Reflections

As the semester ends, we have been asked by our Shakespeare professor to reflect upon our end of semester activities, our Engaging Shakespeare event, and our projects. This post will serve as those reflections for me.

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This semester has been a lot of fun. I have thoroughly enjoyed the course and the opportunities I have had to both increase my understanding of Shakespeare and share those insights on this blog and through our event last Friday.

Engaging Shakespeare

I felt that our event went quite well. JJ Despain and I were emcees for the event and we worked on setting it up, planning the agenda, publicizing it, and creating a website to use to share our work with others.

One of the ways that I was really pleased during the event was the success we had in actually engaging Shakespeare. That was our plan and our hope was to have audience interaction and to really make the whole event serve as a catalyst for discussion about Shakespeare. After all, what good are our experiences if we never share them? That plan was realized during the event.

At the start, when JJ and I asked the audience to share experiences that they have had with Shakespeare, things started slowly. But they progressed over the course of the event and eventually we had some great discussions. It was those discussions that really made the event for me. Hearing from others outside of the class and their questions and viewpoints about the various projects made me think about and understand both Shakespeare and work of my classmates in new ways.

An example of this was the Q&A session for the music video. The audience had some great questions for the group. I was particularly intrigued by Chris's explanation of his part of the video and they way that he found a personal connection to the idea of ambition. I had, of course, at times found personal connections to the works that we have studied but the music video group really made me reconsider just how much I let myself consider the personal relevancy of Shakespeare. I think that I hadn't considered it nearly as much as I could have. Much of my thoughts had been centered Shakespeare relevancy to society as a whole and I appreciated the new perspective.

I was happy with the way that things went for JJ and I as we worked to set up the event as well. Ours was certainly a unique task, at least when compared to the other groups. But I feel we were very successful. My main responsibility was in creating the website. I really wanted to create something that was professional and engaging. I feel that having a modern and well-designed website is key to successfully gaining the trust and the time of visitors. It enables us to be taken seriously. So I did my best to create a fun and clean website that appeared professional to showcase our work. This endeavor is somewhat ongoing, as I will be adding more media and information to the website over the next little while so that full projects and more information can be obtained on our projects page. I really hope that the look and feel of it will be conducive to attracting new visitors and allowing others to see that Shakespeare can be understood on many levels and is in fact still relevant and exciting today. I am confident that it will, especially as is it added to in the future with new classes of students.

JJ did a great job as well running the publicity side of things. He put together the Facebook event page, had the Daily Universe write an article about the event, put together a flyer to pass around and wrote the script for the event.

Learning Outcomes

1. Shakespeare Literacy—Shakespeare literacy is something that I have been able to develop over the course of this semester mainly through this blog and through class discussion. I have previously enjoyed Shakespeare, thus my decision to take the class, but now, I feel like I can read Shakespeare and understand what is going on and how to examine it in a way that will help me learn from it. I think that a lot of this overlaps with the next learning outcome as well.

2. Analyzing Shakespeare Critically—This has been one of the most fun aspects of the semester. Everyone has a different idea about what Shakespeare was trying to convey in the themes of his plays and everyone has different experiences and thoughts while reading it. Discussing these various ideas really made the class fun and taught me to look at the text in new ways. Some examples of the various and creative ways that some of my classmates analyzed Shakespeare:

• Zoology and Parasite Metaphors
• Shakespeare and STDs
• History and Politics

One of my favorite parts about getting to put together the blog page of the Engaging Shakespeare website was being able to read blog posts from my classmates that weren't in my immediate blogging group. A lot of the posts that were written were highly creative and informative.

My most recent posts in regard to this learning outcome are these: a post about illusion and reality in each of the plays I have studied this semester and a follow up post concerning this same theme of reality and illusion in King Lear.

3. Engage Shakespeare Creatively—Another really fun learning outcome, engaging Shakespeare creatively has been one that I have really enjoyed. Most recently, as I have discussed in the first part of this post, I have designed the website for our class to share our projects on. I designed the graphics and layout and constructed the site in HTML. The main page was designed with a nod to the design of old playbills. I look forward to the opportunity I will have to design the presentation of each group's project on the website going forward as I receive photos and other media relating to our event.

Example of an old play bill.

Earlier in the semester, I also worked on analyzing visual representations of Shakespeare's plays and creating some of my own.

4. Sharing Shakespeare—Sharing Shakespeare has been an interesting exercise. I have most enjoyed it when sharing in connection to another interest I have. One of these was my communication with Stephan Thiel about his work at understandingshakespeare.com. I wrote him an email and received an interesting reply. Hopefully this conversation will continue.

I also had the opportunity of sharing Shakespeare through our Engaging Shakespeare event. We were able to have a lot of people show up and learn more about what we have been doing as a class. My family came into town the night before our event, so I brought them along to the event. They really enjoyed it and spent much of the rest of the night talking about it and telling other family members who didn't come about it and why they enjoyed it.

As I stated in learning outcome 3, I will have the opportunity to add more the website about each project. As I complete that task, I plan to find communities of online Shakespeare lovers that I can share the website with and hopefully start to have some visitors and increase awareness of what we have been doing in this class. I will probably post about that on this blog when that time arrives.

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Well, that is about it. I have enjoyed the learning opportunities and new appreciation I have gained for the works of Shakespeare this semester. I look forward to continuing my learning in that regard.