26 April 2010

Friday 5 for April 23: The Bard (though I'm rolling late on this one!)

This week's Friday 5 honors Shakespeare's birthday! Fun for me because of all those collegiate-level courses... and my "Shakespeare's Contemporaries" seminar. You know, the one that gives you the major? That one.
Here we go!

1) In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander says,
“Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth…”
How has this proven (or not proven) to be the case in your life?
It never does.  In relationships, and even with the things I love to do.  Take sewing.  When I'm working on a project, I'll get so entranced in it that I'll forget to eat, or stay up until 4 in the morning fixing a mistake I made at 2am.  It's a battlefield.  But seeing that completed project, and getting to see (or not!) the life it has after me... that's love.  And it's not easy.

2) In Hamlet, the title character says, “Frailty, thy name is woman!” Who in your life has proven this not to be true? And if you’re willing to share, who in your life has proven this to be completely true?
Oh man, easy: I witnessed my friend, Kathy, give birth to her daughter, Illyanna.  The only drug she had was pitocin, which is a synthetic hormone.  No painkillers.  And twenty-six hours of labor.  Ain't nothin' frail about that.
As for someone who has proven it to be true... I'm not going to answer that one.

3) In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Pistol says,
“Why then the world’s mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.”
Ignoring the possible sexual meaning here, how do you feel about oysters?
Wow, yeah, that is dirty.
I love oysters, actually.  It kind of freaks me out how much I like them.  But between my ever-present love of seafood, and my dad's recent turn toward it, we've definitely split an oyster bar at one of the restaurants around here.  I'd love to do it again.  Damn, that was good.

4) In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo says,
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”
Do you agree, and have you known anyone who seemed to be completely unmoved by any kind of music?
I agree with my whole heart, and cannot abide by people who do not have wide-ranging and ever-changing tastes in music.  Those people bother me, and I don't really associate with them.

5) Is Shakespeare overrated, or is he truly the western world’s greatest writer?
This isn't an either/or question, really.  Yes, I think Shakespeare is a tad bit overrated, and no, he's not the western world's greatest writer.  I think that the fact that Shakespeare overshadows his contemporaries isn't fair.  Yeah, he did a lot more writing than most of them, but there are other good plays and written works from that period.  He's not the greatest writer in the western world, either, because other writers have had different impacts and affect people differently.

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