Last Blog

Sorry this is late, forgot! When I look back at my writing this semester I have found out some stuff. I actually have always hated writing and especially reading my own writing. I know I’m not very good and I would just rather leave it to people like William Shakespeare and my favorite Sylvia Plath. So, it was hard blogging every day for me. I usually only like writing about things that I like, so I loved writing about Opehlia in Hamlet and Lady Macbeth, but I hated writing about Richard the III. With these blogs though I found that maybe writing about these characters I learn to understand their personalities and I’ve come to admire the complexity of someone like Richard. It might be good for me to stray out of my comfort zone in writing and explore something that I would normally just ignore and dismiss as unimportant.

Tempest Act V

I think Prospero wants to stop using magic. In his speech he is talking to the audience telling them that he was almost enslaved to the audience and now wants to live his life in Naples. He says ” I must be here confined by you/Or sent to Naples”. So, now it seems that maybe Prospero wasn’t doing all of this magic because he was power hungry but because he wanted to entertain. This reminds me of Ariel. He has to perform all of these magical things and is enslaved to Prospero and all he wants is his freedom. He says since he has done what he had set out to do, “in this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands with the help of your good hands.” If the audience was pleased with the play and clapped then he would be allowed to leave and go to Naples. “let your indulgence set me free.” I think he would really stop using magic, why would he not? He has the dukedom and is happy, so he doesn’t need magic anymore.

Tempest Act IV

In this scene,Prospero conjures up a masque. I didn’t really know what this meant so I looked it up. It was something common in the 16th and 17th century. It was like a little play to celebrate someones impending marriage. In this masque, Prospero conjures up Ceres the goddess of agriculture, Juno the goddess of marriage and Iris goddess of the rainbow and messenger for the gods. These three go on to talk about how marriage is a right social order. They don’t really talk about love and lust, just the social aspects. Prospero remembers that it’s the time for Caliban’s attempt to murder him and he delivers his speech after ending the masque. My favorite line of the tempest is “we are such stuff as dreams are made on”. In this speech he is talking about so much. He talks about how he has conjured up beautiful things but they must end soon. He talks also about the Globe theater and how the play must end also and we must carry on with our lives. This is also talking about life in general.

Tempest Act III

In act III, Prospero is everywhere in the behind the scenes. He isn’t out right and visible to every character; he is hidden. This allows him to spy on all of his growing schemes. When Ferdinand and Miranda profess their love to one another, he is in the background telling the audience his thoughts in asides. He might be controlling this relationship, or maybe he is just happy that his daughter is marrying nobility, since he is looking for his own power redeemed. I think in this scene he is talking to the audience to let us know that he knows about this encounter and is happy with it. He still has power over everything. In scene iii, Ariel confronts the nobles with their wrong doings and Prospero is of course behind it all. He is talking in his asides to the nobles, making witty comments on how bad these people. Then in the end, he tells the audience he is happy with Ariel and he has more planned.

Tempest Act II

Everyone tells stories in this play, because I think, we are just walking in on some building drama. Prospero has his whole story to tell about the ursuption of his dukedom. Caliban tells his story of being born on the island by Scorax and Prospero coming and enslaving him. Ariel has his somewhat hazy and mystified story of how Prospero saved his life and now is enslaved to him with his magics. Even the nobles tell a little about where they’re coming from and the wedding. They are all recounting these stories to people. Some of the people already know all of this like Ariel and the nobles, but then Prospero and Caliban tell their stories to people who don’t know it yet. This is how history was originally learned. People would tell stories around a fire or someone would perform at a party and then everyone would know about a certain story. This play coincides with this way of storytelling very well.

Looking for Richard

I think this movie is trying to make Shakespeare relevant and understandable to the general public. They talk a lot about how Shakespeare has this stigma around it for Americans, that it’s really hard to understand. When we see the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and all the exaggerated metaphors, it’s a little hard to get the gist of what the characters are saying. This is actually something that I have always loved about Shakespeare; the intensely complex language. But I think for some people it can be rather daunting. I think they chose Richard the III because its one of the more difficult plays. There are so many characters and hidden relationships and it has a layer of historical truth. I’ve never read it and I found it kind of hard to keep up with. So, they are taking one of his famous and difficult plays and making it easier for the general public to understand.

End of Richard III

Act IV scene 4 starts out with Tyrrel talking about his henchmen killing the princes. Shakespeare doesn’t actually show the murders, but Tyrrel paints us an awful picture of the bloody act. Tyrrel himself, is lamenting what happened, “the most arch deed of piteous massacre that ever yet this land was guilty of.” Then the two men who actually killed the children tell Tyrrel about it are weeping while talking. The way they tell it is really shocking, because they talk about how the children looked as they were sleeping and they seem to be so innocent. Then, they kill that innocence so violently, “We smothered the most replenished sweet works of nature that from the prime creation e’er she framed”. These murders are guilt ridden. They say that they almost couldn’t do it. I think shakespeare doesn’t include the actual murders because this part is so important, showing that these killers are even disgusted with Richard’s actions.Also, it would’ve been pretty shocking to act out the murders of children.

Writing Process

For this paper, I knew I wanted to write on Ophelia some how. She has always been one of my favorite characters ever. I think people overlook her as a weak girl who just gave up in the end, but I think she shows courage and strength. So, when I was rereading her passages I saw that she talks a lot about flowers and people talk to her with the language or imagery of flowers. I thought this had to mean something. Since Ophelia changes a lot during the play they had to signify something changing. She looses a lot of her ideals and innocence with all the dark things that hang over head. So my thesis was that Shakespeare uses flowers as a metaphor of her innocence dying and death itself, since she dies with flowers all over her. I figured out some new things about Ophelia with this paper and about myself. With these flowers I always thought that her death was highly romantic and beautiful but really there’s nothing beautiful about the loss of innocence. You can never get it back and you are left grieving over something you never knew was there, like a phantom limb.

draft #2

Chesney Christner
Kristyn Leuner
Shakespeare for Non-Majors
ENGL 3000-200, Summer B-term
July 21, 2010
FLEURS Draft
There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious silver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. (IV.vii 170-173)
These lines spoken by Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, are describing how the fair Ophelia died. It is one of the most memorable images of death in all of Shakespeare’s works. In our minds we see a beautiful, young woman floating in a brook with a crown of flowers atop her head drifting off to death. Ophelia in this play is always talking about flowers she mentions them at least seven times. Other characters also talk about flowers and for some reason they are never used in the way that we would think; blooming and signifying life. In Hamlet, flowers represent not life, but death and specifically with Ophelia, the death of innocence.
Polonius, Ophelia’s father is talking to her about her virtue in regards to Hamlet,
“Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes./ The canker galls the infants of the spring/Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, (I.iii 37-39) Polonius uses a metaphor of a flower to signify Ophelia’s virtue and how her innocence is threatened by the “canker”: Hamlet. The word buttons is footnoted in the text as buds. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a bud is “a girl who is just ‘coming out’; a debutante. Also more fully bud of promise.” So, Shakespeare uses thelanguage of flowers, because bud is also a young flower, to signify her purity as a thing that holds promise. This is just setting it up for her virtue and innocence to be shattered later on in the play. He uses the language of a gardener because he has been the protector of her “garden” for years and here he is worried of Hamlets intentions. The hard sounds of “canker” and “calumnious” seem to attack, while “the infants of the spring” are much softer, further showing how Polonius is worried for her fragile virtue. This quote is foreshadowing Ophelia’s loss of innocence, although not in the way Polonius thinks.
Shakespeare contrasts Ophelia’s protected and intact virtue with that of Queen Gertrude’s defiled virtue. While the ghost of the king is talking to Hamlet about how he was killed he says “Leave her to heaven/ And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge/ To prick and sting her. (1.v 86-88). Here Hamlet senior tells Hamlet not to mess with the Queen because in Heaven she will be punished and to her own conscious. He uses a metaphor of thorns that represent her incestuous deeds that still haunt her. Instead of the full rose, as Ophelia’s virtue was, Gertrude only gets the bad parts of the rose, the thorns. “Prick” and “sting” are again harsh sounding words and when reading them we stress them. This is perhaps foreshadowing her death, which will be painful. In this passage, innocence has long been dead with the queen.
During the play that Hamlet orchestrates, there is a dumb show which depicts the actions that the King and Gertrude did. In it the king, “He lies upon a bank of flowers.”(III.ii) The queen then leaves and a different person comes in and while the King is sleeping, slips a poison into his ear. Here the fact that this all happens with a backdrop of flowers is important. When we think of a couple lying embraced on a bed of flowers, we think of love and romance, but here behind the disguise of love there is deceit and ultimately death. In this dumb show, we once again see flowers as the antithesis of what we have always thought them to be.
Another instance of Gertrude’s dead virtue is when Hamlet is yelling at her in
her bedchamber, just after killing Polonius. He says
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows

As false as dicer’ oaths (III.iv 42-45)
Hamlet is talking about how Gertrude so soon after her husbands death married his brother. He uses such rich and intense language here to depict his disgust and rage at her actions. We see the image of a rose and then it is replaced with a blister. These are so different and evoke such different emotions. Rose here again represents her virtue and then the blister represents the loss of that virtue.
After the death of Polonius and the refusal from Hamlet and Laertes’s departure,
Ophelia is left alone and with out all the men in her life and she goes mad. Her last speech, that isn’t a song, is where she distributes flowers and herbs to her brother, the Queen, the King, her dead father and herself. Each flower represents something, pansies and rosemary she gives to Laertes which both mean remembrance and thoughts. Perhaps she is telling him to think before he acts, because at this time him and Claudius are plotting to kill Hamlet. She gives fennel and columbines to Gertrude. Fennel means flattery or deceit and columbines mean infidelity, which both make sense. She gives rue to Claudius, which means regret. Regret for killing his own brother. She also gives rue to herself, perhaps for what she is about to do.
Lastly she says, “I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say a made a good end. (112) Violets mean faithfulness, but they are all dead as is everyone’s faithfulness here in this scene. In this scene she doesn’t give out any happy flowers to anyone they are all reflecting the emotions of the people around her. Her words here are extremely somber and full of maddening remorse. It’s almost shocking to think that these people didn’t know she was off to kill herself. She is extolling these secret meanings to all of the people in the form of flowers. They’re all dark, personal meanings. Ophelia has shaken off her budding rose of virtue and is now dealing with regret and her foreboding death. Here the flowers mark a change in her character. She has seen cruel things that have killed the innocent little girl that she once was.
Not long after this speech, her body is found in a brook. The Queen goes into detail about her  “muddy death”: “Therewith fantastic garlands did she make/ Of crow flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples”(IV.vii 166-167). Ophelia sees her untimely death wreathed in flowers and many artists have depicted this scene with flowers all around the brook and on her clothes. Here death and flowers go hand in hand. It is a really romanticized image of death. It seem that
she got dressed up in flowers and went singing into the water and slowly submerged and drifted into the river Styx. Her innocent look at life is shattered and she brings those signifiers of death with her in this beautiful scene. My favorite line is, “Or like a creature native and indued/Unto that element.”(IV. vii 177-178). The Queen is saying that she willingly returns to the earth. This is fitting since her life was rifled with imagery of flowers and the earth in which they grow.
When they are burying her body, Laertes says “Lay her i’ th’ earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring!” (V.i 228-230) Even in her death, that was pretty obviously a suicide, people are extolling her virtues and comparing her to flowers. Laertes believes his sister to be the North Star, but it is fairly tarnished after all the events that have affected Ophelia. The Queen even says, “Sweets to the sweet! Farewell.” (V.i 234) and lays flowers on her grave. The flowers here are tellers of the death of sweet Ophelia. Even when her body is long rot and her name is forgotten there will still bloom flowers from her grave, signifying the death of something, anything. She will become meaningless but the flowers will become an eternal signifier of things long dead.

The word loss in the Oxford English dictionary is defined as “Perdition, ruin, destruction; the condition or fact of being ‘lost’, destroyed, or ruined.” Ophelia’s innocence and even though her loved ones that are left, try to encourage her virtue still being intact, that is also lost. At the end of the play her life is ruined, by her own hands, and her beauty is destroyed, for it is in the ground never to be seen again. And at every point there are flowers in the language and the imagery. Her father tells her to beware Hamlet and that he might steal her purity by using a metaphor of a flower. Right before she goes to the brook for an eternal rest, she gives flowers and herbs to the only people left in her life. Here she is seen as a mad woman, but she knows the inner feelings and turmoil’s of the bearers of the flowers. At her watery grave the Queen tells us of how she dies with flowers all around her and in her hair. Then at her earthly grave the Queen gives her body flowers to be buried with. The flowers are all foreshadowing something about an end.

Draft #1

Chesney Christner

Kristyn Leuner

Shakespeare for Non-Majors

ENGL 3000-200, Summer B-term

July 21, 2010

FLORES Draft

There on the pendent boughs her crownet weeds

Clamb’ring to hang, an envious silver broke,

When down her weedy trophies and herself

Fell in the weeping brook. (IV.vii 170-173)

These lines spoken by Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, are describing how the fair Ophelia died. It is one of the most memorable images of death in all of Shakespeare’s works. In our minds we see a beautiful, young woman floating in a brook with a crown of flowers atop her head drifting off to death. Ophelia in this play is always talking about flowers she mentions them at least seven times. Other characters also talk about flowers and for some reason they are never used in the way that we would think; blooming and signifying life. In Hamlet, flowers represent not life, but death and specifically with Ophelia the death of innocence.

Polonius, Ophelia’s father is talking to her about her virtue in regards to Hamlet, “Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes./ The canker galls the infants of the spring/Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, (I.iii 37-39) Polonius uses a metaphor of a flower to signify Ophelia’s virtue and how her innocence is threatened by the “canker”: Hamlet. He uses the language of a gardener because he has been the protector of her “garden” for years and here he is worried of Hamlets intentions. The hard sounds of “canker” and “calumnious” seem to attack, while “the infants of the spring” are much softer, further showing how Polonius is worried for her fragile virtue. This quote is foreshadowing Ophelia’s loss of innocence, although not in the way Polonius thinks.

Shakespeare contrasts Ophelia’s protected and intact virtue with that of Queen Gertrude’s defiled virtue. While the ghost of the king is talking to Hamlet about how he was killed he says “Leave her to heaven/ And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge/ To prick and sting her. (1.v 86-88). Here Hamlet senior tells Hamlet not to mess with the Queen because in Heaven she will be punished and to her own conscious. He uses a metaphor of thorns that represent her incestuous deeds that still haunt her. Instead of the full rose, as Ophelia’s virtue was, Gertrude only gets the bad parts of the rose, the thorns. “prick” and “sting” are again harsh sounding words foreshadowing her death. In this passage, innocence has long been dead with the queen.

During the play that Hamlet orchestrates, there is a dumb show which depicts the actions that  the King and Gertrude did. In it the king, “He lies upon a bank of flowers.”(III.ii) The queen then leaves and a different person comes in and while the King is sleeping, slips a poison into his ear. Here the fact that this all happens with a backdrop of flowers is important. When we think of a couple lying embraced on a bed of flowers, we think of love and romance, but here behind the disguise of love there is deceit and ultimately death. In this dumb show, we once again see flowers as the antithesis of what we have always thought them to be.

Another instance of Gertrude’s dead virtue is when Hamlet is yelling at her in her bed chamber, just after killing Polonius. He says

That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,

Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose

From the fair forehead of an innocent love,

And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows

As false as dicer’ oaths (III.iv 42-45)

Hamlet is talking about how Gertrude so soon after her husbands death married his brother. He uses such rich and intense language here to depict his disgust and rage at her actions. We see the image of a rose and then it is replaced with a blister. These are so different and evoke such different emotions. Rose here again represents her virtue and then the blister represents the loss of that virtue.

After the death of Polonius and the refusal from Hamlet and Laertes’s departure, Ophelia is left alone and with out all the men in her life and she goes mad. Her last speech, that isn’t a song, is where she distributes flowers and herbs to her brother, the Queen, the King, her dead father and herself. Each flower represents something, pansies and rosemary she gives to Laertes which both mean remembrance and thoughts. Perhaps she is telling him to think before he acts, because at this time him and Claudius are plotting to kill Hamlet. She gives fennel and columbines to Gertrude. Fennel means flattery or deceit and columbines mean infidelity, which both make sense. She gives rue to Claudius which means regret. Regret for killing his own brother. She also gives rue to herself, perhaps for what she is about to do.

Lastly she says, “I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say a made a good end. (112) Violets mean faithfulness, but they are all dead as is everyone’s faithfulness here in this scene. In this scene she doesn’t give out any happy flowers to anyone they are all reflecting the emotions of the people around her. Her words here are extremely somber and full of maddening remorse. It’s almost shocking to think that these people didn’t know she was off to kill herself. She is extolling these secret meanings to all of the people in the form of flowers. They’re all dark, personal meanings. Ophelia has shaken off her budding rose of virtue and is now dealing with regret and her foreboding death. Here the flowers mark a change in her character. She has seen cruel things that have killed the innocent little girl that she once was.

Not long after this speech, her body is found in a brook. The Queen goes into detail about her  “muddy death”: “Therewith fantastic garlands did she make/ Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples”(IV.vii 166-167). Ophelia sees her untimely death wreathed in flowers and many artists have depicted this scene with flowers all around the brook and on her clothes. Here death and flowers go hand in hand. It is a really romanticized image of death. It seem that she got dressed up in flowers and went singing into the water and slowly submerged and drifted into the river Styx. Her innocent look at life is shattered and she brings those signifiers of death with her in this beautiful scene. My favorite line is, “Or like a creature native and indued/Unto that element.”(IV. vii 177-178). The Queen is saying that she willingly returns to the earth. This is fitting since her life was rifled with imagery of flowers and the earth in which they grow.

When they are burying her body, Laertes says “Lay her i’ th’ earth, / And from her fair and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring!” (V.i 228-230) Even in her death, that was pretty obviously a suicide, people are extolling her virtues and comparing her to flowers. The Queen even says, “Sweets to the sweet! Farewell.” (V.i 234) and lays flowers on her grave. The flowers here are tellers of the death of sweet Ophelia. Even when her body is long rot and her name is forgotten there will still bloom flowers from her grave, signifying the death of something, anything. She will become meaningless but the flowers will become eternal.