Washburn Shakespeare (Spring 2019)

So, I know the assignment for writing a blog post over the Qualities of Mercy project was cancelled. However, I was just really intrigued by all of the modern interpretations of Shakespeare’s centuries-old works in all of the different scenes. First of all, I have a confession to make. And this is coming from a future English teacher. Before taking this class, I really struggled to see why Shakespeare was so important to be taught in every classroom in the entire United States. I mean, he’s the only author specifically stated in the Common Core Standards that has to be included in curriculum. In my high school English class, my teachers did not make the plays relevant to our lives. Being the literature nerd that I am, I found my own reasons to be interested in Shakespeare. I loved the stories and the ideas, and I could get caught up in reading all of his plays. But as I said, my teachers never connected any of his ideas to the present day; I viewed Shakespeare’s works as an ar...

    While Shakespeare is known for the bold actions of his characters, complicated plots and various themes of race, religion and identity, does he give the women in his plays any choices?      In “Henry V” Katherine does have a choice in her marriage to Henry. When it became obvious that France was going to lose the war, Shakespeare gives his audience a scene with Katherine and Alice. He shows how quickly Katherine accepts the fact that Henry will become her husband. While it is debated how to perform this scene, it is evident that Katherine understands her need to learn English. Yet, the audience sees very little of Katherine so it is difficult to tell how she accepts France’s defeat and the singularity of her choice. In the final few scenes the audience gets to understand Katherine more as she talks with Henry. While it seems that she may simply not understand Henry due to a language barrier, could Katherine also be using the language barrier to...

          While we all can agree that we were forced to read Shakespeare in high school, can anyone recall reading a female author that lived during Shakespeare's time period? I know that I didn't get to read any female authors prior to Emily Dickenson and the Bronte sisters that wrote later on in the 1800s. Yet, authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Amelia Lanier also wrote during this time period, but are widely ignored in education until students reach college. Consequently, this is when I first encountered these female authors.      Why are the female counterpart’s of Shakespeare not widely read? Is it because we focus on Shakespeare and his male contemporaries too much? It is difficult to go through college without reading something written by Shakespeare or Ben Johnson as their writings were highly influential. While new editions of Shakespeare's plays are released every few years, several works written by Shakespeare's female contemp...

The presentation by Professor Whitney Sperrazza at Shakespeare's birthday event was fascinating to say the least.  Personally I have been intrigued by his treatment of female characters, but I did not stop to think about the women writers he was overshadowing in his time.  It would have been near impossible to be noticed at the time of Shakespeare, which is why I have huge respect for those three women Professor Sperrazza spoke about in her presentation.  As an intern at the Kansas State Archives, I found her whole idea of archival absence fascinating.  The example of the final woman, I believe Hester (?), her work wasn't found until years and years after her death.  The fact that her work has even come to light is amazing all in itself, as it sounded like a huge collection that needed to be gone through.  For those who are not familiar with archives, collections often remain untouched for years, and when they finally are, they are not always gone throug...

*SPOILERS FOR THE FILM GET OUT * When I first saw Jordan Peele's directorial debut  Get Out , I never thought there was anything particularly Shakespearean about it. But thanks to this class--and my newfound ability to find Shakespeare references literally everywhere--I managed to somehow get more out of this amazing film than ever before. In particular, this film stuck out to me as almost a companion piece to discussion surrounding the play Othello . The race allegory is an obvious one. Photographer Chris Washington goes with his white girlfriend to meet her equally white family, and discomfort and micro-aggressions ensue from the first hello. We can make parallels between Chris and Othello: both are black (or at least POC) men who seem out of place in the white societies of their respective universes. Their skin color seems to be their defining trait to everyone around them, to the point that almost all conversations with or about their characters involve their blackness in s...

This semester we have discussed the roles of minorities in Shakespeare's plays.  The roles of minorities are evident in plays like Othello and Merchant of Venice.  In the Merchant of Venice it is easy to look at the Prince of Morocco and the Prince of Aragon as the only minority characters, but I contend the way Jewish characters in the play can also be classified as minority characters.   The Oxford English Dictionary refers to the Other as, "a  person or thing that is different or distinct from one already mentioned or known about" (OED). I think in Shakespeare's plays the idea of the "Other" is made clear.  Othello is refered to often as the "Moor," and Shylock is portrayed as a greedy and vengful Jewish money lender.  Even the Prince of Aragon is portrayed as a bit of a bafoon in his rationale when he picks the casket.  Many of the characters refer to Othello as the "Moor."   The characters like Iago or Roderigo do not refer to O...

Yo I don't have time to go to any of these events WUMester events so let's-a talk birthday parties. Particularly our man Shakespeare's and how our lovely guest speaker talked about people other than Shakespeare. No sarcasm there, it was great. A bit typical in this day and age of subverting all expectations, but that's fine.  And I guess I could be talking about the fey while I'm at it. That seems to be a running theme with my posts. But hey, it works, right? Right? Let's just pretend it does.  Whitney Sperrazza's talk on Archival Absence reminded me a bit of the ending of a Midsummer Night's Dream - and not just because I was half focussed on making sure I still had it memorized. If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended - that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear.  It's an interesting line, with Puck encouraging the audience to not take the events of the play with a grain of salt.  If you...

This comic  reminded me about what was discussed, were women purposefully left out, was it due to accessibility, and other things that prevented female writers from Shakespeare's time to be properly archived. I understand why so many are hung up on Shakespeare having other people write/ help write his plays. He wrote a lot, surely he had some help, no human being could just write like that. It remind me of James Patterson, where you'll see a book of his in the store and then underneath this name is another name in about half the font size his name was. It's the fact that women wrote/ helped write his plays that really gets me sometimes, especially with how misogynistic they can be. It makes me wonder what a play of his would turn out to be if it was co-written by a female author today, because that stuff doesn't fly anymore. To tie this in with free-speech, I like to look at how we have evolved to make certain speech less okay to say. Racist things, sexist thin...

Alicia Andrzejewski Alicia Andrzejewski I found our guest speaker Alicia Andrzejewski's discussion last week to be very intriguing. She got me thinking about women in Shakespeare's work in entirely new ways. When taking a second look at the text I did start to see the flirtation in Hermione's banter with Polixenes. Alicia got me thinking about how different that would have been percieved in that time period. I'm so use to my own culture that I didn't at first judge the conversation to be flirtatious.  I liked how our discussion turned to stereotypes of pregnant women because these are still applicable today. Thinking about how people don't usually envision a pregnant women as being flirtatious or unmotherly in any way made me have much more sympathy for Hermione and women in general who are pregnant. While my thoughts strayed away from the text, I started to consider this aspect in today's culture. Pregnant women today are still expected to behave i...

Okay so because I am trash and cannot remember the guest speaker's name, I am going to call her the kind guest speaker/professor from KU. (my bad please forgive me) Anyway, the speaker shook up Shakespeare's birthday by disregarding him and calling attention to multiple female authors of the same time period. I found this a wonderful way to shine a light on those who were overshadowed because of their gender, and not because of lacking abilities. Our speaker did a really cool grounding exercise where she had us call out names of Shakespeare's plays, major and minor characters from any, then proceed to do the same with any other female playwrights we could think of. The results were poignant and obvious-- we all know about the famous white man, and his plays sprinkled with a little racism and sexism here and there, but as a whole we have learned little of other magnificent writers of the time. Aemilia Lanyer. This presentation is where I first learned about her book of poe...

By this point in the semester, I'm pretty sure we're all aware of the ways in which Shakespeare often portrays his female characters, right? They're either commoners, with little to no intelligence, or they're the titular characters, love interests or general "damsel in distress" kind of woman. So what's the deal with Paulina?  Initially depicted as Hermione's (the wife of one of the big Kings) handmaid, or lady in waiting (not really sure to be honest), she appears as one of the only people that the queen has permission to talk to. There is a severe lack of women in this play, with Hermione, her ladies in waiting, and Perdita being the only ones mentioned. However, The Winter's tale seems to exhibit some proto-feminist vibes.  Firstly, Hermione argues back with Leontes when he's blaming her, and accusing her of cheating with him; she states that her opinion matters just as much as a man's does, to no avail. This, in addition to the ...

Our discussion about Iago's motivations has stuck with me. I know we don't like to talk about him so much since he's such a douche, but it's nearly impossible to think about Othello  without also mentioning the villain and questioning his reasoning. I've read through the play in its entirety twice now, and I made sure to look closely for hints as to why Iago is as evil as he is. As a result of my "investigation," I've come up with a few theories about what Shakespeare may have had in mind when he wrote Othello : Theory 1: Iago is a REPRESENTATION of demonic evil/the Devil. Theory 2: Iago IS a demon or the Devil. Theory 3: Iago is POSSESSED by a demon or the Devil. We've talked about the ways Iago tries to justify his actions (Othello promoted Cassio over him, Othello may have slept with his wife, he wants to sleep with Desdemona), but none of these seem to suffice as reasons for such evil acts. I posit, therefore, that Shakespeare h...

For the WU-mester event I attended, it was simply our celebration for Shakespeare’s birthday. During the celebration event itself, I expected Dr. Sperrazza to talk about Shakespeare’s plays and how they affect us in a modern-day context, much like we have been doing in class this semester. I was pleasantly surprised that she did not do that or really talk about Shakespeare’s “greatness” at all, even though we were at a celebration for his birthday. I really enjoyed Dr. Sparrazza’s presentation as a whole. I have yet to take English Lit 1, so I was rather uneducated on the author’s she discussed as a whole. First of all, I love hearing about early female authors due to the fact that they were all pretty badass. They were sneaky with their writing because of societal expectations almost forced upon them of being mothers, not to mention the restriction of education because of their gender. Out of the three authors introduced in the presentation, my favorite was ...

Queen Elizabeth I is recognized for her impact during a period which is named after her.  What many people fail to realize is that Queen Elizabeth wrote some poetry too.  She is not often thought of as a prolific writer of the period, but she did contribute some poems during a time in which men like Shakespeare and Spenser were consider the height of English drama and writing.  I thought about this blog post for a while after hearing Dr. Sparazza's talk on women who wrote around the same time as Shakespeare.  When she asked if anyone could name a women writer of the time, I couldn't think of any until after I left.  I thought that Queen Elizabeth had to have written something. I searched the Poetry Foundation's website and found that Queen Elizabeth very much impacted literature during this time.  The Poetry Foundation claims, " Critics have traced her role as subject of or inspiration for such works as Edmund Spenser 's The Faerie Queene (1590-1596), W...

I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed many striking similarities between the plot lines and characters of Othello and The Winter’s Tale. Although they have many key differences, I want to focus on the ways in which they present very similar issues. The first main issue that the audience encounters in both plays is the rapid descent into jealousy that both Othello and Leontes fall into. In Othello, his suspicions of his wife’s infidelity is started by the lies fed to him by Iago. Audiences can sympathize with Othello’s jealousy because they are witnesses to the foul manipulation that occurs. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’ intense jealousy is even more problematic; it has almost no basis. After telling his wife to convince Polinexes (his lifelong friend) to stay longer, he then proceeds to become angry at the two for interacting. Despite the differences in how they came to be consumed by jealousy, the two characters both end up acting upon their feelings and taking their situ...

One of my favorite things when learning more about Shakespeare is finding his quotes in everyday things. Whether it is in advertising, movies, TV shows, or even finding myself quote weird lines, it brings me a little bit of joy. I don’t know if this my inner English nerd coming out, but I kind of think it’s funny to see the quotes misinterpreted, more often not. One example I see more often than I probably should is on  the inside of the Chick-fil-a nugget box of “To dip or not to dip.” Another that I’ve only seen once was on the inside cap of a Sobe Water bottle with the quote of “star-crossed lizards” rather than “star-crossed lovers” of Romeo and Juliet. As lame as it sounds, I get a kick out of seeing these things. Personally, incorporating humor into Shakespeare’s play has helped me further understand the context of the scene. One of my favorite things that I find funny, as weird as it sounds, is looking at the play or the scene and trying to imagine it happeni...