Results of Ruminations

This is the last of the three mini essays that I'm hoping to submit to the Wooden O Symposium at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Unlike the other two, this one focuses on the entirety of the play instead of exclusively on the female characters. It's also the weakest of the essays, so I'll likely have to rewrite this thing and change the organization of the entire submission. Hooking Up: A Midsummer Night's Dream I'm not the first to observe that it's in some ways inconsistent that middle school students are often exposed to Shakespeare via Romeo and Juliet . It's a play about teenagers mistaking the early stages of infatuation, assuming it's the kind of love that can last, and then killing themselves when it doesn't go the way they'd hoped. Hardly the morals that we're trying to instill in Utah's youth. So perhaps there's a better play to put into the hands of resistant striplings in order to infuse them with the intoxicating dr...

Like I mentioned before, the Utah Shakespeare Festival has an annual symposium, called the Wooden O , that is a place where scholars meet to discuss Shakespeare and to share papers that they've submitted. Here's the second part of my proposed paper for the symposium, "Hooking Up and Marrying Down: Relationships in Shakespeare." Marrying Down: Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet 's eponymous heroine is a surprisingly capable and thoughtful teenager, and certainly her Romeo's mental superior. Though perhaps her age counts against her in the analyses of language and love (and the language of love), she still provides a strong sense of capacity that many of us are loathe to see wasted by the end of the play. Sure, she is somewhat impetuous about the marriage. If you've spent any significant amount of time in the presence of teenagers, there's a pretty large problem with myopia when it comes to emotional questions, even under normal circumstances. Th...

The Utah Shakespeare Festival has an annual symposium, called the Wooden O , that is a place where scholars meet to discuss Shakespeare and to share papers that they've submitted. I've yet to go, but I'm trying to write a piece that (I hope) might be a contribution to the symposium. It's a large topic, and I'm still wrapping my head around what I want to do, but I thought I'd lay out some preliminary thoughts. Since I used up my writing time today on this, I figured I'd do double duty and post it here. So here's the first part of my proposed paper, "Hooking Up and Marrying Down: Relationships in Shakespeare." Marrying Down: As You Like It   Rosalind's charm is so pervasive and charming, Harold Bloom prefers to think of the play by an alternative title: As Rosalind Likes It (221). It's almost becomes a tragedy at the end of one of the highest comedies to think she marries a schlub like Orlando. In many ways, hers is the most conf...