Due: First version in class on Wednesday April 17; Final version on Monday April 29.
Instructions: Three to four pages long. See Paper Standards on syllabus for details about the formatting of your paper.
This essay has two parts:
For Part 1: Pick a passage from either The Tempest, Merry Wives of Windsor or Twelfth Night of around 10 to 20 lines maximum that you think presents interesting possibilities for interpretation. These possibilities might be uncertainty of motives, of morality, of meaning, or of broader significance. Choose carefully, since the success of your paper starts with a good pick. Look for passages that are rich in all these uncertainties–that is, in interpretive possibilities. Read that passage in as great detail as possible, and, in the first part of your essay, note the uncertainty or uncertainties, and how you would interpret them. This section should be about a page to a page and a half.
For Part 2: Explain how you would convey your interpretation(s) in part 1 through the performance of those lines. You can consider all the possibilities for performance outlined below. Because this performance is only being described, note that you are not limited by the kind of material constraints that we find with in-class performance (“I don’t have a gladiator costume in my closet”). On the other hand, do imagine yourself limited in the ordinary way a theater director might be, e.g. you can’t have a real airplane land on stage. You do not have to set the performance in either the time/place of the play’s text or in Shakespeare’s time/place, if you think you have a good reason to set it at a different time/place
Evaluation of this paper:
- Precision and insight of the interpretation of the lines in Part 1
- Effectiveness of communicating the insights of Part 1 through performance in Part 2
- Creativity and interest of the performance imagined in Part 2
- Excellent writing at the level of the sentence.
Some Performance Categories to think about:
- thesis: what important idea(s) about the play does the performance convey?
- tone: emotional mood of the play (also used to talk about emotional mood in stories or poems)
- blocking: relationship of bodies to one another on stage
- physical body type of actors: how used to convey something about the character, or his/her relationship to other characters
- setting: where and when the performance is set (also used to describe where and when stories take place)
- props: objects on stage. How are they used? What tone or idea about the play do they convey?
- costume: what the characters are wearing. How do these convey tone or thesis regarding the play or its characters?
- delivery of lines: how does the voice convey the tone of lines or ideas in them?
- special effects: lighting, sound. How do these convey tone or idea about the play?
Sample Essay[gview file=”https://robertmatz.com/mason/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/performance-sample-essay.doc” profile=”3″ save=”1″]