MM Oct 25

Santino Rosanova- A Midsummer Night's Dream 10/25/2010

Dr. Mathur began the class once again on a tangent about the motion picture Twilight. She expressed her disapproval of the vampire being able to quote Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and also made it known that she found Romeo and Juliet to be quite “cheesy.” Once the subject of Twilight was off of everyone’s minds, Dr. Mathur explained William Shakespeare’s life in brief. Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564 in Stratford, England. He received what would be the equivalent of a high school education while being trained in the field of rhetoric. The time period between the 1580s to the 1590s is referred to as the “Lost Years” of Shakespeare’s life due to the fact that not much is known about his endeavors during these years. Shakespeare eventually was hired as a playwright in London, where he wrote 36 plays, 3 narrative poems and 154 sonnets before retiring in 1612. He later died on his birthday in the year 1616. The next topic of discussion was the form and language of Shakespeare’s writings. The dialogue is split up into verse and prose. Verse is more of a poetic style that takes on the form of iambic pentameter, which means that every line is divided into ten stressed and unstressed syllable combinations. Prose is more of the commoner speech whereas those of the noble class usually speak verse. Eventually we split up into small groups to discuss the variety of ways that love can be classified in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as exemplified by each of the different couples. We concentrated on five different couples, Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, Lysander and Helena, Theseus and Hippolyta, and Oberon and Titania. The group that I was in focused on how love had many different definitions and a type of love unique to each situation defined each couple. Other groups mentioned how they thought love might be defined principally by free- choice, conflict and magic in in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The class ended by Dr. Matur asking us to take a look at the topic of Love and Idleness for the next class by focusing on the story of how cupid’s arrow fell upon a flower and changed the color of the flower from white to purple.