Looking Back Over My Work on Hamlet

The time has come for class to end, and for me to evaluate my work here on my blog. It's been fun talking about Hamlet and how Hamlet has been an inspiration and a sort of cultural reference point, and also my less focused topic of Shakespeare and popular culture.

A. Posts: I feel that I have written a respectable number of posts that relate to my topic, and that they tie in pretty well to my Thesis:  "Shakespeare’s play Hamlet has been an inspiration and a source of cultural reference points for the people that have gone before us and it still is for us, the people, now." Most of my posts do have some sort of related image, though most of my posts do not have any other sort of media. I don't know if I could say that I spent a lot of time analyzing primary sources. I do a little bit in my post Ophelia, Her Death as Mad and as Picturesque as Our Imagination Paints It which is probably my best and most varied post. I do spend some time analyzing Hamlet movies and references in a popular TV show, though the actual analysis is not spectacular. I do think that they are formatted well, with useful titles, pagebreaks, and tags. I probably should have rewritten my hub post to incorporate Some Supporting Quotes from the Epilogue of Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet and a further discussion on the article
"Whither Shakespop?" ... though my hub post took me ages and I really did want to rewrite it.


B. Research: I possibly could have done a better job researching. I do think that I eventually reached a fair Thesis and was able to draw support for that Thesis with my own work and the work of my peers. My process is fairly well documented and you can see if you go back through my blog how my thoughts jump from one place to another but dwell most on Hamlet, Popular Culture, and Shakespeare's Legacy, and I did show how I was struggling to come to a coherent thesis in my posts In Search of a Focus and Thesis. I have a sources page where I think all of my resources are gathered, in a style that is not MLA, and most of them are properly linked to something related (if it's a book, it may link to the Amazon page for that book, which is what seemed like the best idea at the time). The last few sources are not linked because of technical difficulties in editing the page.


C. Personal and Social: I feel that my personality and connection to my posts is pretty clear through my side-content, and my voice, and probably my design too. There are posts, which I talked about and linked to in the paragraph above, that were explicitly me talking about my process. My hub post shows a pretty clear connection to my peers.


D. Design: I think my design is good. I like the background, and the side-content, and all of my design. I don't think any of it detracts, and I think some of it, like my tags, should be very useful.

 

Some Supporting Quotes from the Epilogue of Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet

I found some phrases I really like in the epilogue to the book Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Hamlet which is "Cheating Death: The Immortal and Ever-Expanding Universe of Hamlet" by Maria M. Scott.

The first of these great quotes is:  

Perhaps more than any Shakespearean text, Hamlet is embedded in our collective cultural consciousness long before we actually encounter the gloomy Dane in the pages of his play. The question "To be or not to be?" is as over-determined as the direction to "have a nice day." However, the original text has been reinterpreted and retransmitted so many times that what we receive sometimes only vaguely resembles the original message.

This passage is exactly in line with my thesis that Shakespeare has seriously influenced our culture, both serving as an inspiration for new ideas and as a commonly known set of ideas that can be easily referenced.

Another great quote follows close after that one "If the dilemma facing Shakespeare scholars today is that there's just not that much more we can say about him, surely that dilemma is doubly pronounced in relation to Hamlet." This dilemma is one that I sympathize with, since I too was trying to say something about Hamlet, and there is so much already said that anything else just seems superfluous.

There's one more quote from this epilogue that I like and that echoes and reinforces my own ideas about Hamlet and society is "we have the opportunity to show that Hamlet remains relevant as a cultural icon and continues to evolve." Of course, this book is written for teachers as an aid for them, but I think it applies just to the simple studying of the play. "We have the opportunity to [see] that Hamlet remains relevant as a cultural icon and continues to evolve" and that it continues to evolve both in how we view the original text and in how we adapt it and make use of it for new creative performances and works.

So, I like the epilogue to this book, it agrees with me.

Evalutating Mandy's Blog

I was assigned to review Mandy T's blog, The Little Corner of Shakespeare in My Life.

A. Posts: There seems to be a sufficient quantity and quality of posts related to Mandy's focus of Love and Shakespeare. Another post or two linked to in the hub post wouldn't hurt, but everything seems fine. She varies what and how she talks about well enough, though the number of bullet-points kind of got to me after a while. The media is related and the embedded videos are discussed.She also has analysis on different kinds of media, primary, and secondary sources. Her titles tend to be nicely informative, and she doesn't have many posts that exceed a page-length without a jumpbreak. Tags could make it a little easier to visually see what she has been posting about, but she does have a search bar so that you can find key word of your choice.

B. Research: The focus of the blog is made perfectly clear through the hub post, the multitude of thought-gathering posts preceding it, the supporting posts, and the design of the blog. The hub post does a fine job of linking back to posts that support the claim that Shakespeare used his own love life to help him explore love in different situations and circumstances in search of how to best capture the essence of what true love is. The Works Cited page also shows, in nice and properly formatted, all the formal sources Mandy used.

C. Personal &Social: Mandy's personality is all through the blog, in her colorful background, in her sidebar information, and in her posts. She discusses her own learning process... frequently. She also has a lot of friendly discussion in the comments-sections about what she's discovered and where she can go to find more information.

D. Design: I think the overall design of the blog is good, and reflects nicely on both the romance theme and a bright personality. Of the sidebar content only the Pandora struck me as a little non-contributing, though now that I think about it, you could say that the songs up there count as love songs and so fit back to the theme.

Hamlet Shows Shakspeare's Long-Lasting Cultural Effect

Pondering the Definitions of Popular Culture, Again.

What is Popular Culture? The definition in “The Introduction” by Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes to Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture seems like a good definition to me “cultural products created of the people… for the people.” But who are “the people?” In this introduction they say that “citizens and yeomen were frequently were frequently classed together as ‘the middling sort of people’, divided between town and country and it is these groups rather than those who ‘have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth as Smith puts it, who would usually have been referred to as ‘the people’.” To me, this is an insufficient definition of “the people.” Everyone, from the Queen down to “those who ‘have no voice nor authority’” are people and are therefore part of “the people.” Sometimes it is useful to look at the different aspects of a culture, the types of literature that make it into textbooks, films that win awards and praise while being perhaps a little too aware of their own artsy-ness and other praise-able qualities, art that is found in museums, to the generally enjoyed books, movies, and TV… and other aspects of a culture that are less snobby and may or may not have plenty of their own merits. Shakespeare wrote for and was appreciated by the snobby elite and the groundlings and the in-betweens of his own day, and he has returned (if he ever left) from the realms of the snobby elite to being accessible and enjoyable to all of the people from the snobby elites to the couch potatoes. Shakespeare’s play Hamlet has been an inspiration and a source of cultural reference points for the people that have gone before us and it still is for us, the people, now.

Thesis

My current thesis and conclusion are:

Shakespeare is still popular in popular culture, the kind of culture that is of the people and for the people, but he belongs not just to the popular or just to the high-brow but he can be found comfortably fitting in throughout our culture as a cultural reference point and an inspiration for new art and literature and this can be best seen in his best-known play, Hamlet.

Is this a good or a bad thing? "Does familiarity breed contempt?" (which is a question asked and discussed in “Introduction: whither Shakespop? Taking stock of Shakespeare in popular culture” which I intend to talk more about soon) Perhaps, but most of the people who despise it now, would still, I think, not appreciate it without all of the cultural strings attached, without the “decontextualized appropriations solely for commercial gain”(another quote from Wither Shakespop) and without all the parodies. I don’t necessarily think that everything that’s attached itself to Shakespeare is good, or anything of the sort, but I do think that new interpretations and spins inspired from and working off of Shakespeare’s work themselves benefit from using Shakespeare as a source and that they can also benefit a study of Shakespeare’s works by breathing new life into the old texts.

Reference to Hamlet in General Conference

Today I was pleasantly surprised to hear Elder Lynn G. Robbins in the 181 Session of General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints quote Hamlet's famous soliloquy "To be or not to be" and to hear him say that this is actually a very important question and base the rest of his talk on the importance of being and doing good. Shakespeare's best writing is still awesome, applicable, quotable, and well enough known and liked that quoting him is at times the best way to say something.

So, we have an answer to that old question, and the answer is "Be".