EdwardC’s Blog

Hooray you made it to English 3!! Not really there is still a lot of work to be done but its not all that bad.  Now my experiance will be different than most because i had Ms. Duke for English 2 as well and i think the transition is different depending on the teacher.  For me i didnt really have to get acustomed to the routine, but if i have to say one thing it is that slacking off is bad.  If your like me and have been able to do the bare minimum to get by most the time then your going to have to change that.  Because you need to be prepared to work every night.  Also there will be a lot of work at the beginning of the year but remember the day is darkest before dawn, so just hang in there.

The thing about Ms. Dukes class is that you really never know what to expect or with our class that seemed to be the case, but work wise i guess you could say the same thing.  Take vocab quizes for example those dont have a set format like you are probably use to so actually learn the words; it took me basically till the last vocab quiz to figure that out.

Time managment is a big thing in Ms. Dukes class.  Occasionally things will overlap and you have to realize that, but luckly things are always posted ahead of time for you to take care of things so you dont feel over whelmed and send stressed emails to her.  Also homework is big because there can be a lot of it and it makes up most your grade so if you dont do it then your in bad shape.  However dont take advantage of the fact that Ms. Duke lets you turn things in late because that is basically a privalege.  Lastly the whole working backwards thing was kind of cool because i think we were able to get all the hard stuff out of the way at the beginning of the year; i.e all the modernism and post-modernism stuff that requires alot of work.

Well i hope this helps and lets you no basically what to do and look out for, and good luck i guess.

Dear Simon Russell Beale,

I had mixed feelings about your performance as Hamlet in the audio we listened to.  I thought you got over dramatic at times during the story, though that was probably necessary because we can not see you.  But i hated it when you did the sad depressed over dramatic Hamlet voice.  The worst was that you usually did it for long fraises, but hey your better than i would have been so hats off to you.

I did think that after hereing your voice with Hamlet so much it began to shape how i looked at the character Hamlet.  I got the image that you wanted to portray him as very emotional and kind of pathetic.  It was hard to adapt from your voice in the recording to the movie Hamlet who i though portrayed him much more different than you did.

Dear Kenneth Branagh,

I enjoyed your adaptation of Hamlet especially the little touch you added to the end.  I thought you played Hamlet very well actually.  I thought how you whispered a lot help show you were sad and everything but sometimes it got hard to tell if you were sad or just whispering.  I also thought it was funny when you were making fun of Robin Williams.  Your death was kind of cheesy to me though but eh nothing is perfect.

As a director i thought you did a good job casting for the most part i thought you cast some people that i thought were a little to old for the part.  Those people would include you as Hamlet and who ever played Horatio.  Hamlet was supposed to be young and in college.  I thought it was funny that you made Robin Williams gay i just thought that was an interesting interpretation.  We over all good show so ya.

Here we finally see actual death instead of Ros and Gil randomly talking about it.  However the final act wasnt as serious as i had origionally anticipated.  We see the players again, which is funny becuase like ros and gil they play moderatly insignificant roles in Hamlet but in this the author puts more of them as he did for hamlet.  Also i thought it was funny that it took Ros and Gil this long to finally get aggrivated with each other, but they really didnt make a huge deal about it.

The pirates were funny i thought, they reminded me of someone from The Pirates of the Caribbean.  But alas in the end our lovable Ros and Gil meet their ultimate demise.  They finally see Death as it is not as a light hearted topic to ponder on and determine if its worse than living in a box.  And i kind of thought of that at the end because they are now dead and when your buried you buried in a coffin or a box as i thought it so i thought that was funny.  Lastly there was intertextuality at the end where the announcment that Ros and Gil are dead is made.

So ya this keeps reminding me of something Montey python would do more and more just because the stupidity of Ros and Gil.  First of all they dont realize what is going on with the play and even when they see the actors who are playing them they are totally oblivious.  We also see basically how things are going to turn out for them in the play ( DEATH!!!) but again they dont really understand.  I like how Ms. Duke’s brother put it where all the action is happening around them, and i think this is because they are clueless to what is going on.  The also see Hamlet with the dead polonius and i thought that was cool adding that in because it tells about what basically occurs between sences in Hamlet.  THough when Ros and Gil see Hamlet they have sort of a mental break down add start to panic.

When i think about how we have been making directors journals for Hamlet and how we would film that i cant but help think the same thing about Ros and Gil in my mind because it would be really funny to watch to actors have the random back and forth conversations that Ros and Gil have.  They are always saying to little to going to far i have noticed when they talk.  But even when they say alot they never really go indepth in to things, they seem like they just wanna stay out of the bulk of things but they cant so they just try to stand there and hope no one will notice them.

1.  At this point Hamlet is basically asking himself what is the point of living now.  He has lost everything and he is trying to work out all his emotions.

2.  The audience i guess is hamlet himself again trying to work out his emotions.  The reader is just an observer in this part.  Also the Question to be or not to be is directed to hamlet in an attempt to act and do something.

3.  Basically Hamlet is trying to ask himself what he should do, but as we discussed Hamlet is very emotional and this is him trying to act based on his emotions.  However his emotions are so jumbled up that he doesnt no what to do.

4.  Ethos- The beginning of the soliloquy is Hamlet asking himself a question “To be or not to be.”  Hamlet is trying to wonder what to do why he should live.  Because the audience is Hamlet he must present a statement or question to build his ideas around.  But he follows by explaining and solidifying his question with, “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?”

Logos- “But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns,”  Hamlet is saying that no one returns from death and that many people go there to explore it but never return.  It is the place or the undiscovered country that will never be understood because all that study it will join it and its mysteries lost forever.

Pathos- “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to.”  He Hamlet is expressing his emotions and feeling to the reader talking about how feels.. He is saying that it hurts so bad the pain is not only emotional but phisical.

5.  Hamlet compares death and sleeping a lot in his soliloquy, usually referring to death as an eternal sleep basically.  “And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,”  Shakespeare is using imagery here to give to audience a cold pale and sickly view on Hamlets thoughts and ideas.  This is helping the audience watch Hamlet dive deep and deeper into madness and self destruction.

6.  After readin the soliloquy and from what we have read of Hamlet so far i have found Hamlet to be basically alot of talk and focuses on his emotions to much.. It is like the jedis in Star Wars how the always say that your emotions will cloud your judgement.  I think that is exactly what is happening to Hamlet he can control his wild emotions and thus doesnt no how to act upon them.

Ros and Gil to me seem like very predictable characters who get on other peoples and there own nerves.  The constantly argue and debate about small things like when Hamlet talks about death.  At the end of the reading they talk about there own death, but life as well.  I think this could some how relate to the title and maybe it was influence by Hamlets actions. 

The players end up coming in and prepair for the performance but show signs of dislike for R and G maybe because they have travel with each other they no that they can be annoying.  I can tell more that R and G are very commedic characters and remind me of characters you would expect to see in Monty Python, where they are very random and just remind me of a british commedy.

This reading was more confusing because i thought that the reading itself was harder but i still understood what was going on because of the paralell to Hamlet.  It was certainly more confusing than the last reading.  I think the reason i struggled with this reading was because the wording was harder, and i am not a good reader and with harder words it just makes it worse.

I thought that our groups presentation went smoothly.  I was actually very proud of our powerpoint and i thought that it was very informative.  The only thing that i was worried about was the fact that some of the work we had done appeared to have gone missing and it is still MIA.  But the circles that we did i thought work as well as the could have though it appeared as so not alot of people had read.  But in the end i think everyone in the group contributed in the presentation and the project over all which was what i was most worried about.

I think that the second group to go, the miller’s tale, did a very good job and infact exeeded my expectations.  The group had nothing spectacular but they found away to get their information out there in a simple way.  I quickly noticed that the whole group contributed to the project and they got the class into it which i thought was a good way to keep things going.  The group focused primarily on the characters in the story, which like the Franklin’s tale make the story work.  Though i thought that they were kind of repeating themselves at certain points in there project, and maybe over anilizing things sometimes.  though i did not research the story so i would really no, but good presentation over all very informative.

I want our group to do something fun that just isnt any same old project.  I was thinking about making a movie for the tale where we use our powerpoint as a template on what to do.  But i want to add a funny twist to the story to give a kind of i ronic sense to it that i thought should have been in the story.

Though the movie idea is probably our groups top idea it does have its low points.  like the amount of time and effort that is needed to make a movie would be a lot for the group to handle.  so that being the case i would think that even though the movie would be fun something like a poster or a song would be more practicle.  We could easily do those and give things to people in our group that would easily fit them so we could get the project in on time.

The Franklin’s Tale is about a woman named Dorigen whose husband, a knight, leaves to go to britian to compete in fighting games.  when he is gone she is in deep depression and fears that his ship will sink on the way back.  While depressed a young man named Aurelius approaches her and pronounces his love towards her.  Se doesnt love him but cleverly makes a task, that she thinks is impossible, that she claims if he completes she will love him.  she tells him to move the rocks from the sea so her husband can return safely.  Knowing he cant do this Aurelius gets a magician to create a spell that makes it seem as if the rocks are gone.  after this Dorigen realizes what has happened and then becomes even more depressed because she doesn’t love Aurelius, but her husband Averagus then comes hom.  She tells him everything and being a noble knight says that he would rather live with a broken heart then have his wife not keep her word.  Hearing what Averagus said Aurelius called off the deal with Dorigen and thus the magician didnt charge Aurelius for his services.

this is a complex courtly love that creats a problem from the beginning of the story and carries it on till the end.  So many things happen in the story that it seems so unlikely that any of it will get resolved, but just when things seem to be bad a simple kind deed ends up fixing everything.  It gives a good example of chivalry and how people honored the knights for ther humbleness i think.