apple at some men. Not the friendliest of people for sure. The way Kate is "tamed" is essentially abuse though. She is not allowed to eat or to sleep, and if Petruchio says the sun is the moon, or an old man is a young maid, than Kate must agree or she'll be deprived of more. He swears to Kate that everything he does is just because he loves her.

But by the end of the play she is a hollow shell of a character, with no personality other than that of a robotic, brainwashed Stepford wife. She's not at all the person she was in the beginning (which is the point of the play, yes), but if you really love someone, shouldn't you love them the way the are, and encourage them to change their flaws, not completely destroy who they are in a matter of weeks?


Another thing I thought a lot about while watching and reading this play is how painful it can be to have a seemingly perfect sister whom everyone loves and adores, while you feel like a mere side note in the shadows. I wonder when Bianca started being praised more than Kate, and if that is what started Kate's acting out in the first place, possibly at a very young age. It is very common for people to seek negative attention if they feel like it's the only kind they can get. And after acting in such a way for what could have been quite a few years, it would be a hard habit to change. Maybe Petruchio gave her the chance she needed to be able to make that change without people doubting her motives and thinking she was up to no good.

Taming of the Shrew

Sorry I didn't blog on Friday. I woke up in the middle of the night Thursday with what I think was food poisoning and afterwards slept through essentially the whole of Friday. Anyways...

My individual Shakespeare play is "Taming of the Shrew". This is one of the Bard's plays that I've known the generals of the story for years, but have never actually read it, so I'm pretty excited to dive into it.

 (Warning- this play may cause my slightly masked feminism to show its true colors)

Something that attracted me to this play/story what the bitterness of Katherina. In general I know that I can be/have been/sometimes still am a bitter and jaded person, but what do you know, my husband helped me let go and rid myself of most of that.
While doing some surface research I came across an article called "Taming of the Shrew: Shakespeare's Mirror of Marriage" by Coppelia Kahn. This gives an interesting perspective on the roles of each partner in the marriage relationship and how Kate learns to become submissive to her husband's will. And being in such a feminist era, this makes my female brain, say, "Excuse me? I don't think so." So I'd like to take a closer look at how Shakespeare portrays marriage while reading the play to see if he's encouraging women to be more submissive or telling them to stop being puppets.

While looking over the text I see that along with the standard five acts, there is a prologue. I don't know why he couldn't just make it six acts. I guess that the actual play is being performed for the characters in the prologue and they say it's a history. The prologue is the only part of the play, as far as I can tell that involves the character's observing the play, so I don't really know why they are in there at all.

"Taming of the Shrew" is a comedy, and generally I prefer tragedies over comedies, simply because romantic interests and drama and love stories don't really interest me. But I do know that Shakespeare can be absolutely hilarious, so that in and of itself makes up for the "mushy-gushy", someone-please-strangle-me stuff that is the actual plot. I'm pretty positive "Taming of the Shrew won't disappoint when it comes to humor, and I'm also hoping that because Kate is a "shrew" that the love aspect of it will be more appealing to me.

The Honor Code

A complete and austere institution, according to Michel Foucault, in its general form is intended to "render individuals docile and useful, by means of precise work upon their bodies..." (Foucault 214). In these institutions, the persons having the "work" done to them are constantly being observed and those observations are recorded in order to better push each individual to a desired outcome. Examples of such places are prison, school, a hospital, etc.
In "Love's Labour's Lost" the first act is about setting up such an institution so that "the mind can banquet, but the body pine (Act 1 Scene 1 Line 27). These men are to dedicate three years of their lives to study, and are given a strict set of rules to follow (fast once a week, no women for three years, and only three hours of sleep a night).
Why do we subject ourselves to such kinds of institutions? There are always going to be people who fight against an institution they are placed into, but what makes them so powerful that it generally doesn't matter if you don't care for the institution you're in because they are already such a powerful force in your life and in society. I feel like this is a case where society creates something in their minds and then in the outside world and it begins to control their outside world and how they think. These aren't negative things all the time, and often produce positive results (going to school for four years where you are required to obey a certain about of rules and at the end you gain a degree/a record proving what you did for four years).
What will happen in "Love's Labour's Lost" when they decide to break away from the institution they have created? Will it eventually be a positive or negative decision?

Foucault, Michel. "Complete and Austere Institutions", The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books, New York. 1984.

O, Ophelia...

I don't have a particular anthropological theory for this post. I just have this tiny pet peeve about the younger women in Shakespeare's plays that I feel like ranting about briefly because of Ophelia's suicide.
Something that I've noticed in Shakespeare's plays is the reactions of women to tragedies in relation to their age. It seems to me that the younger the girl is the more melodramatic she is, but I know this is the case in real life too. Sometimes I just want to slap these ridiculous girls in the face. Do not kill yourself over a man. Good heavens, ladies, keep it together.
I don't feel like our society is really helping young girls learn to control themselves emotionally at all, in fact I think it's encouraging them to be even more melodramatic, prissy, and strumpet-esque. Or has it always been this way? Was it this way in Shakespeare's day too? Being a whore with a temper does not make you a powerful woman. I'm not saying that Ophelia's character was a whore, or that she had a temper by any means, but I do think she overreacted.
And to lighten the mood, I'd like to share this little youtube video dealing with Ophelia's situation. Hopefully it won't be too offensive.

Bonds caused by the Bard

Going down to the Shakespeare festival in Cedar City this weekend to see "A Winter's Tale" was a rather interesting experience. I'm used to the theater, so that wasn't anything new, and this wasn't my first Shakespeare play. I thought the casting was great (except for Florizel who I thought was an idiot pretty boy and I imagined Paulina to be a bit more spicy than she was portrayed). But the thing that interested me most about the whole experience was how the play changed the conversation on the drive back home.
I was wary driving four strangers around all day, especially because I'm fairly shy. The drive down had a hint of awkward as we tried to get to know each other with the basic name-major-home town questions and I feared we had run out of things to say to each other the first two hours of the drive. However as soon as the play was over and we piled back into my car something amazing happened. While discussing the play we stopped trying not to step on each other's toes and actually disagreed with each other about what we liked and what we thought could have been better, not only about the play we had just seen, but about other plays and other aspects of life in general. It was fantastic. Maybe it's just the observer in me, but I found it very interesting that before we had seen the play we were cautious about what we said to each other and how we said it. Once we knew we had some small sliver of something in common (seeing the same play together) we were able to brake down a lot of awkward social niceties that had made us so uncomfortable the first part of the day.
Anthropologically thinking, I wonder why it was easier for us to open up more to each other afterwards than before. Not much, if anything, had changed about us personally from the three hours in the theater, so what happened? What is it about a mildly heated discussion about Shakespeare that causes people to connect?

It takes a village to raise a child...

Many anthropologists believe that a person's personality and social self is created by their environment and society (for example you take a five or six year old and put them in a place where they are taught to play nice, how to share, their ABCs, and how to behave in relation to other people, from that a kindergartener will emerge). Something that kind of irked me in "The Winters Tale" was how Perdita was acting like a blue blood even though she was raised by an old Shepard. I know that some things are inherent or passed on from parents, but I don't think she would be as royal acting as she appeared. If a society creates a person, Perdita should have been more of a Shepard's daughter.
Another aspect of this is that people create their society while the person is created by society. So Perdita could have had an influence on her society and environment to make the county side less peasant-esque with her feminine ways, but it probably wouldn't have seemed like as big of a difference.

I would not wish any companion in the world but you

I don't really have a sociologist or anthropologist in mind for this post, but I wanted to talk about the friendship between Hermione and Paulina. They are clearly very close friends, and I'm just going to go ahead and say that they are best friends. Paulina has the dedication of a best friend. She will go down into prison even though she's not allowed, and she confronts the insane king when she is clearly not welcome, just to help Hermione and her baby.
On the other hand the story starts out with two people that are clearly supposed to be best friends and have been for most, if not all, of their lives. Leontes completely dissolves his friendship with Polixenes in a matter of seconds because of what seems to me to be uncalled for jealousy.
Are these two friendships supposed to be foils of each other?
Why do we as human beings seek the companionship of friends? Ayn Rand, who was a strong advocate for "objectivism" thought that a person should not care for anyone except themselves and that having connections with people was a waste of time and would get in the way of helping one achieve what their personal goals were. I definitely don't agree with that stand point, but I do think that some friendships should not be made (like ones where the friend will want to kill you).

Emerald City Syndrome

In L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the book, not the movie), Dorothy and her friends reach the Emerald City, and on the outside it's the most brilliant emerald green (exactly what you'd expect right?). Anyways they get inside and are given these green sun-type glasses. They are told they must wear them because the light reflecting off the walls is too brilliant and they must protect their eyes. They go through that whole bit with getting new green clothes to look nice for the Wizard and all of that jazz that happens there. When they leave the city to go on their quest to kill the witch they take off their green glasses and realize that their clothes aren't green like they thought, but white.
Are you ready for the Shakespearean and anthropological tie ins yet?
People will see what they want to see. It's a simple truth that is found everywhere in the world. As natives of a specific place you see things how you're expected to see them, but if you go to another culture and meet the natives of that area, they may (and probably will) see the same things in a completely different way. It's easy to think that the other culture is wrong and that your way of seeing something is right, if you don't have the right anthropological attitude.
In "The Winter's Tale" Leontes is determined that what he sees is an unfaithful hussy of a wife. He has on his green glasses and is convinced that no matter who says differently, Hermione is green (a cheating whore), not white (a pure and honest wife). It's not until his wife and son die that he realizes, "Oh wait, these glasses are tinted."

To seek the light of truth

Another contemporary theorist I'm reading works from this semester is Clifford Geertz. Geertz believes that the deeper you try to understand a person, culture, event, etc. the further away from "the answer" you will get because every one of those things is so thick with layers and possible meanings. There are so many little things that people do and think it is impossible to understand or interpret correctly what actually happened in the past or that is happening in the present. Granted it is a little different with works of art because the artist or author can come out and say what their piece of work means, but that doesn't mean that every person will read or see that work of art the way the author intended. People may also change their mind about what something means upon going back to it after some experiences in life happen. When I was a child I knew that "The Lion King" was loosely based on "Hamlet", so that movie was my childhood "Hamlet". In high school I watched the Kenneth Branagh production of "Hamlet" and it was clearly no longer "The Lion King", but it was still mostly only surface interpretations coming to me and simply entertaining. Now as I read "Hamlet" I feel so much more, but still everything is not clear. Specific things in the play stand out to me now that haven't before and might not again next time I come across "Hamlet" just depending on where I am in my life. There is no end to how people may interpret something.

All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players

In one of my anthropology classes this semester we read some of Peter Berger's ideas on world construction. Berger is a leading contemporary theorist in the anthropological world. Part of his world construction theory is that people create different worlds for themselves depending on the people they are with or the situation they are in. Multiple people creating worlds together, according to Berger is what creates society. In Hamlet the characters are acting, and creating worlds for themselves and for others to see. The whole "fake it until you make it" idea fits into this theory and play as well because by acting as one thing you will eventually become that thing. By pretending to have a virtue, one should eventually acquire that virtue. Hamlet knows his family and friends think he's crazy and starts acting on it, and eventually he becomes crazy. When the worlds we are creating become our reality they become just that, reality, and it's harder to change a world when it's our reality. People sometimes long for a  "clean slate" and want to move somewhere different because the world they've created and they worlds around them that have been created are too real. The society that has been created in Hamlet is full of sneaking, spying, and distrust, which leads to the destruction of their "society" via murder.

Scratching could not make worse... such a blog as this.

I don't exactly remember my first experience with Shakespeare, but I do know that I have always loved him. Even when I really didn't know anything about him or his works, I was determined to love him. The first time I remember reading Shakespeare was in a class my freshman year of high school. We read Romeo and Juliet (which is my very least favorite work of Shakespeare. I wrote a personal essay for a creative writing class about how much I actually hate Romeo and Juliet's characters). But I remember sitting in that freshman English class and the girl sitting next to me turned and asked, "Do you, like, actually get this? This is, like, so boring!" I told her that, yes, I got it, and yes, I liked it. She stared at me blankly for a second then turned to the person on her other side and asked them the same question, seeking the appropriate response.
Sophomore year I read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Merchant of Venice" along with a few of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets. When I read "The Merchant of Venice" I was in a group with three or four other girls. We were supposed to take a scene from the play and present it whatever way we wanted to the rest of the class. We put on a puppet show. The others in my group hated the whole ordeal and put zero work into it, which made me angry. I suppose I was/am just a snob about things I believe to give me and others essential culture and when people disagree with me I do desire we may be strangers. That year I was also on a committee to put together a birthday party for Shakespeare. We wrote him cards, ate foods that he probably would have eaten, jousted, etc. 
Junior was my first exposure to "Hamlet" by watching the full play in the form of Kenneth Branagh. My senior year came about and we read "Othello" which I fell in love with instantly. I read the part of Iago and he has since been my favorite villian (even more so after we watched the Kenneth Branagh adaptation. I really do love him, especially in "Much Ado About Nothing).
I suppose all in all, my Shakespeare experience is pretty limited, but I find him fascinating. Especially going in depth and trying to tie his works in with my major (Anthropology emphasis: Archaeology). Even though the characters he created are ficticious, they represent the minds of real people and similar situations people might find themselves in, and I think it's fun to tie in things I've learned about theories of society to Shakespearian characters and worlds.