Make-up London Merchant Week 12

Instead of the normal discussion during the class focused on The London Merchant we took a different approach and had an opportunity to act out some of the scenes and actually get inside the play. I thought that this was a great way to further our understanding of this play, and furthermore, a great way to better understand how to read plays in general. When I am reading plays, I find myself approaching them like a novel. I read straight down the page and pay little attention to stage direction or who specifically the characters are talking to when there is a group of people in a scene. When acting out the scenes I quickly realized that there could be very different meanings in phrases when directing them at different people in the scene and when using different emotion or sarcasm. I also thoroughly enjoyed experiencing a scene acted out as if the students were in their own apartment talking to their roommate. I thought that putting the scene in modern terms and allowing the students to figure out how they would put certain situations into their own words gave me a more complete view of what Lillo was thinking in his time period. Overall, I thought that this was a fun and productive activity, and I would very much enjoy another opportunity to partake in this practice later in my academic career.