Today I will not be embarking on a delightful critique of the complaints on the back of the Flor-Ala due to the fact that I did not pick up a copy of the Flor-Ala. Yes, I know, what is the world coming to. No doubt, Dr. Brewton enjoyed his morning of quiet without me plinking on the piano in Lafayette.
For my part, I would have been able to sleep in for once this morning due to the happy cancellation for the day of one class, but NOOOOOO. Elaine, my sister, who is always one of the first in the family to know anything (in stark contrast to me, always the last in the family to know anything), did not know that I only had one class today and so at 7:00 she banged on my door. It went like this:
"Elyse?"
*annoyed* "...Yeah?"
"Are you awake?"
"Obviously."
I had to explain to her that I didn't have to leave by 7:15 as usual. She was a bit defensive. "I didn't know!" etc. Sheesh... the ONE time I forget to set my alarm and still manage to leave on time, and she never lets me forget it... the same thing with Peter... never lets me forget the one time I was late to piano lessons.
Today we wrote our analytical essays in English. I wasn't very worried about it to begin with, but once I started writing I realized, "Hey! This is what I did all the time in high school with Shakespeare!" So after that it proceeded rather well. Yes, I did have to write analyses of Shakespeare's plays in high school and they were great fun. That was due to the fact that I proceeded to bash Shakespeare and his characters in every way possible- in every logical way possible, I suppose. Even Audrey agrees that Romeo and Juliet is an incredibly stupid play. Put it this way: I only liked one character per play, pretty much. You can tell what kind of person I am by the characters I liked. Feel free to go look them up: Kent from King Lear, Ariel from The Tempest (and he is a guy, despite later directors and Disney), that one dude who does the 'all the world's a stage' spiel from As You Like It, and pretty much no one from Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet. (Though I am fond of the, "I am a grave man," line.)
In A Midsummer Night's Dream (by the way, is it midsummer's night or midsummer night's? I never can remember), I don't know why, but I was rather fond of Oberon. Just because Oberon is an awesome name. It comes from Alberich, which is a Germanic name meaning pretty much 'elf king', and which was Frenchified into Oberon, which, nevertheless, is still an awesome name. Titania isn't a bad name, either. Puck... well, he had a few good lines. Nevertheless, the whole play is stupid with a capital S, T, U, P, I, D. Words cannot begin to plumb the fathomless depths of its stupidity. I mean, it goes like this: "The elf king and queen are fighting over some mortal kid they want to adopt. Meanwhile, some Greek dude wants his daughter to marry some guy or he will kill her or force her to be an ancient Greek nun, but she runs off with some other dude. Meanwhile, her BFF tells the rejected suitor, whom she herself has a crush on, and they run into the forest after the other two. Oberon and Puck attempt to help the situation with a magical love potion-y flower but only cause more chaos. Meanwhile, some random craftsmen practice for a play and one of them gets a donkey head. In the end everything gets straightened out but the mortals don't even remember it. Oh, and Oberon gets the mortal kid. The end."
Yep, pretty much.
Romeo and Juliet is even worse. Romeo is depressed because the girl he had a crush on didn't like him and joined a convent rather than marry him. His friend Mercutio suggests gate-crashing Capulet's party to cheer him up. They gate-crash the party, Romeo meets Juliet (and doesn't even know who she is at first), is instantly infatuated, and marries her the next afternoon. The next thing he does is kill her cousin for killing his friend, gets exiled to Padua, and has the nerve to complain that his life is in shambles and that he wishes he were dead after the duke/leader person/whoever showed him mercy in not condemning him to dead. The friar tells Romeo pretty much, "Get a hold of yourself, man!" So off to Padua he goes. Meanwhile, Juliet is depressed so her parents decide to cheer her up by marrying her off to the duke dude's brother, Paris. (A dude named Paris. Seriously. But after all Paris was a guy in Greek mythology, even if a very stupid, wimpy guy. I liked Hector, but I hate Paris! And GUESS who played him in Troy? Yup. To add to the insanity, Boromir/Sean Bean was Odysseus. LOL.) Anyway, Juliet runs off to the friar who gives her a potion that will make her seem dead to get out of the wedding. I don't know how Juliet gets away without being embalmed, but whatever, they put her in the family mausoleum. Romeo meanwhile hears of it, buys poison (illegally, I do believe), runs back to Verona, kills Paris who was throwing flowers at Juliet's grave (seriously...), drinks the poison and dies. Juliet wakes up and finds his dead body. The friar offers to take her to a convent, but she stabs herself with Romeo's dagger and dies. The families arrive in the cemetary with the news that Romeo's mother has died. The dads are like, "Okay, let's be friends." The End.
Yup... And this is considered a classic. It has come to my attention that what are commonly held as classics are not usually as good as you are always told they are. While I'm thinking of it, never bother reading The Red Badge of Courage unless you like being confused, and being confused by psychology at that. And The Virginian is pathetic. It has far too many climaxes and drags on. I was halfway through it and thinking, "Man, is this thing ever going to end?" I could go on and on...
I'm not real sure how I got on this topic. That's probably a good sign I should get off it.
In Pace Christi,
Elyse
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