First Day

[jessica_de_milo]

So, my first day of Winter Session: Shakespeare, was today. Winter Session at the University of Montana is three weeks, three hours a day, and for this class, five days per week. I like Shakespeare. A lot. So far though, I'm not expecting this class to be life-altering. The good news? It's only three weeks.

Comments

[clowe]

Oh dear lord, I love Shakespeare. I love watching his plays. I love acting in his plays. Hell, that's why I moved to Missouri, to continue being a part of a Shakespearean acting troupe originally based out of Dillon. What plays are you studying?

[jessica_de_milo]

A grand total of: Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. Oh, no, and "a few of the sonnet cycles." Just the "mature tragedies" because my instructor "cannot fathom" teaching even an intensive course in "only three weeks." I did block scheduling at Western for three years, so I have a really difficult time with instructors (note the plural, I had similar issues with the otherwise fabulous grad student who taught my poetry course last winter) who kick up a fuss about teaching three credits in three weeks. At Western we got four credits in three and a half weeks. I took drama history/drama literature genre (they combined two classes when they went to block schedule) from Judy U, and in 18 days of class we read 16 plays. I thought that in this class we'd cover at least one play per two days and get a minimum of 6 plays in.

I love comedy ... and romance, history, fantasy. I'm bummed we're only reading what we're reading. Can you tell?

Ok. End of whiny rant.

[clowe]

I like those plays, but for a Shakespeare-centric class, that's a little odd. Four tragedies and no comedies or histories? Hm. At the very least, if I was the prof, I'd throw in weekly (or even more often, since it's such a short period of time) videos of performances or movies. I mean, you wouldn't even have to study Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing or a commedia dell'arte version of some of the comedies. But it's criminal not to invest at least a few days on one of the histories. They'd be harder to just show to an audience, but I think a few hours discussion and then a viewing of a performance would be benificial.

But eh, at least you get some Shakespeare!

[jessica_de_milo]

I think she wants to get more in depth. It's like, since she couldn't get all of the breadth she wanted, she just dumped breadth altogether. So, rather than covering, like, one from each genre, she picked the one of most 'literary value' and decided we'd dig into it. And then, the part of me that gets irritated by people in academia bashing on 'genre' fiction, gets irritated with the notion of 'literary value' and that it attaches itself to 'mature tragedy.' I said up there that I was going to quit whining. Maybe I've moved up to griping.