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.