Feminism Throughout Time

In our last humanities class for sophomore year, Drama, we read Henrick Ibsen's "A Dolls House." We read this in the same format as we did with Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew." We would read an act or a scene and then have a quiz on the play. Once we were finished with the play, we watched the movie version of "A Dolls House." I really liked the movie and thought it stayed very true to the play. It was almost word for word. I enjoyed "A Dolls House" a lot. It was shorter than "The Taming of the Shrew," and the language was much easier to understand. I thought maybe we should have read "A Dolls House" First to get used to reading scripts, and then gone onto "The Taming of the Shrew" which was more difficult to read."A Doll's House" takes place in the late 1800s in Norway. It is about a woman who is controlled by her husband and keeps a secret from him. He then finds out the secret and is upset, but after learning it would be ok, he forgives her. This causes her to see how badly he treats her and she leaves him. For this unit, we went to the Goodman Theater in Chicago to get a tour of their stage, and then to work on our plays with some of their staff. I thought these field experiences were helpful, but not very fun. For this action project, we were randomly paired up. I was paired with IF and ZG. You can see their blogs here and here. We had to write a script discussing feminism throughout different times. This was a daunting task, but with 2 other people, it was fairly straightforward. We then filmed up acting out the play.

In the end, I liked this project. It was very daunting at first, but with partners, it was fairly easy to split up the work so we were not overwhelmed. I liked the creative process of writing the play, and it was also very fun to act out the play. The most difficult part was to get good lighting and audio in the video. I am happy with how this turned out, and I really liked the action projects in Drama.

Is Kate Really a Shrew?

In Drama, our 3rd sophomore humanities class, we read Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew." I have never read this play, and it was a lot better than I thought it would be. We read an online version and all picked out parts and read each act and scene. After each scene, we took a test. I liked this format of picking the roles and reading the play. We discussed the gender roles of the play and the patriarchal society at the time, as the play takes place in Italy in the 1500's. We were asked to write down words that we do not recognize throughout the play. We then would define them and put them into our glossary. For this AP, we had to write a sonnet about a character. We looked at different sonnets that Shakespeare wrote. A sonnet is a kind of poem that follows these specific guidelines: It has to have 14 lines, 10 syllables for each line and has 3 quartets or stanzas of 4 lines, and a rhyming couplet at the end, which is 2 lines that rhyme at the end. A sonnet also follows the iambic pentameter or a rhyme scheme. This says that either every other line rhymes or the 2 in the middle and the 2 on the ends rhyme. I chose to do it the second way, mostly because that was how my first lines came out, and you have to stick with the same rhyme scheme through the whole sonnet. I decided to write to Kate, one of the main characters in the play who is being tamed by her husband. I wanted to tell her that she should not let him push her around and that she was fine the way she was behaving.I thought that it was wrong that Petruchio (Kate's husband) was manipulating Kate and telling her that she was wrong about everything. This just shows how much of a patriarchal society everyone was living in.

Here is a video of me performing my Sonnet

Here is the sonnet. The bold words are my vocabulary words. The quote is one I found in the play.

Dearest Kate, I have heard of your story.

I understand your situation well.

You were a shrewish wench straight out of hell.

Being sassy, you were in your glory.

Petruchio is not a gentleman.

There was nothing wrong with the way you talked.

You were so strong and sure, everyone gawked.

He only wants you to be feminine.

You should not have let him be a rudesby.

He only wants to manipulate you.

You should not have let him take your mind too 

"By this reck’ning, he is more shrew than she.”

Prithee, do not let him beguile you too.

For Petruchio wants to tame a shrew.

In the end, I liked this action project. I was very unsure about poetry, as I am usually not very good, but I found this kind of poetry to be fun and fairly simple. I liked having to find words that rhyme, and also having to use our own vocabulary words. I think my biggest challenge was starting to write the sonnet. This was because I doubted myself in what I could do, but once I got the first few lines, I was able to do the rest pretty easily. I am most proud of how the poem came out, and how I tied in all the words to make it sound nice.