For our first round of reviews for March, we looked at the theme of Languages and Literature and got a little bit Shakespearean.
Just a little bit. Not to the extent of actually reading Shakespeare, but by looking at a couple of books that nod in his direction.
Tasch read Virginia Woolf's classic extended essay A Room of One's Own, which uses Shakespeare's (not entirely real) sister to explore issues faced by women in a male-dominated society. Sharon played Hamlet (and Ophelia, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Dad) in a book that starts with Shakespeare's original play, and then goes all over the place.
What are you reading for the 2019 Reading Challenge?
Just a little bit. Not to the extent of actually reading Shakespeare, but by looking at a couple of books that nod in his direction.
Tasch read Virginia Woolf's classic extended essay A Room of One's Own, which uses Shakespeare's (not entirely real) sister to explore issues faced by women in a male-dominated society. Sharon played Hamlet (and Ophelia, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Dad) in a book that starts with Shakespeare's original play, and then goes all over the place.
What are you reading for the 2019 Reading Challenge?
Natascha Kucurs read A
Room of One’s Own by Virginia
Woolf
If you are
in the market for a light read then this is definitely not the book for you. A Room of One’s Own, written in 1929,
explores aspects of gender equality through the lens of female fiction; it
considers both the portrayal of females in works of fiction and the role of
female as author. The extended essay based upon lecturers by Woolf at two
Cambridge women’s colleges is written through the eyes of a fictional narrator
Judith Shakespeare.
Judith, as
her name suggests, is sibling of the famous, William Shakespeare. Woolf argues
that the freedoms afforded to Shakespeare and those that share/d his gender - including access to education, time, space, legal privilege and financial
stability - provide the necessary environment for beneficiaries to think, read
and develop as intellectuals. In contrast, we find Judith’s story (and those of
her sisters) bound to an existence of servitude and lack of privilege in which
no such dreams of intellectual excellence will ever be realised. Unless, of
course, they happen to find themselves with a room of one’s own.
An
interesting read while the thoughts of International Women’s Day are still
fresh in our minds.
Non-fiction(ish), 820 WOO.
Sharon
Bryan read To Be or Not to Be: A Choosable Path Adventure, by Ryan North, William Shakespeare and You.
This book is brilliant. Just straight up,
undeniably brilliant. It takes the story of Hamlet and turns it into a Choose Your Own Adventure style romp.
You pick a character at the beginning of the book and follow their path through
a variety of possible adventures and endings that will lead you to some
familiar places (if you know the play) but also some very unfamiliar places.
You can play as Hamlet, Ophelia or Hamlet
Sr (the Ghost), and there are dozens of choices you can make as each. As
Hamlet, you can choose the follow the play as Bill Shakespeare originally wrote
it (boring!) or you can go off on a wild tangent and run away and become a
pirate. As Hamlet Sr and Ophelia you will find it next to impossible to follow the
original play.
No matter how often I played the book as
Ophelia, I could never find a path where she went mad and killed herself. You could play it so she faked her own death,
ran off and became a highly trained assassin, which you must admit is much
better. If you read Hamlet’s options in the book closely, there is an
implication in his story lines that this is what happened to Ophelia, too. In
fact, if you read the original Shakespearean play carefully, there’s no reason
why you should assume this didn’t happen. We don’t see Ophelia die, after all,
(Gertrude tells us what happened – but she might be lying) and while Laertes
and Hamlet have a punch-up in her grave as she’s allegedly being buried, we never see her body…
Just saying, is all.
Fiction, c820.71 NOR
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