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]

Didn't he do Shakespeare for a few years after college? Or something like that? **needs to go read his bio again**

Okay, according to MS Online, he was with the Stratford Festival for two years. I looked that up, the description was this: repertory theatre festival producing, to the highest standards possible, the best works of theatre in the classical and contemporary repertoire, with special emphasis on the works of William Shakespeare.

Interesting. I've seen pictures and playbills from some of his performances. He looked awfully young, but I guess he was back then. :-)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Actually, he did Hamlet (in Vancouver I think it was...) about a year or two ago, not as part of the Stratford Festival.

I've been to the Stratford Festival. It's first-class. They do the period costumes and very true-to-the-time productions. It's an impressive accomplishment to have been part of it for two years.

Icarus

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

Oh, I knew that. He did Hamlet between seasons 2 & 3--hence the "Hamlet hair" in Out of Mind/Into the Fire. I was just thinking to myself (and ended up writing it in your LJ) about the fact that I thought he'd actually studied Shakespeare for a while and...I tend to get caught up in details--obviously. hehe So...not studied so much as was just with that theater group for a couple of years, mostly in small roles.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Stratford Festival is big. Really big.

It's the... Harvard... of Shakespeare festivals in North America. Really. Doing Shakespeare at that level is very impressive. That's top rung. I think the other big Shakespeare venue is Ashland, Oregon, but they are less devoted to authenticity, the original form.

Icarus

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

Really? So it's cooler than I originally thought. I had no idea.