Response to Course Material #6

                Over the past few weeks we have spent our time finishing up Hamlet and beginning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. I personally found what we did with Hamlet for our final exam to be really interesting. Having to interpret a scene multiple ways forced me to read more into the lines of the characters in order to pull out evidence for both sides. I think that this is going to end up being really helpful for the AP essays as well as essays for other courses because often times my point of view doesn’t seem to have the most textual support and now I know how to work well with the opposing interpretation. That last Hamlet film was pretty interesting as well. I’m not sure that I agree with the director’s take on any of the scenes, but it was intriguing to see them attempt to make Hamlet more relevant in today’s society (although I still don’t find it relatable to my own life at all), but I do think it took away from the message that fate and revenge should be left up to God.

                I’m really glad that we have begun Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for a lot of reasons—the biggest being that I can understand the lines of the play. Although Shakespeare’s words sound pretty, I often find them nearly impossible to translate. I also find the whole concept of the play to be really interesting. Throughout the entire time we studied Hamlet I never really looked at Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as characters. Stoppard’s representation of them really exposes how little we know about those roles and opens up a lot of possible explanations for why that might be. I also like reading this play because like Hamlet, there are a lot of hidden meanings within the lines. I think that working with pieces like that really helps us interpret literature because the more we are exposed to those hidden meanings, the easier they become to spot—something that I think will prove to be very helpful on the AP exam as well as in future courses.