April
9
B30: Ap 9 Hamlet begins!!
- We had a well-planned for performance of the “Porphyria’s Lover” dramatic reading this morning. Other groups who have not yet performed their poem will have to make other arrangements on the schedule by the door.
- To start Hamlet, we watched the video below with Rowan Atkinson and the lead actor on the show House, Hugh Laurie. They were doing a skit where a play producer back in “Shakey’s” time period was trying to shorten the length of Hamlet and cut out words to create the now-famous “to be or not to be” monologue.
- We looked at a dialogue between Hamlet and his mother, except Hamlet’s part of the discussion was written in Text Message lingo. The point of this was to show that, while the language used in the play may seem unusual or “old style”, language continues to change. For these students to be able to understand what Hamlet’s part of the conversation was saying, they were able to “interpret” it, which is what they’ll have to keep doing for the play.
- We tried something new today, as well. I had several statements up on the projector wall and asked the students as a group to respond to each. If they “strongly agreed” with the statement, they had to go stand in the back corner of the room. If they “strongly disagreed”, they had to stand in the front corner. Anyone who was sort of “uncertain” had to stand in the middle. The point of this was to decide what their response was to the question but to also align themselves with others who felt that way. An example of one of the statements was “Others dictate your fate more than you yourself.” Others are “Not making a decision is, in itself, a decision” or “Over thinking leads to inaction”. These statements are all related to the plot of the play and its major themes.
- The students were given handouts:
- A fold-out page that has the plot structure of the play for students to fill in once we’re done. On the back, it also has a diagram of the plot structure of an Elizabethan play. The play Hamlet follows this Elizabethan structure, one that existed before Shakespeare’s time but that he used for all of his tragedies. In it, the problem is presented in the first Act, complications arise in Act 2, the climax or highest point of tension occurs in Act 3 (which you would think would come more towards the end of the play) but that tension continues through Act 4 in which the tragic hero seals his fate by some action. In the final Act, Act 5, the tragic resolution comes leaving many of the characters dead and the story left to be told to others.
- Students were also given a handout that is going to be quite important. It has:
- An introduction to the character of Hamlet and a variety of ways people perceive him.
- The common characteristics of Elizabethan tragedies, such as a tragic hero who fakes madness, a young virginal maiden who goes insane and kills herself, the hero is forced to do unpleasant things despite his wishes, ghosts who tempt men to their death and more.
- A background description of what all transpires in the first few scenes of Act 1.
- Summaries for each of the individual scenes.
- Questions for each of the chapters. We will discuss these together as a class.
- We talked through all these and volunteers signed up for the roles in the first few scenes of Act 1 that we will start tomorrow.
- We had a few people play dress up as well, trying on the outfits for each of the characters. We’ll see how things go with out performances!