1. Gain Shakespeare Literacy
Breadth: We read a few works together as a class which expanded by breadth of Shakespeare understanding, though I feel the majority of my breadth actually came from reading other people's blog posts and research papers. Actually, before reading a research paper on a play I hadn't read I usually looked up the sparknote or Wikipedia summary quickly beforehand, skimming through it so I wasn't going in totally blind. It didn't take a ton of effort, but I actually ended up learning a lot from it.
Depth: I definitely have a thorough knowledge of The Winter's Tale now after reading it, seeing a performance of it, and writing my research paper on it. I also feel that I have a thorough understanding of Henry V now. Part of that is the result of reading it for this class and watching the movie with my sister who has an obsession with Kenneth Branagh, but it also conveniently coincided with two of my theater classes. I had to see the BYU production of Henry V,read the script for it, and write two papers on it for the theater classes. Also, there were multiple people in the class that wrote in reference to that play and I watched and tried to help as their papers developed. Actually, I'll be honest and say I don't think I want to watch Henry V again for a very very long time...
Performance: I actually already had a fair amount of performance background in Shakespeare before coming to the class, having been in multiple productions as an actress. Going to see productions though, rather than being in them, definitely gave me a new perspective. Also, I had seen movie productions of Shakespeares before, but before this class I feel my brain was pretty occupied by just following the plot. Now that I'm more familiarized it wasn't as difficult to follow the plot which enabled me to really start analyzing the movies. Talking about the movies in class helped with that a lot - the other students would bring up all sorts of things that I hadn't noticed.
Legacy: It was definitely beneficial to take this class at the same time as my theater history class. I got to look at Shakespeare within the context of Elizabethan theater, the theater that predated it, and the theater that followed it. This class also had a heavy social basis - I discovered when talking with friends/peers about this class how prevalent Shakespeare is in pop culture. Even people who had never read or seen any of his works could spit out famous Shakespeare quotes.
Analyze Shakespeare Critically: I definitely got some experience analyzing Shakespeare on a textual level, we had some posts on that and I also tried to incorporate analyzing the primary text in my final paper. I got some contextual experience with Shakespeare as well - thanks to a large degree to Lizy's paper :) A new and huge facet to analyzing Shakespeare for this class was through digital means: digital dialog, blogs, goodreads and other online communities etc. That took some getting used to for me, and I'm sure I'm still not fully digitally literate but I'm a whole lot further than I was at the beginning of this class. I'm not exactly a computer person so this wasn't an entirely enjoyable aspect of the class for me, but I know it was a good thing and I'm slightly less afraid of the internet now... In terms of literary lenses, I definitely looked at his work through the lens of feminism, especially when we were reading The Taming of the Shrew.
Engage Shakespeare Creatively: So I'm going to be honest: I was sadly disappointed at the lack of creative opportunity in this class. I definitely got that through the sonnet and I loved that. That was probably my favorite part of the whole semester. I guess I was just hoping we would do more creative projects like that/group performances etc. Granted, this is coming from an actress...
Share Shakespeare Meaningfully: I'll hopefully be able to do this through my research paper - I ended up changing my thesis last minute so I'm a little behind and haven't submitted it to be published, but once the paper is fully finished I plan on doing that. I definitely got to share Shakespeare via this blog and digital dialog, and through other online communities I started looking at when I started my research paper. Most fun for me was sharing just through conversation. My sister is quite the reader so I think she was ecstatic to have someone to analyze Shakespeare with, my friends who were in Shakespeare productions with me in the past and were in the recent BYU productions were excited to talk with me, and my theater professors even talked to me about Shakespeare!
Gain Digital Literacy: So... I hate computers. I'm the type of person that still brings a pen and paper to all her classes. With that said, I wasn't a huge fan of the whole "digital literacy" thing, but it was definitely beneficial. A digital medium allowed me to be able to communicate with enthusiasts and experts who I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. I read a lot of my information for my research paper online, was able to post on blogs/forums, and e-mail others from online Shakespeare communities.
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