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.