In the past few weeks, we have been mainly working on Hamlet. First we read through the play, which took forever, and then we began to watch different films to compare. The biggest impact reading Hamlet had on me was realizing how much ambiguity could be in one piece of literature. We've now read, discussed, and watched Hamlet a million (approximately) times, and I still have conflicting views over what actually happened and how things are supposed to be acted out. The three major relationships I can't explain are between Hamlet and Ophelia, Hamlet and his mother, and Hamlet and the deceased King Hamlet.
For homework we annotated Hamlet and two essays on Hamlet. Annotating it took a much shorter time than I originally imagined and I caught and understood many more of the jokes and hidden meanings the second time through. The two essays discussed some of the major disagreements about Hamlet, including whether the ghost is from Heaven or Hell. I thought this was slightly stupid because the ghost tells Hamlet that he is burned during the day to purge away his sins, so he is definitely not in Heaven. One interesting thing that was included was that Hamlet is based off of Amleth, a much older play.
In class, we watched the BBC version of Hamlet with David Tennant, the Olivier version, and the Branaugh version. I liked the one with David Tennant the most, mainly because I felt they added their own twist to it.
