GENERAL GUIDELINES: The short reflective papers are meant to be exploratory, and no research should be required. I’m looking for your reaction to and interpretation of a short story, a poem, or a theme, motif or problem reoccurring in multiple literary texts. This is a formal writing exercise, however, and I do expect you to follow the rules of Standard Written English. Your paper should be no fewer than 2 and no more than 4 pages in length, double-spaced, with a 1” margin all around (this translates roughly into 900-1,800 words—insert page numbers, please, top right hand corner, preferably). Be sure to provide an introduction and a conclusion to your paper and organize your thoughts into coherent paragraphs of sensible lengths within the body of your paper (a well-developed paragraph consists of a minimum of 7-10 sentences). Please proofread your paper and follow MLA conventions!  (Each short reflective paper accounts for 10% of overall grade for the course.) top

PAPER 2:
For your second short paper, I would like you to focus on one of the two plays we have read, i.e. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King or Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night's Dream / Hamlet. Reading drama is different from reading poetry or novels. The difference from prose fiction is obvious: Novels are bursting with words; descriptions of scenery, characters, and landscape abound; live images are created for us and all around us, forcing us to see and experience the plot alongside the protagonist. Drama doesn’t do that! Not exactly anyhow—there are words, of course, but they are fewer. Language, i.e. words, is limited to dialogue, sometimes even to monologue or the ever tantalizing soliloquy; scenery is sparse and setting often little more than a brief (and rather vague) phrase or even simply a word: “Faustus in his study,” “A Heath,” “Elsinore,” or, perhaps the ubiquitous “Enter” (Enter what? Where are we? What’s going on?). The playwright doesn’t specify. Or does s/he?  

Is drama like poetry then? It rhymes, doesn’t it? Well, not always—blank verse is tricky. But still, if we “read-between-the-lines,” as we do in poetry, paraphrase sentence constructions as we go, follow the rhyme pattern and allow ourselves to be carried along by iambic pentameter, interrupted by caesura and startled by the capping couplet—maybe, just maybe, that will help us to get at the meaning behind the dramatic plot. And yes, it will, but that’s still only half the ticket: Drama is a little bit of both novel and poetry—which means that we need to experience the action alongside the characters, while, all along, simultaneously, and at the same time, we have to “read-between-the-lines.” Every word counts! Every omission of a word is crucial! Every utterance a revelation! Think of drama as a game between you and the author—the characters even. Play the game and get to the heart of the story by following the clues the playwright has left you. Dialogue is everything here and if it is interrupted by monologue (only one person speaking) or soliloquy (one person speaking, but nobody (nobody?) is around to hear the speaker), something is always the matter. Beware! Don’t miss a thing!

Through dialogue we learn almost everything there is to learn in a drama. Take a typical “scene” (how about 1.2.1-5 from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night):

                       Enter VIOLA, A CAPTAIN, and sailors.
                       VIOLA: What country, friends, is this?
                       CAPTAIN: This is Illyria, lady.
                       VIOLA: And what should I do in Illyria?
                       My brother, he is in Elysium.
                       Perchance he is not drowned. What think you sailors?
                       CAPTAIN: It is perchance that you yourself were saved.  top                                           

Who is Viola, you wonder? She is a lady (that is how the Captain, apparently himself a social inferior to her, addresses her), who lost her brother in a drowning accident, probably out at sea since she is accompanied by sailors and since the captain seems to have been a witness to the accident. A shipwreck seems to be the most likely explanation because they “enter,” apparently without ship—notice that none is mentioned. They are just there. Where? In Illyria, probably at the coast, washed ashore most likely, and Viola seems to have barely escaped with her own life when the ship sank, or so the Captain seems to suggest. He also implies that Viola’s brother was probably not that lucky: he thinks that he drowned, as does Viola by the way. Elysium is the heaven of classical mythology (in literature, we call this type of reference to something outside the text that everybody should know and understand almost instantaneously an allusion), and that is where Viola thinks he has gone (in other words, she thinks he is dead), and that is where she would like to be as well, rather anyhow than in Illyria. Illyria is a country she has never been to before; notice that she has to ask her companions where they are. It is not her home. On foreign ground and alone, Viola feels lost and desperate. She does not want to be here, has no reason to be here, other, perhaps, than not having any other place to go after her recent loss and the catastrophe she has experienced. All this (and more?) we learn from six lines of dialogue and one line of stage direction. Amazing, isn’t it?!

Of course, it is also tedious, because we have to read slowly and carefully. A trick to reading drama is to read the lines out loud to yourself, your roommate, or your parents on the weekend. Remember that plays were not written to be read; they were written for the stage, for performance. This, too, should explain why descriptions in regards to scenery, setting, and clothing are sparse. Scenery was created on stage, setting was provided through props and backdrops, and characters were attired in scene-revealing and period-specific costumes. Chances are that in the scene above a coastline was painted on a canvas, sand sprinkled across the stage, and that the actors were wet: one of them must have been dressed like a woman in a precious yet dirty and disheveled gown (keep in mind that woman were not allowed to act on stage in Renaissance England—remember Gwyneth Paltrow’s masquerade in Shakespeare in Love and the trouble the theatre company was in when they found out that she was a woman?); one of them probably wore a captain’s hat, and he might have had a compass in his hands to help him determine their location and, and perhaps more importantly, to help us determine who he is (à la Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean; the compass—or a sextant, as the case may be—was, in fact, often used as the identifying mark of a captain on stage (it’s a captain’s stage prop), since it required special knowledge to read nautical instruments and calculate one’s position by the stars in the sky); and the rest of them were in all likelihood dressed in the traditional blue and white mariner outfits—rowdy and rugged looking, no doubt. top

Despite the fact that these visual aids are unavailable to us now as we read the plays more than four hundred years after their conception, there are clues the playwright has left us. We have already mentioned dialogue and tested the narrative value of its content. There is more though: form, structure, imagery, themes and motifs, to name only a few. Renaissance drama follows certain patterns that were and are known to the audience and thus expected by them—the playwright hence has to follow those patterns; by the same token, any deviation should alert the audience and make them and us taker a closer look at what’s happening: Why is the pattern broken? What are the author’s reasons for interrupting the natural flow of the plot? Traditionally then, plays have a five act structure, in which—roughly—act one introduces the audience to all the major conflicts (exposition), act two develops these conflicts (rising action), act three brings them to a peak (climax), act four slows the action down—things are slowly falling back into place (denouement), and act five brings closure to the plot (reunion of Viola and her brother?) and ties up all the loose ends (conclusion).

This is what happens on a structural/narrative level. Underneath it all, the playwright has buried recurring imagery and themes (e.g. blindness, storm, and madness in King Lear); word games, such as puns or an overabundance of synonyms all circling around the same word (double, face, mirror etc. in Twelfth Night); subplots—these are plots that run alongside the main action: these can be of apparently equal importance (Polonius-Laertes-Ophelia subplot in Hamlet) or of seemingly negligible importance (Malvolio-Feste subplot in Twelfth Night or Rafe-Robin or even the horse-courser episode in Dr. Faustus). They are seldom just that, mind you—more often than not they parallel the main plot, laying bare differences and similarities.

In a similar manner, rhetorical devices might alert us to problems the protagonist might be experiencing—the repeated use of hyperbole in Macbeth underscores the extremities that (will) continue to wreak havoc in a Scotland run by a murderer and his conniving wife, and the continuous popping in of the good and the bad angel, presenting paradoxical views in regards to the main character’s fate—and Christian notions of redemption more generally—in Dr. Faustus should alert us to the inner conflict Faustus, the scholar-magician, experiences in his ambitious quest for forbidden knowledge. By the same token, characters might inform us about other characters; this can be done straightforwardly through dialogue, but more frequently this is done through actions, which stand in such stark contrast to the actions of the protagonist that a comparison cannot be avoided. In literature, we call these characters dramatic foils; typically these are minor characters which mirror and thereby illuminate the main character, most famously perhaps Laertes in Hamlet: both study abroad, both lose a father, but their reaction to their respective tragedies could not be more different! top

For this second short paper then, I would like you to make use of one of the many clues Marlowe and Shakespeare have left us to gain access to their work and construct your own (textually informed) understanding of the text. Find something that struck you as you were reading: Was it the rhyme—the abrupt switch from iambic pentameter to blank verse? Was it Hamlet’s persistent contemplation of suicide, his anger with Gertrude, or his cruelty towards Ophelia? Was it Oedipus’ blindness, Jocasta’s utter refusal to even consider the truth as a feasible reality, or the overall oppression of divine providence over human control? Pick something, anything, and develop a working thesis. What might be the purpose of this device? What does it contribute to your understanding of the story? Now trace the rhyme, image, or character (whatever it was that triggered your curiosity) through the play and see whether your working thesis holds true. And this is where the writing begins. Go back and write down the result of your analysis—this will be your introduction and thesis statement. Then go back through your notes and the text and prove your analysis by making extensive use of textual evidence, in other words, cite the play wherever you can. Show that you’re right! Unveil characters and their flaws! Scan the poetry and explain its inconsistencies! Prove that you know what the author is up to! Tell me what the story is really about! And don’t forget to support your argument!

In short: Write a short analytical paper that explores one aspect of one of the two plays we have read. Develop an argument, introduce your paper and formulate a thesis statement, provide support in the body of your paper and conclude your paper in a confident and convincing manner.

Structurally and mechanically, I need you to stay within the page limit—no less than 900 words and no more than 1800. There is no need to consult outside sources, but. I do need you to give your paper a title, and it has to be a title that stands in immediate relation to your thesis statement. This means that if you call your paper “’To be or not to be’: Self-doubt in Hamlet” (notice the single quotation marks inside the regular quotes which denote the title to set off a direct quote from the text) your thesis (and thus your entire paper) has to circle around the problem of identity crises and/or suicide; if you call it “Damned Faustus,” you had better talk about Faustus’ seemingly inevitable decline to hell and his reluctance to repent; and if you call it “Homoerotics in Twelfth Night,” you will have to talk about same sex love. By the same token, I need to you to sustain your focus throughout the entire paper. This means that if you write about madness, you need to make sure that each and every paragraph of your paper deals with this theme and that they are all headed by a topic sentence which leads the readers into the next part of your argument and prepares them for whatever textual support you may have discovered. Above all then, focus on coherence and consistence in your analysis. Take us for a ride but make us feel safe!   top

I’m available for questions via e-mail and during my office hours—and I’d love to see a rough draft or help you hone a paper topic, so come on by. For appointments outside my office hours, talk to me after class or send me an e-mail. Proofread e-mails and drafts, please—remember this is an English class: Use language to impress, not to confuse or make your reader wonder whether you actually care or only threw something together at 2am on due-date-day. Clarity & style are just as important as logic & coherence! top