As You Like It

For a course, I started a metaphrasis of Shakespeare's As You Like It; I am turning the play into a community blog at http://the-forest-of-arden.blogspot.com. I likely won't finish it, but I gave it a start. Generating all of the different avatars was a total pain, though. And getting them all in invited? I had to sign in and out, in and out. It took a long time.

I might update it a bit more now and again, but I have no real reason to: I won't get graded on much more than I have already.

Among other things, it's an exercise in genre-change. The movement from play to blog is that no privacy is available. Conversations between two characters, if available to the audience, are necessarily available to all of the characters as well. So, if I want the readers to be able to follow Rosalind and Celia's conversation about Orlando, I need to recognize that the character of Orlando could--and likely would--read that conversation as well. Further, the characters themselves would only miss that through a gross oversight. Either I must represent conversations that are private in the play as public on the blog, or I must choose not to represent them at all (which I do in some cases). These means, then, that the audience does not have access to information that can only be found in private conversations unless the audience already knows the play. So if you've read As You Like It, you already know who the user Ganymede is and where he came from. If you haven't, then you're in for the surprise (except that I'm really heavy-handed about it). Further, I've changed the speeches so they're shorter and more modern, and sometimes I've changed the tropes so that they are more blog-referential than play-referential.

That is all.