the slaves of chance and flies of every wind that blows.

I have been reading The Winter's Tale this week, and I absolutely love it. I went in to this play not knowing anything about it, which, i think, aided my imagination and I was really able to get in to the minds and actions of the characters, as well as really visualize the setting of the different acts and scenes.

There are a few things I noticed right off that I wanted to pursue further, so I'll just list them off here, and get to them later, either in this post or another.

• First off, TWT was mentioned by Bevington as being the best example of Shakespeare's genre tragicomedy. After reading the whole play, I was able to see why it was named so: the first half was definitely tragic, while the second half was full of love and forgiveness. What's interesting is that the play was set up in a very stark contrast between the two emotions, rather than mixing the two, as is done very frequently in even Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, they will mix all sorts of emotions without a very clear-cut scene for each emotion. Example, Hamlet; you get wit and comedy swirled in here and there even though the whole over-arching theme is very traumatic and disturbing.
• TWT boasts to have the most unique stage direction of any Shakespeare play, that being "Exit, pursued by a bear." This made me wonder how many productions of this play really did stage a live bear, as the Bevington intro indicates. That certainly would cause a scene.
• TWT has a significant amount of prose, more so than any other Shakespeare play I've read, other than The Tempest, which I wonder, and know, there has to be some reason Shakespeare turned toward the more natural speech of man during his last years. 
• TWT is obviously set in a pre-Christian world. The play is very consistent in referring to the Roman gods that were so highly favoured, as well as the oracle at Delphi. However, I did notice one reference of a chapel in act 3, scene 2. In my mind, chapel refers to Christianity, so I'm very curious...was this word ever used in describing temples of the Roman gods? Or did Shakespeare use chapel because he knew his audience would be more familiar with that term? I could just be fixating on a small detail, but it did made me wonder enough to note it here.
• There is a fair deal of mentioning the improbability of such stories as TWT within the play. It's almost like Shakespeare is making a commentary of the silliness of fantastical tales that he himself is so expert at weaving. 
• In act 4, scene 4 there is a reference to BOWLING! I was curious about how the game has changed since Shakespeare's time.
• And finally, Queen Hermione...why did Shakespeare fool the audience in to thinking she had died? Or did she really die and Paulina was a sorceress who brought the statue of Hermione to life at the end of the play so she could offer a blessing to her daughter and forgive her husband Leontes? Either way, Bevington, once again, was right in saying that Shakespeare used "a kind of trickery found in no other Shakespearean play." 

Hopefully, during this three-day weekend, I can address most of these questions I have brought up to myself.

coz rosalind.

Yesterday I tried a different approach to getting acquainted with As You Like It: instead of reading the play first then watching a film adaptation of it, I watched the film first, and now I'm working on reading the text. This helped introduce the story line, especially since I am totally unfamiliar with the play, other than the "All the world's a stage" speech.

I watched the 1936 version with Lawrence Olivier, and it was pretty decent. But first off, the actress playing Rosalind seemed too sweet. Like I said before, I have had no previous experience with As You Like It but I knew well enough that Rosalind was much too sweet and soft-spoken. Then once she got into the character of Ganymede, that's when she really came out of her shell and became that strong, confident woman that I had read about in the Bevington introduction. This made me wonder if this transformation from sweet to strong is a convention of the character of Rosalind, or if that's just how it happened to turn out in the film.
As I read the text, I'm going to pay careful attention to if there is any indicator of this transformation in Rosalind's speech. Also I will be watching the 2006 version of As You Like It directed by Kenneth Branagh and then compare Rosalind from all three angles.

o henry.

Well I began my reading of Henry the Fourth Part One. To get situated historically, I visited Wikipedia to get the brief rundown of the Plantagenet lineage. That helped a bit, and it will help to keep referencing back to short histories of the time of these monarchs. I also read the introduction before the play, and that really just set up what was to follow.

Since yesterday, I've only read the first two acts of the play, but that was enough for me to see a few differences from Hamlet. First off, the characters in Hamlet weren't nearly as confusing as in Henry IV. Because of the confusion and the who's-against-the-king thing in Henry I have made a little card with the characters' names and allegiances on them so I don't have to keep flipping back to the front page of the play. Secondly it seems that there are lengthier speeches for any given character in Henry. Perhaps in Hamlet no one had the patience to listen to long speeches, unless it was an individual offering a soliloquy to themselves. And lastly, this may not be so much a difference as me just noticing more, but I found myself having to refer more often to the footnotes during the dialogue between the two Carriers in act two scene one. Their speech patterns are by far very different from the more "sophisticated" usage of the royalty and upper-class characters of the play. If it weren't for the glosses, I'm afraid I wouldn't have the slightest clue of what they were talking about.
Well, so far so good.