With the global sharing objective in mind, I did a search on Icerocket for anything new or interesting concerning my individual play, The Merchant of Venice. And I stumbled across something really interesting! There's a Boston cycling blog that did a piece less that two weeks ago about drivers' actions towards cyclists and sharing the road. It's called The Bard and the Bike: A Plea for Tolerance. In the post, the author takes Shylock's famous speech about tolerance and antisemitism and rewrites it about having tolerance for cyclists. It's actually pretty good. 

This is Shylock's speech, done by Al Pacino:

And here is the blog's speech:

I am a Cyclist. Don’t Cyclists have places to be? Don’t Cyclists have friends, families,
engagements, jobs, appointments, obligations; aren’t we entitled to
the same rights, injured by the same collisions, subject
to the same laws, ticketed by the same police,
enduring the same weather and road conditions
as Drivers? If you cut us off, do we not seethe?
If you yield to us, do we not wave? If you run us over,
do we not die? And if you do not respect us on the road, shall we respect you?
If we are alike in all these other ways, we are alike in this way too.
If a Cyclist takes the lane, how do Drivers react?
With anger and aggression. If a Driver cuts off a Cyclist, what is
the driving force behind the Cyclist’s response? Aggression.
I will emulate the irresponsibility and indifference you teach me,
and take it to a whole new level – regardless of the consequences for you.

The whole post is really interesting. You can read it at the link above.

And since I recently made the car to bike transition (not by choice, my car died right before I moved up to Provo this summer) I felt like I could give some insights in the driver/cyclist relationship. If you go to the blog and scroll all the way down you can read my comment. It was essentially aimed at explaining how this speech fit into the rest of the play, with Shylock, the intolerant man, asking for tolerance. I simply encouraged them not to make Shylock and Antonio's mistakes, and to be a little more tolerant yourself before asking for other people to make way. 

There hasn't been a response yet, but I'll post about it as soon as I hear anything. Hopefully it'll be productive, I felt like I tried pretty hard to be considerate in my comment. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

For my local sharing objective, I decided to come up with a brief survey on some common misconceptions about Shakespeare and use it as a talking point. The questions are vague and can be argued either way, so my hope was that some of the people I harassed would challenge the questions and/or what I told them were the "right" answers. It worked pretty well. And I tried to work in my individual play as examples for why questions were true or false. The people who didn't care didn't ask for the answers, but those that did led to some good discussion.

So don't judge my flaky questions, they were conversation starters. Here's the survey and a tally of answers I got:

1. T / F Shakespeare wrote original masterpieces
   True:6  False:3
2. T / F Shakespeare was more concerned with crowd pleasing than making deep comments on society
   True:3  False:6
3. T / F Shakespeare’s plays tend to have a clear protagonist and antagonist
   True:6  False:3
4. T / F The best way to study a Shakespeare play is by renting the movie
   True:0  False:9
5. T / F Shakespeare was subject to the cultural views of his day, including racism and elitism
   True:5  False:4

And, when asked, here's the answers I gave:

1. False. In the Renaissance there was no such thing as copyright. Writers borrowed ideas and stories from each other and whoever wrote it best got credit. For obvious reasons, that tended to be Shakespeare. ex. Hamlet is based off an ancient Scandinavian tale, "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet" by Arthur Brooke was Romeo and Juliet's direct source.
2. True. There's not really a way to know his motives, but I lean towards true. All Shakespeare's play are comments on society, but his main audience was the common man. He brought his plays down to the groundling's level with cheap jokes.
3. False. I used Shylock from my play, The Merchant of Venice, as an example for this. His character's are always more complex than just good or bad. The ones who may seem to be the antagonist tend to have bad motives and there's always that moment where you sympathize with the bad guy.
4. True. Shakespeare never meant for his plays to be read. They weren't published for the first time until 7 years after his death. He intended for his plays to be performed, and it is much easier to get the theme and feel of a play from experiencing it than reading it.
5. False. While Shakespeare included the racial and elitist stereotypes of the day in his plays, he almost always goes against expectations. The clowns and low men always seem to know what's going on while the royalty run around with their heads cut off and kill each other. In Merchant of Venice his Christian audience would have instinctually disliked the Jew. But Shakespeare gives Shylock a famous speech that speaks strongly prejudice. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" "If you prick me I will bleed."

Obviously there are some faults in my questioning. And all the arguments are true, but they don't exactly match up with the questions. The funnest part of this assignment was seeing how many people just took my word for it, and who thought about it a little more and challenged what I told them. There was one guy I met, let's call him Joe, who seemed pretty interested in what I had to say and came up with some awesome comments. I guess I should have seen it coming when I interrupted him reading The Aeneid in the CougarEat. Here's as close as I can remember of what Joe said to my answers:

1. Every author has sources and influences.  The way they put the work together makes it their own original. (A good point, although I would argue that most authors today don't use plagiarism as a literary tool)
2. There are specific things in plays meant for royalty, so it wasn't all for commoners (He did, however, consent that I was right on more general terms)
3. Many of them do, but not all (More of a comment on my questioning skills I guess..)
4. When I explained my reasoning to Joe, he agreed that, other than actually going to a play, watching a movie is the best way to go. (I, in turn, argued that movies are much more convenient and easily available than a production of whatever play you happen to be studying.)
5. He had to be subject to them in some degree because he wrote about them (On this one I think we ended up agreeing that Shakespeare was subject to these views in the sense that he understood them, but was able to look past them enough to invert stereotypes and make a point.)

So there you go! I shared Shakespeare with my community! Talking to people about what I'm learning was actually pretty fun. I got the chance to see just how well I could articulate the ideas that have been forming in my head all semester, and I got to see some other people's perspectives as well. Although I have to say, the hardest part about this was probably just sucking it up and walking up to a stranger to ask for their opinion. But it feels like a good learning experience. And somebody out there knows just a little bit more about Shakespeare because of me.

I searched the vast expanse of knowledge and truth known as the internet and came up with some pretty interesting things people were saying about the two focuses I ended up taking with Merchant of Venice: is Shylock the villain or victim?, and animal imagery.  On the topic of Shylock, I stumbled across a "Yahoo!Answers" question which posed the same idea. Although the questioner there seems to come to the conclusion that he is the victim, the commenters all have good points. Specifically, one answer suggests that Shakespeare is a product of his time and we should not try to impose our moral views on him. I also found a discussion board where one user suggests that he is simply both. After making a case for both sides, he says:

"You can make a case either way. For me, I'd argue that he's both at once: though like the Wittgenstein duck/rabbit, at any one moment he seems one or the other."

For animal imagery, a blog post gave me a little better perspective of Shakespeare's using animals as every day images by comparing it to things we say today such as:

"Like a deer caught in headlights"-Surprised look.

"There is more than two ways to skin a catfish"-There is more than two ways to do something.

I also found reference to animal imagery in Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. So it seems like I was correct in assuming that Shakespeare relies heavily on it in many of his works.

So what does any of this have to do with me? 

Well like I said before, I'm newly exploring the idea of working with wildlife for the rest of my life. So my mind has been on animals for a while now. The idea of how animals and humans relate to each other and animals can portray human emotions and actions is fascinating to me. And for Shylock.. at the beginning of the year I posted about needing to find my self, and looking for characters with unsure identities. Shylock seems to fit this better than any other Shakespeare character. It is unsure on what side of our emotions he should be, whether pitied or hated, and his identity as a Jew is taken away from him when Antonio says he must become Christian or lose everything he owns. I don't think anyone could feel more confused with their identity than that..

Until next time, Hakuna Mutata:)