My Tweethis

I posted my thesis on twitter and Facebook.  Probably because I rarely post anything on twitter I did not get any responses back but I did actually get some helpful feedback through my Facebook post.  One friend told me that I need to make it more specific, while another friend gave some helpful suggestions about how I could possibly do that.  I had to limit my thesis to 140 characters so my thesis so the specificity of my thesis suffered a little bit because of that but I was able to confirm some of the thoughts that I had already had.

Annotated Bibliography

Works Cited

Brunvand, Jan Harold. "The Folktale Origin of the Taming of the Shrew." Shakespeare Quarterly 1966: 345-59. This paper discusses the folktales that Shakespeare used to write his play, Taming of the Shrew.  This has obvious application to my paper because it helped me study another play that Shakespeare took from an already existing story.

Marchalonis, Shirley. "Medieval Symbols and the "Gesta Romanorum"." The Chaucer Review 1974: 311-9. What was so helpful about this play was that discussion on the Gesta Romanorum, which is a collection of Italian stories.  Shakespeare used a lot of these stories for his plays.

McKnight, George H. "Germanic Elements in the Story of King Horn." PMLA 15.2 (1900): pp. 221-232.   This work was important because it shed light on the vast amount of old fiction that has not been used by Shakespeare or other writers.

Muir, Kenneth. "Saxo and Hamlet." Shakespeare Quarterly 35.3 (1984): pp. 370-372.  This article discusses the relationship between Shakespeare's Hamlet and the original work by Saxo Grammaticus.

Saxo, Grammaticus,d.ca.1204. The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus. Ed. Oliver Elton 1861-1945. and 1850-1904 F Powell (Frederick York). London, D. Nutt, 1894.   The paper details the works of Saxo Grammaticus and allows us to understand the connection between him and Shakespeare better.

Select Tales from the Gesta Romanorum. Ed. Charles Swan tr. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1887.  This is another paper that discusses the Gesta Romanorum and gave insight into the popularity and purpose of these stories that Shakespeare used. 

Sperber, Hans. "The Conundrums in Saxo's Hamlet Episode." PMLA 64.4 (1949): pp. 864-870.  Another work that discusses and compares Shakespeare's Hamlet and that of Saxo Grammaticus.  This was helpful because it emphasized some key differences in the works.

Weiss, R. “Bandello's Fiction. an Examination of the Novelle.” The Modern Language Review, Jul., 1957, Vol.52(3), p.443-444, 1957.  This was very important because it gave insight to the works of Mattello Bandello and all that he wrote.  He was a very important writer that pre-dates Shakespeare.

annotated bibliography

So I found a lot of good articles that could help my paper (some I read, others I haven't yet)  last week while on campus and I exported them to refworks but I couldn't access my refworks account once I was off campus.  I really liked what I had found and so I will give my bibliography tomorrow once I am back on campus.

My rough, rough draft and outline

Film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays are quite prevalent in popular culture.  Modern film makers and story tellers often use Shakespeare as a launching point for their own stories and films.  Some of our most famous modern stories are actually filled with Shakespearean plot elements.  From the obvious adaptation of Romeo and Juliet in Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story to the elements of Hamlet and Richard III found in Disney’s The Lion King, the performing arts owe a great deal to Shakespeare.  This is not a novel idea; the many adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays have been well documented.  However, while considering all of these works influenced by William Shakespeare an important question comes to mind: where did Shakespeare receive his inspiration?  To better understand Shakespeare and his work I would like to examine the works of writers and historians that predate Shakespeare; namely Arthur Brooke, Saxo Grammaticus, and also the works contained in the Gesta Romanorum.  By examining the works that inspired Shakespeare we will widen the pool from which modern filmmakers and storytellers can draw for their own inspiration.

First body - Arthur Brooke

a. influence on Shakespeare

b. other works

c. other poets and/or play-writes of influence

c. potential for modern application

second body - Saxo Grammaticus

a. influence on Shakespeare

b. other writings

c. other early known world historians

d. potential for modern application

third body - Gesta Romanorum

a. influence on Shakespeare

b. influence on other authors of Shakespeare's time

c. other works like it

d. potential for modern application

fourth body

a. compare modern 'Shakespeare' adaptations with earlier, non-Shakespearean works

b. possible influence on Hollywood

conclusion

a. discuss what effect this has on Shakespeare

b. creative possibilities for modern story-tellers

Phase 2 progress report

So I am a little late in doing this but nevertheless it is now done.

1. Gain Shakespeare Literacy and here as well
so far in this course I have been exposed to more Shakespeare in more forms of media than I had ever been.  I have learned some historical facts of the Shakespearean era (like how politics could have influenced his writing) and also other works that could have been an influence to the Bard.

2. Analyze Shakespeare Critically / plus this one
With the increased interest that I have gained through my exposure to Shakespeare I have started reading his texts in a different way than I ever did.  I am trying to identify themes that were alluded to in Shakespeare blogs and other sites.

3. Engage Shakespeare creatively
I haven't done too much for the semesters creative project but I have been really interested with modern film adaptations of Shakespeare I would like to plan a project around that but I still need to do some brainstorming.  Part of this learning outcome, however, has been the many different ways that I have been able to enjoy Shakespeare this semester: text, audio, youtube videos, blogger's interpretations, comics etc

4. Share Shakespeare meaningfully
Apart from sharing ideas with other students in the class it has been fun to post on other blogs and receive their responses.  I didn't realize that there was so much digital chatter about Shakespeare everyday.

5. Gain digital literacy
Through this blog and the other blogs that I have found I now feel like I am part of a new learning community that I didn't know existed.  I now feel confident that I can go and find social proof for other academic essays that I undertake because, firstly, I know that it is out there and, secondly, I know some good sites that I can go to jump off to other sites.

My first response

I got my first response from one of the people I contacted.  Rod Marsden is an English/Shakespeare scholar from Australia.  His response was very informative and could possibly help anyone wanting to know more about things that may have influenced Shakespeare's writing (his contemporaries, religion, and/or societal factors).  Here is a link to his response: click on this and scroll down to the bottom

Progress Report

Exploration - So I have been looking for other writers and/or plays and stories that predated Shakespeare so that I could see if it were possible to re-attribute some of the credit that is given Shakespeare by modern film makers and storytellers.  I want to make it clear that I do not want to get into the whole controversy of whether or not Shakespeare wrote all that is given to him.  I do not doubt that and from what I have read the theory is not really founded on fact- just speculation.  What I wanted to do, instead, was see who was influencing Shakespeare as he wrote it and then hopefully this would allow us to give more value to the writings of other authors that either came before Shakespeare or were contemporaries of him.


Textual analysis - A helpful guide in analyzing some of Shakespeare's works was the blog of Liz Dollimore . She has researched over a dozen Shakespeare plays and provided examples of works that were written before Shakespeare's plays.  Using her researching I was able to go back and examine the same plays that she had to see for myself the similarities that existed.  There are slight differences of course but a lot of the major plot elements were unchanged in Shakespeare's plays.
 
Social Proof - Another source that has proved encouraging was an article that Kaleigh shared with me that talks mainly about the grammar in Shakespeare's time but what I found particularly compelling was a comment stating that Shakespeare's contemporaries probably were inventing new words and phrases at the same rate that Shakespeare was.  I have contacted the author of this article (Dr. Hope) as well as a Shakespeare scholar in Australia named Rod Mardsen that has been researching the development of the English language.  I have also contacted Liz Dollimore, the Shakespeare sources blogger, but I am still waiting to hear back.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/31/research-reveals-shakespe_n_1244339.
This link goes to an article that discusses Shakespeare's grammar and how that is what separated him from his contemporaries.  I thought it was very interesting.

Recent developments

My brother shared a link with me that led me to an article by Rod Mardsen an English language scholar from Australia, that gives a quick account of the history of the English language.  Because my research topic has been centered on pre-Shakespearean writers that could have influenced his work this was very interesting to me.  I posted a comment; asking him if he knew more about my topic specifically and now I will wait to hear back from him.

Exploration

Continuing my research into Shakespeare sources, I have decided to focus on modern adaptations that credit Shakespeare but maybe should give credit to earlier sources.  Here is a blog that shows some famous Shakespeare adaptations: A Literary Odyssey
Some films that I am looking at are West Side Story that is allegedly based upon Romeo and Juliet, but a blog by Liz Dollimore shows that Romeo and Juliet's plot has earlier sources: Romeo and Juliet

Lion King is said to be based on Hamlet and Richard III but the story line for Hamlet (uncle murders king and marries king's wife,  the king's son discovers or suspects the uncle's crime and is haunted by it) are seen in earlier versions from various countries: http://bloggingshakespeare.com/shakespeares-sources-hamlet

Words invented by Shakespeare

As my previous post mentioned, I am very interested in discovering how original Shakespeare really was.  I have always thought that Shakespeare was the king of originality.  He is credited with inventing over 1700 words.  Many of our movies contain, if they are not completely based upon, key Shakespeare plot elements.  As I have looked at different blogs I have been intrigued by the influences that pre-dated Shakespeare's time.  So trying to take this further I found a site that contained some of the words that have been attributed to Shakespeare: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html . With this and other sites that contain Shakespearean phrases I will try to do some research to discover if any of them have an origin before Shakespeare.