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All homework from this semester is due by this Thursday (the 18th). I will not accept any late work after this. If you need help with an assignment, or would like me to edit it once before you turn it in, please turn it in tomorrow.
We began our study of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with a discussion of . . . The Wizard of Oz. All of you were familiar with the story (or the Garland movie, at least), and most had read Wicked, the novel-turned-play by Gregory Maguire. In the same way that Maguire tore apart the story of The Wizard of Oz then rebuilt it in a new form as Wicked, Tom Stoppard (in 1966) reconstructed a classic play into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a postmodern, existentialist performance.
To better understand what the authors have done with the original works, we watched this commercial for the Kia Borrego, comparing it to a number of "normal" commercials.
Your assignment for tonight is to look over Hamlet’s soliloquy after Claudius and Gertrude leave him. Notes are always a good thing (might use your journal), but you will not turn anything in. As you read it, keep in mind the following questions:
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month–
Let me not think on’t–Frailty, thy name is woman!–
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears:–why she, even she–
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer–married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.