The Revenger's Tragedy Reactions

About 22 hours ago, I finished The Revenger's Tragedy, my third and final book (well, play in this case) for my outside reading project. Before I give my thoughts on this play, there is one unusual thing about this play. That is the fact that the authorship of the play is unclear, in that there are two playwrights who are credited this play. While most critics credit the work to Thomas Middleton, some critics credit the play to Cyril Tourneur. This unclear authorship is something unique of this play that I wanted to point out.

Overall, I enjoyed the play. This is a straight forward revenge story, just like the master piece The Count of Monte Cristo. It is about a man named Vindice who is trying to avenge his lovers death by killing the Duke. He does everything to accomplish task, be it selling his sister into prostitution for the Duke's son or giving himself a fake identity to go by. In the end, Vindice does get revenge on the Duke, making it a "happy ending" for the play, even though the play ends with a massacre.

The fact that this story was a play had both its merits and demerits. Being it a play makes it slightly harder to read, but it makes the reading shorter in terms of page length. I believe if this play were a book instead, it would lose its appeal since the style of the play fit in well with the work as a whole. Unlike The Count of Monte Cristo, I believe this work does not need as much detail compared to Dumas' masterpiece.

If I get the chance, I would love to see The Revengers Tragedy actually played out. While it was exciting enough to read it on the pages, I know it would be overwhelming to see all the greed and killing be acted out right in front of my eyes.

As a end of a year field trip, I say we take the class to go watch the The Revengers Tragedy!

Reflection on Poetry

Since the poetry unit is soon approaching its end, I thought that I would blog once again about how I felt about poems, and if this unit has changed any of my thoughts towards the subject.

To make a long story short, I still do not enjoy poetry. A lot of the poetry is confusing, and I usually can not fully understand the poem. Additionally, the majority of the poems topics does not interest me. I would rather read an educational article that is full of information that would be useful to me.

While my attitude toward poetry did not change during this unit, I did discover one beautiful aspect of poetry that I was not aware of before. It is the rhyme scheme of the poems, which in other words is the sound aspect of the poem. I found the different patterns of stressing the syllables very interesting, since growing up with another language as a primary language that made my intonations different from the typical American. This unit helped me learn the stressing and unstressing in the English language. It also allowed me to appreciate the beauty of these poems, in that how two lines that do not rhyme with syllables instead rhyme with the stressing of the words in the line. I thank this unit for that.

I still do not understand poetry very well. I will not be able to identify conceits in the poem and completely understand it without more practice. However, now I understand (somewhat) how the sound works in a poem.  I did not really enjoy this unit (partly because of the poetry journals and MC practice), but I did enjoy the foot lesson.

College and Stuff

There is 6 more weeks, or 30 more days of school left until the seniors graduate. I know that these next 6 weeks will go by in a blink, and then I will be advancing onto the next level of education. I don't want to talk about poetry in this blog since I already wrote about it in my poetry response, so instead I decided to write about my next four years and plans for the summer.
For those of you that are not aware, I will be attending University of California, Berkeley starting August. I am planning to major in materials science and engineering, a discipline of science that combines aspects of physics and chemistry to synthesize new materials to continue improving technology. The MSE department is rather small at Berkeley compared to the other majors, so I get to enjoy both the large university feel that Berkeley has to offer with a concentrated group for my major.
This summer, I am planning to go back to Japan and spending about 6 weeks there. Hopefully, I get to experience my culture and help out with the country as much as I could. I plan to go volunteer in the northeast for the tsunami victims, and also backpack across Japan to further enhance my knowledge on my heritage.
I am really excited for this summer and Berkeley. However, I can't let senioritis get me too much since I need to maintain a B or higher in all my classes for Berkeley to not kick me out. I hope to finish the year out strong, enjoy the remaining 30 days of senior year, and then transition into the next stage of my life.