Blog 7 - Self Evaluation

I think I have made a considerable amount of progress in this course, and feel I have learned a lot about Shakespeare since the start of this semester. In the beginning I thought I could grasp the play by just quickly reading the spark notes, but I have come to realize that much of the smaller nuances that bring the meaning of the work to light can be lost in such quick overviews. Because Shakespeare’s works are written in such a foreign time and culture, it often takes me several times of reading through a passage before I truly feel I understand what is going on and why. I’ve taken literature classes before that discuss Shakespeare, but I like how in this class we discuss more than the plays themselves. I have learned about the context in which these works were written and how that affects the actual meaning of the plays. I also enjoy learning about how people of that time may have felt about, or reacted, to the characters and jokes in the plays. I think that reading a lot of the works in the class group has really helped me to improve my own close reading skills, better understand some of the more obscure meanings that could be derived from certain passages, and increased my confidence when reading out loud.

Of the texts we’ve read so far, my favorite was definitely Merchant of Venice. Prior to this class, I had no experience with this play and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved how the Christian characters were so critical of Shylock obsessing over his money, when it turned out that he actually placed more sentimental value on his “priceless” possessions than they did. I also found the discussions in class about the practice of usury very helpful in understanding a lot of the major irony in the play. Christians in Venice despised the Jews for lending money at interest, and yet they borrowed from them often enough that it was a thriving business in Venice. I found the Sonnets to be the most complex and difficult to understand. I think this is because I often confuse the many different poetic and rhetorical terms used when discussing the physical structure and composition of the sonnets. My least favorite work was Twelfth Night; I know this is one of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies, and I’ve worked with it before. I always found the humor to be trivial, and the ease with which the other characters were fooled so thoroughly by Viola’s cross-dressing slightly ridiculous and unrealistic. I think, for the most part, this class has captured my interest quite thoroughly. I am a Biology major, so I don’t expect to use what I am learning in my career, and I don’t have any other classes involving reading, aside from textbooks. However, I am very thankful for the diversion I find in this class. I have always loved literature, and I need it to balance out the stress of my other math and science classes.