Shakespeare The Animated Tales: Julius Caesar 

 Similar to previous activities, state the plot of the play and what you think the themes developed by Shakespeare are. Give as many details as possible.

Why Read Plays?  by Edward Albee. 

The question is so absurd that we need not only answer it but find out why it's being asked as well. Most simply put: plays--the good ones, at any rate, the only ones that matter--are literature, and while they are accessible to most people through performance, they are complete experiences without it.

      Adjunctively, I was talking to a young conductor the other year whose orchestra was shortly to give the world premiere performance of a piece by a young composer whose work I admired. "Oh, I can't wait to hear it!" I said, and the conductor replied, "Well, why don't you? Why don't you read it?" And he offered to give me the orchestral score--to read and thereby hear. Alas, I do not read music. Music is a language, but it is foreign to me and I cannot translate. If I did know how to read music, however, I would be able to hear the piece before it was performed--moreover, in a performance uncolored, uninterpreted by the whims of performance. This is an extreme case, perhaps, for few nonmusicians can read music well enough to hear a score, but it raises provocative issues, including some parallelisms. Succinctly, anyone who knows how to read a play can see and hear a performance of it exactly as the playwright saw and heard it as he wrote it down, without the "help" of actors and director.

      Knowing how to read a play--learning how to read one--is not a complex or daunting matter. When you read a novel and the novelist describes a sunset to you, you do not merely read the words; you "see" what the words describe, and when the novelist puts down conversation, you silently "hear" what you read . . . automatically, without thinking about it. Why, then, should it be assumed that a play text presents problems far more difficult for the reader? Beyond the peculiar typesetting particular to a play, the procedures are the same; the acrobatics the mind performs are identical; the results need be no different. I was reading plays--Shakespeare, Chekhov--long before I began writing them; indeed, long before I saw my first serious play in performance. Was seeing these plays in performance a different experience than seeing them through reading them? Of course. Was it a more complete, more fulfilling experience? No, I don't think so.

      Naturally, the more I have seen and read plays over the years, the more adept I have become at translating the text into performance as I read. Still, I am convinced that the following is true: no performance can make a great play any better than it is, and most performances are inadequate either in that the minds at work are just not up to the task no matter how sincerely they try, or the stagers are aggressively interested in "interpretation" or "concept" with the result that our experience of the play, as an audience, is limited, is only partial.

      Further--and not oddly--performance can make a minor (or terrible) play seem a lot better than it is. Performance can also, of course, make a bad play seem even worse than it is. God help us all! When I am a judge of a playwriting contest I insist that I and the other judges read the plays in the contest even (especially!) if we have seen a performance. And how often my insistence results in the following: either "Wow! That play's a lot better than the performance I saw!" or "Wow! The director sure made that play seem a lot better than it is!"

      The problem is further compounded by the kind of theater we have today for the most part--a director's theater, where interpretation, rethinking, cutting, pasting, and even the rewriting of the author's text, often without the author's permission, are considered acceptable behavior. While we playwrights are delighted that our craft and art allows us double access to people interested in theater--through both text and performance--we become upset when that becomes a double-edged sword. I am convinced that in proper performance all should vanish--acting, direction, design, even writing--and we should be left with the author's intention uncluttered. The killer is the assumption that interpretation is on a level with creation.

      I'm not suggesting you should not see plays. There are a lot of swell productions, but keep in mind that production is an opinion, an interpretation, and unless you know the play on the page, the interpretation you're getting is secondhand and may differ significantly from the author's intentions. Of course, your reading of a play is also an opinion, an interpretation, but there are fewer hands (and minds) in the way of your engagement with the author. 

Article found on the web page http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=85

After reading the article, i would like you to answer the following question: If you had the chance to read or see a play, which would you do and why? Answer the question providing an explanation (7 sentences at least)

The tempest by William Shakespeare

Here you have an interesting rendition of this play, an animated and subtitled one.. After watching all 3 clips (It's not that hard, people - less than half an hour), write a summary of the play. Real simple, just like we've done it before. The only diference is you will post the summary based on what happens in each clip.  8 sentences for each one.

Later on i'll be uploding your plays and the feedback on your comments.

 

Shakespeare's Hamlet

Watch this clip about and state the main elements of the play. Which are they to you and why? 

DRAMA  AS  A  LITERARY  GENRE

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action", which is derived from the verb meaning "to do" or "to act". The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception. The early modern tragedy Hamlet (1601) by Shakespeare and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus the King (c. 429 BCE) by Sophocles are among the masterpieces of the art of drama. A modern example is Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill (1956).

The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. They are symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia and Melpomene. Thalia was the Muse of comedy (the laughing face), while Melpomene was the Muse of tragedy (the weeping face). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BCE)—the earliest work of dramatic theory.

The use of "drama" in the narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the 19th century. Drama in this sense refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example, Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1873) or Chekhov's Ivanov (1887). It is this narrow sense that the film and television industry and film studies adopted to describe "drama" as a genre within their respective media. "Radio drama" has been used in both senses—originally transmitted in a live performance, it has also been used to describe the more high-brow and serious end of the dramatic output of radio.

 

Info taken from the website Wikipedia 

 

 After reading this description of what drama is, how would you catalog the play you reanacted? Would you describe it as comedy, tragedy or somwhat in between? As usual, answer these questions providing an explanation as detailed as you can (10 sentences at least).

Something really helpful for everybody that comes across a poem.

Wacth this clip from the movie "Dead poet society" and answer this one question: So far, what will your verse be?

Watch this video and produce 10 sentences on why it is important for you to read.