Sunday, November 16, 2008

Shakespeare

Along with many others in the class, I did not understand the play very much. The language was extremely hard to follow and the large amount of characters and plots did not help very much. The relationship I tried to look into was between Oberon and Puck. Oberon obviously over rules Puck in any situations, Puck follows Oberon's requests. Oberon and Puck try to make everything right by using the potion from a flower.
Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew'd thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.

This potion is the basis for a lot of the plays conflicts. Puck accidentally puts the potion on the wrong person's eyes, Titania falls in love with Bottom who has a donkey head. I find it odd that the play ended by just being a dream but that also helps with the ridiculous events that took place. Thats really all that I got from the play. It was very confusing to read through and I lost track of who was who a lot.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

yeah, easy to do with a ton of characters. did you like it?

Shannon said...

Summary materials can often help with initially keeping track of "who is who" and "what is happening" in the play. I'm sure you'll continue to encounter difficult material in your future classes. Find the resources that will help you in your understanding of the plays/literature. Coming back to the actual text with some of the basics pre-established allows you to look more closely at how words and language work together to create meaning.

Keep working through it!

Casey McCarthy said...

No worries, I was completely lost for the most part for both the book and the movie version. Although it is called a Midsummer's Night Dream, I too was suprised that the entire story ended up just being a dream..but I guess thats where the "Dream" part comes in with the title.

lisajo88 said...

I thought the characters were really confusing also. I ended up pronouncing a lot of them wrong (as did you I think :)). I am actually starting to like the play, well what I can understand that is.

Anonymous said...

Penis