Shakespeare Symposium

So let's be real, I didn't think Shakespeare had a whole lot to do with my paper (Gender roles in Harry Potter), but I was pleasantly surprised and proven wrong. However, the Symposium schedule was not ideal for Sage's schedule. I work until noon, and then I have classes starting at one and so things were looking a smidgen bleak. Nothing was going to work, but sitting around crying about how much my life (and schedule) stinks wasn't going to solve any of my problems.

So I put on my big girl pants and made something work. There weren't a lot of options for me time-wise, but I noticed that the Shakespeare session started at 12:15, so I begged and pleaded with by boss and she let me leave a few minutes early.



There were three presenters, and the first presented her paper about different adaptations of Shakespeare's plays and whether or not changing the actual language impacted the way the plays were understood. Her presentation was probably the most entertaining to watch/listen to, and she brought up a few points that related to a few things I've been thinking about in regards to Harry Potter, such as why modern language is so relate-able (making stories sell better and get higher reader retention).

Warning....Venting moment: there was a part during her presentation where she mentioned that Shakespeare had been translated into ASL, and that the direct translation was composed of a jumble of broken sentences with random words, but that the meaning was still apparent. She told us that she did not know ASL, but she wanted to read the translation as it would be translated back into English. As she was speaking, one of the girls near the front started trying to do the actual signs, and totally distracted the presenter from her paper and distracted the audience from the presenter. I felt the need to get up and duct tape her hands together. I didn't do that, but I did do this:

Quiet Sage-Rage

The second presenter's paper was extremely well-written, and delved into portions of Hamlet that I had never considered before. His presentation focused on the role of Ophelia, and how because of her gender, she was often treated like a puppet by her father and other male counterparts. I was pleasantly surprised at how much this related to the research I had been doing on my own paper. I had never realized that Ophelia could be considered a mermaid, expected to be in her world and in man's world at the same time - hovering between two realities. This has a lot to do with the idea that J.K. Rowling was expected to write like a man to be more appealing to a male audience, while maintaining her femininity and appeal to females at the same time. I believe that J.K. Rowling used the role of Hermione to show this in her actual writing, too.

The third presenter (I will admit) was a tad hard for me to pay attention to because I was thinking so much about the second presenter's paper. Oops. She did have a few good points in her analyzing King Henry's hypocrisy, but I didn't gather a whole lot of ideas from this. All in all, I learned a lot from attending this session, and I was able to consider pathways that I hadn't considered previously for my paper.