Shakespeare, Medieval India, and the Lotus Sutra.

[icarus]

I'm taking Shakespeare because:

1) I'm nine classes away from finishing my English degree.
2) No one, in my opinion, deserves an English degree without studying Shakespeare.
3) Three of my classes need to be pre-1800 literature.
4) Hey, Shakespeare. Cooooool.

One thing I forgot: I love Shakespeare.

I've never read Othello and I'm sure that the close-reading at some point is going to kill me, but Shakespeare has already, in the first Act, made me want to string up Iago (yon bad guy, the worst most ESE character he's ever written), and within pages the situation is so inutterably complicated. Oh yes, yes, I loathe Shakespeare's Sonnets, they're so pure and holier-than-thou, but his plays -- blood, guts, and mayhem! Treachery. Sex. Puns. Silliness. Madness.

I really ought to have gone to see Michael Shanks play Hamlet, even if the reviews were iffy. Speaking of madness.

And Romeo still cracks me up. "Oh woe is me, the beautiful girl won't have me -- oh wow, man. Check out Juliet, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! And I've got such a hard-on I took the skin off my nose!"

Although I've jaw-crackingly hard reading assignments. I'm leaping from medieval Muslim historians (with their casual and highly biased treatment of bloodthirsty raids "we swept to glorious victory with our heavily-armed calvary against the Buddhist monk idolaters") to classical Indian text language ("Thus have I heard. We are now going to repeat 90 names in a row, with diacritics, that you can barely imagine pronouncing...") to Shakespeare.

I can't believe it. Shakespeare's my light reading this quarter. Though probably the history's going to get a little easier as we approach more modern times.

Comments

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

I really ought to have gone to see Michael Shanks play Hamlet, even if the reviews were iffy. Speaking of madness.

You had a chance to see him? Oh, I'd have loved to have seen him in that. I only read that play a few months ago. My son had to read it for a literature class so we bought extra copies and he and I read it aloud (badly *g*), but it was so much fun. The more I read it, the more I wished I'd seen MS in the play, though I didn't even know who he was back then.

Have fun with your class! :-)

This is my favorite "Daniel with the Hamlet haircut" icon.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I missed it by six months, but I was close enough that it was actually conceivable that I could have gone. I'm keeping my open for other performances by him, as I suspect he'll do more to keep in touch with his roots. I'd like to see it.

Icarus

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

That's too bad. Has he done any other theater recently? The Hamlet thing was...gee? I can't count. LOL I'm unsure when they filmed the other seasons. I hadn't heard of him doing any theater since Hamlet. I wish he would--not that I could afford to fly up there and see him. hehe I think I was probably living in Alaska when he was doing Hamlet in Vancouver, though--and with airline miles, gee! Maybe I could have gone to see him, too. Too bad I'd never heard of him back then. ;-)