It's Very Shakespearean

So this reading assignment has shoved how terrible I am at reading old(er) English so far up in my face that light is no longer able to reach my eyes. The summaries at the beginning of each scene helped a lot with giving me the foundation I needed to work with, but then I had to use the bricks of detail given to me by Shakespeare to build a proper house of story understanding in the neighborhood that is my mind. Normally I'm a pretty good carpenter, but now instead of normal house-pieces it's like I'm working with some sort of weird stone blobs and odd shaped doors that are just really hard to figure out how to put together. Then if you can't figure out how to fit the plot-pieces together and you just start placing them wherever or leave some out because you don't think they're important for the structure, then they don't fit right you get some weird shape but you think "a little mistake is fine, nobody will notice when it's done" and then you keep building, but the mistakes keep piling up and then your house ends up looking really awkward and ugly and nobody wants to live in it.

 I turned Hamlet into an M.C. Escher painting.

Basically the task I set for myself while reading this was to figure out who the heck it is that I'm supposed to be rooting for (joke's on me and it's probably going to turn out that everyone's terrible and anyone who I actually like will die anyway, as per Shakespeare). My current consensus is thus: The king and duke are assholes, the slave kid started out pretty cool but then turned out to be a creepy rapey weirdo, the daughter and the prince are the arbitrary hormonal teenagers that decide they're in love because they are opposite gender and happened to make eye-contact, Ariel is just a perfect wonderful innocent little spirit who can do no wrong, and the wizard guy doesn't seem too bad, except I feel like his grudge about being out-duked is going to go bad places AND HE'D BETTER KEEP HIS PROMISE TO FREE ARIEL OR I SWEAR TO GOD. What I'm saying is, screw the mortals, Ariel is my protagonist.

There's no doubt a lot of details that I missed, since I don't understand half the things these people say and the stuff on the left pages IS NOT VERY HELPFUL. Seriously though, half the time there's a phrase I don't understand and the book refuses to help me, half the time it decides to help me with something that I'm honestly insulted it thought I couldn't figure out on my own ("incharitable: i.e. uncharitable" Really? REALLY!?), and some of the time it actually aids me in figuring out the story. (I may have rounded these values.) Basically all I picked up from the whole first scene was that the ship was sinking, and in retrospect I guess the prince guy was on it? So if anyone picked up on any details that would probably affect my character opinions, please tell me I feel so helpless.

Merlin the interesting life story.

Sorryfor the late post, didn't understand the switch. Now I am not to familiar wi the history of Merlin, but I did enjoy the readings. There is so much going on here I just want to touch on a few things.

First off, talking baby. I never pictured Merlin young. I just had this image of him as old and powerful. So when the story highlights his youth and his flaunting demeanor it struck me. Another element of Merlin's humanity is that he ages.

I found it also quite interesting that God gives Merlin these powers because as the it says in the text "he gave this ability to the child, whose need was greater." Merlin was influenced by demonic powers. So the best way to cancel that while still givin Merlin free will is giving him good powers and letting him choose. I want to highlight the part about Merlin's need is greater. He obviously needed to be blessed by God and given such holy powers or else we might have had an antichrist roaming around. The thing that I find so interesting, is all the Mystics we have read that received their visions; they were in great need too. And so God gave them visions. Maybe Merlin was one of the first Mystics in a way

Lastly, I want to talk about how religious or how much Merlin refers to God, Jesus and the last supper. I never thought of merlin this way. He is a magician, a sorcerer, a master of the magical arts. He poofed the stone heads to where they are now (just one of many origin stories about this lol). But a man of God. Never would have pictured that. Even from the beginning my thoughts don't jump to the conclusion that God gave Merlin these powers. I just thought he was magic, one of the first know beings of magic. This is what I think anyway.

Now there is his death which I won't get into since it frustrated me. But he died in a very human way which was sad, but he was powerful so as Merlin says man should not fear death and nothing does not come that does not end,