Over the past few weeks we have
spent most of our class time working with Hamlet,
and have also worked with imagery. I find that after watching the film versions
of Hamlet, I am able to understand the
text better as I write my annotations. This could be because I got used to
hearing the language or because it is just easier to comprehend after knowing
the plot. While writing my annotations, I have also noticed how precise
Shakespeare was in writing the dialogue. For example, he often uses words with
double meanings and foreshadows future events. These are things I never would
have noticed if I had not gone back through the play specifically to find them.
This has given me a new respect for a lot of authors because it is incredibly
difficult to do, but my feelings toward the play have not changed. Although I
now know what is happening in the play, I still feel that it is mostly
irrelevant in society. People lie and betray each other, but most people do not
kill others and pretend to have gone mentally insane. Maybe relevance was not
important in plays in Shakespeare’s time period, but I think it takes away from
the overall message of the play today, at least for me it did.
I think that the activities that
we have done with imagery are really helpful. Since we have to create the tone
with our words, it helps us to be able to identify it when other authors do it.
This will help us a lot for the AP test. It’s important that we do activities
like this in class because we haven’t seen a lot of imagery in the readings we
have done so far because they have all been plays. I would like to read some
novels because we would be able to see more of these techniques, but I do think
that the strategic dialogue that we see in plays is really important to become
familiar with as well.
Kelsey, I agree that the annotating got easier after watching some of the films of Hamlet. For me, the class dicussions about the play helped a lot. It was nice to hear other people's ideas about what was going on in the play and how they analyzed it. It gave me a few ideas and opened my eyes a little to some new aspects that I never really thought about. I also noticed the double meanings in the play. I thought that it was a very clever to incorporate that into the play, especially with Hamlet's character. I would have never thought about that if we had not talked about it as a class. I liked how you talked about your own feelings about the play and whether it is relevant in society. I agree with you that what happened in the play was a little extreme.
ReplyDeleteOverall, I think you did a really nice job talking about not just everything we did in class, but how it will help with the AP test and outside of the classroom.