We had a wonderfully dramatic day today with hours spent on Ben Jonson’s extraordinary poem in praise of his rival William Shakespeare, followed by much hilarity watching Egeus challenging Theseus to help him tame his recalcitrant daughter into marrying the man she DOES NOT LURVE!! We then finished with a beautiful poetic rendering of the…
Tag: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare 2019 Week 3: The Play within a Play- All the World’s A Stage
Today we homed into this aspect of Shakespeare’s subversive and controversial writing. Shakespeare loves to dramatize the way in which we all spend so much of our energy play acting, both to ourselves and to others. Where is the real “me” we may all well ask- and Shakespeare seems to be challenging us with this…
Shakespeare 2019- Week 2
See Judi Dench in the full video right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSDQjEJTPzg Hi All, well we made it finally into A Midsummer Night’s Dream through the gateway of The Sonnets and Shakespeare’s many-sided sexuality! And we also learned about his deep and passionate belief in the power of art, of literature, of poetry to transcend the ravaging effects…
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Part 2
Le Painting by Henri Fuseli This week we explored many of the “languages” of the play: rustic, lovers, aristocratic, fairy… and we also focussed closely on that most mysterious speech by Bottom about Bottom’s dream. We came to no clear conclusion on this speech, but, in the context of Hypollyta’s response to Theseus at the…
Shakespeare Week 6- from Classical Tragedy to Romantic Comedy: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Today we broached one of Shakespeare’s most loved plays, his celebratory fantasy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We explored the ways in which Shakespeare in his opening scenes ricochets his audience from the high-sounding, poetical iambic pentameter of the Greek court through to the passionate language of the Romantic lurvers and then down into the depths of…
End of Week 3: Shakespeare’s Madness
Is Shakespeare really as pessimistic as he seems to be when describing the nature of “love”? When Lysander says (1.1.142) about true love -if and when it is eventually found- that “War, death, or sickness did lay seige to it/ Making it momentary as a sound”, I really did have some students clawing up…
Great Start to Semester One
Hi All, I am not sure whether to call this autumn or summer semester! We are having the best summer for a long time and we are well into Autumn! Global warming??? At all events we have had a fabulous start to the semester in all literature units. The one blog topic for this week…
