Phase 2--Digital Media

A list of some digital media I found concerning my research:

• Shakespeare Explorations with Patrick Stewart: Merchant of Venice
• This is the DVD I used for the Performance Analysis post. Basically it is a video of several scenes acted out from The Merchant of Venice, and then some commentary on the background of those scenes. A little unconventional, but it helped me understand the deeper issues involved with antisemitism. 
• Audio version of Merchant of Venice (and Hamlet, too)
• Inspired by our listening to Hamlet (which was also helpful since I'll probably do a part in my paper about Hamlet as well as MofV), I found an audio version of The Merchant of Venice and listened to that. It was good just to hear the play again, get the plot, characters, important quotes, etc. into my mind again. I picked a lot of the most passionately-read quotes to analyze for my research just because they stuck in my memory better after hearing them. 
• Shakespeare in Shelfari--1996 film version of Hamlet.
• I had never heard of Shelfari before, but apparently you can look up any book you want (I looked up Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, and Othello) and it gives you all kinds of information about it--character list, themes and symbolism, summary, quotes, authors and contributors, even a note to parents about the subject material. This is a good starting point to get first ideas for a paper. The most helpful thing here, though, was the list of media connections for each play I looked up. Hamlet, for example, has several film versions, and I got the 1996 version from Netflix and watched it.
• Merchant of Venice on Slideshare.net
• You can look up anything on Slideshare! I simply searched for "Shakespeare merchant of venice" and there were tons of great results. There was a slideshow giving some background to the play, another giving a short summary, another discussing a few themes of the play and their relevance during the Renaissance. They even had one that was a slideshow of the entire written play, meaning that you can just read it right there instead of trying to find a version somewhere else online or in print. This site is great because I can do pretty much all of my preliminary research on it instead of going to a ton of different places to find basic information about the play.
• Random blogs about Shakespeare and Christianity.
• I wrote about a lot of these in my other posts, so I won't go into too much detail about them. The reason I like to look at other people's blogs all the time is because everyone's opinions are different. I like finding the ones I agree with and arguing with the people who wrote about things I don't agree with. They helped me narrow down my topic a lot because I would see an idea that intrigued me and then I would search to see if there was any more on that particular side.