I’ve had kind of a hard time deciding what to focus my research on. I wanted to do it on something that really interests me, but everything I could think of was not specific enough. I was looking through my blog posts, and realized that my favorite ones were the ones where I applied my own love of creative writing to my study of Shakespeare.
I’ve been studying some of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in my English 291 class, and I’ve noticed that a lot of writers around that time tended to voice their personal opinions about what makes good writing. As I was thinking about that, it made me really curious to see whether Shakespeare himself made any statements about that.
I’ve decided that I’d like to research Shakespeare’s opinions about creative writing. If I can’t find personal statements from Shakespeare himself, I’m hoping to find scholars’ conclusions to that end from studies of his works. Then I’d like to do a close reading of one of Shakespeare’s works, and analyze how I think those views are applied in it, and what I think that adds to its effectiveness in various ways.
Hopefully the final step here will be for me to do some kind of creative writing work myself in which I try to apply the literary ideas I’ve learned from Shakespeare. Now, this whole idea is subject to change, but for now, that’s what I have.
I spent some time looking through the bibliography of our textbook, and searching online a little bit for books I could look up at the library to begin my research. These are the ones I’ve found so far, and am planning to look up this week
1) Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 60, #4. Winter 2009 (his views on life and everything)
2) “Shakespeare’s Ideas”, David Bevington (1 chapter on his ideas on writing)
3) absoluteshakespeare.com (trivia about his education)
Hopefully these will give me a good start, and I’ll be finding more soon!
