Term Paper Ideas

I have a few ideas that I really thought were interesting and I'd like to think about a little bit more. The first one that I like the most, is how people choose to react to sorrow.  We talked about that mostly in Lear, but it is something we could also look at when talking about A Winter's Tale.  So I'm sure that's got to be a theme we could look at in some of his other plays as well.  I read a book a while ago called "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" which really delves into the different ways that people react to and deal with their sorrow and so when we talked about it a little bit in class it really caught my attention.

Another idea is that of identity.  It is so interesting in these plays how people are identified by themselves (like how they perceive themselves) and then how other people perceive them.  That is how we get the idea of who the character is.  But then we know that the characters' perceptions are affected by their own experiences and judgments.  So I think that we can learn a lot about how people in general gives themselves identity and how that identity changes when things come up in their lives.

Lastly, the effects that take place because of a choice.  Usually in his plays we see that the effects often make the character wish he would have chosen differently thus making him choose to do something next.  So there are a lot of choice leads to effect which leads to choice.  And since all of us have to make a million choices everyday, it makes his plays so relateable to everyone.

Some of the books I have not read yet but I would love to read are:

Hamlet (yeah, can you believe I haven't read or seen it?)
Othello
The Taming of the Shrew