I made a quiz about Act 3 of Romeo and Juliet

1. Who are the two casualties of Act 3, Scene 1? How did they both die?

2. Why does the Nurse's thoughts on Romeo change?

3. What is Friar Lawrence's plan for Romeo?

4. Do you think his plan will be successful? If not, how do you think it will fail? If yes, how will it succeed?

5. How does Lord Capulet's stance on the potential marriage change from earlier in the play? Why do you think it changed?

I get to write about Romeo and Juliet writing in their diaries! What fun!

<Enter Romeo>

Romeo throws open the heavy curtains to his room, which have been in place to block out the sun. He hastily sits down at his desk as the spotlight falls on him.

He opens up a journal and finds a quill and inkwell to write with.

Romeo looks outside in the night.

Romeo:

   "Yes, the sun...she is the sun..."

He looks forwards and writes fervently for a moment.

He looks out at the sun again and smiles before looking back down and reading aloud, with passion.

  "My love, she is like the sun...She has livened my days, just as the dawn would break upon cold night...She is radiant enough to shine through even darkness...Juliet! How I love thee...And yet you are a Capulet...yet...if I can no longer be Romeo, then that is what I shall be!"

Romeo stands up from his chair as he nearly begins to yell his words.

 "If I can no longer be Romeo for thy love, then I shant be Romeo no more!"

Romeo puts the journal back on his desk and departs, heading for Friar Lawrence's cell as dawn begins to break.

Romeo and Juliet's balcony scenes that are either really funny/romantic/creepy/???

Balcony scenes.

There's a ton of them and boy do they like getting creative.

1. Romeo + Juliet (1996)

This one is actually really nicely done. I'm not a huge fan of Romeo and Juliet, and the text version of this helped cement that. I mean, you meet a girl and a few hours later you're trying to scale her house to see her. Dude, you like don't even know her birthday.

Regardless, this one handles it pretty well, with Romeo awkwardly scaling some vines near a pool and then shadowing the oblivious Juliet, making for a humorous scene to start and still have it come out romantic. I literally don't know anyone who hasn't at least cracked a tiny smile at Leonardo DiCaprio hovering over Clare Danes as she speaks to nobody about how circumstances cause painful love.

Visually, the pool provides an analogy of rebirth as they both fall in, willing to denounce their names for the sake of love. The motif of water in its entirety (so far) has been mostly to show the viewers how it brings about a purity between the two, whether it be pure love or pure clarity.

This one's pretty good.

2. Romeo & Juliet (1968)

This opens up with Romeo being kinda creepy as he tries to stealthily make his way through the Capulet grounds, spying upon the unknowing Juliet who stands on a...ramp or something?

(I think his speech about Juliet and astrology is kinda weird, I mean you combine his expression with "I wish I were a glove so I could touch her cheek," and I don't know, I just get uncomfortable about that.)

Juliet then loudly proclaims her love to the air and he's all like "SHE SPEAKS!" and then gets closer and we hear her talk about "What's in a name?" which is actually a pretty good speech that gets cut off by him running up and yelling "I WON'T BE ROMEO!" And she has a natural reaction at first but then turns around and realizes it's Romeo.

I just...I don't really like this one too much. Romeo really comes off as just a "stupid teenager in love" and it just feels like there's a big disconnect between the pair. The scene doesn't really show them as a pair, just two disjointed people who speak of each other at a distance that lends itself very well to jump cuts every time it's their turn to talk.

Not a huge fan.

3. The Royal Shakespeare Company

Now this is a very expressive Romeo, he's really good at projection and showing emotion without it getting obnoxious.

Juliet seems just like a statue at the start. Maybe its for the audience to be forced to have Romeo's perspective. Pretty cool. Although Juliet seems much older than she should be.

I like the way they talk, it has a good rhythm.

Juliet seems pretty aggressive when Romeo first reveals himself. It was loud enough to make me flinch.

Suddenly she transforms into like this sorta "Ooh it's Romeo time to be flirty." That was way too sudden.

There's not really a lot to say about this, honestly. The lack of music/visual/sound effects really stands out, and it makes the entire thing hinge on the actors.

4. Gnomeo & Juliet

I'm a sucker for Disney.

Also Juliet's comment about "Why do you have to wear a blue hat? Why can't it be red [...] or green [...] or purple..." Was pretty funny.

I like how a lot of the fluff from the balcony scene is toned down into a pretty digestible manner. We don't really need to listen to Romeo Gnomeo talk about how he uh, wishes he was the paint on her porclain or whatever. Plus Juliet's really straightforwards and just says what Shakespeare wrote, but in more understandable language.

I haven't seen the movie in years so I have no idea what that ending was about, but it was pretty cute. Maybe that was the movie's way of depicting how they're forced to part for the night?

It's not bad.

I accidentally made bullet points about the wrong thing to read so here are bullet points about the legit thing

Oops.

1. She suggests audiences should have an even spread of focus on language and characterization and the rules of the world of the play.

2. Fuchs' recommends the audience/readers to ask a lot of questions to understand the bigger picture.

3. It seems that she believes readers should think of themselves as gods of a sort ("imaginer of worlds"). Is this meant to facilitate/encourage a lot of creativity when trying to "mentally direct" the play as they read?

Three things about Fuch's how to read a play and OH GOD THERES A MOSQUITO IN HERE

I hope I dont get bitten.

Okay, three things about reading a play.

1. The thing is written with enough ease so a toddler can understand it, which is neat.
2. There's a ton of nuances about imagining how a play would be. We're essentially being asked to direct a play entirely in our head and I happen to be very lazy but visualization is a thing I do when I read...it's just that they want every single detail about the play to be visualized...
3. "Consider action text" yeah ok I would if Shakespeare HAD ANY.

Oh boy I get to talk about the psychology of fictional characters I actually do this too much so this'll be fun

Once again, I must discuss Hamlet. But instead of Hamlet, I'm going to talk about Ophelia! Because she seems like the most fun to overanalyze!

Let's talk ladies in Shakespeare. More often than not they're reduced to relatively minor roles, and if they aren't, they tend to be pretty bland and/or crazy.

Ophelia is unfortunately relegated to a minor role as the helpless daughter of the king's adviser who's also helplessly in love with Hamlet, and unfortunately for her, he stops returning her affections after some time. This...also leads to her suicide.

(Why do they always seem to end up killing themselves out of love? I mean I barely know Shakespeare but out of the 3 plays I do know only one involves happy ladies at the end and that's A Midsummer's Night Dream, which isn't anything like the other two...)

Anyways, Ophelia.

So she kills herself by throwing herself off a cliff, and with the way things have been going for her, it's not really hard to see why she wouldn't do that. Hamlet's been in love with her too, until he's gone insane, and now she's got unrequited love and it's making her insane.

Personally, I find Ophelia to be just another one of the women in Shakespeare’s writing. She kills herself out of love, but it’s a lot more meaningful and drawn out than Juliet killing herself for someone she knew for literally THREE days. THREE!

At least Ophelia knew Hamlet for at least a few months by that point, they had been in love since before the start of the play.

(In hindsight, this was probably a pretty bad scene to choose, considering Ophelia never speaks. Regardless, we do get to see how her death affects other characters, and frankly I don’t feel like it has much of an immediate impact compared to a long term or plot-relevant impact, and her death definitely carries plot impact.)

While Ophelia’s suicide feels a bit cliched to me, I do sincerely think that the way that it impacted all the other characters in a long term way is genuinely well handled. Even if Hamlet loses all will to live other than revenge since the sighting of his dead father, Ophelia’s death gives him further motive and causes him to continue on his ultimately self-destructive path of revenge once he had lost the only person he still loved, as it’s arguable he stopped loving his mother.

I think I stopped overanalyzing Ophelia by accident. Oops.

Thank you for reading.

There's a lot of scenes in Hamlet but this one is my favorite and therefore I am obligated to write a paragraph on it.

Okay, where to start...

There's a lot of scenes in the, uh, thing of media Hamlet. To me, some of them are pretty boring, some of them are kinda dumb, and some of them aren't really that bad. 

Personally, my favorite is Act 3, Scene 4. The first half of the scene MY FAVORITE HALF involves a little (maybe unintentional) humor, with Hamlet parroting his mother in response to her pressing questions and her wish that he cease his irrational behavior. Their conversation quickly turns aggressive, with Hamlet inadvertently killing Polonius and barely reacting with a mere, "Is it the king?"

Their exchange throughout is pretty dynamic to me, as it shows the audience/readers/moviegoers/??? that Hamlet's become almost entirely dedicated to exacting revenge, while Queen Gertrude gives us a window to see how his insanity and singular focus has affected literally everyone around him.

Obviously, Hamlet doesn't care about her at all, and just rants about how much he hates Claudius. And while I really don't like all of his edge/angst, I personally can't pass up an extremely rant that's all about "I hate my uncle/dad/king/your husband and I wish he were dead."

Unfortunately, I think the meaning of this rant was definitely lost on me. I just couldn't help but laugh.

It gets a little awkward and uncomfortable when he's screaming at his mom to not have sex with Claudius in "the rank sweat of an enseamed (ew) bed." I think we were supposed to relate with Gertrude at that part, when she pleads for Hamlet to "Speak [...] no more!"

Oh, also I'm supposed to talk about how this scene is memorable. Three things.

1) Polonius died. Memorable because this is definitely what we'd get questioned on in terms of "how well do you know Hamlet"

2) Hamlet's rant about Father-Uncle-King Claudius (why did Shakespeare bring up the uncle thing? to mess with us?)

3) The conversation involving enseamed beds. Pretty self explanatory.

Thank you for reading.

Benedict Cumberbatch talks about Hamlet and I talk about that and accidentally go on a tangent about steaks and teenage angst

Link to the interview.

Woah! It's Benedict Cumberbatch! It's the guy that all of my friends cry about as the star of that show, Sherlock! Woah!

Now that that's over...

This interview is all about the totally amazing and hot Benedict Cumberbatch playing the titular Hamlet in the play, Hamlet. The interviewer asks Cumberbatch about the famed monologue, "To be or not to be", and why it's a monologue rather than a conversation between the insane Hamlet and some friend of his. Of course, Cumberbatch replies that it's so that the audience (and I suppose readers) can "empathize with Hamlet".

Personally, I can't relate.

For most of Hamlet, it lives up it's name as a tragedy. It's pretty bad for all the characters, it's kinda dark, and characters and readers alike are miserable thanks to the situation they're forced into, whether by Shakespeare's hand or a teacher's assignment.

There's just so much depressing dialogue and events up to this point that it just becomes horribly dull and monotonous. By the time that Hamlet's only begun to deliver his famous soliloquy, I personally find myself either having abandoned the tale of the Danish prince's plight or sound asleep.

Personal complaints aside, I do find that monologues in literature or media tend to have two purposes. One, for the villain to gloat about his imminent victory, and two, for characters to tell their audience or readers about certain subjects. In this case, Hamlet's telling himself (and us) what essentially could just boil down to, "I'd like to kill myself, because life sucks. But at the same time, being dead sucks."

This whole play makes me feel like it's just long, drawn out teenage angst with a healthy mix of a dead father and his ghost, your murderer of an uncle marrying your mom, and some good old insanity.

I mean, as a teenager, it's pretty easy to relate to other people's angst, but when you just deal with so much of it, it's just immensely frustrating and also pretty ridiculous to see a thirty-something grown man dealing with it in the same way a sixteen year old girl would after a breakup.

Like, imagine this, you're a sixteen year old girl, fresh out of a breakup, maybe it's your first "real" relationship and you were both SO into each other and suddenly he turns to you and says "I'm done with this relationship shtick, peace." And then you go full Bella Swan mode and start crying about how "Oh I loved him so much now I feel dead inside."

Whoops, went off on a tangent...That'll probably happen a lot.

Hamlet's angst and speech is sort of relatable? I'm sure almost everyone's going to go through a period of sadness after any major and bad event, whether it be a breakup or a dead father or heck, a lot of homework and this one assignment that's a blog post about this story you're obviously not a huge fan of and how you gotta do a write-up about it.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, you're gonna have to buckle up and get over it and solve your problems because wallowing in your sadness is going to solve nothing and I really wish someone told young William Shakespeare that because I think a lot of his really famous plays involve a lot of the whole "wallowing in sadness followed by suicidal thoughts" thing.

Yeah, I get that people need time to grieve after times of trauma or sadness, but it really shouldn't have progressed as quickly as it did. Hamlet's dad Hamlet has been dead for like a month or two and Hamlet's son Hamlet is talking about the nuances of life and death and discuss his revenge and/or lack of exacted revenge with himself. It's been just a month, dude.

Anyways, I think my point has been made. Hamlet and his famed speech can be perceived as an unexpectedly bad steak from a restaurant with five stars on Yelp. And all your friends and your parents and your parents' friends have been there and they're like, "Wow, this place has really great steak! You should try it!" And you're like, "Okay! I trust your decisions on choosing good steakhouses!" And you go to the steakhouse and order your neat little 6oz cut of beef and you wait a really long time for it to come and you figure, "Well maybe they're just taking a really long time to make sure it's really good, I can deal with that." So you wait some more, and eventually your steak comes and you look at it and it's three-quarters really gross and chewy fat and one-quarter semi-charred steak. BUT, there is this one tiny bite on the side, and it's really good and it makes up for the other 99% of the steak. That's this speech. A really bad steak with one really good bite.

That's my assignment-turned-rant.

Thank you for reading.