Pride and Prejudice

As promised, here is the background information on the period and some of the class distinctions. Please feel free to use this space to ask questions, make comments, etc., as you read.

Notes on P'n'P:

Austen wrote during the Regency period, a point in British history covering the end of the 18th century and into the early 19th. It’s called the Regency because the King, George III, was mad as a hatter and his son, the Prince Regent, also not known for his stability and good choices, was running the country. Social rules were tight, but many of the titled nobility were also strapped for cash, so they had to look to the new money of the merchant class to keep things going. The upper classes generally looked down on people who worked – you lived off of your inheritance and your lands, maybe investments, and, if things got tight, your wife’s dowry. It is important to note that, while there are significant class distinctions in Austen’s novels, the people in them are generally of the upper class in general (she doesn’t write about, say, farmers or maids). In addition, being born into a rich family didn’t guarantee stability. All of the estate usually went to the oldest son, leaving younger sons to figure out something, whether that was the church, the military, or marrying well.

The role of women here is tricky – women had a brief period when they came “out” to society (generally between 16-20) and were shown around to all the prospective husbands, virtually always with the amount of money that came with them well advertised. Ideally, the young women would marry at the end of that “season.” The longer she waited, the less attractive her prospects. Unmarried women like Elizabeth (a shocking 20 to 21 years old) faced a more difficult future. There were no job opportunities for women, other than the hell of being a governess to a wealthy family, a strange position where you are neither servant or equal of the family. For women like the Bennet girls, who have little money to accompany them, marriage is the only security. Mrs. Bennet’s husband hunting for her daughters is funny, but it is based in very real concerns.

Let me explain an “entail.” An entail is a very restrictive inheritance provision that is legally attached to a piece of property restricting who may inherit it. In the Bennets’ case, their home and its lands are entailed upon a male heir. Since the Bennets have five daughters and no sons (points for trying), the estate will go to a cousin, Mr. Collins, when Mr. Bennet dies. If Mrs. Bennet is still living, she will have to leave the house and turn it over to him. Hence her desire to get a least one daughter married well, so that she will have somewhere to go!

A few last words on Hamlet...

So here is the link to the This American Life show about Hamlet in prison...listen at your leisure, comment on what you got out of it. For those of you not going on internship, This American Life is the model for the audio project we're doing in May, so listen to some other ones...this is one of my favorites.

I'm also posting here an excerpt from an essay by Harold Bloom, extra-famous literary critic at Yale, on what makes Shakespeare special. I'm interested in hearing how it fits with what you think - and the Middlebury article, as well. How do you compare your thoughts on Shakespeare with theirs?

From Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:

Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging; women and men are represented as aging and dying, but not as changing because their relationship to themselves, rather than to the gods or God, has changed. In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others. Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation, and not other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages.

The more one reads and ponders the plays of Shakespeare, the more one realizes that the accurate stance toward them is one of awe. How he was possible, I cannot know…The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind’s reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us, in part because he invented us…

[I argue that] he went beyond all precedents (even Chaucer) and invented the human as we continue to know it. A more conservative way of stating this would seem to me a weak misreading of Shakespeare; it might contend that Shakespeare’s originality was in the representation of cognition, personality, character. But there is an overflowing element in the plays, an excess beyond representation, that is closer to the metaphor we call “creation.” The dominant Shakespearean characters – Falstaff, Hamlet, Rosalind, Iago, Lear, Macbeth, Cleopatra among them – are extraordinary instances not only of how meaning gets started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being.

We can be reluctant to recognize how much of our culture was literary…A substantial number of Americans who believe they worship God actually worship three major literary characters: the Yahweh of the J Writer(earliest author of Genesis, Exodus, Numbers), the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark, and Allah of the Koran. I do not suggest that we substitute the worship of Hamlet, but Hamlet is the only secular rival to his greatest precursors in personality. Like them, he seems not to be just a literary or dramatic character. His total effect upon the world’s culture is incalculable. After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness; no one prays to him, but no one evades him for long either. Overfamiliar yet always unknown, the enigma of Hamlet is emblematic of the greater enigma of Shakespeare himself: a vision that is everything and nothing, a person who was (according to Borges) everyone and no one, an art so infinite that it contains us, and will go on enclosing those likely to come after us.

Position Papers

Okay Danielle, Michelle, Thea, Saanchi, Alisha, Casey, Will, and Gen,

All of you are writing some kind of position paper on ideas in Hamlet. You are making an argument about a question or aspect of the play. Your process is similar to the Women in Hamlet group:

Grab some post-its and go through every scene that is relevant to your argument. Write down any line that seems to support or contradict your argument. Use the post-its to arrange your evidence in a way that makes sense to you and that will support your idea. You can also do this using the online version of the play and cut 'n' pasting. Now...

THINK ABOUT IT. For a while. Mull.

So what are the implications of the argument that you are making? How does your argument change our understanding of the play? Does it shift or explain motive? Does it give a familiar character a new aspect?

Your basic format for this essay is an explanation of your argument (serves as intro/thesis), a careful, detailed examination of the evidence in favor of your interpretation, an explanation of why other evidence might not apply - this is very important here, especially for those unanswerable questions..you have to shoot down arguments against you - and a conclusion that explains, in detail, why this argument is important. How does it contribute to our (the universal our) understanding of the play? I would strongly suggest posting your drafts here for comment...Please try to make sure all topic sentences are assertive...

NB: I know this play very, very well. If you pay short shrift to your evidence gathering and miss something, I will probably know. And I will not be amused.

You are welcome to consult outside sources, but EVERYTHING you look at must be sourced in a bibliography, even if you don't quote it. Standard MLA rules apply.

Women in Hamlet

Okay, Rei, Dina, Nicole, and Cristina,

So you are all writing on different aspects of the female characters in the play and you all have rough ideas of a thesis...So here's what you do:

Grab some post-its and go through every scene that your character appears in. Write down any line that seems to support or contradict your argument. Use the post-its to arrange your evidence in a way that makes sense to you and that will support your idea. Now...

THINK ABOUT IT. For a while. Mull.

So what are the implications of the argument that you are making? How does your argument change our understanding of the play? Does it shift or explain motive? Does it give a familiar character a new aspect?

Your basic format for this essay is an explanation of your argument (serves as intro/thesis), a careful, detailed examination of the evidence in favor of your interpretation, an explanation of why other evidence might not apply, and a conclusion that explains, in detail, why this argument is important. How does it contribute to our (the universal our) understanding of the play? I would strongly suggest posting your drafts here for comment...

NB: I know this play very, very well. If you pay short shrift to your evidence gathering and miss something, I will probably know. And I will not be amused. ALSO: you may use any of the articles I assigned (properly cited, of course) and you may use other resources, but YOU MUST cite anything that you used...really, if you even read something else, I'd like that noted in a bibliography.

Performing a Speech

Okay, Jing and Farrah, here we go:

You are going to do two pieces of written work (in addition to memorizing and performing your speech). The first is a complete, very detailed explication, exploring every idea, every metaphor, fully breaking down the speech. The second is an in-play analysis. How does this speech fit into the play? What emotional state is the character experiencing? What does the character want? How do you envision this character in general? How can you explain his/her actions throughout the play?

Once you begin working on your performance, you need to bring all of the ideas you've written up into the speech - think of how you can communicate these through your words and your actions. How will you use props or set pieces (like a chair) to help emphasize a particular interpretation?

Suggestion: watch your speech in several different versions of the play and think about what you would like to do differently. There are quite a few available online (I can't really link, as our netnanny doesn't like youtube).

Director's Notebooks

Okay, George, Winnie, Jess, and Lauren...

Director’s Notebook

The goal of a director’s notebook is to present a complete vision of a scene from the play, with setting, costumes, motivations, actions, and tones. Here’s what you will need to have:

1. Artistic statement of purpose: 3-4 pages. In your statement of purpose, you will explain your vision of the play. It should include explanations of the following:

· Your vision of each of the characters in the scene – their motivations, their attitudes, their personalities. You can “cast” your scene using real actors, living or dead.
· An explanation of the main actions of the scene…what are the most important moments? Why? What choices are you going to make?
· Setting: when, where, why? You need to explain what the stage is going to look like, how the characters will be dressed, etc.
2. A set diagram from a bird’s eye view. If you’re feeling artistic, you can draw or make a collage. Here’s a link to some great photos of different kinds of stage design: Hamlet
Here's a stage diagram with the acting areas laid out.

A stage manager’s/director’s book. This is a double entry notebook, with the text of the scene on one side and every action, tone of voice, gesture, etc. on the other. With this book, the actors could perform your version of the play without you! Please use correct theater terminology. Download your scene here.

Process:

Read your scene over a bunch of times. Figure out what, if anything, you are going to cut. Write down all of your initial ideas.

If you feel inclined, watch your scene in several different versions of the play (there are 3 readily available).

Sketch your set out, including furniture placement, etc. Many directors draw it out and then use markers, like Monopoly pieces, to help them figure out how everyone is going to move around the stage.

Write up your artistic statement.

Using your set drawing and markers, figure out the action of the scene, entrances, exits, interactions between characters, what people are doing while they aren’t speaking. Write these in your notebook.

Using your notebook, see if you can move through the whole scene without a hitch, using your markers. Add detail.

Put it all together pretty –like!