One of the texts we’re studying this year is Hamlet, yes the Hamlet written by Shakespeare. I know there are other Hamlet’s out there but in this case we’re looking at Shakespeare’s version. I’m finding it interesting how much Hamlet has made it into the movie and book world. If he were able to get royalties he’d be doing quite well.

I’m not a Shakespeare person, I find him really hard to study and understand. There are so many words I’m not familiar with and so many stories and meanings behind the words and phrases that I know nothing about. My teacher is doing her best but I’m still finding it a hard slog. To help us we’re watching many parts of the Kenneth Brannagh version of Hamlet filmed in 1996. It has a cast of stars including Dame Judy Dench, Richard Attenborough, Richard Briers as well as Gérard Depardieu in a minor role. I don’t know how he has the clout to get all these fabulous actors together in the one movie.

We’ve also seen a small part of Hamlet filmed in 1964 by Grigori Kozintsev. It’s in Russian with fairly decent subtitles. I’m going to have to get hold of it and watch the whole thing, it looked really good.

We’ve been given a mound of reading material by our teacher with essays on Hamlet by various people, most of whom I’ve never heard of. The one I’m reading right now is by Isaac Asimov and I’m finding that rather strange as he’s very well known for his science fiction and his essays on scientific subjects, I’d never heard of him writing about other subjects. It’s also well known that science type people have trouble with English literature, it’s nice to see this ‘fact’ blown out of the water by him. This is the fifth essay I’ve read about Hamlet and it’s the best by far. It gives a great deal of historical background, mentions Shakespeare’s anachronisms and basically helps me to pull the whole play together and understand it. I still plan on watching as many film versions as I have time for and read all the essays my teacher has given me but I now feel I have some kind of handle on it.

Studying as an adult with adult children is very interesting. Some nights during dinner we’ll be discussing my classes and something will pop out. We were talking about Hamlet a couple of nights ago, funny about that, and the eldest mentions a character in one of the Jasper Fforde books called Hamlet. Neither child could remember the name of the book, just that it’s in the Thursday Next series. Hello! Mr Google, put in the search string of “Thursday Next Jasper Fforde Hamlet’ and the first few links tell me the book is Something Rotten and it’s the fourth book in the series. Not only that, but I look at the picture and get elements of familiarity. Yes, I have it in stock. As soon as I finish Café Scheherazade I’ll dig it out to read, I’m curious to see how many elements of the character have been included.

I’ll probably write more about Hamlet at a later time, not that I feel I have any particular skills but more because I want to share my thoughts here and I guarantee I’ll have more thoughts later on. I might write about the different movies I’ve seen and compare different elements.

Moving away from Hamlet for a little. One of the books we’ve been studying is by Tobias Wolfe. This Boy’s Life is an autobiography/memoir of some parts of his childhood. I will be writing quite a lot about this as I want to share some of my homework with you. I don’t feel it’s particularly good, but it’s an excellent example of why you need to have an editor. I’ll probably do the whole thing over the course of a week as there are several elements to it and I don’t want one absolutely massive post. The first day will be discussion of the book itself including summary and a description of my feelings about it, the second will be the work we were meant to do, the third I’m planning on actually typing up my homework which was a creative response and a reflective commentary, I might put the reflective commentary in a different day with the final day a rewrite of my homework based on the comments by my teacher. Writing that makes me feel I’ve left something out. I think I really need to also put in a day detailing her comments, discussing them in the context of why it makes it a better story. This will be challenging as I still have to rewrite it, I know what I want to do I just have to do it. I know I only post Monday to Friday but if that turns out to be more than five days I might just go on into the weekend to finish.