tutorials

Its the end of 5th week and I had two tutorials this time, one on Wednesday night, like always and one today at 3. I think one of my favorite things in Oxford are the tutors.

In my early english/renaissance lit tutorial I was reading John Webster (a revenge tragedist, contemporary of Shakespeare) this week, and I also read The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd to include it into my essay. Hmm..revenge tragedy. I don't think I like the body count at the end of the plays, it seems like a little to much for me, but I do understand why they did it. We talked about religious skepticism and moral relativism in The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil and compared it to other plays in that time, like Hamlet. We also talked about the characters and the authors and good stuff like that. We giggled for a while about how english majors are always having dialogue in the margins of the english faculty books and on the bathroom walls. :) It was probably the best tutorial I've had yet.

Then my Shakespeare tutorial was this afternoon and that went really well. My question this week was, "In A Mid Summer Nights Dream and Twelfth Night how much fun can be had watching someone be made a fool?". I read my essay and we, for some reason, started talking about Feste and wondered why he would have been present in an elizabethan court and not today. Why dont we have people like that? How is "courtly" life different now? How are governments different now? How are governments responsibilities different now? Then we got back on topic and discussed Shakespeare and how he has this weird understanding of cruel comedy. As well as love and violence. Why do we laugh when others look like fools? What causes laughter? How does Shakespeare employ those things in his comedies?

I will let you think about those things for yourself.

I told Jonathan Thorpe, my Shakespeare tutor, that I want to read all of Shakespeare over Christmas. He told me he would work on some questions and an order I should read the plays in for next time, and that I should be emailing him as I read over break. :)

Tomorrow I start on Sir Thomas Moore and As You Like It.