Final Humanities Essay:
Compare Thine Eyne
Imagination and love are two very powerful things. If you use them together then you can create a beautiful piece of work. Some people believe that love is something that you can feel closely in your heart or something you can see by picturing a moment in your mind. But how do we know that love is a feeling or something that you can see? William Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream with both imagination and love to define the different forms of love, those definitions are still used in our time. You can see his imagination in this story because we are told about fairies, donkeys, and humans all in one big play. It was a good choice to use love as the main feeling because it's the emotion that everyone has felt before and it's the strongest emotion of all. We have felt love as infants from our mother, we have felt love as children when we cherished something special to us, we feel love from our lifelong friends that we grow old with.
Shakespeare used both imagination and love to write about the love between characters like Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, Lysander, Oberon, Titania. Some of these scenes have a huge impact on his audience. In the beginning of Midsummer Night's Dream it starts of with Theseus and Hippolyta planning their wedding and the event is going to take about four days. In the play Theseus is very impatient with his wedding and sounds frustrated with his own love, then comes Egeus’s looking for advice on his own daughters love life. Hermia wants to be with Lysander but her father Egeus wants her to be with Demetrius. This situation reminds me a quote from The Greenwood Companion to Shakespeare”-- A Comprehensive Guide, Edited by Joseph Rosenblum, “The authority of law has no patience for the authority of love”. When I hear this quote I think of Egeus and Hermia. Hermia didn't want to listen to her father's rules, she is not following the authority of his law and she used her love for Lysander to break the authority. To me it was almost saying that love is stronger than any authority no matter what or whose authority is issuing the rules. In the same scene one, Lysander is trying talk to Hermia about their situation and says, “so quick bright things come to confusion”, to me that means love can be so bright and so dark all at once, and so begins the story of their quest for love. Shakespeare is a very powerful writer and uses his feelings to create a very powerful book through his emotions and love for writing.
In Midsummer Night's Dream the concept of romantic love can be interpreted in various ways like how the lovers and other couples love change when they go into the forest. Shakespeare presents to us several different couples and Shakespeare uses the stories of these different couples to create many different models of love. We learn that we always seem to love the one we can’t have, like Hermia is suppose to marry Demetrius but really loves Lysander, she says in disgust, “to choose love by another’s eyes”. We often make love more complicated and dramatic than it needs to be, an example being when Hermia has been threatened with death based on who she chooses. We learn that outside sources are always working to make things difficult like the fairies who worked to mix the love up. I feel the fairies are making the mistakes they did on purpose to show that love is not as complicated as the four characters were making it to be, Puck makes it clear by saying “following darkness like a dream, but if we shadows have offended think but this and all is mended”. Darkness can complicate love but it can be mended. Love is not complicated when you follow the rules of Shakespeare, you can fall in and out of love quickly just like most love stories that are told to us today. Yet in real life we need to take these examples by trying not to force love to happen in our life when we make good decisions and let time take it's course love will find a way.
In Midsummer Night's Dream there are many strange ideas that Shakespeare wrote and some of those ideas leave us questioning what really happens and what the meaning behind it is. An example is when the whole play is over when Theseus finds all the lovers together and they are all with the person that they originally wanted to be with and the lovers are telling Theseus what had happen to them. Theseus doesn't buy it and that leaves us to think whether it was a dream or if it really happened. I think sometimes we want to think that romantic love can last forever and that we hope that romantic love today is not a dream and that we don't want to wake up from it because it seems so magical and you are able to express yourself to someone you desire. I think that Shakespeare wanted the lovers to think of it as though it really happened and to leave the outside world to think of it as gibberish and to leave the lovers with the main question, if it was a dream or was it for real? I believe that the lovers actually had the experience because I do not think they would have just all of a sudden woken up with the one person they desire. I believe in the magic that happened because in reality they could not have just solved all their problems in one night. With this story we all want to have faith in the magic of love and fantasy of the story. We want to believe in the perfect dream and in my opinion that is the way Shakespeare wanted the reader to see it.
We know that not all Shakespeare’s stories end in happiness, but with this Midsummer Night's Dream, he may have felt it was the right thing to do. Just as Hermia’s father came to realize that his original threat to Hermia was no longer necessary, once he saw his daughter was happy with the one she chose. People enjoy a happy ending, even when we clearly have a villain and a hero we like to hope for a happy ending. Shakespeare has helped us as humans evolve to think about what love is today. There was a time when love was a very different thing, it did not exist for desire but for power, power over property and a time when it could have meant life or death. Shakespeare has helped change and shape what authors write about today. His work is popular and we have been taught how to deal with desires in our life. I feel the idea of love is simpler, thanks to Shakespeare’s book and writings, he has helped us describe the types of love in our world to be deeper than desires, love is a commitment to something important that allows you to give yourself to another person.
REflection:
For this project we had to do a play on a Shakespeare Novel and it was called A Midsummer Nights Dream. This play was about how four lovers go into the forest to run away from the authority because they weren`t able to love the person they wanted to love and things got magical in the forest. There were magical fairy's in the forest and they decided to cast a spell on the lovers, which was a bad idea because the lovers got worse and by the end the Fairy's straighten it all out and the four lovers were able to love the person they wanted to and then got married and lived happily. The role that I got to play as one of the four lovers and I was Demetrius and I also had a production role and that was set design, For set design we had to paint these two large prisms and we painted a couple of forest trees on them. It was a very enjoyable project that we all got to do.
I really enjoyed being one of the four lovers because I got to be in the play and I had a huge role in the play which made me responsible for memorizing my lines and my blocking. But out off all I got to do one great play with my class mates and it was such a great experience. The Projects that I really enjoyed was the Escher paintings and discussion because we got to look at some paintings of Escher`s .We had to write what we thought of the painting and what he was trying to say and it was fun coming up with ideas that we thought the painting meant and finding the deeper meaning. This relates to Shakespeare because in the play Midsummer Nights Dream Shakespeare has lots of meanings in his lines and how he shows things in various ways like how he shows love in various ways and finding a different meaning of what hes trying to say. Another project that I liked was the whiteboard discussions about nature of love because it was a new thing that we were trying and I personally liked it because everyone got to show their ideas of what the topic that we had to write about. I was able to show my ideas to everyone in the group because when we have regular seminars I don't really talk as much and don't get to say my thoughts but with the whiteboards I did and liked it more over the regular seminars that we had. The other projects that I liked was memorizing my lines because it's really fun to be able to memorize something thats not a test but you are memorizing it for yourself, it's almost like your trying to memorize a poem. It's also fun to be a character from one of Shakespeare's play and practicing the play with everyone. The final humanities essay I am writing about how Shakespeare shows love in various ways with all of the different couples and how he use the stories of the couples to create different models of love.
A part that was difficult about this project was when we had to memoeriz our lines for the play and then we also had to work on our final humantites essay. I said this was difficult becaseu I had PARC Testing for a wee which dragged my time down to practice with the class and to be ablee to work on mu humanitites essay and I also had to work on other projects which were do and it was just very stressful. But I used perddiverancce to work on this project because if I wouldn't have then I would have been a lot more stress but I came up with a plan to work on each project for about thirty minutes and I got a lot done and I just did that every day and so far its been working out really great and I also had to take some time for my self which took away some stress and every time that I turned in a project for a close that just got a lot of stress off of my chest. Even though that I was really stressed out and tired I still had to do my work and I was proud of myself for persevering because there was a lot to be do and I got most of it done on time and was able to still work on my essay and practices my lines with the class.
I learn about my self doing this project was that I`m a good listener and that I have the skills to be a great writer some day and this project I saw myself as learner, collaborator, actor because when this year started off I was quiet and didn't say much and this project has helped me be able to speak out loud especially when I was in the Shakespeare play because everyone was surprised how loud that I could Speak my lines and I projected my voice which made me feel good about myself. This project has also helped collaborate more with my class mates because we had to to talk to each other and give everyone feed back on how they did and what they could improve on which made me fell good and improved my acting skills and writing skills .