Who suffered more: me or Hamlet?

      I mean, sure, his dad died and what not, but he didn't have to annotate himself. Which is what most of the last... six weeks has consisted of. Minus break, of course. I have to admit, I really struggled with this one. Although I picked up on some of the Shakespearean terminology, most of it still left me confused, which made annotating really difficult. I usually try to have a good variety of DIDLS and personal reactions to the story line, but I couldn't get into the play enough to have good reactions to most parts. As a result, my copy of the play is covered in many little purple "diction," "syntax," and "language" notes. Which I guess isn't completely terrible, considering the fact that pretty much everything we do involves DIDLS. The one thing that really helped me through parts of the play was Ms.Holmes' commenting during our first read. I never would have picked up on a lot of what she told us.
      Still on the topic of Hamlet, comparing the movies was a kind of relief for me. I happened to picture the play almost exactly as Branagh did, so when we watched Bennett's version (I hope that's the right director, it took a good ten minutes to find him on the internet), I felt like I got everything wrong. Even though we only watched parts of Branagh's version, it helped me a lot with grasping some of scenes I either missed when we read them or just didn't understand.
      The other thing we did with Hamlet that impacted me was the use of language sheet we did. I missed the first part of class that day, so I only answered a few of the questions, but even just that was helpful. I hadn't really thought of Hamlet's use of language as being intentional; I just thought he liked to show off his superiority. Going through some of the scenes and focusing just on how he used language helped me focus on that more when I annotated other scenes I thought he might be using his language intentionally. That definitely helped me get some more purple "language" notes written.
      Not related to Hamlet, we started doing mood and atmosphere practices, which has been a very interesting experience in 3rd hour. Although we sometimes don't really focus on mood or atmosphere, we get there eventually, so we do get some practice in. And we do it in a fun way, which makes it more meaningful for me. Reading the other hours' examples also helps me more with mood, because I'm more of a reader than a writer, so sometimes I get more out of reading their examples than writing mine.