#@hackshakespeare

Just a fun prompt from my Coursera course: “Sharpened Visions: A Poetry Workshop”

“Breaking Good”:

Re-poemifying a famous poem that has been de-poemifyied:

The line breaks have been removed from a well-known poem. The task was to turn this bit of writing back into a poem, creating lines and stanzas where we felt it made sense. Inevitably, the meaning of the poem would be altered, showcasing the importance of the “line” and “line break”. It was fun – give it a try!

ORIGINAL…

Fun with Much Ado About Nothing!

For this assignment in Shakespeare in Community, we were given many tools to try to find different ways into the text:

“This week’s text lectures have considered the way a Shakespeare play moves from one medium to another…For the assignment this week, we encourage you to look at what else individual words can tell us, either in Much Ado About Nothingor in one of the other plays in this course.…

Shakespeare in Community End of Course Self-Reflection

Although I have yet to post reflections on Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempestbecause I am still digesting the material and swirling it around in my brain, I have completed the “End of Course Self-Reflection” for Shakespeare in Community, which offers prompts to consider about the learning experience thus far. I’ve included these thoughts here, but check back for reflections and assignments…

Breaking Dreams For Love

“For this activity, you’ll break something as an act of literary analysis. Choose a selection of words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and rearrange them into something else. You can use any or all of the words as many or as few times as you’d like. What you build from them can take any shape: text, image, video, a collage, a poem, a pile, digital, physical, sense-making or otherwise… For this…

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Is NOT A Love Story

Never before had I read or watched A Midsummer Night’s Dream until this morning. Despite some plot and theme preparation from my Shakespeare in Community MOOC, I still managed to hold onto preconceptions that a play about love and faeries would be, well, happy… and magical.

It took me a scene or two to familiarize myself with the characters, particularly because in this play, Puck was played…

The funniest scene in Romeo & Juliet as a “Word Cloud”

Romeo & Juliet Act 1, Scene 1 

SAMPSON My naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I will back thee. GREGORY How? Turn thy back and run? SAMPSON Fear me not. GREGORY No, marry. I fear thee! SAMPSON Let us take the law of our sides; let them begin. GREGORY I will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list. SAMPSON Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them, which is disgrace to them if they…

Midterm Self-Reflection for Shakespeare in Community

I’ve had some profound insights as I reflected on my experiences thus far with Shakespeare, so I thought I would share them here. They are personal to me, but if you are seeking out your own Shakespeare, I encourage you to ask yourself these questions after awhile. It may bring your own abstract ideas into focus.

“Reflect on your own encounters with Shakespeare leading up to and within the first…

Discovering the Joy of Shakespeare, or For the Love of Romeo and Juliet

I’ve been studying Romeo and Juliet for some time now. Of course, I know the main plot points – it’s been parodied countless times in countless art forms, and I read the play, with much instruction, during my freshmen year of high school. Yet, as I took up the book again, I found myself stymied by the language. I could not behold the grandeur of the vocabulary, as so many fans of the Bard seem to…