Shakespeare for the Scared

"There are way too many girls in this class." Such was the thought that caused me to double check my schedule last winter semester to discover that I had in fact walked into the wrong class room for my Statistics for Scientists and Engineers class. A similar thought walking into my Shakespeare class did not yield the same results. As a senior in my final semester of mechanical engineering, it had been years since I'd been in a class with such a high girl to guy ratio. But I needed one more GE class to graduate, and a desire to be more culturally well-rounded led me to sign up for a Shakespeare class. As an engineering major, my college experience has been completely devoid of classes even remotely similar to this one. In fact, I rarely have classes that take me beyond the Clyde-Crabtree-Fletcher cluster. A class in the JFSB is a long way from home. I hark back to my AP Lang class in high school, where our teacher, an avid Shakespeare fan, had us memorize a sonnet and watch some adaptation of Hamlet after reading the play, searching for something familiar. Yep, that's about the extent of it. Wait, maybe we had a Shakespeare unit in my History of Creativity class? Okay, add that to the short list. As I venture into this brave new world of the arts, this blog is to record my thoughts and experience with learning Shakespeare this semester.