Response to Course Materials #5

     Once again it is time for a Response to Course Materials blog.  Since the last response to course materials we have mostly been analyzing Hamlet.  Hamlet is the lengthiest play we have read so far and by far the hardest to understand. 

     

     We have watched two different film versions of Hamlet, each of which interpreted and portrayed the play very differently.  The movies had two main similarities, the text used, and Patrick Stewart as Claudius.  I thought it was awesome Patrick Stewart was in both of them because it really helped me contrast the way the character Claudius was represented in both movies without needing to contribute the differences to the change of actors.  I found the BBC version to be much more boring and struggled to stay awake for much of it.  The Branagh version to me was a million times more interesting but I thought both films did a great job.  I thought the BBC version sexed up the relationships between the characters a little bit more.  For example Ophelia and Laertes made out when they greeted each-other and Hamlet practically humped Gertrude during the bedside scene.  The Branagh version was much more visually appealing.  For example during the bedroom scene they show the ghost that Hamlet is seeing and speaking to.  This makes him seem a little less crazy than he came off in the BBC version.  I thought it was really cool to see the differences in interpretations across these two films.  Ms. Holmes said we are going to watch a more modern take on Hamlet in a few days and I am very excited to see how they mix the old-sounding Shakespearean language with modern society.  

     

     Annotating on the other hand I found a little less fun.  I spent well over 12 hours annotating the play and I found it much more difficult to annotate than the previous books.  In the previous plays we read the text was much easier to read whereas Hamlet is written in a very elevated style that makes it difficult to interpret and pick out literary elements that Shakespeare uses.  Shakespeare uses many double entendres and to fully understand the play it is necessary to know a little background (which Ms. Holmes was kind enough to provide).  I still struggle with understanding the language that Shakespeare uses because it is so different from that in today’s literature.  I do however think working with it for so long really has really helped me. 

     

     The imagery activities that we have done in class have been very helpful. It will help us to be able to identify it when other authors do it. This will be quite helpful 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.