English Coursework Afterthoughts.

'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools /  The way to dusty death.' (5.v.18)

I think that passage of Macbeth's soliloquy roughly sums up the mindset on the final stretch of perfecting a 1,500 word essay comparing 'Macbeth' and 'Pulp Fiction'. Between 3 hour 'Wuthering Heights' rehearsals and all day Sunday 'The Hero That Panto Deserves' rehearsals and assignments for my other subjects, staying up til midnight checking whether this word is an adverb or in this instance (and this instance alone, apparently) perhaps a pronoun, if this clause could be counted as an interrogative even though its in the middle of a complex sentence, checking this line reference actually corresponds to the quote and painstakingly checking the 70:30 'Macbeth':'Pulp Fiction' ratio.
It feels as though I haven't had the last week and a half, just one very long day in which 8 hour sleeps are just naps and the hours tick by slowly, but somehow inexorably, towards the final deadline as I struggle to maintain my other theatrical and intellectual endeavours around it.

It's been a real struggle. I've already worked out that, though this essay is worth 10% of my entire English A-level, I could still get an A in English even if I got no marks at all. The logic behind that maths is that if I write something, I'm unlikely to get 0 marks, so therefore doing something is better than doing nothing. Only problem with that is, the whole coursework is lumped as one. Yes the creative writing is 10% and the 'Macbeth' vs. 'Pulp Fiction' essay is 10%, but it's counted as one figure out of 20%. I was really proud of my creative writing this year - an Attenborough-style documentary about Cephalopoda and a spoof sermon of a radical evangelical - I put a lot of work into them both (and yet I didn't know, and still don't know) how well this essay was going to turn out.

However, in the last 5-ish days before the deadline I had something of a eureka moment, a realisation of what my essay was really about, and I worked bloody hard once I realised my direction.

I made myself a visual representation of the 4 paragraphs as a floorspace.

You may remember my review of Frantic Assembly's 'Othello', in which I described its setting as a 'violent, patriarchal hyper-sexualised microcosm … in which one's violence is what establishes and maintains one's status', well I suddenly remembered it, and realised that description was also applicable to the king's court of 'Macbeth' and the gangster subculture of 'Pulp Fiction', and there was a direct comparison I could carry all the way through the essay. I ended up enjoying this. I felt like an intellectual, I'd come up with my idea and it was my task to take apart these texts to prove the idea I'd had, that the two were set in fundamentally similar microcosms. More than just doing this analysis because I wanted a good grade in my essay, I was doing this analysis to prove to myself that there was a discernible link between the two, that my epiphany had been right. Further, analysing two performance text really showed to me how intellectual the work of an actor really is, and how intellectual a subject drama can be. Making links, comparing, contrasting, analysing. As long as this essay doesn't fail me drastically, I more care about the process of producing it than the mark it got me in the end. Far from something easy, I felt I had to work hard to accomplish this piece of work, felt I earned those 3 pages, those 1,600 words. 'Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer' (Richard II, 1.i.1) ;)

Now I'm done with 'Macbeth', and English coursework in general, it's time for me to get back to my normal schedule. It's time to start churning my way through the Shakespeare films in the library - I'm taking out 8 'Hamlet's over the Christmas holiday - and writing reviews of those as evidence to future drama school interviewers of my commitment.

Winter work. (well, half of it).

However, what I really like doing is writing fiction, and I do intend to get back to writing short stories now that there are now horrific looming deadlines. If you follow my Facebook page (which I suggest you do) you may have seen my little sneak-peak of the horror short that I was writing for halloween until this coursework got in the way. I do still write, and I do still love to write fiction, and I'm getting back to it. But for now, I have a Batman panto rehearsal this evening, so I have to go and check over my lines for the Joker, thanks for reading, probably coming up next is a review of that BBC Shakespeare 'Hamlet' when I have time.

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